The Original Macintosh:    26 of 40 
The Puzzle
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: September 1983
Characters: Andy Hertzfeld, Jerome Coonen
Topics: Software Design, Management
Summary: The puzzle desk accessory became controversial.
The Puzzle desk accessory

The original Macintosh could only run one real application at a time, but it could also concurrently run little programs called "desk accessories" that shared memory with the main application. Like the system itself, most of the desk accessories were written in 68000 assembly language, but in the fall of 1982, I decided to write one in Pascal as a proof of concept and to show developers how to do it, by writing a tiny adaptor that the Pascal code linked with.

Desk accessories were usually utilities, like the calculator or the alarm clock, but I thought that we should also have a game or two, to show that the Macintosh was fun, too. I decided to write a "15 number puzzle", where there are fifteen numbered tiles in a four by four space that must be arranged in sequential order. If you click on a tile next to the empty space, it slides into that space. It was a fun way to waste time and build up your mouse coordination.

Since the number puzzle was written in Pascal, it had to link with the Pascal run-time, which dragged in lots of extra code that wasn't used. This made the Puzzle over 6K bytes long, even though most of it was just the run-time.

By the fall of 1983, it was time to make decisions about what to include in the shipping product. We had shown the Mac to a number of industry analysts, and while most were enthusiastic, some didn't really get the graphical user interface and thought it was "game-like", not suitable for serious computing. This made some of the Macintosh marketing folks a bit leery about the more whimsical aspects of the design, and the puzzle, being an actual game, became somewhat controversial.


I liked the puzzle and I didn't want to capitulate to the buttoned-down, all business view of the customer, so I told Jerome, "You know, the puzzle doesn't have to be so big. I bet I could rewrite it and get it to take up less than 1K bytes. Would you keep it if I got it that small, or is it really the other issue?"



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