Folklore

I had a chance to read Andy Hertzfeld's book-from-a-blog Revolution in the Valley over the winter break. Based on the blog folklore.org, this was a nice companion to an earlier, more business-oriented read, Infinite Loop. While full of stories that reveal little bits of Mac trivia, the most gripping anecdotes (to me anyway) focused on two topics.

The first is the management of Steve Jobs. Though not for everyone, and at times testing the boundaries of civilized behavior, his style could coax the best out of the team (see "The Macintosh Spirit"). Being stingy with praise, suggesting improvements to features that had just been built, and using the right incentives to keep people working generally had the right effects.

The other great story is the design and development of the Mac itself. Stories of how the engineers an OS that would run a GUI smoothly on the 68000 processor with only 128k (see "Resources"), as well as the evolution of the UI itself are testaments to the supreme skills of the team, as well as their belief in the importance of their product ("Macintosh spirit"). Overall it's a pretty inspiring and extremely quick read.

Added (1/9/06): jellis puts it much more eloquently in his review of the book.