Folklore.org

My friend Mohsin, 'stumbled upon' a link called, folklore which narrates some anecdotes about development of Apple's original 'Macintosh' computer and the crew which developed it. There are total 118 stories, I have completed reading few of them and believe that all are enchanting.

We are living in a much simpler world of computers these days. When we scroll our mouse nicely and easily to read something on the monitor, plug in head phones to listen to songs, press a key on keyboard to see a character printed on screen, we did not appreciate the efforts that are behind implementing this magic. We must thank those legendary software programmers and hardware engineers who simplified initially cryptic world of computers so that an average person can use it without knowing the internal intricacies . After reading some stories, we understand the challenges those people faced while making a full-fledged COMPUTER with the optimized use of hardware and smart programs communicating with that hardware. It involved right from developing a small kit which has a limitation of addressing 64K of memory( which is solved by using cascaded memory banks) , a graphics routine which shows a Scrooge McDuck sitting on a large pile of dollars saying 'HELLO' to the user ( remember those were the days when GUI was in its nascent stage, and 'Look and Feel' concept was very new ) and many more challenges. Those were the days when people worked hard to increase Apple-2' s 192 scan lines to Macintosh's 256 scan lines. There were times when people need to put in extra intelligence to pull up extra bit from a stream of 8 bits in order to increase the bit density by using group encoding technique instead of FM encoding. The stories also depict the 'cult' work culture at Apple. The developers there enjoyed playing Nerf Ball after lunch and even went out to play a video game at the nearby restaurant in the lunch time. Like every work place, there were some sad events of firing from the job, some encouraging moments like promotion, words of appreciation. In all, those stories are so real yet look like so dramatic and interesting that the reader wants to be a part of Macintosh Team.

In all a worth reading link...