As I write this review, the annual gathering of the Macintosh tribes, Macworld, is just getting under way, and the usual computer press frenzy is boiling. What will be the big announcement this year? A $400 computer? An even cheaper, smaller, cooler iPod? Something new, something breathtaking? The hype, especially since Jobs' triumphant return to the company that he started and then was exiled from, has always been nonstop. Outside of, possibly, Microsoft, no computer company has received more press in the past 25 years than Apple. The story of the Mac has been told time and time again. Does it really need to be told once more?

I wondered about this question before diving into "Revolution in the Valley." But at the end, which occurs approximately at the moment when former Pepsi executive John Sculley forces Jobs out of his own company, I realized there are some stories that can't be told enough times.

As we sit staring at our multiple-windowed computer screens, effortlessly switching between e-mail and word processing and the Web and games and spreadsheets, it may be hard to recall that it really wasn't so long ago that personal computers were clunky devices accessible only through arcane instructions typed into a command line. Your blood had to run at least half-geek to take pleasure in such machines -- or to get any kind of useful work out of them. Perhaps the most amusing irony in "Revolution in the Valley" is that while it is a book by geeks for geeks, it is about the making of the computer that brought computing to nongeeks.

Hertzfeld and his co-conspirators, hardware whiz Burrell Smith, software magician Bill Atkinson, visionaries Jef Raskin and of course Jobs, and a handful of others, should not get sole credit for making computers user-friendly. They took ideas from elsewhere -- not least the famed Xerox PARC laboratory -- and built on the efforts of countless other engineers and programmers. But if there is a moment when the computer became something that was for the world, it was that moment when the Mac was born, and even those of us who use PCs should be grateful to this day.

And in a world of ceaseless hype, we can even give Hertzfeld the benefit of the doubt and believe him when he closes his collection of tales by saying that in contrast to every other computer, "the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great."

Recent Stories