This is a pretty fantastic article. It’s really amazing how forward thinking these guys were. I loved how Jobs kept pointing out the fact that the Macintosh was designed so well that it actually had less chips than a standard IBM video card. It’s also pretty incredible to see how Steve Jobs’ devotion to making designs that are as simple and elegant as possible was exactly the same as it is today. This quote could just as easily have come from an article about the iPhone:

“Jobs: If you read the Apple’s first brochure, the headline was “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.” What we meant by that was that when you first attack a problem it seems really simple because you don’t understand it. Then when you start to really understand it, you come up with these very complicated solutions because it’s really hairy. Most people stop there. But a few people keep burning the midnight oil and finally understand the underlying principles of the problem and come up with an elegantly simple solution for it. But very few people go the distance to get there”.

By the way, if you liked this article you really have to check out folklore.org. It’s a site created by Andy Hertzfeld that’s full wonderful stories about the creation of the Macintosh by the people who created it.
He also wrote a great book covering the same subject called Revolution in The Valley.

An Interview: The Macintosh Design Team – The making of Macintosh

On October 14, 1983, the design team for Apple Computer Inc.’s new Macintosh computer met with BYTE Managing Editor Phil Lemmons at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters. In the dialogue that followed, Bill Atkinson, Steve fobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Kenyon, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Dave Egner, Chris Espinosa, Steve Capps, Jerry Manock, Bruce Horn, and George Crowe discussed the evolution of their brainchild.

BYTE: How did the Macintosh project begin?

Jobs: What turns on Andy and Burrell and Chris and Bill and Larry and everyone else here is building something really inexpensive so that everyone can afford it. It’s not very many years ago that most of us in this room couldn’t have afforded a $5000 computer. We realized that we could build a supercheap computer that would run Bill Atkinson’s amazing Quickdraw and have a mouse on it— in essence, build a really cheap implementation of Lisa’s technology that would use some of that software technology. That’s when the Macintosh as we know it was started.