Gemini Proxy
Scrooge McDuck
* Author: Andy Hertzfeld
* Story Date: February 1980
* Topics: Origins, Hardware Design, Prototypes
* Characters: Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Jef Raskin, Tom Whitney, Bob Bishop, Cliff Huston, Dick Huston
* Summary: The very first image on the very first Macintosh
Burrell Smith liked to do intensive
design work over the Christmas
I went out to lunch with Burrell a
few weeks later and, knowing my
By now, Burrell thought that he had the graphics running properly, but he wasn't really sure; he still needed to write some software to try it out. I told him that I'd look into it when I had some time. He gave me a copy of a handwritten page that contained the magic addresses that I'd have to use, hoping that I'd get around to it soon.
I was used to coming back to the lab at Apple after dinner, to see if anything interesting was going on and working on various extra-curricular projects. I had some spare time that night, so I got out Burrell's instructions and wrote an Apple II (6502) assembly language routine to do the necessary bit-twiddling to transfer whatever was on the Apple II's hi-res graphic display to the Mac prototype's frame-buffer, using Burrell's unusual synchronization scheme.
One of my recent side projects
involved using Woz's new, one-to-
Even though it was starting to get
late, I was dying to see if my
The only other person in the lab that evening was Cliff Huston, who saw the trouble I was having. Cliff was another early Apple employee, who was Dick Huston's (the heroic programmer who wrote the 256-byte Apple II floppy disc boot ROM) older brother and an experienced, somewhat cynical technician. I explained the situation to him and was surprised when he started to smile.
Cliff told me that he could insert
a disk controller card into
I could barely make myself look,
but amazingly enough Burrell's
By the time I came in the next
morning, an excited Burrell had
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