Gemini Proxy
Revolution in the Valley
* Author: Andy Hertzfeld
* Story Date: January 2004
* Topics: Commentary, The Book
* Characters: Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Markkula, Steve Wozniak, Tim O'Reilly, Allen Noren, Michelle Weatherbee, Melanie Wang
* Summary: The story of how this site turned into a book
**Revolution in the Valley** is a new hardcover book, published by O'Reilly Media in December 2004, that is based on the anecdotes from this website. This story describes the book and how it came to be, and what it means to Folklore.org moving forward.
When I began to write stories for
this site in June 2003, I had no
After I got the initial site
running in August 2003, with about
Tim introduced me to the talented team at his company, including my editor, Allen Noren, who specializes in O'Reilly's more humanistic efforts (his previous two books were Dan Gillmor's "We the People" and Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters"). Allen guided me through the laborious process to transform the raw material of the Folklore site into a beautiful book.
After completing the writing phase
in June 2004, we embarked on the
The next step was working on the layout. We decided to maintain the basic format of the site, but we divided the stories into five parts at the natural breaking points, to give the reader a chance to rest. We decided to use an unusual form factor, eight inches square, which seems simultaneously large and small at the same time. I was delighted when Allen told me they wanted to print it in full color on high quality paper without increasing the price.
Unfortunately, I discovered that
it's a lot harder to publish images
Before unveiling the site publicly
in January 2004, I gathered up my
I didn't even know that Apple had a
marketing archive. It took a few
Some of the material in the archive
was indexed in a Filemaker database
Allen introduced me to Michelle
Weatherbee, an award winning book
Allen told me that I needed a foreword for the book and suggested that I ask Steve Jobs to write one, but I didn't have the courage to ask him to do something like that. I suggested Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak instead, who told me that he loved the site and had even contributed a few comments to some of the stories. Woz was enthusiastic about writing the foreword, which he thought he could get done in a few weeks. We told him we needed it by the end of June.
I warned Allen that while Woz always had the best intentions, he often was a notorious procrastinator. If he didn't do something right away, it had a tendency not to get done indefinitely. Predictably, the foreword wasn't finished by the end of July and Allen began to send Woz emails to remind him about it every few weeks. Woz always replied promptly, promising to make room in his busy schedule to get it done soon.
Finally, in September, while I was
meeting with Allen and team in
I assumed the title of the book
would be "Macintosh Folklore", just
The next time I visited Sebastopol
to work on the layout, Michelle
My biggest disappointment with the book has to do with the story links. We decided to keep the story links in the book, even though you can't click on them. To compensate, they were supposed to include the page number of the referenced story, but apparently that was too much for O'Reilly's layout system to cope with, given that page numbers changed frequently as edits were made. I hope we're able to improve this in subsequent printings.
Now that the book is complete, it's
interesting to compare it to the
But by far the main advantage of
the website over the book is that
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