Andy Hertzfeld Quotes

Part of Steve's job was to drum into us how important what we were doing actually would be to the world.

You show me a great program and I'll show you a passionate individual somewhere behind it.

I'm the kind of developer who likes to throw lightning rods around. To make a great program there's got to be at least one person at the center who is breathing life into it. In a ferocious way.

It's [programming] the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There's an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.

I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.

I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.

I left General Magic in 1996 to become an Internet hobbyist - got a T-1 line to my house. At one point I had all four food banks of the Bay Area hosted from this house here.

Apple was our benefactor at starting General Magic, but about a year later decided they would rather BE General Magic and tried to make us blink out of existence ... which we eventually did, but it took a few years.

Working long hours being single helps because your time is yours. Once you have a family your time isn't all yours anymore. Most of the Mac team, we were in our mid-20's, most of us were single, and we were able to essentially devote our lives to it.

People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well.

Sayings from Chairman Jobs." 1. Real artists ship. 2. It's better to be a pirate than join the navy. 3. Mac in a book by 1986.

I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.

The Macintosh having shipped, his next agenda was to turn the rest of Apple into the Mac group. He had perceived the rest of Apple wasn't as creative or motivated as the Mac team, and what you need to take over the company are managers, not innovators or technical people.

The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.