Andy Hertzfeld

Andy Hertzfeld ( born April 6, 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American software developer. He was a leading member of the original Apple development team, some see him as a pioneer among software developers. Since the beginnings of Apple Computer, he has both the design and the development to the support of open source software in the Open Source Applications Foundation doing to make involved computer easier and better to use.

Hertzfeld's Apple Business Card led as job title " Software Wizard" (software mage ) and he wrote large portions of the Macintosh system software, including the majority of the ROM code, the User Interface Toolbox, and a number of innovative components that today in many GUIs are standard, for example the check box and scrapbook.

Life

After graduating in 1975 from Brown University in the subject Computer Science, Hertzfeld attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978 he bought an Apple II computer and soon began to develop software. He was employed by Apple in 1979 as a systems programmer and developed the Silentype printer and the first 80 - character card for the Apple II

After a redesign of the Apple II team, and at their own request Hertzfeld was brought by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to the previously established shortly Macintosh team in February 1981. There he worked for Bud Tribble and side by side with Bill Atkinson and Burrell Smith. Hertzfeld was one of the leading software architects of the Mac OS, which was considered by the use of a graphical user interface as revolutionary.

Since 1984 he left Apple, he has co-founded three new companies: Radius (1986 ), General Magic (1990) and Eazel (1999 ), where he helped develop the Nautilus file manager for the GNOME environment on Linux. Now, with the Open Source Applications Foundation, Hertzfeld is working in the direction of innovation and ease of use on the Linux platform support.

He opened folklore.org early 2004, a site that contains dozens of anecdotes about the development of the first Macintosh. The stories were published in December 2004 in an O'Reilly book, which is titled Revolution in the Valley.

Since August 2005, Hertzfeld is working for Google, where he is mainly responsible for the user interface of Google .

Writings

• Revolution in the Valley - The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. O'Reilly Associates, 2004. ISBN 0-596-00719-1