Geek Nirvana

Via Slashdot I discovered a book written by Andy Hertzfeld about the creation of the Macintosh computer, entitled Revolution in The Valley. Which is nice; I'll pick up a copy at the library. What's, like, totally awesome and cool is that via an interview with Andy, I discovered his site, folklore.org, dedicated to relating the history of the creation of the Mac. (The book was cobbled together from the posts on this site.)

<valley girl>OMG!</valley girl>

I blanch at trying to describe the enormity and the wonderfulness of the existence of this information trove.

Imagine if the process of the invention of the combustion engine, or heart surgery, or the Apollo space program, was archived, described, and commented on by the very teams that accomplished their creation - for free on the web and you could peruse it at your leisure. Folklore.org is that very thing for the Macintosh desktop computer. The Macintosh simply defined how computer interaction is accomplished in our age. Though Xerox Parc came up with some of the initial concepts borrowed by the Mac team, the Mac team created the reality you have before you, even if you're using a Microsoft Windows or Linux system. (Yes, Unix existed before it all, but the graphical interfaces laid on top of Linux are still largely derivative of the Mac.)

For instance, here is a description of the evolution of the user interface, replete with Polaroids of each breakthrough. How cool is that!?!?

Too cool, imho.

So I'll shut up so you can get right over there and have some fun!