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28 Oct 2026

Revolution In The Valley - Macintosh Anecdotes

Revolution in the Valley is a book full of history and anecdotes about the team that built the first Apple Macintosh. I'd really recommend. It's the print version of folklore.org.

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This is the type of book I really enjoy. There is a somewhat recurring theme in this blog of my book recommendations all being around tech teams from the 80s and 90s, so Revolution In The Valley fits right in. My go-to recommendation for that era though is still Masters of Doom.

I thought I’d write a post with some of my favourite stand out stories from the book. Being a printed version of folklore.org also means that beyond just highlighting some fun parts of the book to you, loyal falkus.co reader, I can actually link you direct to the stories in question for you to read.

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How The Mac Was Made

  • Hungarian

    Relatable. One of my first software dev gigs required patches and maintenance to a tangle of PHP code. It was a WordPress plugin, fairly large, long since unmaintained, with the added challenge that the comments and variables were all in German.

  • Calculator Construction Set

    Who hasn't found bike shedding a problem at some point in their developer career? Shortcut to the end game by building a construction set for others to use.

  • Do It

    It feels obvious now, but a dialog with 'OK' and 'Cancel' wasn't the starting design point.

  • Swedish Campground

    I'm a long time Mac user and never stopped to consider what the source of the keyboard symbol ⌘ was!

  • We're Not Hackers!

    I'd always thought it would be great to be considered a hacker back in the early 80s, but not everyone agreed. Maybe the best hackers are those that know when to do some clever system hack and when to go for maintainability.

  • Thunderscan

    Talking of great hacks though, I really enjoyed the Thunderscan article and the ingenious conversion of a printer to a scanner.

  • Disk Swappers Elbow

    Is there a name for this type of bug? The type where system experts don't realise why they can't replicate. Classic cause for that is race conditions, e.g. different speed of action between pro users and those new to the software. Interestingly this isn't a race condition, but has a similar trigger that the dev team couldn't figure out to start with.

All The Articles

Why list all the articles here? Well the website continued to evolve a little after the book was published. As a reference for myself, here’s the list of articles with a marker by those that are online only:

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