“The Macintosh hardware was brought to life by several teams working in concert on everything from the logic board, disk drive and power supply to the mouse, plastic casing and factory production line,” Dan Farber reports for CNET. “Similarly, a small team of young and talented software engineers were writing the code that would bring the Macintosh to life.”
“At the core of the Macintosh software were the QuickDraw graphics routines, which performed the operations that painted the screen with graphics and user interface elements. Bill Atkinson wrote the code for Apple’s Lisa workstation computer, and then it was ported the Macintosh,” Farber reports. “Bud Tribble was friends with Atkinson and Jef Raskin, who conceived the Macintosh project, and joined the team as its first software developer. He started in September of 1980, when the Macintosh team consisted of three people other people — Raskin and his long-time colleague Brian Howard and hardware engineer Burrell Smith. Tribble wrote some graphics code for the Motorola 6809 processor that was being used for the Macintosh project, but later convinced Macintosh hardware wizard Burrell Smith to switch to the more powerful 68000.”
“At that point Steve Jobs had become involved in the Macintosh project and began exerting his substantial influence on how the low-cost, user-friendly machine would evolve,” Farber reports. “He brought in Andy Hertzfeld from the Apple II team to work on the project in February 1981. ‘Writing a big chunk of the system software for the original Macintosh was the high point of my career, if not my entire life,’ Hertzfeld said.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.