December 4, 2019
Most of what the public knows about the day-to-day culture of the original Macintosh team comes from one source: Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org, later collected and expanded into the book Revolution in the Valley. Hertzfeld was a core member of the team that wrote the Macintosh’s system software, and starting in the early 2000s he began publishing short, specific anecdotes about the project’s development — annotated, eventually, by comments from other participants who read the site and corrected or expanded his recollections in public.
Folklore.org is not a neutral historical survey. It is one team member’s memory, written down two decades after the events it describes, shaped by which stories happened to stick in Hertzfeld’s mind and which didn’t. That caveat matters for anything built on top of it, including this piece. But it is also the single richest firsthand documentary source on the culture of the project, and it treats Jef Raskin more carefully, and more sympathetically, than the compressed popular history usually does.
What Folklore.org Actually Is
Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team in early 1981 — not long before Raskin’s own departure from active leadership of the group — and worked on the system software through the 1984 launch. He began publishing his recollections as short, titled anecdotes on Folklore.org years later, and readers who had been present for the same events left comments correcting details, adding context, or disputing his memory. Hertzfeld incorporated some of that feedback directly into the entries. In 2004, a curated selection was published in book form as Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, with some entries further annotated using the public comments the site had accumulated.
The result is an unusual kind of historical document: not a single author’s fixed account, but one that was partially peer-reviewed, in public, by the people it was about, before it was set in print.
How Raskin Appears in the Record
Hertzfeld’s own framing of Raskin is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against a common assumption about how the team that displaced Raskin would remember him. Hertzfeld has been explicit, both in interviews and in his own writing, that Raskin deserves recognition as the conceptual originator of the Macintosh — someone who had been developing the underlying ideas about accessible, inexpensive computing since the 1960s, and who pulled them together into a funded, staffed project at Apple. That is not the account of a rival erasing a predecessor; it is closer to the opposite.
Hertzfeld’s personal recollection of Raskin, as he has described it, is of a manager who was fun and creative, with an imperious, professorial manner, who helped bind an early team together around a shared and genuinely unusual vision for what a computer could be. The professorial description is not incidental — Raskin had, in fact, taught computer science before joining Apple, and the manner Hertzfeld describes lines up with that background.
Where the Firsthand Account Complicates the Compressed Story
The value of an oral-history source like this is precisely that it resists compression. A few specific complications are worth drawing out.
Raskin’s departure predates most of Hertzfeld’s own tenure on the visible day-to-day project. Hertzfeld arrived on the Macintosh team around the same period Raskin was being sidelined by Steve Jobs’s takeover. This means Hertzfeld’s direct, contemporaneous experience of Raskin as an active team leader was limited — much of what Hertzfeld reports about Raskin’s role and departure is itself secondhand, reconstructed from what other, longer-tenured team members told him. A careful reading of Folklore.org has to track which anecdotes are Hertzfeld’s own witnessed memory and which are accounts he collected from Burrell Smith, Bill Atkinson, and others who had been present since 1979.
The public-comment layer adds friction the original telling doesn’t have. Because Folklore.org accumulated comments from other participants over years, several entries carry visible disagreement: someone who was there recalls a detail differently, or adds a piece of context Hertzfeld didn’t have. This is exactly the kind of complication a polished, single-narrator popular history smooths away, and exactly the kind of complication a documentary reading should preserve rather than resolve artificially.
The book version is not identical to the website version. Revolution in the Valley selected and organized a subset of the Folklore.org material, adding some editorial framing and additional images. Citing “Hertzfeld’s account” without specifying whether the citation is to the live website (which has continued to accumulate comments) or to the fixed 2004 book text is a common source of small inaccuracies in secondary writing about this period — the two are related but not interchangeable.
The Public Annotation Process, Concretely
It is worth being specific about how the public-comment layer actually worked, because it is the feature that distinguishes Folklore.org from an ordinary memoir. Hertzfeld published each anecdote as a dated, titled entry — short enough to read in a few minutes, focused on one specific episode or character trait rather than attempting a comprehensive chronology. Readers, including former Apple colleagues who had been present for the events described, left comments beneath each entry. Over time, some of Hertzfeld’s own retellings were corrected in these comment threads by people who had a different, sometimes more accurate, memory of the same event.
When Revolution in the Valley was assembled from this material in 2004, Hertzfeld used a selection of that accumulated commentary to annotate the printed entries, marking places where his own recollection had been challenged or supplemented by someone else who was there. This is unusual for a published history. Most memoirs present a single author’s memory as settled once it reaches print. Hertzfeld’s book instead preserves visible seams — places where the record is disputed rather than smoothed over — which is precisely the texture a documentary reading should value and precisely what a compressed retelling of “what Folklore.org says” tends to erase.
Specificity Versus Comprehensiveness
The anecdotal format has a specific cost that is easy to overlook when the stories themselves are vivid and well told. Folklore.org was never designed as a comprehensive chronology of the Macintosh project. It is organized around whichever moments Hertzfeld found memorable or telling enough to write up, which means large stretches of the project’s actual day-to-day development — including, plausibly, a good deal of what happened during Raskin’s own tenure leading the team before Hertzfeld’s arrival — are simply not covered, not because they didn’t matter, but because no one who experienced them directly chose to write them up in this particular format.
This is a real limitation for anyone using the site or the book as a primary source about Raskin’s specific leadership period, since Hertzfeld’s own direct observational window began close to the point where Raskin was already losing control of the project. Anecdotes about Raskin’s earlier tenure necessarily rely on secondhand accounts Hertzfeld collected from people like Burrell Smith and Bill Atkinson, whose tenure on the project predates his own — valuable, but a step removed from firsthand testimony in a way that a careful reader should track.
Why This Source Deserves Careful Handling
None of this is a case against using Folklore.org as a source — it remains one of the most valuable firsthand accounts of the period, and its treatment of Raskin is, if anything, more generous and more historically careful than the compressed popular version. The point is narrower: a documentary reading should treat it as what it is — one participant’s memory, publicly annotated by others, organized around vivid anecdotes rather than a systematic chronology — and should be specific about which claims it can support and which it can’t.
Used carefully, Folklore.org corroborates a specific and important claim this site returns to often: that the compressed popular history of the Macintosh, organized almost entirely around the Jobs-Raskin conflict, actively obscures the extent to which the people who built the machine — including the person who displaced Raskin’s team — regarded Raskin’s original conception as the project’s real intellectual foundation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Folklore.org an official Apple history?
No. It is Andy Hertzfeld’s personal collection of firsthand anecdotes about the Macintosh project’s development, published independently starting in the early 2000s, later collected in the book Revolution in the Valley. It has no institutional affiliation with Apple.
Did Andy Hertzfeld work directly with Jef Raskin?
Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team around the same period Raskin was losing active control of the project to Steve Jobs, so his direct overlap with Raskin as an actively leading manager was limited. Much of what Hertzfeld has written about Raskin’s earlier role draws on accounts from team members with longer tenure on the project.
Does Hertzfeld’s account portray Raskin negatively?
No. Hertzfeld has been explicit in crediting Raskin as the conceptual originator of the Macintosh project and has described him personally as a creative, if idiosyncratic, manager who helped establish the team’s early shared vision.
What’s the difference between the Folklore.org website and the “Revolution in the Valley” book?
The website is an ongoing, publicly commented collection of anecdotes. The 2004 book selected and organized a subset of that material with additional editorial framing. The two overlap substantially but are not identical texts, and citations should specify which one they’re drawing from.
Should Folklore.org be treated as a definitive historical record?
It should be treated as a valuable, partially corroborated firsthand source rather than a definitive or systematic history. Its strength is specific, vivid, participant-level detail; its limitation is that it is organized around memorable anecdotes rather than comprehensive documentation, and some entries reflect secondhand accounts Hertzfeld collected rather than his own direct observation.
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