Insanely Great; The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

New York: Penguin Books, 2000. This edition contains a new Afterword. First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. Format is approximately 5 inches by 8 inches. [8], 328 pages. Bibliography. Index. Signed by the author on the title page. Cover has some wear and soiling. With a new Afterword. Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for Wired who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicles the early days of the computer underground. Levy published eight books covering computer hacker culture, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and multi-year exposés of Apple, Google, and Facebook. His most recent book, Facebook: The Inside Story, recounts the history and rise of Facebook from three years of interviews with employees, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Zuckerberg. In 1978, Steven Levy rediscovered Albert Einstein's brain in the office of the pathologist who removed and preserved it. Levy won the "Computer Press Association Award" for a report he co-wrote in 1998 on the Year 2000 problem. Levy is writer and Editor at Large for Wired. He was previously chief technology writer and a senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has had articles published in Harper's, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Premiere, and Rolling Stone. In December 1986, Levy founded the Macworld Game Hall of Fame, which Macworld published annually until 2009. Derived from a Kirkus review: A breezy, anecdotal, yet discerning history of the people, ideas, and technology that led to the user-friendliness of the Macintosh computer. Levy is among our best interpreters of computer technology. Here, he recounts Apple's wrong turns and the widespread criticisms of Steve Jobs. In tracing the evolution of how humans conceive of, and relate to, information in cyberspace, the author has done his research. From a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush describing a ``memex''—a sort of desk/cockpit with monitors for ``piloting'' one's way through information—that inspired Douglas Engelbart to invent the desktop metaphor and the now-ubiquitous mouse, Levy takes us to the golden age of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. There, although Xerox overlooked the invention of the personal computer, Allan Kay wrote SmallTalk— the simple operating system that would one day be embodied in the Mac—and conceived of the ``DynaBook,'' the inspiration for Apple's PowerBook and considered ever since the Grail of computer designs. As the creation of the Mac looms, Levy focuses on the personal contributions and internal politics of those working at Apple; on software offerings like PageMaker, which revolutionized desktop publishing; and the last step in evolving the Mac as we know it: Bill Atkinson's HyperCard, the program that changed the way computer-users think about information. Everything you never realized you wanted to know about the Mac, by a very smart, infectiously enthusiastic partisan.