In 1984, Apple debuted the Macintosh: a personal computer that took a radical leap in the user experience, and brought it to the masses. And behind the computer was the team, which included a young programmer, Bruce Horn. Fresh from the groundbreaking labs at Xerox PARC, Bruce worked on the Finder, an application and concept that in some form or another, is universally used by computer users today. Now, soon after the Macintosh’s 20th anniversary, Dr. Horn joins us to revisit his experience as a collaborator in one of the greatest technological projects in history, discuss what he has done since then, and what he has planned for the future.

MacThemes: Let’s start with some history. Xerox PARC has created some of the most important developments in personal computing, including laser printing, ubiquitous computing, Ethernet, and of course, the graphical user interface. How did you join the lab at the age of 14?

I was pretty lucky. My parents moved to Palo Alto when I was 12, and thanks to Nils Nilsson, the head of the Stanford Computer Science Department, I and other kids had a chance to be introduced to computers in elementary school. I of course was very interested in learning much more! The Palo Alto Unified School District had an HP2000 timesharing computer and terminals at each school, so we could write programs in BASIC and try them out (excruciatingly slowly, with ASR-33 Teletypes noisily banging out the lines of code).

I had friends who were connected at Stanford, and we would often go over to Ventura Hall where a number of graduate students were doing some computing projects; they gave us accounts on the various computers and we played with graphics on the Imlac terminals, wrote papers for school in the text editors, and generally had a great time. Some of the Xerox PARC people were there as well, though I didn’t know it at the time.

At one point, Ted Kaehler, then a graduate student as well as a member of the Xerox Learning Research Group at PARC, wandered down to the high school to see if he could find a couple of kids to help out with some programming. I was very interested in mathematics, and went to a few math competitions in the Bay Area, so the math department head, Dr. Hawkinson, knew me pretty well and knew that I was involved with computers. He recommended me (and later my friend Steve Putz).

It was an incredible time. We started using a version of Smalltalk-72, one of the earliest Smalltalk systems, and it was tremendously different from what I had been used to. The syntax of the language was unique, to say the least; there were odd characters in the character set (a pointing hand and an eyeball, for example, which were used in the language) and of course Smalltalk provided a graphical interface using the three-button mouse. Eventually the entire lab was wired with Ethernet (invented there by Metcalfe and Boggs), and the laser printer down the hall was just a click away. This was in the mid-70’s, remember; each time I went in the door at PARC it felt like I had walked into the future.

I played around with the system for a while before I started to get into lower-level projects that involved Novacode (an assembly code) and microcode, and eventually I even started to do some useful things for the rest of the group. Some of my favorite projects include working on the Smalltalk bytecode interpreter microcode on the Dorado, a very fast ECL (emitter-coupled logic) research machine; working on the NoteTaker, a “luggable” Smalltalk machine; and working on porting Smalltalk to a Norwegian microcomputer at the Central Institute for Industrial Research in Oslo, Norway.

The people at PARC were just amazing. The Learning Research Group consisted of artists, musicians, and rock climbers, all of whom were also incredible computer scientists, and the most passionate and enthusiastic people you could imagine, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, Dave Robson, Larry Tesler, Steve Weyer, and many others—were, to a person, eclectic, passionate, and amazingly talented. In particular, the head of LRG, Alan Kay (who just received the Nobel Prize of Computing—the ACM Turing Award—as well as the Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering) was an accomplished musician, tennis player, philosopher, and cognitive scientist; a modern renaissance man.

The rest of PARC was the same way. Everyone was willing to talk with us—think of being able to walk into the offices of people like Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, the founders of Adobe; or Ed McCreight, the inventor of B-Trees. I could write an entire book about the people at PARC, but others already have. For a teenager hungry for knowledge, this was truly nirvana. I can’t imagine a better way to have spent my teenage years.

After I finished university, I reluctantly concluded that I should see more of the world; despite the fact that PARC was the Mecca of computer science, I thought that maybe I should go out and make use of what I had learned there. So I went to Apple, and the rest is history.

MacThemes: Apple, a company near and dear to our hearts. By the time Apple was preparing to release the Macintosh, the company must have been rushing to complete what was probably one of the most influential products of the decade. Can you tell us about working there, and creating history?

There is so much to tell, it’s hard to say much of anything in a short interview. The Mac group was very small when I started there—we worked in a little building at the corner of Stevens Creek and De Anza, behind the Texaco station. When I first arrived, I was given a demo of the Lisa, which I thought was pretty cool…but of course I had been working with much more interesting things at PARC already. However, when Larry Tesler introduced me to the Mac group, I was intrigued by the concept of the Mac. Jerry Manock and his crew were making a physical box that was so appealing, and the software group was so passionate about doing something truly wonderful, that I was seriously drawn to the project. Of course I was interviewing at other places to work at the time as well, and it took some serious Reality Distortion* to get me to recognize the incredible opportunity that was at hand.

The people in the Mac group were some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever worked with; I’d like to name them all but it would take up too much of this article! The time I was there was magical. I think many of us did some of the best work in our lives during the development of the Mac.

* Editor’s note: This, of course, is referring to Steve Jobs’s infamous “Reality Distortion Field”, also known as his fabled charisma.

MacThemes: The experience must have indeed been magical, but you fail to mention a major player in the project. Tell us the truth. Is Steve Jobs insanely great, or just plain insane?

I think that there isn’t anyone like Steve Jobs. In many ways he’s insanely great. Like the rest of us, though, he has strengths and weaknesses. I’d say mostly strengths, but I admit that it takes a special kind of person to be able to work effectively with Steve.

MacThemes: This is off on a tangent, but something you must have thought about at one point or another. Apple computers have recently been overshadowed by the enormous success of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Do you think Apple is preparing Plan B?

I wouldn’t call it Plan B, but I’m sure that Apple is making plans to continue to provide innovative solutions in areas that we haven’t thought about—or maybe have thought about, and hoped that Apple would be doing something! Desktop computing has turned into a commodity market. Laptops seem to be where the most growth is at this time (I do all my work on a Powerbook), along with the small devices like the iPod and linking to online media sales. I don’t pretend to understand what Apple is planning, but I’m sure that it will be interesting.

MacThemes: But you have had experience consulting for Apple. What projects have you been involved in since leaving Apple in 1984?

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