man, folklore.org was an amazing find when I went through university.

I was fully convinced all those late nights at the lab meant I was doing something horribly wrong the whole time. Reading about all the trial and failure that the Mac team went though really set everything into perspective.

I really wish more groundbreaking projects cut through the mythology behind them, the sharp edges where the teams bled through aren't always shown. I really enjoy works where this stuff comes through, works like "The Soul of New Machine" and the like capture the hard parts...

An iWeb site! I didn't end up using it much, but i still find it the most intuitive, simple and true WYSIWYG full site making tool regardless of platform. Too bad Apple discontinued it (although it still works in modern macOS, i wonder for how long though), there are some alternatives but every single one i've seen either scales down the WYISWYG part or scales up the complexity - or both.

I wonder if Google made him go through their regular interview process?

Ones that had customers, such as Bot and Dolly, were shut down. For several years, many people thought Google had some big secret project in the works.

That works wonders to inflate Google's stock too (on such vague promises of future tech), way beyond they ever spent on them.

Even so, the brief summary hinted that he probably did more during an earlier 8-year stretch than at Google.

Andy Hertzfeld is such a nice guy who worked on a lot of amazing things, and who gives proper credit where it's due:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AndyHertzfeld/posts/FddaP6jeCqp

Andy Hertzfeld, Public, July 1, 2011

It's great that the user experience of Google Plus is being so well received, and I'm happy about all the positive feedback that's been coming my way, but I'm worried that I'm getting too much credit for it, so this long-winded post is an attempt to set the record straight.

I am indeed the main individual behind the interaction design and implementation of the circle editor. I conceived, designed and implemented a compelling prototype for it almost single-handedly, and then wrote a fair percentage of the production javascript code with lots of help from my friends. I also worked on a couple of other parts of the product a little bit, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.

Steven Levy's excellent Wired article got the story right - I wrote the circle editor and then recently widened my focus to the overall Google Plus user experience. But subsequent stories jumped to the conclusion that I was responsible for the design of the entire product that we launched on Tuesday, which isn't true, but I guess it was just too good a story (about Apple design values infecting Google) for people to resist. And now some people are saying that I'm responsible for the broad visual refresh now rolling out across Google, which couldn't be further from the truth - in fact, I'm not even sure I like it.

One thing that I learned during the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984 was that the press usually oversimplifies everything, and it can't deal with the reality that there are many people playing critical roles on significant projects. A few people always get too much credit, while most people get too little, that's just the way it has always worked. But luckily, it's 2011 and I can use the service that I helped to create to clarify things.

+Shaun Modi is the awesome young designer most responsible for the visual design of the circle editor, especially the blooming circles, along with +Jonathan Terleski, who helped refine it after Shaun departed. +Joseph Smarr also helped with the design quite a bit, and was especially valuable as someone I could rely on (along with Jonathan) to tell me when a particular aspect was good enough yet or not.

Google probably won't be thrilled about me mentioning the names of the superb developers who helped me with the circle editor code (hello recruiters) but I feel that I must mention my main collaborators here: +Owen Prater +Eric Cattell +Eric W. Barndollar and +Griff Hazen, along with Ariel Gertzenstein and Rich Conlan who helped in the early stages. And those are just the main front-end guys, there are plenty of others who worked on the shared infrastructure or the back-end that I won't mention.

And all of the above are just the people who helped with the circle editor and related UI. There are plenty of others who worked on the stream, profiles and photos, as well as the leadership, product managers and various specialists who also made invaluable contributions every day. Suffice it to say that Google Plus is the creation of large, talented team that I'm proud to be a part of, and anyway it's only the beginning, we're all excited about what it has a chance to become over the months and years ahead.

I wonder if Google has become the place where famous people go to...not do much

They don't have to do much. If they just have 1-2 major insights per year, or help teams make the right decisions because of their experience, that's enough to justify millions in salary -- even if they don't write code or project manage themselves but just sit on their office playing Pong and waiting for someone to ask them a question.

A lot of big companies do that.

Two examples i can think of: The guy who made Tetris ended up working at Microsoft for the Xbox team, and I think Matz works for Rakuten in Japan? - might just an honorary position.

Sibling comment mentioned mentioned OSAF. Recently I read Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, which is a chronicle of the fun technical debt (mis)adventures that the OSAF had with Chandler, with some appearances by Hertzfeld.

You're not really doing something very revolutionary if you're not running into some dead ends.

You don't have a clear idea of what it's going to be when you start, you have an inkling and then, each step tells you what the next step is but you don't know what the next step is until you've gotten to a certain point.

We thought we were making an exquisite product, the best possible thing at the time but then, we figured, in a few years we'd make something a lot better, completely different. We didn't realize the architecture we were putting in place could last five years, let alone 10, 20, 30 years.

I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on.

Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup ;)

Absolutely agreed, and I think they well-deserve their fame. It's hard to do well in this competitive space.

Yes, agreed: I think he was being way too modest. It didn't turn out exactly like they expected, but they were right about the important things, and we still have a LONG way to go, so comparing their vision with the crap we have now just isn't fair. I think time will prove them right (but wrong about being wrong ;).

Telescript is still something that intuitively seems like a good idea for a certain class of problem.

It has been available in other forms -- e.g. Distributed Smalltalk ( https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/170223/ ).

Pardon me for the off topic reply, but I don't see your contact info anywhere so will post it here:

The "recent posts" link at your website throws a lot of "Illegal string offset" warnings at the start of the page.

I think it's both: right place at the right time, but so were a lot of other people. Some rose above the rest.

Woz was a hobbyist at a time when a hobbyist could get his hobby mainstream. There was only a year at most when you could do that with the "home computer".