Andy Hertzfeld describes the effort that went into putting together the first Mac demo. Here he tells us what Steve Job asked for:
"We need a demo for the intro! The Mac deserves to have a great demo for its first public showing. I want the Mac to play the theme from Chariots of Fire" while it's showing a slide show of the apps. Plus lots of other cool stuff, whatever you can come up with. And it needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals."Sweet!
And here he talks about Desk Ornaments, Bill Atkinson, and Mac Paint:
Bill Atkinson complained to me that it was a mistake to allow users to specify their own desktop patterns, because it was harder to make a nice one than it looked, and led directly to ugly desktops. But I thought that users should be free to do as they pleased, since it was their desktop, and it was easy to revert to one of the built-in patterns. Bill cared most about MacPaint, and didn't want a potentially ugly desktop pattern marring his creation. So he made MacPaint allocate a window that was the size of the screen when it started up, and filled it with the standard 50% gray pattern, making his own desktop covering up the real one, thus protecting the poor users from their rash esthetic blunders, at least within the friendly confines of MacPaint.You can read more stories over at Folklore.
