The Archive and Why It Matters
Andy Hertzfeld joined Apple in 1979 and wrote much of the original Macintosh system software. When the Mac shipped in January 1984, he had spent years in the same rooms as Jobs, absorbing the arguments, jokes, and pressure that shaped the machine. Two decades later, he began publishing those memories at folklore.org ↗, a site dedicated entirely to first-person accounts of the Macintosh’s development.
The archive runs to more than a hundred stories contributed by Hertzfeld and other original Mac team members, including Susan Kare and Bill Atkinson. Each entry is dated by the period it covers, tagged by contributor, and cross-referenced by character. That structure matters. A quotation attributed to Jobs in a folklore.org story can be traced to a named witness, a named occasion, and often corroborated by a second contributor who was present. That is a stronger evidentiary chain than most circulating Jobs quotations can claim.
Hertzfeld is careful to distinguish remembered speech from documented transcript. He frequently hedges — "as I recall," "something like this" — which is intellectually honest and also a signal readers should notice. A paraphrased line in a Hertzfeld story is still a paraphrase; it is not a verbatim transcript. The distinction between a primary source and a contemporaneous account by a participant matters here. folklore.org sits in a middle category: closer to the event than a biography written years later, but not a tape recording.
The site is archived at the Internet Archive ↗ in multiple snapshots, which allows version comparison if a story is ever quietly edited. Hertzfeld also published a selected, edited version of the stories as a book — Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly, 2004) — but the website remains the fuller and more easily checked resource.
- folklore.org — contemporaneous participant account; stronger than biography, weaker than transcript or recording
- Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly, 2004) — edited print selection from the same archive; useful but less complete than the website
- Internet Archive snapshots — allow version-history checking of individual stories
For Jobs quotations specifically, folklore.org is most reliable on the 1981–1984 period, when Hertzfeld was present daily. It should not be used as a source for the NeXT years, the Pixar era, or the later Apple period; Hertzfeld was not there, and those stories draw on second-hand information. When a Jobs line traces back to folklore.org, the right question is not only whether Hertzfeld said it but whether Hertzfeld was in the room when Jobs said it. On the Mac years, he usually was.
Each entry is dated by the period it covers, tagged by contributor, and cross-referenced by character.
