The first book I wrote

1985

In 1985, I was working at Apple, mostly talking on the phone all day. My job was to help Macintosh software developers figure out the Mac and write their cool new applications. Online support was just starting to become a thing. To use the modern vernacular, our support model of mostly phone calls didn’t scale very well. Caroline Rose and her team were hard at work writing a stack of wonderful documentation, but those docs were in draft and were hard to come by if you didn’t have a connection to Apple. And those docs didn’t yet cover the gritty, run-timey, debugging-y details you needed to developer commercial software for a radically different machine like the Mac.

That summer, I went to the first Boston Macworld Expo. It was amazing: a whole trade show dedicated to our little computer! But the most exciting moment for me was seeing the Hayden Book Company booth, where Mac author Steve Chernicoff was showing off his new book called Macintosh Revealed, all about programming the Mac. He seemed to be having the time of his life, chatting with people who were buying his book - and there were a lot of them.

I thought “Wow, that looks like fun!” And then I thought “I could do that.”

I met the publishing folks and suggested a book focused on debugging and finishing Mac applications. They said yes. Then I had to convince my boss, Chris Espinosa, to let me write the book in my “spare time.” He said yes too. So I fired up Microsoft Word 1.0 and got started.

I thought, “I could do that.” And I could.

The book just poured out. It was like connecting my brain directly to the computer. I realized that because of my job, I knew stuff that few people knew, that many people wanted to know. That was very motivating. I worked on the book at home, at night, while I kept supporting developers all day.

After I finished writing, I heard the publisher was having money problems and might go out of business before the book was published. Oh no! They rushed through the editing process. I loved to write in a casual, goofy, jokey style (not a surprise) that was not typical for technical books then, nor approved by everyone. But the we’re-going-broke publishing process meant they didn’t take the time to edit out my writing voice. That was incredibly lucky for me. The book was published with my style intact, and most readers liked it. After that, publishers asked me to write that way.

I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing a book, a real book, with my name on it. The book was called How to Write Macintosh Software and it was about objects in memory, how to debug, what happened when you compiled a program, and other nifty topics Apple didn’t yet have documentation for. It was very popular among the Mac nerd folks. I even saw it on desks and shelves at work. Apple started giving a copy to every Mac developer. And I didn’t have to explain these things on the phone all day anymore! I could just tell people where to look in the book.

The back cover. I didn’t write this copy. “A well-known authority”, mind you. I took a lot of ribbing over that turn of phrase. This photo was taken in the atrium of the Mac building (Bandley 3) by the legendary Ed Kashi.

What happened next

I was very lucky with this book, and it profoundly affected my life. I still meet people who say they learned to program the Mac by reading my books. And some of the people who say this also hired me. Most of the jobs I had for the rest of my career came from bosses who read this book and others. So I’m very grateful that I was in the right place at the right time.

You can read this book at the Internet Archive. Caution, the book is 40 years old and is somewhat out of date.