Welcome to Macintosh Page #8

And then I go...

You know, pretty much go right to bed.

And so I woke up the next morning

and there in my Inbox...

...was this e-mail

from Avie Tevanian and I thought:

But he was a very good sport about it.

He was amused.

And I managed to avoid any litigation.

Well, I mean it really...

You know, I didn't start out

with any goal other than...

I just found myself

writing these things anyway...

...and I wanted a place to publish them.

So there was no grand plan in mind.

I never thought that I was gonna make

any money doing it.

And I do manage to actually make...

...at least a little bit of money

doing it.

Keeps me off the streets.

The idea of a start-up sound

was from the Apple II.

The Apple II once it reset,

made a little beep...

...with the square wave speaker.

So we thought that was a great idea.

Let's the computer know it's...

Let's the world know it made it,

like an infant's first cry.

The very first one we did

for the earliest Mac prototypes...

We had a square-wave sound generator

built into the early Mac prototypes.

We later got rid of that.

So I made a thing

that incremented the frequency with...

You know, I tweaked the delay

so it made a whooping sound.

The first original boot sound

was more like something like:

Or whatever. And it was a little comical,

but it wasrt very elegant.

And so I was experimenting

with different things for the boot sound...

...but a guy named Charlie Kellner

had just joined the Mac Team...

...who's also a brilliant musician...

...and he had actually designed one

of the first PC-based synthesizers...

...called the alphaSyntauri

for the Apple II.

He was an accomplished musician...

...and he kind of looked

what I was doing...

...messing around

with different boot sounds.

I guess for the time I was doing it,

everyone could just hear it.

You know, trying this, trying that.

And he said... Oh, he had an algorithm

he always wanted to use.

That was...

It's not conceptually musical.

It's more conceptual

at the algorithm level...

...which was just filling sound buffer

with a square wave.

And then just making passes through

averaging every adjacent sample...

...till they got to be all the same.

And that made

a chiming, bell-like sound.

It was in the Mac, you know,

starting in 1984...

...and it lasted up until the Mac II...

...where once again, they put in even

more sophisticated sound hardware...

...and they came up

with a different sound...

...that I wasrt involved with.

Well, the start-up sound, let me think...

Well, the main inspiration was...

...how horrible

the one on the Mac II was.

So a tritone is the most dissonant sound

you could imagine.

And stack four of them together.

And that was the sound that you heard

when you turned on the Mac.

Which was horrible. And so...

...I set out trying to change that

because it didn't make any sense.

Especially when you usually hear

the start-up sound after it crashed.

And so I'm like,

"Great, reward for a crash."

So the sound that I wanted to do

turned out to be, politically, a challenge.

No one wanted to change it.

They thought of it as the brand.

There was this new machine...

...that we were building

at the time called the Quadra.

And the Quadra

was going to have better speakers.

And then I'm like, "Great, horrible sound

on better speakers."

And so I started working on new sounds

that would be the sound of...

I kind of thought of it as:

"What's the palette cleanser

for a crash?"

Plus, it was this new,

bigger, badder machine...

...and I wanted it to sound like

a bigger, badder machine.

I remember when Byte magazine

did the review.

The very opening paragraph

of the review was:

"I knew it was gonna be a good

computer by the way it sounded."

So I was like, "I did it."

That was the actual goal, was I wanted

it to sound like a good computer.

And then unfortunately, what happened

was no one wanted to change the sound.

We ended up just doing it.

And after that...

...everybody changed the start-up

sound with every new ROM...

...which was

exactly the opposite problem.

You can't establish your brand...

...if you keep changing your logo

with every release.

And so, you know,

these sonic logos or earcons...

...where, you know, that should be

a recognizable sound.

Right about the same time

Steve Jobs came back, I heard...

The story I heard was he had said,

"Let's go back to that good sound."

And that was the one

that I had done...

...and so it's still been there.

It's the same one. It's the only one

that's ever been there since.

So, I mean, it's kind of cool to hear it

every time, I mean...

I never really think about it,

millions of people crashing...

...and hearing me

play the C-major chord.

No, it was a widespread

C-major chord...

...with a high E, I think,

in the upper voice...

...which, to me, just sounds more bright

and sort of unresolved, but happy.

It's a happy chord.

It's way better than a tritone.

One psychologist said...

...that, you know, people form

a social relationship with their machine.

It becomes like a friend,

it becomes personalized.

It seems a little silly...

...but you kind of build up

a relationship with your computer.

And it can either be a good relationship

or it can be a dysfunctional relationship.

You can customize

any computer system...

...but these are very easy

to develop a relationship with.

That's different from customizing.

They're the closest devices

that I know of...

...that are really symbiotic.

And I'll admit it,

you know, when they...

When they do make it

so that you can kind of jack in neurally...

...l'll do that.

Yeah, I think maybe somebody

needs to sit down with those people.

Maybe it's Dr. Phil.

Your computer doesn't love you.

This relationship is not working.

Don't be an enabler.

Their soul is somehow reflected

in that machine.

It's an object of communication,

but also of creativity.

You know, the most essential things

that they are...

...the things that express themselves,

are expressed through the computer.

And so they invest, you know,

so much in that...

...that it's a cybernetic relationship.

When Steve came back...

...he was like, "Hey, you know,

we should get into this music thing."

I mean, he saw it.

But to me it was, like, five years late,

like that was obvious five years earlier.

I think Apple

could be as big as Sony right now...

...if it had been five years earlier.

A phone? Finally? Whatever.

A couple of years ago when they...

Apple said it was gonna come through

with some breakthrough device...

...there was a lot of speculation

about what this might be.

People figured it was a music player,

but exactly what, no one knew.

And people were saying on the forums

they were gonna buy it anyway.

It didn't matter. They were gonna get it

because it was gonna be f***ing great.

The iPod people

have had the iPods in their pocket...

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