Steve immediately rejected it as lousy, which it was, and opted for using a CD of the "Chariots of Fire" theme to play in the background instead. It's hard to write a music editor/player in two days, but I managed to put something together that could actually play the "Chariots of Fire" theme, but it didn't sound very good, since it used simple sine waves without any envelope shaping. I integrated all the pieces and also signed up for the "Chariots of Fire" music part, since no one else wanted to do that. Susan worked on an intro graphic of the Mac sitting in its canvas carrying bag, and well as some of the other graphics for the slideshow part. Bruce Horn wanted to do a starry night with twinkling stars, and a skywriter writing "Macintosh" in cursive across the night sky. We were too tired to think about it right away, but when we came back the next day, a plan started to emerge.Ĭapps had an idea to use a gigantic font to scroll "Macintosh" across the screen, one letter at a time, to start the demo, so he worked on that, as well as the slideshow. We moaned and groaned about being tired, but as we talked we realized that it would be fun to cook up something impressive. And it needs to be done by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals." Plus lots of other cool stuff, whatever you can come up with. I want the Mac to play the theme from "Chariots of Fire" while it's showing a slide show of the apps. "We need a demo for the intro! The Mac deserves to have a great demo for its first public showing. Uh-oh, I thought, someone must have found a show-stopper in the release and we're going to have to track it down. "Hey, pick yourselves up off the floor, you're not done yet!" By 5pm, most of the software team had dragged themselves back for the same reason, and we were lounging around in a tired daze, happy that we finally shipped, but still not quite believing it, when Steve Jobs strode into the software area. I thought I would need to sleep for at least 24 hours, but I woke up after 6 hours with a desire to go back to Apple to see if the release held up, and to see how everyone else was feeling. By that point, most of the software team hadn't slept for days, so we all went home to collapse. We finished with literally no time to spare, shipping the "golden master" of the "Write/Paint" disk to the factory at 6am on Monday morning January 16th, a week before the introduction. It took a monumental effort, fueled by inordinate amounts of chocolate covered espresso beans (see Real Artists Ship), to finally finish the first release of the Macintosh software in time for the introduction.
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