Mr. Macintosh

Early in the development of Macintosh, Steve Jobs wanted to add “a mysterious character” to the first OS, according to an early developer from the 80’s, Andy Hertzfeld. Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while, when you least expect it, and then winks at you and disappears again. It will be so quick that you won’t be sure if you saw him or not… One out of every 1000–2000 times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you’ll get Mr. Macintosh, leaning against the wall of the menu. He’ll wave at you, then quickly disappear. You’ll try to get him to come back, but you won’t be able to. Steve was really excited to get this mysterious character in the OS, so he hired Belgian cartoonist Jean-Michel Folon. Mr. Macintosh was intended to mysteriously appear every “One thousand times or so a person used an OS UI element such as the menu bar.” Code for Mr. Macintosh is named “MrMacHook” and exists in the first version of Mac OS. Animations were never made for Mr. Macintosh because the character was scrapped from the OS, as the images were too large to fit in the available storage space.^[129]