Burrell Smith

Burrell Carver Smith (born December 16, 1955 in upstate New York) is an engineer who, while working at Apple Computer, designed the digital board for the original Macintosh. He was Apple employee #282, and was hired in February, 1979, initially as an Apple II service technician. He also designed the digital board for Apple's LaserWriter, and designed a low cost version of the Apple II that eventually became the Apple IIe, using the same, innovative design techniques that he pioneered with the Mac.

Burrell was working in Apple's service department when he helped Bill Atkinson to add more memory to an Apple II in an innovative fashion. Bill recommended him to Jef Raskin, who was looking for a hardware engineer to help him with his newly formed Macintosh project. Burrell actually designed five different digital boards during the course of Macintosh development, all of which used extremely clever techniques based on Programmable Array Logic (PAL) chips to achieve maximum functionality in a minimal chip count.

Because of internal politics, he left the company before releasing Apple's "Turbo Mac" design platform, which included an internal hard drive and a simplified chipset.

He was a co-founder of Radius Corp, and is retired and living in Palo Alto.

External links

• Stories about Smith at Folklore.org — A collection of first-hand accounts of the early days of the Macintosh.
• Revolution in the Valley Andy Hertzfeld's book about the development of the Macintosh.
• I'll Be Your Best Friend, A character sketch of Burrell.
• It's The Moustache That Matters Burrell figures out how to get promoted
• I Invented Burrell Burrell's imitation of Jef Raskin
• Five Different Macintoshes The evolution of the Mac digital board
• Are You Gonna Do It? Burrell quits Apple