Mac History

The Apple Macintosh revolutionized the entire computer industry by the year of 1984. Steve Jobs and his ingenious Macintosh team arranged for the computer to be used by the normal “person in the street” – and not only by experts.

The first Apple Macintosh (1984)
[ high res version ]

“Insanely great” - Steve Jobs could hardly put into words his enthusiasm by the launch of the Macintosh. On the legendary annual general meeting of January 24th, 1984, in the Flint Center not far from the Apple Campus in Cupertino, the Apple co-founder initially quoted Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in order to then polemicize against an imminent predominance of the young computer industry by the IBM.

The early 1980s. 1981 - Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer, and Apple has grown to a 300 million dollar corporation, becoming the fastest growing company in American business history. With over fifty companies vying for a share, IBM enters the personal computer market in November of 1981, with the IBM PC.

1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, with each selling approximately one billion dollars worth of personal computers in 1983. The shakeout is in full swing. The first major personal computer firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for 1983 overshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM.

It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom.

IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?

The crowd, among them the complete Macintosh developer’s team, shouted back: “Nooooo!”

The introduction of the first Mac on January 24th, 1984; taken from the “Lost 1984 Videos”

There had only been two milestone products so far: the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, Jobs further said. “Today (…) we are introducing the third industry milestone product, the Macintosh. Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now and it has turned out insanely great.” Taking a look at the history of the personal computer today, Steve Jobs had been on the right track with his historical comparison, although it should not be the IBM to become the great dominator of the computer industry over the years, but the alliance of Microsoft and Intel.

Steve Jobs

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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Apple, Apple Computer, Bob Ryan, Guy Kawasaki, IBM, John Sculley, Mac, Microsoft, Steve Jobs, Triumph of the Nerds

It had been a long way until the day of the official introduction of the Macintosh on January 24th, 1984. Five years earlier, in spring 1979, Apple chairman Mike Markkula wondered about whether his company should bring a 500 dollar computer to market. Markkula then charged Jef Raskin with the secret “Annie” project.

Raskin had been responsible for Apple’s publications, particularly manuals, and actually was to look after the developers writing the applications for the Apple II more intensely. “I told him (Markkula) it was a fine project, but I wasn’t terribly interested in a 500 dollar game machine,” Raskin later remembers. “However, there was this thing that I’d been dreaming about it was it would be designed from a human factors perspective, which at that times was totally incomprehensible.”

In fall 1979, Raskin wrote his article “Computers by the Millions“, in which he drafted his version of a computer for the masses. Markkula insisted on the report to be treated as a confidential internal report. The essay had not been published until 1982 in the SIGPC Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2.

Raskin had chosen a completely new approach since until then the “technically feasible” used to define a computer’s design. The academic computer scientist, who had kept secret his diploma from the Apple founders at the time of his appointment (as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs approached academics extremely distrustfully), wanted to design a computer for the normal person in the street – which of course was not to be unattainable as well.

The expression of the “Person in the Street” formed by Raskin became a dictum at Apple’s abbreviated as PITS. Raskin’s first draft envisioned a closed computer including monitor, keyboard and printer able to work without any external wires – and all that for 500 dollars. In return, the Macintosh should only be equipped with a tiny five inch display, a cheap CPU (6809) and a main memory calculated extremely tight by 64 kilobytes.

Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin

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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Canon, Copy Cat, Jef Raskin, Mac, Macintosh, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

It is claimed again and again that in the course of the Macintosh’s development, Apple just resorted to the ideas the research laboratory Xerox PARC had hatched before. Tale or truth?

Link: sevenload.com
In the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley“, the issue “Apple and Xerox” is treated slightly ironically.

In the USA, the name “Xerox” denotes photocopying just as “Kleenex” does for a tissue or “Scotch tape” for adhesive film. After all, already in 1950 the Xerox Corp. was the world’s first company to actually transfer the “Xerography” invented by the American law student Chester Carlson into a functional product.

By the end of the sixties, the Xerox management sensed the threat of Japanese companies catching up on Xerox’s technological advantage. Moreover, the Xerox head worried that the “paperless office” might emerge with the following computer generations in which the Xerox would no longer have a place. Against this background, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California was founded in 1971.

John Warnock, former researcher in the Xerox PARC and later one of the two founders of Adobe Systems, remembers: “The atmosphere was electric eh there was total intellectual freedom. There was no conventional wisdom almost every idea was up for challenge and got challenged regularly.” Larry Tessler, who later took part in developing the Macintosh and the Newton PDA at Apple’s, also enjoyed the liberties the PARC provided in the seventies: “The management said go create the new world. We don’t understand it. Here are people who have a lot of ideas and tremendous talent, young, energetic.” The problem, however, was that the company management at the East Coast of the USA did not care a straw for the PARC’s research results unless they were directly involved with photocopiers.

Link: sevenload.com

In his TV documentation “Triumph of the Nerds” Robert Cringley is interviewing researchers at the Xerox PARC

Within two years, the researchers at the PARC had designed the Alto, which was something like the first personal computer. The Alto did not feature character-oriented graphics as all the other computers of that time did, but a bit-oriented version instead. What the screen displayed could also be put on paper correspondingly by a high quality printer.
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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Adele Goldberg, Apple and Xerox, Bill Gates, California, GUI, IBM, Jef Raskin, John Warnock, Larry Tesler, PARC, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Robert Cringley, Smalltalk, Steve Jobs, Xerox Corp., Xerox Parc

With the initial public offering of Apple Computers in December 1980, Steve Jobs became a multimillionaire – however, he did not posses enough stocks to determine Apple Computers in total and thereby his own position within Apple. By the beginning of 1981, he actually found himself without any charge of a certain project.

To Jef Raskin’s discomfort, he launched into the Macintosh project, which had not been taken really seriously in the Apple board of management at that time.

However, Steve Jobs knew what he wanted. He had seen the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto at Xerox PARC. Instead of green letters on a dark background, white document windows with black text appeared – just like a sheet of paper. Several different fonts could be selected. The graphics board controlled individual pixels on the screen freely. By means of a mouse, a pointer could be moved on the screen in order to mark texts or issue commands. Files were represented by icons on a virtual desktop.

Demo of the Xerox Alto (quoted from: Triumph of the Nerds)

The Alto was not available on the market. The main memory alone of this experimental computer would have cost about 7,000 dollars at that time. Jobs wanted a computer even better than the Alto – and also better than Apple’s Lisa. However, the new marvelous machine should cost only a fraction of the Lisa’s price, which was about 12,000 dollars inclusive of external hard disk.

Pirate flag above the Mac
developers’ building “Bandley III”

Within Apple, Jobs gathered a small, conniving team – and did not care for other projects in the company. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the most important software designers in the Macintosh developers team, remembers:

Steve Jobs kind of came bopping by my cubicle saying OK you’re working on the Mac now. And I said well I have to finish up this Apple 2 stuff I’m doing here. No you don’t that stinks that’s not going to amount to anything you gotta start now. And I said well just give me a few days to finish and he said no and what he did was he pulled the plug on my Apple 2 that I was programming just losing, losing the code I’m working on and start taking my computer and walking away with it and what could I do but follow him out to his car cause he had my machine he plopped it down in the trunk and drove me over to this remote building, took the computer out, walked upstairs, plopped it down on a desk, well you’re working on the Mac now. While Jobs pursued his MacMission he needed a more orthodox chief executive to run the company. A respectable face who could sell to corporate America. He chose Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley. Sculley refused - leave Pepsi for 4 year old company that had been set up in a garage! Are you serious?! But it was hard saying no to Steve Jobs.

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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Bob Metcalfe, Jef Raskin, John Sculley, Larry Tessler, Macintosh, Steve Capps, Steve Jobs, Xerox

The Apple Macintosh had not been a success from the outset. The hardware was not designed particularly generous for the requirements of a graphical user interface. Especially the main memory had been calculated rather tight. Moreover, there was no hard disk for the Mac at that time. In addition, there was a lack of appropriate software

The Mac lacked the applications that dragged the Charlie Chaplin figure across the screen box by box in the IBM’s advertising spot for the PC. Therefore, Guy Kawasaki and other “Software Evangelists” of Apple made an effort to convince the developers of other software companies to write programs for the Mac. The Mac’s ROM, which had been calculated far too tight by 128 kilobytes, did not make this a simple task. Not until the “Fat Mac” with 512 kilobytes was launched one year after the first Macintosh, the narrow bottleneck had been removed.

The problem came to a head when by the beginning of 1985 the Macs that had not found purchasers during the Christmas sales of 1984 were piling up in storage. Apple had to publish the first quarter’s loss in the company’s history and release a fifth of the staff. During a marathon meeting on April 10 and 11, 1985, Apple’s CEO John Sculley demanded to have Steve Jobs relieved of his position as an Apple vice president and general manager of the Macintosh department.

According to Sculley’s wishes, Steve Jobs was to represent the company externally as a new Apple chairman without influencing the core business. As Jobs got wind of these plans depriving him of his power, he tried to arrange a coup against Sculley in the Apple board. Sculley told the board: “I’m asking Steve to step down and you can back me on it and the I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing and you’re going to find yourselves a new CEO.” The majority of the board backed the ex-Pepsi man and turned away from Steve Jobs.

On May 31, 1985, Jobs lost his responsibilities and was shuffled off to the chairman position. In September, the Apple co-founder left the company with a few people in order to found NeXT Computer. “I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that,” Jobs wrote to Mike Markkula on parting.
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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Andy Hertzfeld, clash, John Sculley, Steve Jobs