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)
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“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 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 been only two milestone products so far: the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, Jobs continued. “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 was on the right track with his historical comparison. However, it would not be IBM that became the great dominator of the computer industry over the years, but rather, the alliance of Microsoft and Intel.
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 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 more intensely oversee the developers writing the applications for the Apple II. “I told him [Markkula] it was a fine project, but I wasn’t terribly interested in a 500 dollar game machine,” Raskin later remembered. “However, there was this thing that I’d been dreaming about - it was [that] it would be designed from a human factors perspective, which at that time 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 was not published until 1982 in the SIGPC Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2.
Raskin had chosen a completely new approach, because until then, the “technically feasible” is what defined 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 could not to be unattainable.
The expression of the “Person in the Street” formed by Raskin became a dictum at Apple - 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 at 64 kilobytes.
Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin
At that time, Steve Jobs had not taken particular interest in the Macintosh project – and due to some dim apprehension, Raskin tried everything to exclude the Apple co-founder. Yet in the summer of 1980, a serious conflict between Jobs and Apple’s president Mike Scott was brewing as Scott intended to edge Jobs out of the concrete development of the new Lisa. With his capricious and at times fairly aggressive management style, Jobs had snubbed many developers. In addition, Scott did not think him capable of a major management role and thus planned to assign him the less important role of a company spokesman and promoter in advance of Apple’s initial public offering on December 12th, 1980.
In 1982, Jef Raskin left Apple and founded the company Information Appliance, Inc. in order to realize his original concept of the Macintosh project. The company brought the “SwyftCard” to market, which is a firmware card for the Apple II. The card featured a program package which was also offered on disk as SwyftWare. With the Swyft, Information Appliance later offered a laptop computer, which, however, experienced only moderate commercial success. Raskin licensed the Swyft design to Canon, which constructed the “Canon Cat” on its basis in 1987.
Jef Raskin with a design model of the Canon Cat
Despite the broad attention the Canon’s innovative interface attracted, this product did not achieve a breakthrough either. Raskin also blamed Steve Jobs for the failure, since it was Jobs who as the head of NeXT Computer persuaded Canon into giving up the Cat project. However, it was claimed that Cat also fell victim to internal rivalries at Canon.
In his book “The Humane Interface”, Raskin later described his vision of a computer interface constructed for the human being and oriented to human needs – rather than to technology.
On February 26th, 2005, Jef Raskin died at the age of 61 years.
With the initial public offering of Apple Computers in December 1980, Steve Jobs became a multimillionaire – however, he possessed neither enough stock to lead Apple Computers alone nor to determine his own position within Apple. By the beginning of 1981, he actually found himself to be without management responsibility over any specific project. To Jef Raskin’s discomfort, he threw himself into the Macintosh project, which had not been taken really seriously by 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.
The Alto was not available on the market. For this experimental computer, the main memory alone would have cost about 7,000 dollars at the 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 he 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 a 4 year old company that had been set up in a garage! Are you serious?! But it was hard saying no to Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh Pirates
Above the roof of “Bandley III”, a pirate flag with the Apple symbol as eye patch was waving – and on deck of the virtual pirate ship, Steve Jobs was standing as a man who wanted to prove it to them all. Jobs’ first victim was Jef Raskin, who had fought against the application of a mouse and instead preferred a pen or a joystick. After Jobs had relieved his opponent of the responsibility for the software, Raskin gave in exasperatedly and left Apple Computers in March 1982. In retrospect, Raskin can claim that he was the first at Apple to have presented the vision of an inexpensive, easy to handle computer for the masses. Yet in order to keep “his” Macintosh below the price limit of 1,500 dollars, Raskin also wanted to make technical compromises which would have put at risk the Mac’s success. Thus, for instance, he insisted on limiting the main memory to a tiny 64 kilobytes. Jobs accomplished 128 kilobytes – and afterwards, even this space was actually far too tight for the system programmers.
Raskin did not particularly support the innovations the Lisa team had picked up in the Xerox PARC and therefore disapproved of the change to the more capable 68000 processor, which was included in the Lisa as well. It is hardly imaginable what would have become of the Mac if Raskin had asserted his extreme parsimony and his resistance to the mouse. After the internal disputes had been settled, the Mac team now fully concentrated on the in-house competition against the far larger Lisa developing team. Beforehand, Jobs had enticed away from the Lisa team ingenious programmers such as Bill Atkinson and Steve Capps.
Love and Hate
As a project manager, Steve Jobs had been highly controversial not only within Apple. “He’s also obnoxious and this comes from his high standards. He has extremely high standards and he has no patience with people who don’t either share those standards or perform to them,“ Bob Metcalfe remembers. He is the inventor of the networking standard Ethernet, who had worked as a researcher in the neighboring research institute Xerox PARC at that time. “He’s also obnoxious and this comes from his high standards. He has extremely high standards and he has no patience with people who don’t either share those standards or perform to them.” However, Metcalfe still thinks a lot of Jobs as he had made the vision created in the Xerox PARC become reality. “Steve Jobs is on my eternal heroes list, there’s nothing he can ever do to get off it.”
Larry Tessler and Bob Metcalfe about Steve Jobs (quoted from: Triumph of the Nerds)
The respect for Jobs is also shared by Andy Hertzfeld, who had written the Mac’s kernel in the Macintosh ROM, although he was sometimes afflicted with his boss’s tantrums: – quotation – Kenyon set to work again and shortened the booting process by further three seconds.
In the internal competition at Apple over whether the Lisa or the Macintosh would be finished first, Jobs got the short end of the stick. He lost a personal 5,000 dollar bet against the Lisa team leader John Couch when the Apple business computer was launched in January 1983 – at least one year previous to the Macintosh. However, the Lisa computer soon proved to be a huge flop. With a price of 10,000 dollars (exclusive of hard disk), it was far too expensive;the graphical user interface devoured Lisa’s power such that the computer did not work particularly briskly; and it lacked the necessary programs to induce the business world to buy the Lisa in large numbers. Moreover, the newly established distribution team could hardly resort to any experience in handling Corporate America.
Steve Jobs
www.mac-history.de
