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 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.

Steve Jobs

Previous to the Macintosh developer team, others had already tried to design a computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface – one year before Apple did, with its own business computer Lisa, which retailed for 10,000 dollars.

Advertising spot for the Apple Lisa

However, the Lisa computer proved to be a huge flop. With a price of 10,000 dollars (exclusive of a hard disk drive), it was far too expensive; the graphical user interface devoured the Lisa’s power so that the computer did not work particularly briskly. 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 the handling of Corporate America.

Contrary to its elitist predecessors, the new Macintosh was not only to delight a few experts in the Californian Silicon Valley, but also to conquer the masses – and set the standard for future computer generations. Computer columnist Bob Ryan immediately caught the Mac’s revolutionary core:

The Macintosh is the best hardware value in the history (short though it may be) of the personal computer industry. It is a machine which will appeal to the masses of people who have neither the time nor the inclination to embark upon the long learning process required to master the intricacies of the present generation of personal computers. Barring unforeseen technical glitches and assuming that a reasonable software library is in place by the end of the year, the Macintosh should establish itself as the next standard in personal computers.

The developers of the Macintosh introducing the Mac

[ see also the articles:

It all began with “Annie” – Initial drafts of a computer for the masses

Steve Jobs discovers the Macintosh Project]

Against Big Brother IBM

Given the innovative Macintosh, Apple believed it had discovered a way to reclaim the leadership of the then still young market for personal computers from computer giant IBM.

In 1981, IBM had introduced its first PC and seized the Apple II’s position of the most successful personal computer within a few months. Within three years, “Big Blue” had sold more than two million IBM PCs. Therefore, Apple’s 15 million dollar advertising campaign on the occasion of the launch of the Macintosh directly aimed at IBM. The enormous sales campaign had eventually also been responsible for Apple raising the Mac’s originally planned launch price by 500 dollars to 2,495 dollars.

Lisa Flop Causes Trouble for Apple

The Lisa’s failure put Apple into a precarious situation in 1983. The hitherto existing cash cow, the Apple II, had been eclipsed by newer technology and found itself exposed to intense competition. Now the Macintosh was to save Apple Computers from ruin. In its first business plan of summer 1981, Apple had assumed that 2.2 million Macs could be sold between 1982 and 1985; that is about 47,000 units per month. However, the Mac was not brought to market until the beginning of 1984. After the community of the computer nerds (at least those who could afford the first Mac) had satisfied its buying frenzy, the sales of the Macintosh dropped dramatically to about 5,000 units per month.

Apple boss John Sculley could not change much about this either. In order to professionalize Apple’s management and marketing, Steve Jobs had enticed Sculley away from Pepsi with the sentence: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?“

Despite diverse management methods, Jobs and Sculley initially collaborated harmonically and were celebrated by the public as Apple’s “Dynamic Duo.” However, the Mac’s depressed distribution soon caused serious tensions to arise between Jobs and Sculley.

John Sculley in the documentary film “Triumph of the Nerds” (PBS)

It didn’t do very much. We had Mac Paint and Mac Write were our only applications and the market started to figure this out, by the end of the year people said well maybe the IBM PC isn’t as easy to use or is not as attractive as the Macintosh but it actually does something which we want to be able to do - spreadsheets, word processing and database and so we started to see the sales of the Mac tail off towards the end of 1984, and that became a problem the following year.
John Sculley

At that time, the Mac simply 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 at 128 kilobytes, did not make this a simple task. The narrow bottleneck was not removed until the launch of the “Fat Mac” with 512 kilobytes, one year after the first Macintosh.

[ see also the article:
Showdown at Apple: John Sculley vs. Steve Jobs]

Success on the Second Attempt

In 1987, Apple sold one million Macs and suddenly played in the IBM league again. More than half of the 2,000 dollars for a Mac constituted profit for Apple, so that Sculley and his colleagues in the Apple management believed that the users would always be willing to pay much more for a better technology. Within these years, Apple missed the gigantic opportunity of establishing the Mac as the general industry standard. At that time, either the prices should have been cut dramatically, or a broad licensing program should have been agreed with other hardware producers. With the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990, this “window of opportunity” finally shut.

When Steve Jobs returned to his former company in hard times by the beginning of 1997, first as a counselor and then as a principal, the competition for the industry standard between Apple Computers and Microsoft had long been settled. With new Apple talents such as Jonathan Ive, he not only succeeded in bringing the company back on the course of success, but also in making a mark in the industry.

With the Mac, Jobs also astounded experienced pioneers of the computer industry: Future PCs, Intel co-founder Andy Grove said in 1998 in an interview, wouldn’t be general purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought, but networking machines that also do computing. “The iMac embodies a lot of the things I’m talking about,” Grove said. “Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us.”

Christoph Dernbach

Mike Markkula (1977)

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

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.

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. Fact or Fiction?

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

In the USA, the brand name “Xerox” denotes photocopying just as “Kleenex” stands for tissues 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 – 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, 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, [are] 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 did all the other computers of that time, but a bit-oriented version instead. A high quality printer could print exactly what the screen displayed.

Xerox Alto

However, this marvelous machine was not freely available on the market. Approximately 1500 units had been produced, 1000 of which Xerox employed in-house; the rest went to universities and public authorities.

Link: sevenload.com

An advertising spot for the Xerox Alto taken from Robert Cringley’s TV documentation “Triumph of the Nerds“.

Jef Raskin, who had been charged initially with the Macintosh project at Apple, kept regular contact to the PARC researchers and tried to convince the Apple management to employ a graphical user interface like the Alto contained in the development of the Lisa.

Raskin claimed he wanted to introduce Jobs to the PARC, but due to his personal dislike of Raskin, Jobs simply did not agree to respond to the offer. According to Raskin, it was not until Bill Atkinson supported him that Jobs set out for the PARC. Whatever way the contact was actually accomplished, this visit meant a turning point to the life of Steve Jobs; the three technologies that the 24-year-old encountered there were each revolutionary on their own: the first graphical user interface for computers; networked Alto computers; and object-oriented programming.

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

Even 17 years after this visit, Jobs can still remember it exactly:

They showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they’d done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn’t know that at the time but still thought they had the germ of the idea was there and they’d done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.

Adele Goldberg

Jobs decided to realign Apple’s strategy and fully rely on the “graphical user interface” (GUI) he had seen at the Xerox PARC. Adele Goldberg, who had been a researcher at the PARC at that time, already suspected that Jobs’ visit would entail extensive consequences: “He came back, and I almost said ‘asked’ but the truth is ‘demanded,’ that his entire programming team get a demo of the Smalltalk System, and the then head of the science center asked me to give the demo because Steve specifically asked for me to give the demo, and I said ‘no way.’ I had a big argument with these Xerox executives, telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink, and I said that I would only do it if I were ordered to do it, cause then, of course, it would be their responsibility, and that’s what they did.”

Larry Tessler, Adele Goldberg and Steve Jobs about “Apple and Xerox” (taken from: Triumph of the Nerds)

Apple bought access to the PARC by means of a stock deal that seemed lucrative to the Xerox managers on the East Coast: They might buy 100,000 Apple stocks for one million dollars. Holding this admission ticket in the hand, Steve Jobs, Apple’s president Mike Scott, Bill Atkinson, and a number of members of the developing team marched up. “I think mostly … what we got in that hour and a half was inspiration and just sort of basically a bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things would make this business computer more accessible.”

Larry Tesler, who then took part in the demo as an employee of the PARC, had been fascinated by the visitors: “After an hour looking at demos, they understood our technology and what it meant, more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them.”

The Macintosh team took up the ideas of the PARC, but it also changed numerous operating modes and added countless new features. Accordingly, the Xerox Alto did not imply, for example, menus flapping down from the upper edge of the screen, but operated with some kind of a pop-up window instead. Moreover, the window did not open automatically by double-clicking on a document, but had to be opened manually. During months of painstaking work, Atkinson had written the QuickDraw routine for the Lisa and the Macintosh, which allowed for overlapping windows to be drawn on the computer screen for the first time.

The screen of the Xerox Star

In contrast to the first Mac, the Alto featured no completed desktop metaphor nor ingenious desktop icons such as the trash can, which made it easier to delete files, and not just for computer novices. The historical accomplishments of the Mac team also included the Macintosh Human Interface Guide, which, for instance, when it detected a document in a Macintosh application, determined that it was to be saved using the command “Apple-S.”

As for Xerox, the bitter aftertaste of having missed an historical opportunity remained, particularly due to the fact that parallel to the Apple developers, Bill Gates and his Microsoft crew also went in and out as they pleased. (By the way, they did so without holding an admission ticket comparable to the one Jobs had procured by means of the stock deal.)

“Basically, they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today,” Steve Jobs said in 1996. “Could have been, you know, a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM – could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties.”
Besides, in the context of the dispute with Apple about the plagiarism accusations around the first Windows versions, Microsoft had pointed out that Apple and Microsoft had both helped themselves generously at XEROX. This episode is described slightly exaggeratedly in the movie “Pirates in the Silicon Valley”:

Christoph Dernbach

****************************************************

Book cover: Revolution in The Valley

JT: In your book you allude to Xerox as being, to Bill Gates, the rich uncle that both Apple and Microsoft stole from. What was the relationship like with PARC when you were developing the Mac and how did the Xerox researchers feel about the Mac?

AH: Well, we had no formal relationship with PARC while we were developing the Mac. We got a single demo before the Mac project got off the ground, when the LISA project, that sort of cousin or bigger brother of the Mac, was in development. And so from that one demo we were already pointed in that direction but I would say that Xerox PARC demo galvanized and reinforced our strong opinion that the graphic user-interface was the way to go. And then the influence of PARC was strong in the project, but not through a formal relationship with PARC; more through PARC people getting wind of what we were doing and coming to work at Apple. The very first one was Tom Malloy on the LISA project. He was sort of a disciple of Charles Simonyi–I write about that a little bit in my book. He was one of the original LISA people who came to Apple in 1978. But later, Larry Tessler was a really key figure coming to the LISA team in the summer of 1980 from Xerox PARC and eventually, mostly after the original Mac shipped, there were a dozen or more. Another person I have to mention is Bruce Horn who started working at Xerox PARC when he was 14 years old; he was one of those kids they picked from a Palo Alto High School to teach Smalltalk to and he was one of the four or five key Macintosh developers. And of course he was steeped in all of the PARC values and through Bruce, a lot of them made it into the Macintosh.

JT: Was there any feeling among the Apple engineers that any – guilt is probably too strong a word, but feeling like you know Xerox had these great ideas. I guess Xerox really let them go to waste but–

AH: Oh there was nothing like that; Steve Jobs has a good quote. It’s actually a Picasso quote that he often cites; he cited it at one of our retreats which was sort of good artists copy; great artists steal. And what that means is that when you’re passionate about what you’re doing you’ll take ideas from anywhere and with no guilt. You want to make the best possible thing and that was our mentality.

JT: I have to say I actually worked for Xerox AI Systems in 1986 and it was kind of frustrating because they really had the mentality there that if you couldn’t sell paper and toner for [them] they weren’t interested.

AH: Oh sure. Xerox in a well-documented fashion – they had at least the possibility of having the world at their feet there with the work that Alan Kay and his team did. But yeah; they completely blew it and most of the best PARC people were really frustrated by the Xerox management. There’s no doubt of that; that’s one of the reasons why Steve Jobs is great. You had someone leading the company who could relate to the customers and appreciate things.

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.”

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.

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 narrowly at 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 had this narrow bottleneck 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 quarterly 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.

Steve Jobs and John Sculley

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. Ten years later, Steve Jobs also commented on his disempowerment with bitterness in the TV documentary “Nerds in the Valley” (1996): Jobs:

What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. - Question: That was Sculley?
Jobs: Yeah and he destroyed everything I spent ten years working for. Starting with me but that wasn’t the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I wanted it to.

Apple’s Heart and Soul

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the Macintosh’s fathers, later recalled the events:

The conflict came to a head at the April 10th board meeting. The board thought they could convince Steve to transition back to a product visionary role, but instead he went on the attack and lobbied for Sculley’s removal. After long wrenching discussions with both of them, and extending the meeting to the following day, the board decided in favor of John, instructing him to reorganize the Macintosh division, stripping Steve of all authority. Steve would remain the chairman of Apple, but for the time being, no operating role was defined for him. John didn’t want to implement the reorganization immediately, because he still thought that he could reconcile with Steve, and get him to buy into the changes, achieving a smooth transition with his blessing. But after a brief period of depressed cooperation, Steve started attacking John again, behind the scenes in a variety of ways. I won’t go into the details here, but eventually John had to remove Steve from his management role in the Macintosh division involuntarily. Apple announced Steve’s removal, along with the first quarterly loss in their history as well as significant layoffs, on Friday, May 31, 1985, Fridays being the traditional time for companies to announce bad news. It was surely one of the lowest points of Apple history.

Andy Hertzfeld

It is an irony of computer history that, according to industry experts, the Macintosh’s breakthrough on the market was becoming apparent exactly at the time of Jobs’ disempowerment due to the Mac’s poor sales volume. The convincing the “Macintosh Evangelists” were doing gradually began to show results.

Screenshot of PageMaker 1.0 (french version)

New software companies such as Aldus had made an effort to become acquainted with the details of the “Macintosh Toolbox” and written the first desktop publishing programs, such as PageMaker. In combination with the Apple LaserWriter and the page description standard PostScript (designed by Adobe), PageMaker turned the technology of the publishing sector inside out; it did even more when the Mac Plus with 512 kilobytes of ROM entered the market by the beginning of 1986. The Mac Plus even featured cursor keys on its keyboard, which had been resolutely rejected by Steve Jobs for the first Mac, since he intended to force the users to accept the mouse as an input device.

And it is also an irony of computer history that Jobs later saved the struggling Apple Computer company. NeXT’s subsequent 1997 buyout by Apple brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he has served as its CEO since then.