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 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
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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 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.

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.

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

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

written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: 1984, introduction, January 24th, launch, Lost 1984 Videos, Mac, Steve Jobs

Reprinted from Byte, issue 8/1984, pp. 238-251.

The Apple Macintosh computer

Few computers – indeed, few consumer items of any kind – have generated such a wide range of opinions as the Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it lives up to that potential remains to be seen.

Personally, I think the Macintosh is a wonderful machine. I use one daily at work, and then at night I play with the one I have at home. Or, at least, I try to play with it. You see, my wife – who for years resisted all my attempts to introduce her to computers – has fallen in love with the Mac (her words, not mine). She uses it to type up medical reports, notes on her clients, and personal letters. In fact, she’s suggested that we get a second Macintosh so that we won’t have to fight over the one we have.

The Macintosh is not without its problems. Resources are tight – it needs more memory and disk space – and software has been slow in coming to market. Many have criticized its price ($2495). In fact, there are indications that Apple considered a lower price ($1995) and then rejected it. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the Mac’s market – people are still buying them faster than Apple can make them – but there’s the potential for backlash if the machine doesn’t deliver on all its promises.

Whatever its problems and limitations, the Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting computers to work with people instead of vice versa. Time and again, I’ve seen individuals with little or no computer experience sit down in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they use the same words to describe it: “amazing” and “fun.” The question is whether “powerful” can be added to that list.

In an industry rapidly filling up with IBM PC clones, the Macintosh represents a radical departure from the norm. It is a small, lightweight computer with a high-resolution screen, a detached keyboard, and a mouse (see photo 1). It comes with 128K bytes of RAM (random-access read/write memory), 64K bytes of ROM (read-only memory), and a 400K-byte 3½-inch disk drive. If you throw in an Imagewriter printer (see photo 2 and figure 1) the system costs $2990. The processor is a Motorola 68000, running a name-less operating system (see the text box, “A Second Opinion” on page 248 for a fit description). It has absolutely no IBM PC/MS-DOS compatibility, and it would appear Apple plans none.
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written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Apple Macintosh, Byte, Mac, Macintosh, review

A sidebar to the Apple Macintosh review published in Byte, issue 8/1984, pp. 241-242.

At a glance

Name
Macintosh

Manufacturer
Apple Computer Inc.
20525 Mariani Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1010

Components
Size: 13.5 by 9.7 by 10.9 inches (main unit)
2.6 by 13.2 by 5.8 inches (keyboard)
Weight: 19.5 pounds
Processor: Motorola 68000 (7,8336 MHz)
Memory: 128K bytes of RAM; 64K bytes of ROM
Display: 9-inch built-in monitor; high-resolution bit-mapped display (512 by 342 pixels); adjustable
Keyboard: 58 keys, detached, standard layout, no function keys, software-mapped
Mouse: single button, mechanical tracking, optical shaft encoding
Mass storage: built-in single-sided 3½-inch Sony drive (400K bytes)
Sound generator: four-voice sound
Interfaces: two RS-422A serial ports (230.4K bps transfer rate); external-disk interface for second (optional) disk drive; mouse interface; synchronous serial keyboard bus

Operating System
Proprietary unnamed

Optional Hardware
Imagewriter dot-matrix printer: $595
Numeric keypad: $99
Carrying case: $99
Modem (300 bps): $225
(300/1200 bps): $495
Security Accessory Kit: $49
Second floppy-disk drive: $495

Optional Software
See text box

Documentation
160-page user’s manual

Price
$2495 ($2990 with Imagewriter)

The Memory Size graph shows the standard and optional memory available for the computers under comparison. The Disk Storage graph shows the highest capacity of a single floppy-disk drive for each system. The Bundled Software graph shows the number of software packages included with each system. The Price graph shows the list price of a system with two high-capacity floppy-disk drives, a monochrome monitor, graphics and color-display capability, a printer port and a serial port, 256K bytes of memory (64K bytes for 8-bit systems), the standard operating system for each system, and the standard BASIC interpreter for each system. The Mac’s price includes 128K bytes of memory only.

The graph for Disk Access in BASIC shows how long it takes to write a 64K-byte sequential text file to a blank floppy disk and how long it takes to read this file (For the program listings, see “The Chameleon Plus,” by Rich Krajewski, June 1984, page 327.) The BASIC Performance graph shows how long it takes to run one iteration of the Sieve of Eratosthenes prime-number benchmark. In the same graph, the Calculations results show how long it takes to do 10,000 multiplication and division operations using single-precision numbers. The System Utilities graph shows how long it takes to transfer a 40K-byte file using the system utilities. The Spreadsheet graph shows how long the computers take to load and recalculate a 25- by 25-cell spread-sheet where each cell equals 1.001 times the cell to its left. The spreadsheet program used was Microsoft Multiplan. The time for the format/disk copy test on the Macintosh reflects using the disk-copy utility on a single-drive system. Four disk-swaps are required for the complete disk copy, the time for which is included in the benchmark.

* The Sieve benchmark couldn’t be run on the Mac (see text for details).
** The new Disk Copy program was not available at press time.

written by Christoph Dernbach \\ tags: Apple Macintosh, Byte, Mac, Macintosh, review