Category Archives: Mac History

“1984″ – Apple’s famous Super Bowl Spot

The most famous Super Bowl ad –

The Hammer That Shattered the Monolith: How 60 Seconds Defined the Apple Mythos

It is January 22, 1984. Inside Tampa Stadium, Super Bowl XVIII is in full swing. The Los Angeles Raiders are systematically dismantling the Washington Redskins. But during a break in the third quarter, the game becomes a footnote. For 60 seconds, nearly 100 million Americans are pulled away from the grass and grit into a dystopian nightmare—and then shown a glimpse of a digital revolution.

This wasn’t just a commercial. It was a cinematic manifesto directed by Ridley Scott, a man who had just finished reshaping science fiction with Blade Runner.

The Aesthetic of the Abyss

The spot opens on a monochrome, ash-colored world. Rows of hollow-eyed men, their heads shaved and spirits broken, march in lockstep through industrial corridors. They gather in a cold hall before a towering screen where a bespectacled “Big Brother”—a thinly veiled avatar for the then-dominant IBM—drones on about the “unification of thoughts.”

Then, a flash of color breaks the gray. A young woman (played by British athlete Anya Major) sprints toward the screen, pursued by riot police. She wears bright orange shorts and a white tank top emblazoned with a line drawing of a computer. In her hands, she swings a heavy sledgehammer with the grace of an Olympian. As she releases the hammer, it sails through the air and crashes directly into the face of the tyrant.

The screen explodes in a blinding white light. A voiceover—and a simple scroll of text—delivers the finishing blow: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’.”

Corporate Cold Feet: The Board vs. The Visionaries

Today, the “1984” ad is heralded as the greatest commercial of all time. Yet, it almost never aired.

The backstory is a corporate thriller. The agency Chiat/Day had crafted the concept, and Steve Jobs was immediately electrified by it. He wanted a “thunderclap.” However, when the finished film was screened for Apple’s board of directors in December 1983, the reaction was icy silence.

Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman and major investor, was horrified. “This is the worst ad I’ve ever seen. Who wants to fire the agency?” he reportedly asked. The board ordered CEO John Sculley to sell back the expensive Super Bowl airtime they had already purchased.

Wozniak’s Act of Rebellion

Steve Jobs, refusing to see his masterpiece buried, showed the spot to co-founder Steve Wozniak. “Woz” was so blown away that he offered to pay for half of the airtime out of his own pocket if the board refused to budge. “If Apple won’t run it, I’ll pay $400,000 and you pay $400,000,” Wozniak told Jobs.

In the end, it was a mix of chutzpah and luck: Chiat/Day claimed they couldn’t find a buyer for the 60-second slot in time. With the slot already paid for and no one to take it, Apple was forced to run the ad.

Skinheads and Discus Throws: The Making of a Legend

Ridley Scott’s production was grueling and authentic. Filmed at Shepperton Studios in London, Scott didn’t hire standard extras. To achieve the look of a true oppressed proletariat, he hired actual London skinheads for a pittance and the promise of a free lunch. The atmosphere on set was reportedly tense, with the extras’ rowdy behavior adding a layer of genuine grit to the film.

The choice of Anya Major for the lead role was a stroke of casting genius. Many models had auditioned, but most couldn’t even swing the hammer while running. Major was an experienced discus thrower; she had the muscle memory and the athletic form to hurl the sledgehammer with deadly precision.

The Legacy: When Advertising Became Art

The impact the next morning was unprecedented. News stations didn’t just talk about the ad; they replayed it in its entirety during their broadcasts. Apple generated over $5 million in free publicity. Overnight, the Macintosh became more than a piece of hardware; it became a symbol of individuality and freedom.

“1984” marked the moment advertising stopped merely explaining products and started creating myths. It was the birth of Apple as a lifestyle brand and Steve Jobs as the high priest of the digital counter-culture.

There is a modern irony to the story: today, critics often point at Apple’s massive market cap and closed ecosystem, suggesting the company has become the very “Big Brother” it once vowed to destroy. Regardless of the politics, the 60-second storm Ridley Scott and Steve Jobs unleashed remains a masterclass in storytelling—a hammer throw that changed the cultural trajectory of technology forever.

The commercial was rebroadcast in an updated version in 2004 on its 20th anniversary, with the heroine modified to be listening to an iPod. Viewers generally saw the Big Brother target of the Apple advertisement as being Microsoft, with the original villain, IBM, being all but forgotten.

Apple commercial “1984”: The Plot

The commercial opens with a dystopic, industrial setting in blue and gray tones, showing a line of people (of ambiguous gender) marching in unison through a long tunnel monitored by a string of telescreens. This is in sharp contrast to the full-color shots of the nameless runner (Anya Major). She looks like an Olympic track and field athlete, as she is carrying a large brass-headed hammer and is wearing an athletic “uniform” (bright orange athletic shorts, running shoes, a white tank top with a cubist picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer, a white sweat band on her left wrist, and a red one on her right).

As she is chased by four police officers (presumably agents of the Thought Police) wearing black uniforms, protected by riot gear, helmets with visors covering their faces, and armed with large night sticks, she races towards a large screen with the image of a Big Brother-like figure (David Graham, also seen on the telescreens earlier) giving a speech:

My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

The runner, now close to the screen, hurls the hammer towards it, right at the moment Big Brother announces, “we shall prevail!” In a flurry of light and smoke, the screen is destroyed, shocking the people watching the screen.
The commercial concludes with a portentous voiceover, accompanied by scrolling black text (in Apple’s early signature “Garamond” font); the hazy, whitish-blue aftermath of the cataclysmic event serves as the background. It reads:

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.

The screen fades to black as the voiceover ends, and the rainbow Apple logo appears.

Apple commercial “1984”: The Production

Development

The commercial was created by the advertising agency Chiat/Day, Venice, with copy by Steve Hayden, art direction by Brent Thomas and creative direction by Lee Clow. Ridley Scott (whose dystopian sci-fi film, Blade Runner was released two years prior) was hired by agency producer Richard O’Neill to direct it, with a then-“unheard-of production budget of $900,000.” The actors who appeared in the commercial were paid $25 per day.

Steve Jobs and John Sculley were so enthusiastic about the final product that they “…purchased one and a half minutes of ad time for the Super Bowl, annually the most-watched television program in America. In December 1983 they screened the commercial for the Apple Board of Directors. To Jobs’ and Sculley’s surprise, the entire board hated the commercial.” However, Scully himself got “cold feet” and asked Chiat/Day to sell off the two commercial spots.

Despite the board’s dislike of the film, Steve Jobs continued to support it. Steve Wozniak watched it and offered to pay for half of the spot personally if the board refused to air it.

Of the original ninety seconds booked, Chiat/Day managed to resell thirty seconds to another advertiser, leaving the other sixty second slot.

Intended message

Adelia Cellini states in a 2004 article for MacWorld, “The Story Behind Apple’s ‘1984’ TV Commercial“:

Let’s see – an all-powerful entity blathering on about Unification of Thoughts to an army of soulless drones, only to be brought down by a plucky, Apple-esque underdog. So Big Brother, the villain from Apple’s ‘1984’ Mac ad, represented IBM, right? According to the ad’s creators, that’s not exactly the case. The original concept was to show the fight for the control of computer technology as a struggle of the few against the many, says TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Lee Clow. Apple wanted the Mac to symbolize the idea of empowerment, with the ad showcasing the Mac as a tool for combating conformity and asserting originality. What better way to do that than have a striking blonde athlete take a sledghammer to the face of that ultimate symbol of conformity, Big Brother?

However, in his 1983 Apple keynote address, Steve Jobs made the following comment before showcasing a preview of the commercial to a select audience:

It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasing and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?

Apple commercial “1984”: The Reception

Awards

* 2007: Best Super Bowl Spot (in the game’s 40-year history)

* 1999: TV Guide – Number One Greatest Commercial of All Time

* 1995: Advertising Age – Greatest Commercial

* 1984: 31st Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival – Grand Prix

Social impact

Ted Friedman, in his 2005 text, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture, notes the impact of the commercial:

Super Bowl viewers were overwhelmed by the startling ad. The ad garnered millions of dollars worth of free publicity, as news programs rebroadcast it that night. It was quickly hailed by many in the advertising industry as a masterwork. Advertising Age named it the 1980s Commercial of the Decade, and it continues to rank high on lists of the most influential commercials of all time […] 1984 was never broadcast again, adding to its mystique.

1984 became a signature representation of Apple computers. It was scripted as a thematic element in the 1999 docudrama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which explores the rise of Apple and Microsoft (the film opens and closes with references to the commercial including a re-enactment of the heroine running towards the screen of Big Brother and clips of the original commercial).

“1984” became a signature representation of Apple computers. It was scripted as a thematic element in the 1999 docudrama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, which explores the rise of Apple and Microsoft (the film opens and closes with references to the commercial including a re-enactment of the heroine running towards the screen of Big Brother and clips of the original commercial). The “1984” ad was also prominent in the 20th anniversary celebration of the Macintosh in 2004, as Apple reposted a new version of the ad on its website. In this updated version, an iPod, complete with signature white earbuds, was digitally added to the heroine. Attendees were given a poster showing the heroine with iPod as a commemorative gift.

Influence in media

A commercial for the video game Half-Life 2 was based on this commercial. A parody of the commercial is seen in the Futurama episode Future Stock, promoting Planet Express. Another parody appears in The Simpsons TV show episode Mypods and Boomsticks, featuring Steve Jobs as “Big Brother” and the Comic Book Guy as the runner.

For the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh, Apple re-released the ad with the runner wearing an iPod.

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

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Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

Apple is now (2017) the most valuable company in the world. But 20 years ago it looked like the company was about to completely implode. Nevertheless Apple was celebrating it’s anniversary. It had been twenty years since Apple had officially incorporated, and it marked the occasion with the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, or TAM. The machine was a technological showcase of the day, boasting a number of features beyond simple computing, and with a price tag aimed at the “executive” market.

Released on March 20, 1997, the TAM was essentially the computing version of a concept car, an innovation showcase. It compared to a car in another way: it was expensive, costing $7,499 upon its release. After its launch event, The New York Times called the ambitious effort a “Ferrari-on-a-desktop.”

The TAM was an all-in-one PC, kind of a spiritual ancestor of the iMac, back when the whole idea of a monitor that contains the computer was totally crazy. It was designed by a young Jony Ive, who would go on to become Apple’s resident creative genius.

April 1, 1996 marked 20 years since the day that Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne came together to form Apple Computer. As this milestone arrived and came to the attention of Apple’s then current executives, the decision was made to release a limited edition Macintosh computer to celebrate – and so the “Spartacus” (or “Pomona”, or “Smoke & Mirrors”) project was born.

The normal time-span to develop a new Macintosh computer was 18+ months, however they were already late to the party. Luckily the design team had already been working on several “dream” concepts, and soon settled on the most feasible of those – the (almost) “All-in-One” LCD-based design. To cut down on development time, many off-the-shelf components were used on the new computer’s internals.

The TAM was announced almost 20 years to the day after Jobs and Wozniak incorporated the company, in January 1997 at MacWorld Expo, San Francisco. It was given a release date of March 20, 1997, with a retail price of US$7,499. Originally intended as a mainstream product, the marketing group turned it into a pricey special edition.

Specifications and design

The TAM was to break the established form factor of the personal computer. One of the first projects of Jonathan “Jony” Ive, the design of the TAM was both a state-of-the-art futuristic vision of where computing could go whilst redeveloping Apple’s original objective to create a device that would integrate into people’s lives.

The TAM featured a 250 MHz PowerPC 603e processor and 12.1″ active matrix LCD powered by an ATI 3D Rage II video chipset with 2MB of VRAM capable of displaying up to 16bit color at either 800×600 or 640×480 pixels. It had a vertically mounted 4x SCSI CD-ROM and an Apple floppy Superdrive, a 2GB ATA hard drive, a TV/FM tuner, an S-Video input card, and a custom-made Bose sound system including two “Jewel” speakers and a subwoofer built into the externally located power supply “base unit”.

A thick “umbilical” cable connects the base unit to the head unit, supplying both power, and communications for the subwoofer. The umbilical connects via a multi-pin connector, which is a possible cause of the TAM’s one major fault – the “speaker buzz”. Inspections of units that received a repair by Apple due to the speaker buzz found an extra resistor/s had been installed in the umbilical. Ensuring the connectors are free of dust/dirt has also been known to resolve the “buzz”, though the buzz ultimately only affected a small percentage of machines. An Apple Engineer noted[5] that the thick umbilical was intended to power a higher end CPU, however that option was ultimately curtailed, though the diameter of the umbilical remained.

The TAM came with a unique 75 key ADB keyboard which featured leather palm-rests and a trackpad instead of a mouse. The trackpad could be detached from the keyboard if desired, with a small leather insert found underneath the keyboard ready to fill the gap. When not required, the keyboard could slide under the TAM’s head unit, leaving the trackpad exposed for continued access. The TAM also came with a remote control (standard with the Apple TV/FM Tuner card), but also featured buttons on the front panel that could control sound levels, CD playback, brightness, contrast, and TV mode. The pre-installed operating system was a specialized version of Mac OS 7.6.1, which allowed control over those features.

Expandability was offered via a 7 inch PCI slot and Apple Communication slot II for the addition of Ethernet. Later G3 upgrade options offered by Sonnet and NewerTechnologies made use of the TAM’s Level II Cache slot, which allow the computer to reach speeds of up to 500 MHz. All of these options come at the price of the TAM’s slim profile. The back panel must be removed, and replaced with an (included) “hunchback” cover that adds several inches to the depth of the machine.

One last unique feature of the TAM greeted owners when they turned the computer on—a special startup chime used only by the TAM. This chime does not sound the same when played on other devices, possibly simply due to the design of the Bose speakers.
Production/release

Apple CEO Gil Amelio praised the TAM:

For twenty years, Apple design engineers have been building bridges between what people dream about and the amazing new technologies that can take them beyond those dreams. It’s our magnificent obsession. It’s about working and playing and listening and learning and creating and communicating – sometimes all at the same time. It’s about the delight of doing things faster and better and easier. It’s about turning your back on conventional wisdom and finding new ways. Now, it’s about celebrating the last twenty years, and heralding the next twenty. It’s about the most beautiful thing we’ve ever built. It’s the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh.

Apple manufactured 12,000 TAMs, with a release run of 11,601. The remaining 399 were kept by Apple for use as spare parts.
The TAM was only released in 5 countries: USA, Japan, France, Germany, and the UK.

Both of Apple’s founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, received a TAM. When “Woz” allowed people to see into his office via webcam in the late 1990s, his TAM was visible on his desk.

Ten TAMs were sent to Apple Australia. One was given away as a prize via AU MacWorld magazine. Another was awarded as a prize at a gathering of Apple reseller staff. For some time one was on display in Apple’s Sydney HQ; the remainder were kept for use by Apple Australia executives.

Due to the scarcity of scale, rather than training all Apple authorized technicians in repairing the TAM, Apple opted to ship faulty units to three central locations worldwide—one per continent. The US location was the Eastman Kodak Company’s service center, Building 601, in Kodak Park (now known as Eastman Technology Park) in Rochester, New York. Apple’s Service Source CD, containing information for authorized technicians in the repair of Apple computers, lists the TAM as a “closed unit”, to be returned to said repair locations for all repairs. It does not contain a “take apart” guide for the TAM. Support from online forums is the best source of information for repairing a TAM now.

A prototype TAM was spotted on eBay circa 2010 featuring darker colored speaker panels, and missing the “Sound by Bose” label.

Websites

Rather than a simple page on Apple’s website, the TAM was given its own website, albeit only amounting to approximately 6 brief pages. This was nevertheless a departure from Apple’s standard advertising practice for its other Macintosh computers of the time.

Not long after the TAM’s release, a community website was created by Bob Bernardara, an original TAM owner in the U.S. He created the site for TAM owners around the world and it featured news and information about the TAM, along with links to useful software and a forum for discussions. Apple had an active link to the site shortly before the last TAM rolled off the assembly line.

Welcome to The 20th Anniversary Macintosh Web Site—the “Official” home of the TAM user community. This is the place where 20th Anniversary Macintosh owners can share a wealth of information on this “insanely great” product. The TAM (Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh) is a unique machine in the world of computers and this site will help you get the most out of yours.

The TAM site actively ran for several years and it eventually had to shut down when Bernardara could not contact Axon, the Australian hosting company who hosted the site, to make critical updates.

A number of newer TAM community websites have sprung up over the years, though none with the membership that Bernardara’s achieved

Limitations

Based on a PowerPC 603e processor, the TAM cannot run Mac OS X natively, but with the addition of a G3 or G4 aftermarket upgrade and the use of XPostFacto 4.0 software the TAM could run several versions of OS X, with some limitations.
Attempting to install Mac OS X otherwise can “brick” the TAM, and is ill-advised.

Discontinuation

Upon unveiling, the TAM was predicted to cost US$9,000, which would include a direct-to-door concierge delivery service. At release the price was reduced to $7,499. In the middle of its sales’ lifespan Apple dropped the price further to around US$3,500, and finally upon discontinuation in March 1998 the price was set to US$1,995. Customers who paid full price for the TAM, and then complained to Apple when the price was so drastically cut, were offered a free high-end Powerbook as compensation.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. In March 1998 he made sweeping changes, including scrapping the Newton MessagePad. It was at this time that the TAM was discontinued, and remaining stocks reduced to US $1,995. The timing itself was not conspicuous – most Apple computers only feature a 1-year production run, and the TAM’s began in March 1997. However Jobs was on record stating that he hated the TAM, as it stood for everything that was wrong at Apple when he returned. The attempt to move the remaining stock by further reducing the price may have been a directive from Jobs himself.
Dealers in the US ran out of stock within 14 days of this final price drop.

Legacy

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh may not have been a well known machine in its time, nor a big seller (until the price reductions), but it has had a lasting legacy on personal computers. All-in-one LCD computers are now quite common, not least being Apple’s own modern iMac (starting with the G4 model), which clearly owes its design to the TAM, including using a vertically mounted removable drive (i.e. Superdrive). Even the removable trackpad has been replicated with Apple’s Magic Trackpad.

External power supplies were also used in later Apple computers such as the Power Mac G4 Cube and Mac Mini. Joint efforts with speaker manufacturers (originally Bose, but later Harman Kardon) have become common for several Apple computers.
Despite its poor sales, the TAM remains a “holy grail” amongst Macintosh collectors. As of 2010, complete working TAMs with boxes can sell for over US $1,000. As of early 2015, on eBay, complete working TAMs usually sell with boxes and rarely fetch less than about US$1600 with most examples priced starting at around $3200 and it’s not uncommon to find them listed for nearly twice that, sometimes more still.[6] TAM parts on eBay are rare.

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

In popular culture

Due to its unconventional design, the TAM has featured in numerous films and television series, including:
Seinfeld: Several episodes of the ninth season of Seinfeld in Jerry’s apartment.
Friends: Behind Chandler’s office desk in the fourth season of Friends in the episode “The One With the Worst Best Man Ever”.
The Real World: The housemates on MTV’s The Real World: Seattle.[7]
Serial Experiments Lain: The appearance of the NAVI computer seen in Serial Experiments Lain was greatly influenced by TAM.
Sabrina (1995): A prototype TAM on the desk of Linus Larrabee in the 1995 remake of the movie Sabrina. The TAM prototype sits on the far right side of Linus, on a dedicated side desk. The CD player has a see through port in the middle of the door that allows for the CD to be inserted and removed, this see through feature was removed in the production version that has a solid dark grey plastic door. The actual unit that Linus had on his desk was Apple’s in house development model that Apple lent to the studio.
Batman & Robin (1997): Used by Alfred to write a CD (a capability the real computer did not have) in Batman & Robin.[8]
Children of Men (2006): In Jasper’s hideout, in the film Children of Men, to show the video feeds of intruders breaking in is a TAM. In this movie it would be 30 years old.

References

“25 years of Mac – the good, the bad, and the cheese grater“. The Register. Retrieved October 3, 2012.
“20th Anniversary Macintosh“. Apple-History.com. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. USA: Portfolio Hardcover. 2013. ISBN 9781591846178.
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP408
http://web.archive.org/web/20000421061727/http://tam.axon.net/tam/webx?14@^608@.ee6b2b4
“The Real Truth behind MTV’s 1998 series The Real World – Seattle“.
“Starring the Computer“.

Details

Code names: Pomona, Spartacus
introduced 1997.03.20 at $7,499, discontinued 1998.03.14
Part no.:
Gestalt ID: 512
upgrade path:

Mac OS

Requires Mac OS 7.6.1 through 9.1 (requires special version of Mac OS 8)

Core System

CPU: 250 MHz PPC 603e
Level 2 cache: 256 KB, expandable to 1 MB
Bus: 50 MHz
ROM: 4 MB
RAM: 32 MB (expandable to 128 MB, accepts two 168-pin 5V 60ns or faster EDO or FPM DIMMs)

Performance

CPU performance: 237, MacBench 4

Graphics

GPU: ATI 3D Rage II
VRAM: 2 MB VRAM
Video: 12.1″ 800 x 600 at 8- or 16-bit. 24-bit video support possible with ATI January 2002 retail drivers noted above, although the display itself only supports 18-bit output (6 bits per color channel).

Drives

floppy drive: 1.4M
Hard drive: 2 GB 2.5″ ATA/EIDE drive, 128 GB maximum, newer drives may requires a different drive bracket or modification of the original bracket.
CD-ROM: 4x

Expansion

ADB ports: 1
SCSI: DB-25 connector on back of computer
serial ports: 2 DIN-8 GeoPorts
PCI slots: 1 6.88″ slot
other expansion slots: 1 Comm Slot II, filled with 33.6kbps GeoPort modem

Physical

dimensions (HxWxD): 17.25″x16.5″x10.0″ (43.8×41.9×25.4 cm)
Weight: 14.9 lbs. (6.8 kg)

Online Resources

Upgrading the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. Good upgrade advice, although some products are no longer available.
Low End Mac’s Best Classic Mac OS Deals. Best online prices for System 6, 7.1, 7.5.x, Mac OS 7.6, 8.0, 8.1, 8.5, 9.0, 9.2.2, and other versions.
Six of the Rarest Macs, Benj Edwards, Macworld, 2012.10.19. JLPGA PowerBook 170. Colour Classic II. Macintosh TV. PowerBook 550c. 20th Anniversary Mac.
The Five Weirdest Macs of All Time, Benj Edwards, Macworld, 2012.10.12. Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian iMacs. Twentieth Anniversary Mac. Power Mac G4 Cube. Macintosh XL. Power Mac G3 All-in-One.
Low End Mac’s Compleat Guide to Mac OS 9, 2008 Edition, Charles W Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 2008.05.12. Mac OS 9 remains fast and stable, but Classic software hasn’t kept up with the changing internet. Which Macs support OS 9, where to buy it, and how to update to 9.2.2.
The good, the bad, and the ugly of AppleDesign, Charles W Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 2008.10.15. Apple has produced some beautiful computers and iPods over the years, but also a few of the ugliest and most ungainly computers ever seen.
The 25 most important Macs, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2009.02.17. The 25 most significant Macs in the first 25 years of the platform, continued.
Why You Should Partition Your Mac’s Hard Drive, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2008.12.11. “At the very least, it makes sense to have a second partition with a bootable version of the Mac OS, so if you have problems with your work partition, you can boot from the ’emergency’ partition to run Disk Utility and other diagnostics.”
Attractive and ugly Macs, discontinued MacBook Pro value, and writing with TextEdit, Charles W Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 2008.10.30. Readers weigh in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of Macintosh design over the past 24 years.
The Compressed Air Keyboard Repair, Charles W Moore, Miscellaneous Ramblings, 2008.07.24. If your keyboard isn’t working as well as it once did, blasting under the keys with compressed air may be the cure.
10 cult Macs adored by collectors, Tamara Keel, Digital Fossils, 2008.05.13. Macs are not only noted for their longevity, but also by the passion which collectors have for some of the most interesting models ever made.
TAM I Am, James & John, RetroMacCast, 2006.12.25. Looking at the 20th Anniversary Mac, classic Mac scanners, and the MacMania cruise.
Web browser tips for the classic Mac OS, Nathan Thompson, Embracing Obsolescence, 2006.01.03. Tips on getting the most out of WaMCom, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, iCab, Opera, and WannaBe using the classic Mac OS.
The best browsers for PowerPC Macs and the classic Mac OS, Nathan Thompson, Embracing Obsolescence, 2005.12.16. Two browsers stand out from the pack: iCab 3 is modern and remains under development, and WaMCom brings Mozilla to older Macs.
Guide to G3 Accelerators for Level 2 Cache Slot
Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh Upgrades, Mac Speed Zone
Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh: Technical Specifications, Apple TIL
Apple Spec: Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

Source: Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. (2017, April 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:58, April 10, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh&oldid=773925246

Scrollbar History – UI design is difficult

Happy Birthday, Mac

Steve Jobs acts as Franklin D. Roosevelt – Bizarre internal Apple promo (1984)

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Apple’s marketing history may seem like a continual streak of genius advertising, but even the mighty gadget company has suffered a few stumbles. Take this rarely seen sequel to Apple’s epic “1984” ad spot that features Steve Jobs showing off his acting chops as Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

Steve Jobs acts as Franklin D. Roosevelt

The full clip, clocking in at a lengthy 9 minutes, was created for a sales associates meeting held in Hawaii in 1984. Jobs’ role as FDR leading the charge against enemy forces was meant as a rallying call to defeat IBM’s dominance.

My reader Ned Truslow wrote two years in a comment on mac-history.net about this video:

I was a props master on it and also am featured in the video. It was a black and white film that had Steve and his guys acting like generals in World War II and they had Mac soldiers who were being airdropped behind “enemy” lines and taking backpacks filled with Mactosh’s to zombie-fied office workers whose lives were stuck in limbo with old office hardware. Once the Mactosh’s are placed on all the office workers’ desks and switched on, the office workers come more alive and are happy. We shot the plane sequence at an airstrip in Mojave, California, and did most of the stuff with Steve and his guys, along with me taking time off from doing props on the video to act as a zombie office worker, all on a studio soundstage in Los Angeles sometime around July of 1984. Anyway, I’ve never seen this 20-minute video online anywhere. Just would love to know if you have an idea of where it might be located, if anywhere.
Ned Truslow

Okay, here we are.

How Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project

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It All Began with “Annie” – The Vision of a Computer for the Masses
(Updated: May 2018)

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 was a “philosophical guy who could be both playful and ponderous”, writes Walter Isaacson in his book “Steve Jobs”. Raskin had studied computer science, taught music and visual arts, conducted a chamber opera company, and organized guerrilla theater. His 1967 doctoral thesis at U.C. San Diego argued that computers should have graphical rather than text-based interfaces.

Jef Raskin

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.

So, Jobs left the Lisa project – and looked at Jef Raskin’s baby. The Apple co-founder liked the concept of a cheap machine for the mass market, but he didn’t like Raskin’s design. “Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises to keep down the cost,” writes Isaacson. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him instead to focus on building what he repeatedly called an “insanely great” product. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo. It spelled out everything you would want in the proposed computer: a high-resolution color display, a printer that worked without a ribbon and could produce graphics in color at a page per second, unlimited access to the ARPA net, and the capability to recognize speech and synthesize music, “even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon tabernacle choir, with variable reverberation.” The memo concluded, “Starting with the abilities desired is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology.” In other words, Raskin had little patience for Jobs’ belief that you could distort reality if you had enough passion for your product.

Jobs wanted to switch to the more powerful Motorola 68000 CPU. Raskin demanded a cheaper processor, and lost again. He had to brood and recalculate the cost of the Mac. The disagreements were more than just technical or philosophical; they became clashes of personality. “I think that he likes people to jump when he says jump,” Raskin once said. “I felt that he was untrustworthy, and that he does not take kindly to being found wanting. He doesn’t seem to like people who see him without a halo.” Jobs was equally dismissive of Raskin. “Jef was really pompous,” he said Isaacson. “He didn’t know much about interfaces. So, I decided to nab some of his people who were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of my own, take the thing over and build a less expensive Lisa, not some piece of junk.”

Jobs asserted his control of the Macintosh group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin happened to go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred people there waiting to hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify anyone else about his cancellation order. So Raskin went ahead and gave a talk, writes Isaacson.

That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo to Mike Scott, who once again found himself in the difficult position of being a president trying to manage a company’s temperamental cofounder and major stockholder. It was titled “Working for/with Steve Jobs,” and in it Raskin asserted:

He is a dreadful manager… I have always liked Steve, but I have found it impossible to work for him… Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be almost a running joke… He acts without thinking and with bad judgment… He does not give credit where due… Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid and tell you that it was a waste of time to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon be telling people about it as though it was his own.

That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of Markkula. After a short dog fight Raskin was told to take a leave of absence. “They wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which was fine,” Jobs said Isaacson. “It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control.”
It is somehow ironic that Jef Raskin was the person who convinced Steve Jobs to visit the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The scientists over there pioneered the concept of a graphical user interface (GUI). Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing. So, he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC. Jobs first refused on the grounds that a large corporation couldn’t possibly be doing anything interesting. But in the end Jobs went to Xerox PARC in December 1979 – and was enlightened.

The rest of the story is well known. For Jobs it was a turning-point. Jobs decided that this was the way forward for Apple.

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 orienting 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 though 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.
Steve Jobs in “Thriumph of the Nerds”.

Larry Tesler, at this time a scientist at Xerox PARC, once said: “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.” Jobs tried everything to improve the GUI he had seen at PARC for the new Apple Macintosh.

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the leading Software engineers in the Macintosh project, disputes the view, Jef Raskin was the father of the Apple Macintosh. In an interview with CNET Andy called Steve Jobs “The father of the Macintosh”:

Question: How about Jef Raskin?

Answer: Jef Raskin is the single individual who disagrees with the way I’m telling the story, and he was unhappy with the book (How The Mac Was Made) when he first found out about it, and I suspect he’s still unhappy now.

Jef does claim he invented certain key concepts when no one else thinks he did. Jef actually was not around for almost the entire time the Mac was developed. He left the day before I started (in 1981). Jef’s a tremendous individual and he deserves enormous credit for having the original vision for the Macintosh, starting the project and putting together a dynamite, small team. But then he got at odds with the team and left.

Jef had a lot of ideas about how the Macintosh should be, but they’re not in the Macintosh. If you’re interested: Jef, because he left early, by 1985 he had already designed and licensed a computer that does embody all his ideas–it’s called the Canon Cat.

Question: Then who would you consider the father of the Macintosh?
Answer: Steve Jobs is who I would call the father of the Mac. In second place I’d put Burrell Smith and in third place I’d put Bill Atkinson.

In 1982, Jef Raskin 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. Canon stopped selling the CAT in 1988 – “after a brief and expensive “image” advertising campaign “that did not explain the product’s advantages in any way (Jef Raskin in an email to the “Amercian Scientist” in 1997. “A bitmapped, 68000-based machine, it was equal to the Macintosh of the time in power and screen resolution. The CAT had net-ready and BBS communications build in. In a disastrous miscalculation, Canon did not allow the product’s graphics capabilities to be advertised or mentioned in the manual because the daisy-wheel printer they wanted to sell with it couldn’t reproduce the graphics or offer a change of font on the fly.”

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.

Did Steve Jobs steal everything from Xerox PARC?

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Rich Neighbor with Open Doors

Screenshot of the movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley”

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?

The myth says, Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw Xerox PARC product, such as the GUI, either on a tour or at a trade show. He then used the PARC GUI implementation without permission, to create the Apple Lisa and the original Mac OS / Macintosh GUI.

The myth entwines about a late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of “Making the Macintosh”, writes:

According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn’t understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and “insanely great” Macintosh. The Apple engineers– that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates– stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.

It’s a good story. Unfortunately, it’s also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. There are problems with chronology and timing. The testimony of a number of key figures at Apple suggests that the visit was not the revelation early accounts made it out to be. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late 1970s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Let us take a closer look at what happend at Xerox PARC:

In the Untied States, 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. Carlson received in 1937 a patent for a process that he called “electrophotography.” On 22 October 1938 followed the premiere in practice: With the help of a metal plate was coated with sulfur and a lamp Chester the lettering “10-22-38 Astoria” on a wax paper.

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 1970. 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.”

The PARC Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) – 1970 ca. – © PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Incorporated)

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.

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.

A mouse. Removable data storage. Networking. A visual user interface. Easy-to-use graphics software. “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) printing, with printed documents matching what users saw on screen. E-mail. Alto for the first time combined these and other now-familiar elements in one small computer.

Developed by Xerox as a research system, the Alto marked a radical leap in the evolution of how computers interact with people, leading the way to today’s computers.

By making human-computer communications more intuitive and user friendly, Alto and similar systems opened computing to wide use by non-specialists, including children.

People were able to focus on using the computer as a tool to accomplish a task rather than on learning their computer’s technical details.
The Computer History Museum about the Xerox Alto

However, this marvelous machine was not freely available on the market. Only small numbers were built initially, but by the late 1970s, about 1,000 were in use at various Xerox laboratories, and about another 500 in several universities. Total production was about 2,000 systems.

The revolutionary Alto would have been an expensive personal computer if put on sale commercially. Lead engineer Charles Thacker noted that the first one cost Xerox $12,000. As a product, the price tag might have been $40,000.

Commercial for the Xerox Alto (1972).

This commercial for Xerox’s Alto computer released in 1972 introduced the world to the first desktop computer with a graphical user interface. Named after Xerox PARC’s home city of Palo Alto, California, the computer introduced the world to the window-oriented mouse and keyboard interface we use today. The Alto also had a distinctive portrait screen — an idea that was well before its time.

The video showed how the computer could revolutionize your office life, with email, word processing and reminders all controlled by a cursor. It also shows the protagonist expressing his thoughts and actions out loud, as if in conversation with the Alto (which seems to be nicknamed “Fred”).

Some Apple engineers were already familiar with PARC, its work, or technologies like the mouse. Bill Atkinson had read about Smalltalk as an undergraduate. Some had worked at PARC: Jef Raskin spent time there during a sabbatical year at Stanford, and had a number of friends who were researchers there. Finally, there were even some Apple employees whose had learned about the mouse while working for Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 1960s and early 1970s, or Tymshare in the later 1970s.

Read next page: How Apple discovered Xerox PARC

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The Wizards behind the Macintosh

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The making of Macintosh – An Interview with The Macintosh Design Team (Byte – Feb, 1984)

Bill Atkinson

Bill Atkinson nearly had his Ph.D. in neurochemistry before he admitted to himself that his real love was computers. He “got a quick E.E.” and started his own company. He was happily minding his own business when his friend ]eff Raskin asked him to come see what was happening at Apple, which was then six months old. Bill wasn’t really interested, but airplane tickets showed up in the mail, so he took a look. What he saw was “several years reaching into the future” of anything he could do where he was. He stayed to write Apple’s Pascal and later became Mr. User Interface for Lisa before he moved over to the Mac team.

Andy Hertzfeld

Andy Hertzfeld says, “The Apple II changed my life.” The computer people at Berkeley were a little narrow-minded about letting a grad student really get into the computer as Andy wanted to. So he spent nearly all the money he had in the world on an Apple II and had a computer he could control completely. He decided the Apple was more interesting than his classes and began writing programs for magazines. When Apple bought one of Andy’s programs, Steve Jobs offered him a job, which he took when he finished school. He worked on silent-type printers and Apple III demos until a shake-up in his part of the company shook him loose. He looked around and decided to go with Mac.

Larry Kenyon

Larry Kenyon arrived at Apple from Amdahl with a double degree in psychology and computer science. He was working on Apple III products when the same shake-up that shook Andy loose freed him, too. Andy asked Larry to join the Mac crew because he was one of the few people who understood the arcane art of making the Apple II work with printer peripherals, and anybody who can do that has to be good. No one in the company really believed that Mac was a product when Larry joined the Mac team. It was just a research effort, and there was some risk involved: would you still have your job in a few months?

Joanna Hoffman

Joanna Hoffman is still on leave from her Ph.D. program in archaeology at the University of Chicago. She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics. She came to Apple because of Mac. After using her computer skills in the field of archaeology for so long, she was tired of looking at the past and turned to the future. She was Mac’s entire marketing department for more than a year. She wants to make Mac a tool that feels natural for international users by making it speak their languages.

Burrell Carver Smith

Burrell Carver Smith encountered the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, got hooked on microprocessors, and moved to the Bay Area. Just riding around in a borrowed truck one day, he saw Apple and decided to drop in. The only job Apple had available was in the service department, repairing Apple IIs. He took the job and fixed at least a thousand Apple II boards and got involved in other projects before Jeff Raskin and Bill Atkinson recruited him for Mac. He talked the Lisa engineers out of some chips and stuff and got a prototype running over Christmas 1979. He was the first full-time Mac person after Jeff Raskin.

Chris Espinosa

Chris Espinosa says, There was no life before Apple.” At 13 years old he could be found cruising up and down the bus line in his home town, spending a few hours at each Byte Shop on the line until the owner threw him out. He discovered the way to keep from getting thrown out was to write demo programs for the machines, so he wrote for whatever was lying around: ”Altairs, IMSAIs, or this weird new machine called Apple I. His mom worried when he was offered a ride to the Homebrew Computer Club meeting with two scruffy characters named Jobs and Wozniak, but she gave in, and the rest is history. Chris spent a Christmas vacation debugging Apple’s BASIC in exchange for a whole row of 4K-byte RAM chips, which he thought was a pretty good deal. He worked part-time during college writing BASIC programs and reference manuals and signed on full-time when he graduated. He likes being in on the design process: ”If the machine is designed right in the first place, you don’t have to write a lot about it.”

Jerry Manock

Jerrold C. Manock was a freelance product-design consultant with a Stanford education who finally joined Apple when he saw that three-quarters of his billing was to Apple anyway. He worked on the Apple II, the Disk II, the III, and Lisa before designing Mac. In Macintosh, he says, “The outside matches the inside in elegant simplicity.”

Bruce Horn grew up at Xerox PARC, much the same way Chris grew up at Apple, and later attended Stanford. Bruce started working at Xerox when he was 14 years old: he was one of the kids Xerox brought in to test Smalltalk. Turns out he was brighter than most and became a systems wizard who actually implemented Smalltalk on a variety of different processors. Bruce is all of 23 years old now, but he spent seven years at Xerox PARC and brought Apple that perspective.

George Crowe and David Egner designed the analog board in the Macintosh.

Steve Capps assisted Andy Hertzfeld with the systems software.