The computer
for the rest of us

On January 24, 1984, Apple introduced the world to a computer that anyone could use. It was described, mostly by Steve Jobs, in several ways. An appliance. A bicycle for the mind. The computer for the rest of us. Insanely great. It was all of those things and more and yet it would immediately have its detractors who could only mock the high price, the supposed lack of software, and the tv commercial that launched it. They missed the point. Macintosh changing computing, and its impact is still being felt today.

A good number of books and movies have covered the creation of the Macintosh once Jobs took over, as a result both tend to focus more on Jobs than the computer. And yet it is difficult to separate the man from the machine, after all it was his vision and insights that turned the Macintosh project into the computer it became. At the same time he saw the team creating Macintosh as rockstars, and they were.

It's difficult to remember the days before the Macintosh, the time before the graphical user interface went mainstream. Writers struggle to capture those dark days—literally when computer monitors presented a black screen with green, white or orange text—the time when using a computer was a frustrating experience and due to the complex commands required to make a computer work (assuming you didn't need to program it in the first place), computers were still the domain of a few early adopters. The Macintosh was nearly another text-based computer but circumstances would see the project not only change course but become an even greater challenge.

One of the most popular and best selling computers of the early 1980s was the Commodore 64, a simple but expandable home computer introduced for $595—half the price of the Apple II+ offered by Apple—before an aggressive price war saw the price dropped several times to $250 and even as low as $150. One way Commodore was able to cut the price so deep was that the company owned MOS Technology which produced the chips inside the 64 and many other 8-bit computers of the era, including the Apple II. When turned on, the 64 presented a dark blue screen with a wide light blue border and white text—colors that could be changed—but the user needed to enter BASIC commands to either type in a program or to make one run from a floppy disk (or cassette tape).

The original Macintosh project may nearly have been a competitor to the Commodore 64—the first design used similar chips and would have had the same amount of memory. Instead the project took a different path and the team would reinvent the future. In another well-repeated story, Steve Jobs was allowed to see the secret work computer scientists had come up with inside Xerox's Silicon Valley research laboratory, Xerox PARC, but the truth is as always more complicated. Yet the outcome was the same, Jobs and his team saw a working graphic user interface for the first time, and they would do what Xerox had decided not to do, commercialize it.

But the Alto computer built inside PARC, which had been created in 1973 so the PARC scientists had a computer to work on, was expensive—$32,000 to $40,000 to build in the mid-1970s—and contained between 96 and 512K of memory. Not only did it have a high-resolution bitmap graphical interface, it was the first computer to feature WYSIWYG text editing—of course the copier pioneer would build a machine that let users write and print letters that looked professionally printed on screen and when printed.

Back inside Apple, Jobs immediately changed the course of the Lisa project from just another text-based business machine into what would be a mainstream GUI-based computer. But that wasn't yet destined for the Macintosh. When the Lisa did ship in January 1983 for $9,995, it contained 1MB of memory and support for a hard drive. One year later the Macintosh would ship without the hard drive support, an eighth of the memory and a quarter of the price. Like the Alto and Lisa, the Macintosh featured a GUI, proportional typefaces and support for a mouse utilizing an underpowered processor and 128K of memory. If not for the geniuses on the team, such a feat would not have been possible. As it was, 128K was barely enough memory but it worked.

This is a story about the Macintosh, its visionary and the creators who worked insane hours to produce that first Macintosh, but also the years after Jobs left when the Macintosh flourished then stumbled, the return of Jobs and how he saved both the computer and Apple.

This is a story about the Macintosh, its visionary and the creators who worked insane hours to produce that first Macintosh, but also the years after Jobs left when the Macintosh flourished then stumbled, the return of Jobs and how he saved both the computer and Apple.

From humble beginnings

The Macintosh project didn't start out as a revolutionary new computer, it started as a simple $500 computer. Jef Raskin had pitched an affordable and easy to use computer in 1979, giving the project a code name based on his favourite type of apple, the McIntosh. At the time the Apple II was just two years old and several projects had been started to expand Apple's product range including the Apple III and Lisa. The Macintosh started as Raskin's vision for a computer cheaper, simpler, less-expandable and more appliance-link, a mass market device below the Apple II.

Though Raskin had reportedly visited Xerox PARC in 1973 and may have been aware of computers with graphical user interfaces, he wasn't pushing for a GUI in the Macintosh, but it was meant to be easy to use. This would have been a text-based computer, indeed the original costings for the build did not include a mouse.

Raskin first worked for Apple writing the manual for the Apple II under contract before being hired in 1978 as employee number 31, becoming publications manager. With insight into how the Apple II worked and seeing the Apple III in development, a vision for an information appliance, one without slots, began to take shape, and Raskin wrote several memos the need for a simpler and more affordable machine. Raskin pulled a team together including Apple service technician Burrell Smith who was working in the same building as publications, Brian Howard and Bud Tribble, and spent much of 1980 designing the first version as well as documenting what Macintosh would be. The collection of documents came to be known as the "Book of Macintosh".

For the most part the small team working out of the original Apple office known as "Good Earth" stayed under the wider company radar, but frequent re-orgs put the project in danger of cancellation. Between other projects at Apple, Burrell built the early prototypes utilizing the 8-bit 6502 MOS processor used in the Apple II, then the 6809 Motorola CPU before landing on the more powerful 68000 chip also from Motorola. Raskin had including pricing for all three processors and with an aim to keep the cost of parts under $125, the $90 68000 was significantly more than the $4 price of the 6502 or the 6809 chip at $12 each. Despite the small team and Jef's clear vision, even without a GUI, the Macintosh was already growing well belong $500 and passing a $1000 price tag.

Meanwhile Steve Jobs was focused on the Lisa. The project had also started in 1979 but it took a different direction to the Macintosh. In late 1979 Jobs had secured a visit to Xerox PARC, a tour and demo that would impact the direction of the Lisa and eventually the Mac. Later in his NeXT years Jobs acknowledged he'd seen multiple technologies at the same time including networking (ethernet) and object-oriented programming, but it was the Alto's GUI that caught his attention. As a result Jobs spent 1980 redefining what Lisa would be.

Then as 1980 was coming to a close, Jobs found himself removed from the Lisa project and left adrift until he found the Macintosh team working away. Jobs would soon move the team in a different direction, literally moving the team to larger offices in the Texaco Towers building, supplanting Raskin, who was moved to manage publications for the Macintosh, and moving engineers from the Apple II onto the project throughout 1981.

With the core team in place, development of the Macintosh moved slowly through 1981, but the software had begun to be written and the prototypes refined. An early prototype stacked the components into what would be the familiar arrangement as the case was refined by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama. Pushed to the side, Raskin would leave the project in 1981, and Apple in 1982. Joanna Hoffman, Collette Askeland and Ed Riddle. "The rest of the original Mac team would come to include Bill Atkinson, Bob Belleville, Steve Capps, George Crow, Donn Denman, Chris Espinosa, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare, Larry Kenyon, and Caroline Rose"

Bandley Pirates

After Steve

Apple entered 1985 and the Macintosh’s first anniversary by announcing the Macintosh Office, a suite of products to extend the ecosystem. In an attempt to repeat the buzz created by the famous 1984 commercial played once during the Super Bowl (though it played earlier to qualify for awards), Apple’s advertising agency concocted the Lemmings ad featuring office workers in suits marching off a cliff. (Apple wouldn’t advertise during the Super Bowl for another 14 years).

The ad was seen widely as a failure, though it’s still talked about in advertising. Worse, of the three products comprising the Office, the file server would never ship. However what did ship was AppleTalk networking and the LaserWriter printer, a groundbreaking printer that utilized PostScript from a recent investment Apple made in a small startup called Adobe.

Despite the seed planted that would grow into desktop publishing, 1985 would end up being a rough year for Apple and Steve Jobs. In response to the poor launch of Macintosh Office and struggling Macintosh sales, CEO John Sculley removed Jobs as general manager of the Macintosh division. The Q1 results in July saw Apple report its first quarterly loss. The board saw this failure belonging to Jobs not Sculley, so when Jobs challenged Sculley and asked the board to fire the CEO, the board made their choice.

Jobs story would continue with other ventures worth discussing separately someday, but at the time Jobs chose to quit and sell all but one share of his Apple shares.

In his place Sculley appointed Jean-Louis Gassée to run the Macintosh division having proven himself running Apple’s operations in Europe. Gassée had a different opinion regarding the Macintosh’s lack of openness and expandability, famously having had the license plate “OPENMAC”. Gassée also pushed the Macintosh upmarket, helping Apple make a lot of money as publishers and graphic designers began adapting Aldus PageMaker and the desktop publishing revolution. That open Macintosh appeared in March 1987 with the introduction of the Macintosh II, a Macintosh not only with slots but also the first with an external monitor.

While the original Macintosh was only $2,495, the Macintosh II started at $5,498—a sign of what was to come. Apple had entered 1986 with the Macintosh Plus, a minor refresh of the 512K but one that doubled the RAM and allowed the RAM to be upgraded to 4MB while also introducing the SCSI port for external devices. The Plus remained on sale well into 1990 and would end up being sold alongside the Macintosh SE introduced beside the II. The SE was a step up for the compact Macintosh lineup—it was faster, expandable (while it had only one slot, a video card could be added to power an external monitor, even in color), and it could be configured with either a second floppy drive or a hard drive instead. And in a move against Jobs, the SE had a fan.

Ahead of the original Macintosh launch, but after the case design had been locked down, Jobs and Apple management began searching for a new industrial design partner. Eventually they landed on Frog Design and Hartmut Esslinger, and his “Snow White” design language that would first be applied to the Apple IIc and IIGS before appearing in the Macintosh lineup with the introduction of the II and SE. The design language brought consistency and a clear brand style across all of Apple’s products even beyond the computers through the late 1980s until Apple began building their own in-house group. Robert Brunner was hired in 1989 to lead the group and carefully evolve Apple’s industrial design as the SE and SE/30 made way for the compact Macintosh Classic as well as other low-cost models including the LC and IIsi that allowed external monitors.

Not every Macintosh model was gold at the time. Three years late meeting Jobs’ goal of releasing a “Mac in a book”, 1989 also saw the release of the Macintosh Portable, a battery powered computer that weighed in at 16-pounds and could not be called a laptop (the SE was 17-pounds by comparison). Despite the success of the Macintosh II variations and Apple’s ability to command premium prices, Gassée began to battle with Sculley on pricing and the overall product line. The Macintosh Portable may have been too much to Sculley and Gassée.

Sculley soon began to take a more hands-on role with Apple’s product strategy, at least until his own creation became a distraction. The Macintosh division didn’t get another leader following Gassée’s departure, instead all product development would become the responsibility of the new the Chief Operating Officer Michael Spindler. And while Gassée had helped with the original idea of Apple’s next great platform, the Newton, he didn’t stay to bring it or the new PowerBook line to market.

Following the first attempt at a portable, Apple innovated and someone came up with a clever idea for the keyboard and trackball layout. Where the Macintosh Portable had a large trackball beside the keyboard, the PowerBook pushed the keyboard back to create the now familiar palm rests framing a smaller trackball. Apple also gave the PowerBook line a distinct dark-grey that paired well with the platinum of the desktops while elevating their styling. And the laptop was a huge hit—in its first year the three PowerBook models earned Apple over $1 billion in revenue. The Newton didn’t succeed in the same way.

The release of the PowerBook lineup introduced a trend that would dominate 1990s Apple—the proliferation of multiple overlapping families and models. Three new families would be introduced—the duplicate models of the Performa line sold only in Sears and big box stores, the high-end Quadra line, and the Macintosh II replacement Centris family that merged into the Quadra line after only one year. Some models would even be sold as a Macintosh LC, Macintosh Performa, or Macintosh Quadra—the Performa 475 was also the LC 475 and the Quadra 605.

Soon after the Newton was finally released after many delays, and despite booming profits from the PowerBook, a price war in the PC industry eroded Apple’s profit margins well into 1993 and a costly restructuring saw 2,500 layoffs which combined to deliver a third quarter with Apple’s biggest loss ever. As a result the board forced Sculley out and replaced him with COO Michael Spindler.

Spindler was a terrible choice for CEO. Under the introverted leader the Macintosh continued to proliferate across the multiple families while some streamlining and price reductions were implemented just before Sculley resigned. It was too late for Sculley but not yet the Macintosh. The Centris may have been folded into the Quadra family, and the Macintosh II eliminated altogether with other low-cost models, but the confusing Performa line continued just as Apple began their first processor transition.

One early move Sculley made that now came to fruit was getting Apple to partner with Motorola, its current chip supplier, and IBM, its former foe, on a new RISC based processor platform the PowerPC. While the first demo of a PowerPC Macintosh would take place in October 1992, Apple missed the target release date of January 24, 1994—the Macintosh’s 10th birthday. Apple belonged to Spindler when the Power Macintosh made its debut in March 1994.

Initially the Power Macintosh was an opportunity for a reset with only three models in the line-up—the 6100, 7100 and 8100 using cases borrowed from the Quadra and IIvx—but within a year there would be a refresh and two new lines using the PowerPC, the 9500 tower and various Performa models in the 5xxx and 6xxx numbering. At the same time Apple would continue to release and sell 68K based Macintoshes well into 1996.

The refresh should have been a chance for the Macintosh to gain back marketshare, especially given how rough Windows was at the time. The August 1995 launch of Windows 95 only brought Windows inline with older versions of the Macintosh operating system, but it didn’t matter, there were just too many PCs already on people’s desks. Apple’s solution was too late and ill-conceived. Spindler finally allowed the Macintosh to be licensed.

From 1991, Macintosh users had been able to use System 7 on their Macs—a much needed upgrade from the previous system that included virtual memory, QuickTime, and an improved MultiFinder. System 7 would overstay its welcome by several years as it received major updates with 7.5 and 7.6. By this point the OS had been rebranded Mac OS 7 inline with the Mac clone introduction.

When the first Mac clones began appearing in early 1995 they third-party manufacturers were able to sell more powerful PowerPC Macs below Apple’s own retail prices. The hope had been to grow the Mac marketshare and let clone makers produce affordable low-end computers, but the reality saw both low-end and high-end computers eat into Apple’s shrinking market. And those high-end Mac clones ate into Apple’s most profitable models.

Spindler might have started out as a capable manager, proving himself on the operations side with a strong work ethic that earned him the nickname the “Diesel”, but Apple’s core problems weren’t being ignored. Leadership and the board appeared to be too focused on hardware, ignoring structural problems dragging down software development, while actively looking for a partner to merge with. By early 1996 Apple’s board had lost faith with Spindler and they tapped one of their own.

Gil Amelio was the CEO of National Semiconductor and an Apple board member since 1994. Ahead of the announcement, the trade press were bullish on Amelio taking control as he was seen as someone who had returned National Semiconductor to profitability. He was pitched as the leader to appease shareholders not customers. Interestingly analysts didn’t see Amelio as a leader to take Apple forward beyond a major cleanup.

The implications at the time was that Apple was destined for a merger, and Sun Microsystems was the most talked about candidate. Years later the suggestion was Apple was ripe for a takeover rather than being in a position for a merger. It also highlighted that everyone outside Apple suspected the company was in crisis. And things would prove to get far worse in 1996.

While Amelio’s tenure as CEO was short and he was seen as the wrong leader for Apple, he was able to bring in trusted lieutenants who could help him identify the areas where Apple was struggling and find a solution to save the company. And the most significant problem wasn’t the hardware, it was the Macintosh operating system.