Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? This time for a tech Stuff classic episode. We have another multi parder coming up on here. It's actually a three partner, So for the next three fridays, including this one, we'll be talking about the Macintosh. And because this came from a different era, I used the imaginative titling sequence of the McIntosh story Part one, so I bet you can guess what the next two are called.
This originally published back on June second, twenty seventeen.
Hope you enjoy.
The Macintosh came out in nineteen eighty four, and we'll talk about its debut toward the end of this podcast, because we're really looking at the early stages, what was happening back when they were first talking about starting the Macintosh project over at Apple, and kind of explaining the thought process that went into the formation of that computer. Maybe in later episodes, I'll continue to trace the evolution of the Macintosh, but it's a pretty interesting story. Just
the beginning alone is an interesting story. And you have to put yourself in the mindset of the early nineteen eighties, really the late seventies and early eighties, and what was going on at that time, and the really the birth of the personal computer industry as a whole, because it was brand new back in the late seventies early eighties. Now, I know a lot of my listeners are younger than I am.
That's awesome.
I'm glad you guys enjoy the show. I will be talking a lot about the seventies and eighties. I know it sounds like ancient history to some of you, but that's when I grew up.
So just be nice. I'm old and my feelings are easily hurt. All right, All that's out of the way.
Let us dive into the world of the Macintosh. You know what I do for a living, or, as my favorite character from cinema, Quint from Jaws would say.
You'll know me. You know what I do for a living. I don't just talk about technology.
I have to backtrack fifteen years before the thing began, just to tell you all the stuff that happened before the beginning thing. So we're gonna talk about some history of Apple first leading up into the launch of the Macintosh project. So let's begin with the date of April first,
nineteen seventy six, April Fool's Day, nineteen seventy six. That was when two Steves, one known as Steve Jobs and the other known as Steve Wozniak, decided in a garage to form a very special relationship with one another to become partner in a brand new company that would be called Apple Computers. That garage was in Coopertino, California, and that's where Apple Computers was born on April first, nineteen seventy six. Now, the actual story, of course, starts a
little earlier than that. Wosniak and Jobs originally met in nineteen seventy one through a mutual friend named Burl Bill Fernandez, and the two of them found that they shared a couple of really big interests in common. They both loved technology, and they both loved mischief. They really loved pulling pranks. Steve Wozniak had come from a phone freaking background, and if you want to know what phone freaking is, freaking.
Is spelled with a pH.
I did a full episode about phone freaking in the past, so you can search the tech stuff archives. In short, it involves manipulating the phone system. It's kind of like hacking, but for telephones. And it was all about being able to make long distance calls for free by fooling the phone system that you were some sort of administrative tone. You know, you could actually produce a sound a tone
using a device. One of the early ones was a whistle from Captain Crunch Serial and make long distance calls for free. Well, Steve Wozniak was a guy who was interested in this. He was interested in the way that the phone system worked, and he also kind of liked
the idea of pulling a fast one on people. In fact, there's a great story about jobs in Wozniak making a call to the Vatican this way and they at least reportedly nearly got the Pope on the phone, but he didn't pick up because it turned out his fridge was running, so he went out to catch it.
Anyway, the two.
Joined the Homebrew Computer Club in the mid seventies. This was a big club in California, primarily where people who were enthusiasts of computers would get together start building kits from scratch, trying to make their own co computers. Wozniak took inspiration from an early kit called the Altair. So, yeah, this was a computer that you would get all the parts for, but you would have to put it together yourself.
It wasn't something you bought straight out of the box.
Although there were companies that would do that for you, where they'd put it together and you would just buy the completed Altair.
That's not what Wosniak was interested.
Inosneiak decided he wanted to make his own computer. So he thought, well, what if I made a typewriter interface, which was innovative, no one had done that with a personal computer yet. And what if instead of just a bunch of lights that would indicate the results, I created a display, or I allowed this computer to connect to a display and show things on a monitor. And so he used a television set, just an old TV set that he could wire to his computer, and thus the
Apple one was born. It was a brand new idea. The Apple one computer was a far cry from the personal computers that would follow. It was really a hobbyist computer. Steve Jobs was able to go to a retailer and convince the retailer, why don't you put in an order for these Apple one computers because they're going to be a hot ticket item. People are really interested in computers, and now they can finally get their hands on one.
Steve Jobs is a great salesman, or was a great salesman, and he was able to convince the retailer to put in an order, which was the only way they could actually afford to build the Apple computers.
So they couldn't they couldn't.
Deliver upon the order until they had managed to secure the order, and then once they did, they started building these things. But even then they had to cut some corners. So the original Apple one didn't have a case. It was all just naked hardware and you had to build your own case for it, or just have all these different pieces wired together, but without any sort of protective covering around it. Still, it was enough to get people's interests and it was enough to finance Apple computers in
those early days. They they decided, immediately after they made about two hundred of these, there were only two hundred of the Apple one computers ever in existence, that they were going to go on to the next step, which was to build a more fully functional, self contained personal computer, and they decided to incorporate the company on in January nineteen seventy seven. Now, in April nineteen seventy seven they
were able to debut the Apple to computer. This one had originally tape based storage, So you know cassette tapes.
Maybe some of you know what cassette tapes are, well, we also use those to.
Store computer data back in the day, but that's what the original Apple two computer used as its storage system was cassette tapes. Those are not ideal because obviously the tape is stored on reels, so if you're trying to find a specific piece of information, you have to scan through the reel until you get to it, and this just takes up time. Eventually they would switch over to five and a quarter inch drives, and if you don't know what a five and a quarter inch disk is,
you really missed out. The big black, flimsy discs. And if you told people they were floppy discs and they weren't familiar with the concept, there was a good chance they would fold it in half and put it in their pocket and thus ruin the disc For all time. It was still a form of magnetic storage, it was just in a disc form rather than a tape form. Once they were able to do that, they were able
to speed things up considerably. The most advanced version of the Apple two when it was first coming out, had a stunning amount of memory, sixty four whole kilobytes of memory. That seems like nothing now, and I guess you could argue it is nothing now. By the time, it was really innovative. The monitor resolution was also kind of funny. When you look at today's monitors, you know, you look at the ultra high definition displays that we have today, four K displays, you look at the retina displays.
They're amazing. That's not how things started.
The original Apple to monitor had a resolution of two hundred and eighty pixels by one hundred ninety two pixels.
Yeah, the original monitor.
Had so few pixels you could, if you were determined, count them all. That's pretty amazing.
Now.
If it weren't for the fact that someone actually made some useful productivity software, the Apple two probably never would have gone anywhere. It was a good idea, but you had to have a killer app to convince people, hey, this is something worth buying. And the first real killer app for the Apple two was one called visycalc. Visycalc was essentially a spreadsheet program. It was an application that was like something you would see in Excel or Lotus one, two three.
It was new.
It was a brand new idea. I mean, people just didn't have access to that. They had to do all their factoring on paper and then they would transfer that over into whatever format they needed. This would allow them to do that virtual You could create your cells, you could create your formulas, and so this was a huge demonstration of how powerful and useful personal computers could be. It seems pretty silly now to think about it, but
at the time this was truly new. So it was the thing that helped really convince people that the Apple to computer was the way to go. It was an advantage over some of the other personal computers that were starting to debut around that time, things like the Commodore sixty four or the Texas Instruments computered. We have to take a quick break, but we will be back to talk more about the early days of the Macintosh after this message. Now I could talk a lot about the
Apple two a lot. My dad owned an Apple two. Technically it was an Apple to e. He purchased it. He wrote a book on typewriters, sold the book, used the money from that book to buy the Apple to E and then use that to write other books. So my dad's an author if you did not know, he writes all sorts of books, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, children's literature. If you want to check out his stuff,
his name is Brad Strickland. But yeah, those early books he wrote he wrote on an Apple two E, which meant he stored them all on floppy disks. He could store about a chapter per floppy discs, so each book would be fifteen, sixteen, maybe even twenty floppy discs in size. We had entire sleeves of these floppy disks that represented the books that my dad had written.
In fact, I.
Had dinner with him very recently and he tells me he still has all of those. We don't have a computer that can read them because we don't have an Apple too E disk drive and emulator to read off of these things, but he still has the discs now. I use the Apple to E mostly to play games because I have my priorities stretch. I played a lot of Ultima on the Apple two E. Love my Ultima series. I thought it was awesome.
Now, while the.
Apple two and its variance began to earn some serious cash for Apple, they were very successful comparatively speaking, the founders were already looking at what comes next. It wasn't just about let's rest on our laurels. Now that we've made a personal computer, We've made it a success. We've managed to make a mark on this brand new, fledgling industry. So the logical successor for the Apple two would be the Apple three, And in fact, that's what the company
began to develop. People began to work on the successor, and they began to work on the Apple three computer it would eventually debut. It was faster, more capable than the Apple two, and it was meant to be primarily a business machine, not a personal computer, and it had built in five and a quarter inch disk drives as opposed to the external disk drives you would have to connect to your Apple to computer back in those days. And it had an integrated high resolution graphics chip. But
it didn't sell very well. If you are thinking I've never really heard of the Apple three, I've heard of the Apple too. The reason for that is it just was a failure at the market. It wasn't a total flop, but they didn't sell nearly as well as Apple was hoping. The reason for that, well, there are quite a few By nineteen eighty one, IBM had entered the personal computer picture,
so you had a saturated market. Not only did you have the Apple machines, Commodore, you had Texas Instrument, you had other devices that were starting.
To come out too.
IBM got into the game, and IBM had a huge name in business technology, so IBM was able to leverage that and move forward creating these business machines and dominating that market. This was the beginning of the IBM and IBM compatible era of personal computing. So Apple three just couldn't really keep up. It was a more expensive machine and it was not as well supported as the Apple two was. In other words, there weren't as many people developing software for the Apple three as they had been
for the Apple two. And meanwhile, IBM was catching up on a lot of ground. So even though you had the Apple three team and Apple, some of the other folks there were already thinking about the step beyond, where do we go beyond just creating the next version of this.
Particular personal computer.
What can we do to really innovate and push what personal computing is all about. So one of those people who was really concerned with this was Steve Jobs. He really wanted to look at a way of branching out from this traditional approach. So while there was a team working on the Apple three, Steve Jobs began to look at another project that got started a around nineteen seventy nine. Now this was not the Macintosh. Instead, it was called Lisa. Lisa was a different project that was taking form at
the same time as the Macintosh project within Apple. Lisa was a different a different kind of computer model. Jobs really wanted to take a dramatic step away from the early PC.
Those early PCs were all text based.
That meant that you would get a command prompt and you would have to type in a command and a file extension or a file and its extension in order to have something happen. You had to navigate directories through actual text commands and you would get a text result, so you'd have to read through everything. There was no graphic representation of what you were working on. It was all text based and it was such a wonderful time.
My friends, I loved this time because I actually learned all the different commands, and I could very speedily get it through any system because I understood how they worked, and it didn't require any overlay on top of the basic system, which would slow things down. But then, I'm a computer geek. Even though I'm an English literature geek, I'm also a computer geek. And a lot of people
are not computer geeks. And in fact, there were a lot of technology enthusiasts who were worried that if we stayed in that realm of text based architecture, it would keep people from adopting computers. The mainstream would never latch onto it because it was too hard to use. So Jobs thought perhaps they could create a better system for consumers, and he wanted to move toward a graphic user interface or a gooey Now. He was not the first person to think about the guy that really one of the
earliest would be Douglas Ingelbart. Douglas ingle Bar had been working on early versions of a graphic user interface since the nineteen sixties, and we're almost at nineteen eighty at this point of the story. We're beyond nineteen eighty as of right now, just in case I confused you at that moment. Ingelbart also designed a mouse as a navigational tool to help with graphic user interfaces. So before that you would just use a keyboard or a data pad, something.
Along those lines.
Engelbart said, Well, if we can represent information as graphics and we can create an interface that allows you to drag and click and point and select things, that would make it a much more intuitive interface and allow people to understand more easily how to navigate through the computer. Ingelbart would then take on this information and bring it forward. He had started his work at SRI International, but then continued his work at a research and development place called
Xerox Park. Park is PAARC so as the research and development brand of Xerox. It's a branch of Xerox, I should say, and Xerox Park a lot of very innovative stuff came out of there, And I think I've done a couple of episodes that at least relate to Xerox Park, but maybe I need to do a full one about what the organization was and the things that came out
of Xerox Park, because it's pretty fascinating. Well, Steve Jobs said he knew about Xerox Park, and he wanted to learn more about the stuff that they were developing, so he asked Xerox, hey, can we come and take a look, and some folks from Apple come over and check out what's happening at Xerox Park. I realized that this is all mostly proprietary, hush hush stuff that.
You don't want to get out there.
But come on, we're buddies, right, And Xerox said, essentially, show me the money. So here's what happened. They struck a deal. Apple said, tell you what we'll do. We will sell you up to one hundred one thousand shares of Apple stock at ten dollars a share, which was a huge discount at what Apple stock was trading for at the time. So I said, if you want, you can buy up to one hundred thousand dollars at ten bucks a share. In return, all we want is three
days time at Xerox Park. And Xerox said, you're on, mister, and this was the deal of the century, and let me explain to you why. So let's make a couple of assumptions here. Let's assume that Xerox opted to buy all one hundred thousand dollars one hundred thousand rather of those shares at ten bucks a share. And let's also assume that Xerox has held on to all one hundred thousand of those shares since then, since nineteen seventy nine.
That's impressive. First of all one hundred thousand shares at ten bucks a share, that's a million bucks. That's not a small amount of money. That's a good chunk of change, but it's peanuts compared to what it's worth now. So you might have heard. Apple's done pretty well for itself over the years, so well that the company has split its stock four times since it's it first started becoming
a publicly traded company. Now, that means that they would expand the number of shares that they had out in the market, and that increases the value of the company as a result, And it means that if you own shares after the split, you own more shares. How much
more depends upon the nature of the split. So in nineteen eighty seven, in two thousand and in two thousand and five, Apple split with a two for one share split stock split, which meant that you would get two shares for every instead of just one share.
So if you owned one share.
Of Apple Stock, after one of those splits, you would own two shares, and then after the next split you owned four, and after the next split you own eight. It's a great way to keep seeing value from your shares.
Well.
The fourth time that they split was in twenty fourteen, and that was a real doozy. That was a seven to one split, so for every share you owned, you would get seven shares, an enormous return. So one hundred thousand, let's go back to Zerox here, one hundred thousand that they get nineteen seventy nine, it doubles to two hundred thousand, then it doubles to four hundred thousand, then to eight hundred thousand. Then you get the seven to one split, which means that you get up to five million, six
hundred thousand shares of Apple stock. So for one hundred thousand, they now have five million, six hundred thousand, assuming that they bought all one hundred thousand and that they held on to it for that long. If in fact, Xerox still has those one hundred thousand shares that they bought for ten bucks a share back in the day, they are sitting pretty because today, assuming that the prices and change dramatically, I checked it before, why I did anything
else this morning? I looked at Apple's trading price. Stocks were trading at one hundred forty six dollars fifty three cents per share, So the share price is more than ten times what it was when Xerox bought it. And because of the splits, they now own five point six million stocks, not one hundred thousand stocks.
So you multiply those two.
Numbers together, the five point six million and one hundred and forty six point fifty three dollars, and you factor in how much it's actually worth today. That one million dollar investment would now be worth eight hundred and twenty million, five hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars. So a million dollar investment returns almost a billion dollars today. Again, that's assuming all of those other factors fall into place for a three day tour.
A three day.
Tour, we'll find out if Dylan keeps that or cuts it, but the line people understand anyway. You could argue also that without this visit to Xerox, jobs and Apple would have been way behind on innovation. They would not have allowed Apple to transform into a company that would eventually grow to be worth as much as it was as it is today. So you could say, yeah, Xerox made a huge return on its investment, assuming all those other factors are true. But Apple really benefited from this too.
It wasn't like it's a one sided thing. So Apple was able to redefine again what a personal computer is all about because of the stuff they learned from this visit. This was a machine that they saw the Xerox alto. It was a machine they saw on this visit. This was a machine that incorporated Inglebart's ideas about the graphics, user interface, and the computer map. Else it was a system that wasn't available for purchase. You could not buy one of these as just a member of the general public.
They had made a couple thousand of them, but they were all pretty much internal machines. Very few people had had a chance to actually see them outside of Xerox. Jobs was beyond impressed, and he decided that Apple computers from that point forward should have a gooey and a mouse system. And he felt very strongly that it would open up the computer industry to a wider audience. The text based approach just had too steep a learning curve.
It was discouraging people from getting into computers because only computer geeks understood it. And this is really the era where we began to define what a computer geek was. It was these people who acted like the machines they were really obsessed with. They spoke in jargon, they were unrelatable. The reason we have that image of the computer nerd is because of the text based approaches we had to
comput early in the days of personal computers. It required this dedication and learning curve that not a lot of people possessed. Necessarily, going to the graphics user interface removed a lot of those barriers and opened it up to the mainstream. Although the image of the nerdy computer geek would stick with us for many years and still to this day is there as evidenced by shows like The
It Crowd and The Big Bang Theory. Anyway, this was sort of the beginning of momentum toward developing both the Macintosh project and the Lisa project within Apple and Jobs knew that he could really break free of that narrow stereotype if they went this route. Now I have a lot more to talk about as far as the development that went into the Macintosh. But before I get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
All right.
So in Apple, you've got two teams forming to work on the next big thing within the company, and they're independent of one another. They are not working with each other, so it's two self contained groups within Apple. One of those groups was led by Jobs and this was the LISA team. Now LISA, which was the name that Jobs had given to his own daughter, ostensibly stood for a local integrated system architecture. The LISA machine was meant to be a business device, not a personal computer.
So this was going to be.
Something that Apple would end up marketing to big businesses to use for their operational use and you know, maybe employees would have these machines on their desks, that sort of thing. It was going to be a high end machine, complete with a high end price tag. We're talking to price tag.
Of ten thousand dollars.
Ten thousand dollars in the early nineteen eighties, so you're talking more like twenty grand today. You're talking about the price of a car, essentially, is what we get down to. But the other team was led by a guy named Jeff Raskin. Jeff is spelled j Ef only one f. Raskin earned degrees in physics and mathematics at State University at New York at Stony Brook, and he later earned a master's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University.
He actually first started with mathematical logic, but ended up having a disagreement with one of his professors and switched his focus to computer science and got a masters in the Technically. According to reports, he was actually qualified for a PhD, but there was one problem. The Pennsylvania State University wasn't accredited to award PhDs in computer science at that time, so while he may have had the academics for a PhD, there was no authorized unit to designate
him as such. He then studied a lot of art as well.
He was really.
Interested in not just technology but art, and he was a really smart guy and a little older than the
two Steves jobs in Wosniak. Raskin would go on to teach several subjects at the University of California, San Diego, including computer science, art, and photography, and it was really interested in that intersection between art and tech, which I think is fascinating and people who have that sort of obsession, the people who really focus on that intersection between art and computers, I think makes some of the best and most innovative designers in the world.
So when you see.
A product out there that just is gorgeous and elegant in its design and it works well with whatever its intended purposes, I think that ultimately you have to look for the person who has that vision of where art and technology cross in order to understand what were the decisions that led to that.
This guy was one of those people.
So it sounds like he was a really groovy guy, someone that I probably would have enjoyed chatting with. He has passed away sadly, so I am not able to do that, but I'll talk a little bit more about his life. He joined Apple as the thirty first employee after the company launched the Apple two, so he came on board after Apple two had become a thing.
He had already worked a bit with Apple.
The Apple had hired his company to write the programming manual for the Apple Basic programming language, so he had already worked with Apple in that respect, but now was coming to work full time for the company and His original role was manager of publications and new product review, but he had this passion project he really wanted to do.
He wanted to develop a.
Personal computer that was more accessible to a wider audience. That was his real desire. He wanted to push personal computers beyond the hobbyist and the early adopter phases. So he was the one who started the Macintosh project back in nineteen seventy nine, and he named it after his favorite type of Apple, the Macintosh, although it spelled a
different way than the Apple the actual Apple is. Now you could argue and probably convincingly, that Raskin was somewhat responsible for pushing Jobs's shift toward designing a computer for the general public, because Raskin was writing memos to the rest of the company really to direct it to Steve Jobs, saying, I really think we are missing an opportunity here. If we're able to tap into that market, it's so much larger than just the hobbyist market.
It's a huge beneficial.
Business decision and it will really push the development of personal computers. And he was one of the people who really championed that idea. Now, one thing he didn't do was talk about graphic user interfaces and computer mice or a computer mouse's miss whatever. He was looking at keeping costs down. So his original plan was to make a personal computer that was still text based but more accessible
than previous machines were. So it was a little different than the Lisa development, which was really looking at using the graphics user interface and the computer mouse, but a slightly different version. The mouse they saw at Xerox Park was a three button mouse, and the mouse that they talked about for the Macintosh was a single button mouse. This was in part to simplify things and also to
bring down costs. They didn't want the components to be more and more expensive because the price tag for the Lisa was already pretty astronomical.
As it is.
So Jobs was more or less on the Lisa team. He was kind of supposed to be adjacent to the Lisa team, but he kept involving himself more and more in their activities, and Raskin was leading the Macintosh team, and they weren't necessarily competing because they were looking at
developing computers for two different consumer groups. Right, Jobs wanted to build computers for businesses and Raskin wanted to build computers for personal users, so they weren't directly competing with one another, but there was some professional competition going on between the two and kind of a race to see who could develop their machine first and who was going
to make the next iteration of the personal computer. They were both relying on similar philosophies to make computing more intuitive to the average person, although again Jobs was looking at the guy route, whereas Raskin was saying, how can I make the text route more accessible and keep those costs down. Meanwhile, over on the corporate side of Apple, the company began to bring on more experienced folks from the business world to help make sure Apple became a
quote unquote real company. These were the people who formed the policies and practices of Apple, the ones who kind of codified what the rules were and determined how business would be done, making sure it would maintain a position of dominance in the computer marketplace.
But they also.
Began to change the culture of Apple, and some of Apple's employees were a little chafed by this. They didn't really want to see things change that much, and it caused some growing pains as a result. One person who caused some serious growing pains was Apple's first president and CEO. Whose name is and I'm not making this up, Michael Scott. This is not the Michael Scott from dunder Mifflin. It's not Michael Scott from the office. But it is a
guy named Michael Scott, sometimes called Scotty. Now, some people would go on to say that Michael Scott would end up wreaking havoc through Apple. He had been brought on by one of Apple's early investors, Michael Markula. Markula was technically the third employee of Apple after Wozniak and Jobs. Markula spent much of his own money as an investment in the company and then some more money as a loan to the company. So not only did he invest, he also loaned an extra amount of money to Apple
in its early days. And he was the one who kind of brought Michael Scott on board to become a leader for the company. Now the leaders had almost canceled the Macintosh project a few times. It was a very small project, very humble beginnings. Jeff Raskins had a group of like three people working with him to develop this
idea and design the Macintosh computer. And it was always on the verge of the chopping block because the management was saying, well, could we not dedicate your attention somewhere else, someplace that we're definitively going to make money. And each time Jeff Raskin would argue to allow the project to continue, and it would kind of be allowed to continue for a little bit longer until the next time this would happen,
and then you'd rinse and repeat. The project was almost canceled in nineteen seventy nine and in nineteen eighty despite the fact that again it was very modest, it wasn't taking a huge amount of Apple's resources away. Then in nineteen eighty one, we had a really rough year for Apple, very rough year in nineteen eighty one. A lot of bad things happened. For one thing, Steve Wozniak was in
a plane crash and was severely injured. His recovery would take a huge amount of time, and he stepped away from Apple because he had to concentrate on his health. That same year, Michael Scott in February nineteen eighty one fired more than forty Apple employees, which was a significant number considering this was a very small company at the time. It was on a day that was called Black Wednesday
within the company. That was the day Michael Scott came in, fired a bunch of people, rolled a keg of beer into the office, and then proclaimed himself Lord and Master of all. He surveyed, that's probably going a bit far, but apparently the keg of beer thing is true, which I'm just gonna leave that. It's a little too soon for me to talk about kegs of beer and triumphing
over other people's misfortune. Enough commentary. At any rate, The move did not go over very well with a lot of Apple employees, and in fact, Mark Coola himself said that's a bit much and decided, you know what, I'm gonna have to pull some rank here. I am the big investor, I'm a majority owner of Apple. You are out, and he pulled Michael Scott from position of president and CEO and made him vice chairman. Steve Jobs had become the chairman of the company, so he was in charge
of that. Marculo himself would step in as the president of the company.
Vice Chairman was a.
Title that had practically no actual responsibilities or power associated with it, so it was almost a title and name alone, and later on that year, Michael Scott would actually resign somewhat defiantly. It all seems very melodramatic to me looking at it in hindsight. So Mike Marcula, who was a man who had retired at the age of thirty two
because he made so much money from stock options. He had worked for Fairchild semi Conductor in the marketing department and as a result of his work there, he had been awarded stock options, and the stock options ended up being worth millions of dollars because of the success of Fairchild semi Conductor. It's a good time to get into semiconductors, just before the computer age dawned, And so he was a multimillionaire already.
He had retired at age thirty two. That blows my mind.
Now he becomes the acting president of Apple, and Steve Jobs is acting as chairman.
Now, the reason I.
Tell you all of this is not just to give you a history lesson of Apple. It's so that you understand how things happened. Next, you've got Jeff Raskin, who was working on creating an affordable, intuitive computer for consumers, and his project had been on that verge of cancelation. A couple of times, you have Steve Jobs, who was getting more and more involved in a project that.
Technically wasn't his.
Lisa was being spearheaded by other people, but Jobs was getting more and more involved in it, and you had Markola as the man who's leading the company. And then things turned south a bit. Jobs's team was in trouble largely because of Steve Jobs. He was getting personally involved in the develop of Lisa, and this was upsetting the managerial structure of the project as a result, because it's you know, it's the guy who isn't in charge who comes in and says like, hey, I founded the company,
you should do things this way, not that way. If you've ever worked on any project where someone who was not in charge starts to try and take charge, you've probably experienced this kind of level of friction. Well, this was that on a pretty grand scale, and things were becoming really problematic as the project was progressing, so much so that Markola made the decision to remove Jobs from the team entirely, essentially saying you aren't allowed to work
on that project, stop bothering them, and put them into limbo. Essentially, Steve Jobs had really nothing to do at that point, and the control of the project went over to a guy named John Couch. Jobs was left with no real position of his own, something that would become a recurring
theme with an Apple. If you've heard our other episodes about Steve Jobs and Apple, you know how at times in his career in Apple he rubbed people the wrong way, and so the people in charge would just kind of tell him, go into your own office and do whatever you want to do, but stop bothering these people. And part of it was Steve Jobs's fault. Part of it was the fault of the management. It's no one is blameless in this. I'm not trying to say that Steve
Jobs was a total nightmare to work for. Some people felt that way, but I'm not saying that that's definitively the case, rather than it was complicated. So Jobs is removed from the Lisa project, he decides that he needs something else to do, and then he takes a good look at the Macintosh project and then says, ah, I want to work on this. Here's the problem. Jeff Raskin was working on that. That was his project and his team,
and Steve Jobs wanted all of it. He wanted to jump in there and take over the Macintosh project and turn it into something that it wasn't when it got started. At that time, Raskin was really working hard with a small team to develop a low cost consumer computer. Jobs immediately began to make changes, demanding changes to the work and redesigning the computer pretty dramatically, changing it from the track it had been on since nineteen seventy nine. Remember
this is like nineteen eighty one eighty two. This was enough to exasperate Jeff Raskin, who ultimately decided to resign his position in nineteen eighty two after enduring multiple changes to a project he had defended numerous times from cancelation. So think about that for a minute. He had worked very hard to keep this project alive, arguing for its viability, and then one of the founders that the company comes in and starts making dramatic changes to his design decisions.
It was very frustrating, and so ultimately he decided to resign, and in the book Becoming Steve Jobs, they published a memo that was written by rask And upon his resignation, and it reveals some of the issues. The passage reads while mister Jobs's stated positions on management techniques are all quite noble and worthy. In practice, he is a dreadful manager. He is a prime example of a manager who takes the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the
workers when deadlines are not met. He also said that Steve Jobs missus appointments, does not give credit, has favorites, and doesn't keep promises, and in another interview, Jeff Raskin said that Jobs would have made quote an excellent King of France end quote. That is a sick burn. I'm assuming that Raskin was specifically meeting the kings of France who were in power directly before the French Revolution.
That's brutal.
Raskin would actually go on to found a company called Information Appliance, Incorporated, and later would teach computer science at the University of Chicago. That after the McIntosh debuted, he would be kind of referred to as sort of an eccentric uncle to the Macintosh, not the father of the Macintosh. And the reason for this is because the Macintosh that debuted was so dramatically different from the one that he
had been designing since nineteen seventy nine. It had changed enough so it was no longer really the same computer. Raskin himself passed away in two thousand and five, and I am sad that I never had a chance to meet him, as he does sound like he was fascinating. Now back to the Macintosh team, Jobs wanted to overhaul the computer's esthetic design, both from a hardware and a
software level. He wanted something sleek and different from previous computers, and he really wanted a design that would set the McIntosh apart from IBM's personal computers. IBM's PCs started hitting store shelves in nineteen eighty one, and they poised a direct threat to Apple's position, particularly among businesses. Had that reputation and was leveraging it, and Jobs wanted his team to finish their work before the Lisa team finished their work.
Now that he had been removed from the Lisa team, that last part didn't happen, though Lisa would launch a year ahead of McIntosh. Lisa came out in nineteen eighty three, but the Lisa, unlike the Mac, did not see much success. It was just too expensive, it had too limited.
Software.
It just didn't have a lot of applications developed for it, so there wasn't much of a reason to buy one.
It would like it would be like.
Buying a very expensive video game console, but there are no games.
Out for it yet that would be a problem.
So very few of them were sold. I mean there were ten thousand dollars apiece. The Lisa won the race to the finish line. It was ready before the Macintosh was, but it lost the long game. Apple didn't give up on it right away. They launched the Lisa, it didn't
see a whole lot of success. They then designed and launched the Lisa too, so the second computer in this line at a slightly lower price point, actually significantly lower price point, with some new hardware, some of it taken from the Macintosh computer to make it less expensive, so instead of using more expensive components, they used the components that kept the Macintosh below that exorbitant price point. They also rebranded the Lisa too. They gave it another overhaul,
really kind of. They spruced it up a little bit, and they renamed it the Macintosh XL in nineteen eighty five. But none of this really kept the Lisa treading water. So ultimately Apple pulled the plug figuratively and literally, I guess, since.
It was a computer. Now.
Jobs' version of the Macintosh incorporated a graphics user interface because he had been so impressed by Xerox's computer. Raskin's original design had, like I said, stuck with the text based approach. That this was a big change. It required a lot of work on the part of the team to go from text base to graphic user interface. Raskin really felt that it was appropriate to go with text base to keep the price down, although he did eventually
endorse the use of a computer mouse. Raskin's goal was to make sure that the Macintosh debuted at a price of around five hundred dollars, between five hundred and one thousand dollars. As it turns out, that did not happen, but we'll get to that. He did, however, think you know, Jobs didn't want it to go super expensive like Lisa, but he did want to have this graphic user interface and mouse in it because he felt that it was
just worthwhile. He ultimately came to the conclusion that incorporating those while it would mean a price hike in the mac.
It would be worth it.
People would see the value of the graphics user interface in the mouth and so it would make the final product more expensive than what Raskin then hoped, but it would be a justifiable expense because of the nature of computing.
On that team where several people here are just a few of them, Daniel Kotke, Rod Holt, Mark Lebrun, Larry Tesler, Jerry Minak, among others, and in various interviews they said their goal was to create a computer that they themselves would want to own, which to me seems like a really good strategy if you're developing anything. I think that developing something that you yourself would want to use is important.
If you're just throwing in features and stuff in order to make it shinier, you're probably on the wrong track. If you're incorporating stuff that you yourself would want to use, you're probably on the right track. And I see this
in all areas, not just in technology. The Monty Python crew were famous for saying that they wanted to make sure the stuff they wrote made each other laugh, and if when they got together and they read out the stuff they had been working on, if other people were laughing, they knew they were on the right track and that stuff would go in the yes pile. Stuff that might be amusing, but isn't really getting a good response might go into maybe pile, and stuff that wasn't landing winning
a no pile. So whether it's high tech or lowbrow comedy, you should follow the same general philosophy. At least that's my view and the view of the Macintosh team now. Developing that graphic user interface was actually a really painstaking process because this was a whole new thing for personal computers. No one had done it. Xerox Park had done it for their in house computer system, but no one had
done it for a personal computer. So it required a lot of trial and error designing the programs, testing them, debugging them. In fact, some of the designers would say that the Mac operating system got debugged into existence, that essentially they started with a bunch of different code, much of it didn't work, and then they eliminated the stuff that didn't work until they willed it around down to a workable operating system. Seems like it worked.
Out for them. It had to be.
Programmed and debugged over a long time, but they still had a real goal to get McIntosh out as soon as possible, even though the Lisa had come out in nineteen eighty three and really Jobs had gotten really involved in in McIntosh at the end of nineteen eighty one and into nineteen eighty two. They knew they wanted a debut by nineteen eighty four, and they did. And we'll go more into what happened next in our next section, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
By nineteen eighty four, the Macintosh was finally ready for its unveiling, and it had taken a bit longer to come out than Lisa and the Macintosh team had to contend with Jobs making lots of demands and changes, but in the end they were able to create a computer design for the average consumer. The specs of the machine
were impressive for the time, not for today. The Motorola processor they were using as the CPU ran at a blistering six megahertz, which they cranked up to seven point eight megaherts and they marketed as an eight megahertz machine. The nine inch screen a massive nine inch screen on this computer, which was an all in one by the way.
You had the computer.
Body and the monitor all in the same form factor, although the keyboard was separate. It was a monochromatic nine inch screen and had a resolution of five hundred and twelve by three hundred twelve pixels, so only slightly better than the Apple to monitor resolution. The name for the graphic user interface operating system was called System Software one point oh. Later on they would call it mac OS, but it was System Software one point zero.
In the early days.
Unlike the Apple Too, which had a separate display from the computer itself, this one, like I said, was incorporated directly with the machine. So the whole thing was in a big plastic body, and you had computer and monitor right there, including a disk drive, but then you would connect the keyboard to it. It had a three and a half inch disk drive, so they had advanced beyond the five and a quarter inch discs. Now you were in the more firm, plastic of the three and a
half inch discs. People started calling those hard disks because they didn't know what a hard disk drive was. That's not a hard disk. It was still a floppy disc. It was just a different form of a floppy disk. It also had a handle. The Mac had a handle on it so you could carry it around, making it a.
Semi portable machine. It was really a bit heavy and bulky for toting it around. Everywhere.
It weighed about out sixteen and a half pounds or somewhere around seven and a half kilograms, so that's kind of hefty. You don't want to carry that around very far. But it did have a handle, so you could if you needed to. The original Mac had two serial ports. You might remember I talked about serial ports in the USB episodes, so that is serial as an se r I A L.
I'm not talking about Captain crunch.
If you want to hear about that, go back to the earlier part of the episode where I was talking about phone freaking, had no modem, had no microphone. Sound was in glorious eight bit format, so whenever you hear chip tunes, that's the good old eight bit sound.
For the most part.
You could upgrade the RAM to five hundred and twelve kilobytes. But when I say you could upgrade the RAM, I really mean a reseller could upgrade the RAM. The Mac was designed in a way where you were not, as a user, supposed to make any alterations or change it or upgrade it yourself. Like you couldn't just crack open the case and put in an expansion slot. That's not how it worked, and anyone who's used Macintosh computers since that day can tell you this is kind of how
Apple likes it. They really like to create a closed off system that you aren't supposed to mess with, so it became a recurring theme. Also, it had no hard drive, so everything had to run off a disk drive. If you wanted to boot up your computer, you had to put the system boot disc into the disk drive, turn your machine on. It would read the operating system from
its boot disc, launch into it. And then if you wanted to change another, you know, to another software, another piece of software, you would go in, you would activate it, you would be prompted to put in the appropriate disc. You'd pull out the system operations disc, put in your application disc. Then you could use your application. Such were
the dark days of the personal computer industry. Now, eventually you could end up buying a secondary drive that would be dedicated solely to the system boot disc, which meant that you could use the other drive for all your applications. But that cost extras. So let's talk about cost. Remember, Raskin wanted his machine to cost between five hundred and one thousand dollars, So how much did the original Mac
cost when it went on sale. The original Macintosh cost two thousand, four hundred ninety five dollars in nineteen eighty four. If you were to adjust that for inflation and say how much would I need to spend today to be equivalent to the spending power, the purchasing power of that twenty four hundred ninety five dollars in nineteen eighty four money.
The answer to that is nearly five thousand, seven hundred dollars.
So that translates into saying that the first Macintosh computer would have cost you about the same as five thousand, seven hundred bucks in today's money. Pretty expensive computer, extremely expensive, honestly.
Now, eventually, like I.
Said, they would release the hard disk twenty that was the drive that would be the sole purpose of keeping the system to itself, so that you could use the other drive just for your applications. That was an additional one four hundred and ninety five dollars, so very expensive, more than half of what the computer itself cost. Not
exactly a budget machine. On the software side, the coding side, who had Bill Atkinson who had coded a method for displaying overlapping windows to make it smooth and useful for Apple users. That allowed you to actually have numerous applications open at the same time and you could navigate between them. Anyone who's used a guy based computer system and at all is familiar with this that you can have multiple
windows open and switch between them. That was new back in nineteen eighty four, something that you you know, normally you would have to quit of an application and open a new application if you wanted to do something different on the computer. You couldn't just switch back and forth.
So this was a new thing and very innovative. Meanwhile, you also had other designers who were working on the iconography for the operating system, so the different little icons you would see, the designs that would pop up whenever the machine was processing information. All of that went through rigorous design before it ever launched with the Macintosh, and it made the computer more appealing to use. It was like it was a more friendly type of machine than
the cold text based devices of the past. Oh and there was a commercial that didn't hurt too much either. It was the infamous Apple nineteen eighty four commercial and it was directed by the famed director Ridley Scott. So yeah, the same guy who directed Blade Runner directed an Apple commercial in nineteen eighty four. That blows my mind. I mean, this is a visionary director. And if you watch that commercial,
it's very powerful. It's an incredible ad. It has often been listed among the best commercials of all time, and I think it still holds a place up there just for its dramatic impact. So in the commercial, and it was all a matter of timing, it was so well done.
We see a dystopian futuristic society, kind of like a bunch of people dressed in gray shaved heads, staring straight ahead, marching down the hallway into like a lecture hall, taking seats in almost like an auditorium setting, staring at an enormous screen where there is the very large face of
a man. The man's face is probably normal size, but the image makes it look huge, yelling out various authoritarian nonsense, stuff like you will conform and you will obey that kind of thing, very big brotherish and dictating to the group how things must be. And you also keep cutting back over to this woman in a colorful outfit as she's jogging down the hallway and she's carrying a massive hammer, like a big warhammer style hammer, and she runs. It's
really an Olympic hammer. I guess she runs into this lecture, Hall does a spin throw and throws the hammer into the screen, destroying it, and it shows this beautiful bright light, and the people snap out of their dystopic funk and they look around, and then you get hit by the tagline, which says, on January twenty fourth, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be
like nineteen eighty four. So what they mean is the year nineteen eighty four won't be like the classic George Orwell novel nineteen eighty four, which features Big Brother in this authoritarian government that dictates everything. Has to be a very specific way. The message being, hey, the Macintosh breaks free of the mold. You get to be you. You aren't some drone, You're not some just faceless entity inside a larger company or corporation. You are a person. That
was the message. So it was really selling the idea that the Macintosh was all about individuality and not about conformity, and it was incredible.
I didn't own the Macintosh.
I had an Apple two E and then we switched over to IBM compatible machines in my house, so I don't have any personal stake. I have no nostalgia for the Macintosh computer as a thing, but I certainly think the marketing scheme for the Macintosh was nothing short of a masterpiece. Jobs really loved the ad, and so did John Scully, who at that time was the president and CEO of Apple.
Markola had stepped down.
John Scully, who had come from PEPSI, had now taken the helm of Apple, and Scully and Jobs.
Both thought the ad was tops.
They showed it off to the board of directors and they were less happy with it. They thought it was too oppressive, too dark, too gloomy, so they wanted to scrap the ad, and jobs in Scully really didn't want that to happen, so they kind of dragged their feet a little bit, and their their ad agency that commissioned they commissioned the ad from said eventually, you know, we can get rid of most of the ad spots, but there two we cannot offload.
One of them was in Idaho.
The other was a national spot during the nineteen eighty four Super Bowl. Right, we can't. We can't drop that one. It's no one's going to buy it. You would lose a huge amount of money because the ad space is so expensive.
Whether that was true or whether this was.
All an attempt to kind of get the ad to the public despite what the bord of directors had said, who's to say. But ultimately Apple went ahead and ran the ad during the Super Bowl, reaching more than ninety million people in the process, and it was an enormous impact. News agencies ran stories about this ad because it was just so effective, and they called it a groundbreaking commercial, which gave Apple even more marketing reach that they didn't
pay for. Because news agencies were talking about a commercial for them. It was a gold mine for Apple, and they were able to sell more than seventy thousand Macintosh computers within a couple of months of it debuting.
It debuted late January.
By March, they had sold more than seventy thousand computers at more than two four hundred and ninety bucks a pop.
That was a really.
Expensive computer in nineteen eighty four, and selling seventy thousand of was a huge success story. And it was just the beginning for the Macintosh. And there's so much more I could say about this computer, but for today, I'm gonna call this a close. I'm gonna bring this to an end because this was the birth of the Macintosh,
its debut to the world. I think it makes a good ending for this part of the story, and in a future episode, I'll explore how the Macintosh evolved into the Mac and the trials and tribulations of its evolution, how it changed so dramatically, how Jobs being forced out of his own company effectively changed the way that the Mac developed, How the mac almost perished before Jobs came back and changed things dramatically again. So love him or hate them, jobs got results done and he sold a
lot of computers, So that's another story. I'll probably take that on. Who knows, maybe that'll be my next episode I have. I've not decided yet, but maybe next episode will be The Macintosh Story Part two, where I talk about how it changed from its initial version over the years to turn into things like the iMac.
And that'd be kind of fun. But for now, I gotta go.
All right, I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff, The Macintosh Story Part one. Next Friday, we will have part two. The friday after that, we're gonna have part five three. Sorry, hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.