The Macintosh Story Part 1

and there. But I really wanted to look at a piece of technology that had been around for a while that we are familiar with, but maybe you don't all know the backstory too. And this time I thought I'd

look at the Macintosh computer. The Macintosh came out in and we'll talk about its debut towards 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. Uh, 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 nineties, 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 all the way. Let us dive into the world old of the Macintosh. You know what I do for a living? Or as my favorite character from cinema, Quint from Jaws, would say, you all 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 one, ninety six,

April Fools Day, nineteen seventy six. That was when to Steve's 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 partners 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.

Wozniak and Jobs originally met in nineteen seventy one through a mutual friend named l 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. Uh. 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 text off 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 Cereal

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. Uh. 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 computers. Wozniak took inspiration from an early it called the Altear. 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 on the box, although there were companies that would do that for you, where they put it together and you would just buy the completed all tear. That's not what Wozniak was interested in. Wassniac 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. Uh. 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 gonna 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 computer. 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 decided, immediately after they made about two hundred of these, they were only two of the Apple one computers ever in existence, that they were gonna go onto 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 and nineteen seventy seven.

Now in April n seven, they were able to debut the Apple two 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 till you get to it. Uh, and this just takes up time. Eventually they would switch over to five and a quarter inch disk drives, and if you don't know what a five and a quarter inch disc is, you really miss doubt the big black, flimsy disks. And if you told people they were floppy disks 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, but at the time it was, 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 picks sles by 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 Too 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 Too was one called VisiCalc VISCUC was essentially a spreadsheet program It was an application that was like something you would see an Excel or Lotus one to three. Uh. 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 virtually. You could create your cells, you could create your formula is, 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 two 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, the Texas Instruments computers. Now I can talk a lot about the Apple Too a lot. My dad owned an Apple Too. Technically,

it was an Apple to E. He purchased it. He wrote a book on typewriters, sold the book, use 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 to 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 disks in size. We had entire sleeves of these floppy discs 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 to e disc 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 priority straight. I played a lot of Ultima on the Apple to E. Love my Ultimate series. I thought it was awesome. Now. While the Apple Too and its variants 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 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 Too 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. Uh it would eventually debut. It was faster, more capable than the Apple Too, 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 that 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 reasons for that, well, there are quite a few. Bye 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 to 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 too. And meanwhile

IBM was catching up 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 around 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 mob All Jobs really wanted to take a direct, 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 have to read through everything there. 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 can very speedily get through any system because I understood how they worked, and uh, 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 towards a graphic user interface or a gooey. Now, he was not the first person to think about the

gooey that. Really one of the earliest would be Douglas Inglebart. Douglas Inglebart 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 night as of right now. Just in case I confused you at that moment, Inglebart 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. Angle Bart 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 angle. Bart would

then take on this information and bring it forward. He had started his work at s r I International, but then continued his work at a research and development place called Xerox Park Park as p A r C. So there's a research and development brand of of Zerox. There's

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 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, if you want, you can buy up to a hundred thousand dollars at ten bucks to share. In return, all we want is three days time at Xerox park. And zero said, you're on MR 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 to share. And let's also assume that Xerox has held onto all one hundred thousand of those shares since then. Since nine Uh, that's impressive. First of all, a 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 first started becoming a publicly traded company. Now, that means that they would uh ex span 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 in two thousand and in two thousand 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 own 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 two thousand fourteen and that was a real doozy. That was a seven till one split, so for every share you owned, you would get seven shares, an enormous return. So one thousand, let's go back to zeros here one d thou and that they get nineteen nine at doubles to two hundred thousand, Then it doubles to four hundred thousand 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's 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 onto

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 price hasn't changed dramatically, I checked it before, why 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 a hundred thousand stocks. So you multiply those two numbers together, the five point six million and a hundred 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 twenty million, five hundred 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 life 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 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 mouse. 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 of 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 Compute 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 that these people who acted like the machines they were really obsessed with, They spoken jargon, they were unrelatable. The reason we have that image of the computer nerd is because of the text based approaches we had to computing early in the days of personal computers. It required this dedication and learning curve that not a lot of people possessed. Necessarily. Going 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 evidence by shows like The I T. 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 new 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. Alright, So, an 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 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 their you know, operational use and you know, maybe employees would have these machines on their on their desks, that sort of thing.

It was gonna 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 E F only one F. Raskin earned the EASE 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 UH and got a master's and 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 and computer science at that time, so while he may have had the academic standing for a PhD, there was no authorized UH unit to 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 UH. He was a really smart guy and a little older than the two Steves which Obbs and Bosniac.

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 as gorgeous and elegant in its design and it works well with whatever it's 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. H 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 Too, so he came on board after Apple

two had become a thing. He had already worked a bit with Apple, uh 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 nine seventy nine, and he named it after his favorite type of apple, the Macintosh, although it's 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 as 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. Uh, And he was one of the people who really championed that idea. Now, one thing he didn't do was talking about graphic user interfaces and computer mice or a computer else's nieces 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 that 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 gooey 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, uh, 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 Scottie. Now, some people would go on to say that Michael Scott

would end up wreaking havoc through Apple. Uh. He had been brought on by one of Apple's early investors, Michael Marcula. Marcula 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 rense and repeat.

The project was almost canceled in nineteen seventy nine and in nineteen eight despite the fact that again it was very modest, it wasn't taking a huge amount of Apple's resources away. Then in nineteen eight 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 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 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 Coula 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 a vice chairman. Steve Jobs had become the chairman of the company, so he was

in charge of that. Markola 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's almost a title in name alone, and later on that year Michael Scott would actually resign somewhat defiantly. Um, it all seems very mel a dramatic to me looking

at it in hindsight. So Mike Marcoola, 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 fair Child Semiconductor 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 fair Child Semiconductor, it's a good time to get into semi conductors, 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 as team

was in trouble largely because of Steve Jobs. He was getting personally involved in the development 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 varience 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 Mark Coula 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 him 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 and Apple he rubbed people the wrong way, and so the people in charge would just kind of tell him, going to your own office and do whatever you want to do, but stop bothering these people. And part of it was Steve

jobs fault. Part of it was the fault of the management. It's no one is blameless in this. I'm not trying to say 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 nine Remember this is like two. This was enough to exasperate Jeff Raskin, who ultimately decided to resign his position in 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 publish a memo that was written by Raskin upon his resignation, and

it reveals some of the issues. The passage reads, while Mr Jobs as 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 miss his 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, and after that, after the Macintosh debut, 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 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 aesthetic 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 Macintosh apart from IBM's personal computers. IBM PCs started hitting store shelves in one and they poisoned direct threat to Apple's position, particularly among businesses. IBM 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 Macintosh. Lisa came out in three but the Lisa, unlike the mac did not see much success. It was just too expensive, it had too limited UH 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 it lost the long game. UH. Apple didn't give up on it right away, they launched the Lisa. It

didn't see a whole 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 UH hardware, some of it taken from the mac Tosh 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. UH. 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 XLI. 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 comp a her mouse. Raskin's goal was to make sure that the Macintosh debuted at a price of around five dollars, between five hundred and a thousand dollars. As it turns out,

that did not happen, but we'll get to that. He did, however, think you know, jobs, Jobs didn't wanted 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 mouse, and so it would make the final product more expensive than what Raskin then OpEd, but it would be a justifiable expense because of the nature of computing.

On that team were several people here are just a few of them, Daniel Cottke Rod Holt, Mark Lebrun, Larry Tesler, Ramnach, 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 low brow 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 shout as soon as possible, even though the lease had come out in and really jobs had gotten really involved in in Macintosh. At the end of and into two, they knew they wanted to debut by and they did. And we'll go and more into what happened next in our next section, but first let's take

another quick break to thank our sponsor. 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 Mega hurts, which they cranked up to seven point eight may hurts, and they marketed as an eight Mega Hurts 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 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 oh 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 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 disk. 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 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 Cereal ports in the USB episodes, so that is Sereal as an S E 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 bits sound. For the most part, you could upgrade the RAM to 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 anything 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 want 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 extra. So let's talk about cost. Remember Raskin wanted his machine to cost between five hundred and a thousand dollars. So how much did the original mac cost when it went on sale? The original Macintosh

cost two thousand, four hundred nine five dollars. 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 two thousand 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, about 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 thousand four d dollars, so very expensive, more than half of what the computer itself cost. Uh, 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 allows you to actually have numerous applications open at the same time and you could navigate between them. Anyone who's used a Gooey 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 something that you you know, normally you would have to quit out of an application and open a new application if you want 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 are 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, as 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 eight 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 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's still holds a place up there just for its dramatic impact. So in the commercial, uh, 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 a 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 brother ish 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 like a big warhammer style hammer, and she runs. It's really an Olympic hammer.

I guess she runs into this 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 the people snap out of their dystopic funk and they look around, and then you get hit by the tagline which says, on January, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why nine eight four won't be like

Night four. So what they mean is the year nine eight four won't be like the classic George Orwell novel 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's really selling the idea, uh 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 to E and then we switched over to IBM compatible machines in my house, so I don't have any personal steak. 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. Mark Coola 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 and Only really didn't want that to happen, so they kind of dragged their feet a little bit and there uh their ad agency, the Commission. The commission the add from said eventually, you know, we can get rid of most the ad spots, but there too, we cannot offload. One of them was in Idaho. The other was a national spot during the Super Bowl, right we we can't. We

can't drop that one. It's no one's gonna 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 Border 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 thousand bucks a pop. That was a really expensive computer in and selling seventy thousand of them 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, it's 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 him, jobs got results done

and he sold a lot of computers. Uh, So that's another story. I'll probably take that on. Who knows, maybe that will be my next episode. I have 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. If you guys have any suggestions for people I should have on the show topics I should cover, questions or comments about anything I've chatted about, you can write me. My email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can always get in touch over social media. The handle for the show on Facebook and Twitter is tech Stuff h s W. Remember you can go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff to watch me record these shows live.

There's a chat room you can actually engage in chat while I'm talking, uh as the people who are there right now can tell you I am happy to chat with folks whenever I'm not directly recording my from my notes, but yeah, check that out. Go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You'll be able to find a schedule of my appearances there and find out when you can tune in to hear me record these shows. You get

to see everything, including all the mistakes. There aren't a whole lot of them, but they do happen, and if you are there, you'll get to enjoy that Also, you'll hear shows about a month before they publish. And until next time, I'll tell if you guys again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it, how stuff works? Dot com, wh