To understand Macintosh, we must begin at the beginning. In the beginning(this beginning anyway),there were computers. Big computers. Big, expensive computers. As technology advanced, computer parts became smaller. Oddly enough, though, the big computer manufactures didn't think small computers were a big idea. The large corporations thought small computers were a silly idea-if they thought about small computers at all! So they didn't make any small computers.
Hobbyists, however, thought differently. In the basements of America, they were busy soldering circuit boards, inserting chips, stringing wires, and trying to make their contraptions "listen" to keyboards and "talk" to television screens.
In those days, hobby computers had rows of toggle switches on the front panel. The switches were used to program the computer by entering a persice series of ones and zeros.
Only a true hobbyist could withstand such a grueling task.
About this time, the mists of history recede a bit. Enter Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, one a hobbyist/visionary, and one a hobbyist/engineer. Jobs, at the time, was one of the first ten programmers hired by Atari to program video arcade machines. Wozniak was a technician employed by Hewlett-Packard, a large computer manufacturer. Wozniak helped design calculators for HP, but found calculator design boring, at least in comparison to designing computers. He asked for a transfer to HP's Research and Delvelopment division, but turned down. After all, he was only a degree-less technician, not a Computer Engineer.
Scorned, Wozniak designed a computer anyway, putting four months of almost non-stop after-hours work. The result was a motherboard: the complete circuitry of a computer, less display, drives, and keyboard.
Wozniak brought the computer to his supervisors. Did Hewlett-Packard want to sell it? No. They did, however, grant Wozniak a legal release for his design.
Wozniak proudly showed his creation to follow members of the now legendary Stanford Homebrew Computer Club, many of whose members went on in the early seventies to create Silicon Valley's high-flying, hi-tech companies.
Another of the club's members was Steve Jobs, who convinced Wozniak to form a business and market a computer based on Wozniak's design.
Wozniak and Jobs next met with Paul Terrell, who had started a chain of hobbyist computer stores. Terrell agreed to buy 50 of the circuit boards for $549 each, provided they could deliver the boards in a month.
Making computer boards meant spending money for parts. Jobs happened to own a VW minibus (fitingly). Wozniak owned a scientific desktop calculator (appropriately). The bus and the calculator were sold and pawned (respectively).
Jobs and Wozniak next paid a visit to a large computer parts distributor. They presented their list of required parts and were told that their terms were "net 30 days." Jobs and Wozniak didn't know what "net 30 days" meant, but they did know they didn't have to pay immediately. So they took the parts.
"Net 30 days" means, of course, that the entire balence is due in 30 days. It was a hefty balence.
Few computers were ever assembled as quickly as those that next flowed from Job's garage. By month's end, twenty boards were completed and delivered. And they worked. Jobs, form the beginning, saw beyond the small-scale hobbyist operation. With help from Wozniak's father, himself an engineer, he persuaded Wozniak to integrate the computer into an case, complete with keyboard (a unique idea, in those days), for sale as a conaumer item (another unique thought).
Sales boomed, talented people and investment capital both arrived at the proper times, and Apple Computer was born and prospered.
A happy ending.
A happy middle, actually. Because Jobs and Wozniak weren't the only would-be small computer manufacturers in the late 1970s. Others tried, but most failed. Some, but not many, of the others are still around today.
Apple's success can be explained in many ways, timing being not the least of them. But the crucial ingredient was probably this: as Jobs envisioned from the start, Apples have always been created for use by ordinary people.
Not dull, simple-minded, or illiterate people, but reasonably intelligent adults (and children) who aren't neccessarily fascinated by Computer Science. People who want computers for what they can do, not merly for what they are.
People who aren't thrilled by toggle switches. Which almost brings us to the Apple Macintosh Computer.
The Xerox Alto and Xerox Star were Mac's ancestors, but the story begins somewhat earlier. A good place to begin is with Alan Kay, a man who was, and still is, a brilliant computer scientist.
In the early 1970s, Kay founded the Learning Research Group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The LRG at Xerox PARC, as it was called, conducted research in a number of areas aimed at making computers more powerful and easier to use. Much of the group's work was fueled by Alan Kay's vision of personal computing: the Dynabook.
The Dynabook was a simple but stunning idea: a computer with the power of a mainframe contained in a portable unit the size of a notebook. The Dynabook would have a flat screen, video and audio communcation capabilities, and be able to tap into computing and information networks.
In one form or another, scientists have been trying to realize the Dynabook ever since.
One piece of the Dynabook puzzle was the Preemption Dilemma. This dilemma is familiar to everyone who works with computers, although most people don't know that the condition has an academic-sounding title. It means simply that computers "trap" you into doing things "their" way, and heaven help you if you're not sure what that way is.
The traps are called modes. With computers, you're always in one mode or another; some things can be done in one place, other things can't. To get from, say, Edit mode to System mode, you need to know the right commands. If you forget what those commands are, or use them incorrectly, you won't get where you want to go. Instead, you may get somewhere you greatly don't want to go.
Much of the misery inflicted on computer users over the years come from these omnipresent modes. The Dilemma of the Preemption Dilemma is that choices you might desire are denied, or preempted, by the computer. "Do it my way, or else!" seems to be the message.
About this time, most people have a few messages of their own for the computer.
So the LRG of the PARC set about the task of eliminating modes. It wasn't easy. When you eliminate modes, you have to change quite a few other things as well.
The standard user interface was the next target for demolition.
The user is you. The Interface is everything between you and whatever you want the computer to do. Generally, it means how information is displayed on the screen, and how information is entered from the keycoard or other devices.
If modes are bad, most user interfaces are worse. It's still possible, this very say, to visit your locsl computer store, plunk doen four or five thousand dollars, and take home a computer when turned on, greets you with the marvelously expressive symbol:
A:
on an otherwise blank screen. Not, you'll agree, a swell user interface.
The solution to all this was the concept of windowing, a solution that made what was in the computer visible to users outside the computer.
The hammer-stroke of inspiration was that windows shouldn't just appear on the screen; they should overlap, like sheets of paper. If you can shuffle papers, you should be able to shuffle windows; and each window could contain information entirely different from information in other windows. Each window could hold a different document, and a different tool to work with each document. If you don't like where you are, leave.
No traps.
That's a pretty good basic definition of Macintosh.
Implementing the ideas was difficult. It's easier to merely want something than it is to actually do it. Often, some of the best ideas are impractical-the technology isn't perfected or affordable, or possibly not even invented yet. A: isn't friendly, but it is a cheap and simple way to design a user interface.
The most difficult part of the "Macintosh story" is determining ehich story to tell. There are many. But here's one you might like. It's the story of QuickDraw, the amazing software that underlies everything you see on the Macintosh screen. Because it's the story of QuickDraw, it's also the story of Bill Atkinson, QuickDraw's inventor. And, of course, Steve Jobs enters the tale, as does that fateful visit to Xerox.
The famous visit to Xerox wasn't Jobs' idea, and Jobs wasn't even convinced that the trip was necessary. Jef Raskin and Bill Atkinson talked him into it. Jef Raskin, if credit is given fairly, conceived of the machine that would become the Macintosh. Raskin's vision is hard to see in the final machine, but it was the original impetus behind the Macintosh project. Not surprisingly, the original idea sounds quite a bit like "Dynabook." Macintosh may have happened without Raskin, but Macintosh would never have happened without Steve Jobs. Of Atkinson, there is much to say. A bona fide genius, Atkinson is a driven man who admits to having little in his life outside of computer programming. He's also a man who doesn't consider himself a programmer. He considers himself an artist, a sculptor, a man who takes the concepts of programming and treats them like modeling clay, shaping and reshaping over and over and over again; powered by will, unwilling to stop until the last limit of invention and speed and compaction has been reached the hard-ware limit of the machine. Beyond here no man can go: when that limit is reached, the software is as utterly fast as it can ever be for the particular computer it runs on. There is no conceit in Atkinson's characterization of himself. No vanity. He speaks quietly of how computers "should be." He uses on jargon, no techno-speak. He becomes angry only when explaining how computers, even now, often make users think, "Oh, stupid me." Atkinson knows that computers are the stupid ones. He's using his life to change that. Bill Atkinson began in chemistry, gulped down the field, then moved into neural chemistry, the chemistry of the brain. He began using computers in his studies and became entranced with the power and wonder of computer graphics, an amazingly complex filed of computer science littered with arcane and difficult mathematical concepts. A fellow researcher was slicing human brains in an attempt to gain understanding into basic physical structures. Atkinson took the brain slices, photographed them, converted the photographs into three-dimensional computer graphics, then mapped in structures: "what" is "where" in the human brain. It had never been done before. The results were stunning, an achievement in both the field of medicine and the field of computer graphics. Atkinson's work can be seen on the October 1978 cover of Scientific American. The film he produced is now used in over 600 medical schools across the country. Bill Atkinson is not your ordinary guy.
With success in both fields, the decision had to be made: chemistry or computers. Atkinson choose computers, and founded a company to develop medical computer interfaces for hospitals: Synaptic Systems Corporation. The company rapidly became a success.
And so it was that the life of Bill Atkinson was perfectly in order when, in March 1978, a friend who worked for a company called Apple telephoned. A few days later, plane tickets arrived in the mail. Atkinson journeyed to Cupertino to find a company that employed 30 people and was already a force in the then small, small computer field. After all, Apple had actually shipped over 900 machines!
Apple also had Jobs, Wozniak, and something more important: a dream about how computers should be. Seduced by the dream, Atkinson became Apple employee 31. Not the first, or last, of the deductions of dreams, Jobs, Wozniak, or Apple: a company which seemed have everything going their way. What Apple didn't have was a "software development problem." Or so they thought.
Atkinson thought otherwise. Not believing BASIC was powerful enough to fuel Apple's growth, he set out to investigate USCD Pascal, a new computer language then under development.
He became a believer, and battled for the inclusion of Pascal into Apple's marketing plans. He argued with Steve Jobs, who could see no use for Pascal. He was rebuffed. Jobs, admittedly, is a tough person to argue with. "Jobs knows when somebody's bullshitting him," Atkinson remembers, "and he also knows when someone isn't."
The final argument ended with Jobs saying, "Okay, you've got two months to convince me." Atkinson did, then convinced Apple's President Mike Markkula.
History records that Apple Pascal was an hit. Like VisiCalc¬, it legitimized Apple as a real computer, capable of serious computing tasks.
Atkinson had heard about the research at Xerox. Along with Jef Raskin, he convinced Steve to take the 30-minute trip from Cupertino to the Xerox PARC labs.
The visit lasted about an hour. All were amazed. Windows! Bitmapped graphics! Smalltalk! Sure that he had seen the future of computing, Jobs was determined to incorporate the Xerox discoveries into Apple products.
For this part, Atkinson was sure that he could duplicate the Xerox programming efforts, spectacular as they were. The list was long. At the top of the list was something called "arbitrary clipping."
"Clipping" is a computer graphics term. It is something that can be done fast or done in great detail, but not both at once. The nath neccessaty hadn't been discovered that would permit both graphic speed and graphic detail. Atkinson, having gotten only a glimpse of the Xerox computers, thought that Xerox had, indeed, discovered the philosopher's stone of graphic computing.
If they could do it, he reasoned, he could do it.
But they hadn't. The solution had eluded the scientists at Xerox. How to overlap windows, move them around, yet quickly displaythe contents of windows underneath the second they came into view? Quickly make a window smaller, and see what's underneath? What's showing? An edge, a silver of another window? How many windows can there be, how large is the stack, how can the display show them all, wuickly, in different sizes and positions?
In reality, a window on a computer display isn't a window, but a region. A window is a "region," but anything can be a region. Graphics are regions. Regular shapes such as squares and circles are regions, but so are irregular shapes. Polygons, freehand drawings, even squiggles are regions. But how is it done?
Atkinson set about duplicationg the secret that hadn't been discovered. Six months later, six long agonizing months of pushing at the limits of mathematics, he was closer to discovery, but still the secret eluded his grasp.
Fortunately, Atkinson doesn't sleep. At least, not sleep as most of us know it. For months, he had kept a dream-log of his mind's activities during sleep. Now, when he slept, it was a mix of consciousness and unconsciousness: half dreams and galf wakefulness. Much like an advanced yogi, Atkinson flowed downward without ever completely losing awareness of self, dreamed, and surfaced again, remembering what had occurred. Ecen during the night, the intellect persisted, the problems were gnawed on and probed.
The answer came in that twilight between dreams and reality. Atkinson woke, fully aware that he had solved the problem at last, and wrote down the secret.
Atkinson named the secret QuickDraw. The secter of QuickDraw was his alone on the morning he got into his car, headed for Apple, and woke up in a hospital bed.
He remembers nothing after entering the car. His best guess is that he was thinking, his mind lost somewhere, wrestling with a problem. Or it might have been a dog in the street, or a small child that ran between two cars.
No one knows. What is known is this: his sports car was traveling at high speed when it hit the rear of the parked semi-trailer. The car slammed into the semi and kept on going, completely shearing the top of his car. Miraculously, Atkinson survived. When Jobs was notified of the accident, he raced to the hospital. He remained at the bedside until Atkinson regained consciousness.
When Atkinson finally regained consciousness, he looked at Jobs and said "Don't worry, Steve, I still remember how to do regions."
Atkinson went to regain his health, with no lasting effects from the accident. The Lisa would be born, and the Macintosh would follow. Both machines would incorporate the revolutionary QuickDraw software.
As a reward, Atkinson was named an "Apple Fellow," a rare honot. Apple Fellows also receive an envelope from Steve Jobs. Apple Fellows don't talk about what's inside.
No Apple Fellow, however, has ever returned the envelope.
To casual users, QuickDraw receives a showcase in MacPaint, a program that Atkinson created on the condition that the MacPaint fuctions and appearance would be his, and his alone. Once again, Bill Atkinson got his way. The resulting program is clearly the creation of one man, and shows a consistency that is impossible in software "team efforts." True to his tenacious nature, Atkinson labored over MacPaint through revision after revision, adding new features and refining present features, always seeking a maximum of speed and function and smallness.
What's next? Again, it's a secret. But guesses can be made, especially in light of this Atkinson comment: "If I don't do it, some other corporation will. It they do it, they'll screw it up. If I do it, it'll be done right."
But there's no vanity in the statement. Atkinson says the words quietly, simply, and sincerely. It just happens to be true, and might as well be admitted.
When you look into his eyes, you believe him.
Let's back up. To understand Macintosh, we need to understand Lisa-the machine that came before Macintosh. And we need to take a closer look at Apple itself in those heady, early days.
Which brings us, of course, to Steven P. Jobs, Boy Wonder and Captain of Industry.
Steve, for years, has fascinated Apple users, writers, and corporatewatchers of all stripes. The late 1980s saw a rash of "Apple books," each with a different take on Apple in general, and Steve in particular. Most of the books had, if not precisely an axe to fring, a definite "attitude."
The best of the bunch was a book that took Steve head-on. A straight forward bibgraphy that never never lapsed into enlightened secondguessing or envious back-biting. A good book by a good writer blessed with a marvelous subject.
So back we go, to the days before Macintosh. Journalist Jeffrey S. Young picks up the story in an excerpt from his biography Steve Jobs: The Journey Is The Reward.
Building another computer based on the same microprocessor as the Apple II held about as much fascination for Steve as taking a vacation. He was determined that Apple would change the world with computers, but it couldn't be done with the Apple II. The company had to peoneer the next generation of personal computing.
The Apple III was not it, and was never meant to be. He had to find a new technology to supersede the Apple II and III. Part of that motivation was his desire to build the most incredible machine ever made, as well as his love for the cresting edge of new technology, the latest in "whizzy" gear. He also wanted to prove that he was a responsible and serious person who could run a complicated project.
Steve was on the loose, searching for the way to make a totally new kind of computer. The best example he knew was that of his garage predeccessors, Bill Hewlett and David Packard.
"A lot of steve's product design instincts came from working on H-P products, and looking at them," says Trip Hawkins, an early Apple employee. "The two of us went to the J-P offices one day and practically got kicked out, because he was so obnoxious and started climbing around looking underneath their latest model, the H-P 150. It was pretty obvious we weren't there for a sales call."
Steve hired two seasoned engineering managers from Hewlett-Packard, John Couch and Ken Rothmueller, to design a brand new computer. He named the project Lisa.
Steve's all-consuming passion was always the new product, the next generation of machined. "I wrote the original Lisa plan with Steve," says Trip Hawkins. "It called for a $2000 system that would be based around a 16-bit architecture, rather than the 8-bit Apple II architecture--exactly what the Macintosh turned out to be. We were real excited about it. We were convinced we could change the world."
The basic machine was supposed to have two floppy drives and be targeted at the office market. Ken Rothmueller, a former H-P manager, was to be head of engineering. John Couch, the other H-P defector, was to head up the software divisions. From the second half of 1979 on through 1980, a design war was on. Couch stayed out ot the Lisa project at first becausehe had never been a big fan of Rothmueller. It was part of Steve's thinking that if the two guys heading the project were at loggerheads, they would compete better and bring a further drive for excellence. It quickly developed "...that to a lot of us, with the exception of Rothmueller, we weren't happy with the direction in which it was going," says Hawkins.
By late 1979, Rothmueller had designed a bit-mapped, green phosphor monitor machine with a built-in keyboard. It was not very attractive or inspiring, and it looked like the kind of machine that H-P would have built, not the innovative kind of design that Steve specialized in. This early Lisa was large and clunky, but it was based around an expensive and powerful new microprocessor from Motorola, the 68000. The microprocessor, so new it wasn't available yet, was the hottest thing in the business, and Steve loved it. Rothmueller didn't seem to be able to do anything very stimulating with all its power. The prototype was slow in both processing speed and screen refresh. Steve started to grow antsy.
The Lisa software group was doing some interesting tricks with screen graphics, however. Atkinson was experimenting with various-sized letters and proportional spacing by controlling every dot on the screen. The rudiments of on-screen computer painting--bit-mapped graphics--in higher resolution than the Apple II or III could support, were also possible, and it seemed that if only the 68000 could be pushed to near its limits, they might have a machine that would really excite the public.
As 1979 drew to a close, the vice president of research and development, and vice chairman of the board, Steve Jobs, wanted a few more things in the works. He wanted something more compelling to a consumer than the box Rothmueller was designing. Steve wanted something sexy, as sexy as the latest in home stereos. He started with a detachable keyboard. Steve believed that a movable keyboard would offer users a much more comfortable relationship with the computer. It was not a brand new idea-IBM had used them in the 1960s with some mainframes-but it was fresh to the brave new world of personal computing.
Beyond that, he was having a hard time conceptualizing or articulating the look of the on-screen environment that the user would use to operate the machine. All he knew was that it had to be new and radically different from anything yet seen. Steve needed something to stimulate him; he wasn't an original thinker. He was great at taking ideas of others and massaging them, spining them into something better and more accesible. he needed inspiration, and he needed it soon. he was obsessed by speed, and had convinced everyone on the Lisa project that they had to have the machine ready to ship in 1981.
The Lisa, like the Apple III, was aimed at the nebulous office market. The
Apple heads of state convinced themselves that the Losa would be an office
solution, while the Apple III would be aimed at small businesses, and the
Apple II would keep it focus on homes, kids, and schools. This was how
they segmented the market for personal computers. To develop the right
product for the office market, Steve became convinced that Apple should
consider a strategic alliance with one of the giants who already had a firm
foothold in that territory. He was smart enough to know then that he knew
nothing about offices and those kinds of businesses. So he hired people
from H-P, who he was convinced did know that market. But as he saw what
Rothmueller and his colleagues were coming up with, he also knew enough not
to put all of Apple's eggs in their basket. Steve went in search of a
partner. There were only two choices, and one, IBM, was anathema to all
the countercultural blithe spirits and make-the-world-a-better-place types
who populated Apple. IBM was the enemy; Apple couldn't get into bed with
them. The other choice was Xerox, whose name was synonymous with office
automation and copying systems, and whose reputation was unbesmirched by
the long shadows of mainframes. In the company's second private investment
placement, concluded in 1979, among the Arthur Rocks, venture capital
firms, and investors, was Xerox. Early in the year, Steve had approached
the Xerox Development Corporation, the venture capital arm of the
copier-based empire, and told them, "I will let you invest a million
dollars in Apple if you will sort of open the kimono at Xerox PARC." The
Xerox Palo Alto Pesearch center eas rumored to be a Land of Oz of computer
knowledge and advanced research, and was whispered to be on the verge of an
enormous adventure in personal computers. With his remarkable
salesmanship, Steve succeeded in getting exactly what he wanted. Xerox
signed an agreement never to purchase more than five percent of Apple's
shares and invested $1 million by buying 100,000 shares at $10. Steve got
the chance to see what a real revolution in computing could be. Steve had
been encouraged to pursue Xerox by a collection of Apple's characters, with
Jef Raskin and Bill Atkinson at the forefront. By that time Raskin,
concerned that all the company's new machines were ever more expensive, was
heading a small R&D project of hes own at Apple to build an inexpensive
home computer, one that would cost less than $1000. This machine would
come as a self-contained unit, software inclded. he had three engineers
working on it, and they were casually focusing on this proposed "desktop
appliance." But Raskin had worked with the pellows at PARC a few years
earlier through some work he did at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Lab, and he knew that Apple should find out what they were up to.
Atkinson's interest lay in the world of graphics-how to make a computer
draw rectangles, spheres, or half-moons smoothly, wuickly, and simply. As
soon as the Lisa project was launched in gramming routines that would
define the way every Apple computer after the Apple III looked and worked.
His procedures, which he first called LisaGraf primitives, would give the
Lisa complete control over the screen display. The Apple III had been a
bit-map machine-but it was crude. What the Lisa team, and Atkinson, had in
mind was something more sophisticated. There would be many more dots, or
"pixels," resulting in much more detailed graphics. Thew would actually
control each pixel individually. What they gave up with all this
manipulation of color-adding color to every dot was prohibitive in cost-but
they gained elegant graphics and an appealing visual look. By late 1979,
Atkinson had a sketchy and an appealing visual look. By late 1979,
Atkinson had a sketchy collection of his LisaGraf primitives running, but
he was faced with a few problems. While they were providing new graphics
capabilities for their inchoate system, they still didn't have any idea
about what their on-screen environment should look like.
At xerox PARC, Larry Tessler was working with the Smalltalk programming
environment that his group had created for the Alto computer, an office
computer systems project. Xerox was having trouble figuring out how to
manufacture computers cheaply enough, and was looking at Apple to possibly
build cheap versions of Xerox machines, which is why they had invested in
the first place. In may ways, the Alto was what the Lisa was aiming for.
It reflected a number of the ideas of seminal computer thinder Alan Kay.
Kay was a firm believeer in simplicity, smaller is better, and the mouse,
but he also had a classic academician's problem: he was working toward a
holy grail of computing that was still at least a dozen years away in 1979.
"Up to then I had believed in the Alan Kay vision," says Tessler, "that
computers would not really happen until thay had the power of a VAX [a type
of computer], could be held in your hand, and cost $1000 or less apiece.
He called that computer the Dynabook." Tessler was the designated Xerox
persoal computer expert. He was the only person in the Smalltalk group who
believed that personal computers-the ones on the market, not the ones Xerox
was delvoping-were serious. He had purchased several computers by the time
Apple came around in December of 1979 to look at what Xerox was doing.
Tessler had dealt with commodore over a personal computer at his daughter's
school, and was not impressed. When the group from Apple came by, he
figured, "These were a bunch of hackers and they didn't really understand
computer science. They wouldn't really understand what we were doing, and
just see pretty dancing things on the screen." It was part of the
superiority of formally-trained computer scientists, an attitude that was
just beginning to infiltrate the original corps of self-taught hackers at
Apple as more and more "trained" people, especially H-P engineers and MBA
marketers, were hired. Unveiling the working Xerox system at PARC had been
preceded by several meetings where the ground rules were laid out. Finally
Steve, Couch, Mike Scott, Rothmueller, Hawkins, Atkinson, Richard Page (a
Lisa systems software architect) and Tom Whitney (Apple's head of
engineering and another H-P alumnus) were taken into a demo room. Tessler
unveiled the machine and operating environment Xerox had developed. It was
instant pandemonium. What they witnessed was like nothing they had ever
seen on a computer before. The revolutionary element of the Xerox
Smalltalk environment was that the user could interact easily with the
computer through icons, windows, and menus without ever typing a single
letter or command. Xerox's concept was a computer-style "desktop." The
environment of the was graphically based, with icons instead of typed names
o represent files and programs; used a mouse for pointing and moving things
on the screen; had individual windows open containing different documents;
and demonstrated rudimentary, on-screen, pull-down menus. It was
thoroughly intuitive, and clearly the right way to interact with a
computer. The keyboard was nearly superfluous. Up until then, all computer
operations-such as those on both Apple II and Apple III-had been invoked by
typing at least one, and usually several, lines of porgramming code or
instructions. You might eventually get to a game that used a joystick, or
a spreadsheet that employed cursor keys, but lines of characters were
always essential to start you off. The mouse, a three-button plastic
deck-of-cards-shaped box that fit into the palm and rolled across a desk or
a table, moved the on-screen cursor or insertion point, which could be
centered over an icon or menu title. clicking one of the three buttons
performed different operations on the file or program represented by that
icon. Furthermore, across the top of the screen were a series of menu
titles, each of which could hold a number of choices such as Save, Close,
and Quit. These were also reached by using the mouse and buttons. It was
an absolute revelation to the visitors from Apple. "Atkinson was peering
very closely at the screen, with his nose about two inches away from it,
looking at everything very carefully," remembers Tessler. "And Jobs was
pacing around the room acting up the whole time. He was very excited.
Then, when he began seeing the things I could do on-screen, he watched for
about a minute and started jumping around the foom, shouting, 'Why aren't
you doing anything with this?? This is the greatest thing! This is
revolutionary!'" The Xerox machine demonstrated the fundamental idea behinf
the bit-mapped screen concept, and though they had grasped it
intellectually, the Apple contingent had never before seen it in operation
on such a sophisticated level. It was all done with layers of dots. You
could look at a drawing, then zoom in to look deeper and find more dots.
For Steve and other Apple acid-heads, the PARC experience was like dropping
acid for the first time and getting the big insight-Satori. This was the
Tao of high technology, the right way to build a computer. The
high-resolution, bit-mapped screen, with all the dots arrayed before their
eyes, allowed them to voyage inside the digital world and swim around the
pixels. Like opening the doors of perception, this was crossing the
boundary. It was the electronic acid test. If you got the idea, you were
on the bus. If you didn't, you were left on the curb. Atkinson and the
others were asking Tessler questions, one after the other. "What impressed
me was that their questions were better than any I had heard in the seven
years I had been at Xerox-from anybody, Xerox employee, visitor, university
professor, or student. Their questions showed that they understood all the
implications and the subtleties. They understood that it was important
that things looked good, that the font was attractive, that the icons were
cute. That everything worked together smothly." By the end of the demo,
Tessler was convinced that he was going to leace Xerox and go to Apple,
which he did a few months later. These guys understood what personal
computing could be, and they could make a mass market product. They had
the right stuff, as far as Tessler was concerned. What the Xerox group had
shown them was a revolution, but it wasn't an earth-shaking revelation,
according to Atkinson. "I was aware of most of what they were doing from
the trade press. But here it was working. It looked nearly complete.
They had actually done it, and that reinforced our direction, which was
along the same path. If they could do it, we could do it, we could do it.
It energized us. It gave something to strive for." Steve immediately
wanted to create a computer like the one at Xerox, but much better. On the
drive back to Cupertino, he turned to Atkinson, who was equally inspired,
and asked how long he thought it would take to get a system like that up
and running on a 68000 machine like his Lisa. Atkinson, a giftd
programmer, but with little experience writing operating system languages
and interfaces, said, "About six months." That was all Steve needed. He
was off and running.
At Apple, the most advanced
programming to date had been done with the new Apple III operating system
utilities, where menu commands could be stepped through from the keyboard.
But this system called SOS (for Sustem Operating Software), was still a
command-oriented environment, with none of the finesse and ease of use of
the mouse-and-icon world they had just seen at Xerox. For Steve, it was
obvious: throw the old-fashioned work on the Lisa out the window and start
over again on a new operating environment. According to Steve, the mouse
was obviously a superior way to operate a computer, and when co-founder and
resident evangelist went on a crusade, he ususlly won. Steve wanted
Rothmueller to redesign the Lisa to make it work with a mouse and support a
new graphics-oriented interface with icons and windows. The former H-P
engineer objected, and resented having to make the whole machine over
again. It started a seesaw battle through the corridors of engineering at
Cupertino. Steve, with his band of cohorts-including Atkinson, Page,
Hawkins, and Couch-started proselytizing and building demonstration
programs. Rothmueller, with Raskin, fought them. Steve ordered
Rothmueller to do it. He refused. "Steve has a power of vision that is
almost frightening," says Hawkins, who is a believer in that vision. "When
Steve believes in something, the power of that wision can literally sweep
aside any objections or problems. They just cease to exist." Steve,
Hawkins, Atkinson, and Couch began to map out a new vision of an office
computer. In the wake of the Xerox visit, Steve and Hawkins wrote up a new
specification for the machine. At one point they typed "THINK DOTS" in the
middle of a section about what the screen should be based on. They showed
it to the head of engineering, Whitney, along with a few demonstration
tricks that Atkinson and Page had put together. "There were no mice for
computers in those days," recalls Hawkins, "so to prove how great the mouse
was, we found the only guy who made them, in Berkely, by hand, out of a
single block of wood. We gave on to Atkinson, and he wrote some kind of
driver for it so we could show a simple little drawing program that he
called MouseSketch. "We called it the 'clandestine mouse,' and when we
started to demonstrate around the engineering labs, we won about half the
crew over to it." It was by no means an instant sale. For those who had
been formally trained on mainframes, the mouse was an entirely heretical
way of interacting with a computer. For the self-taught Steve Jobs and his
corps of supporters, the guys who had no tie to the past who saw computing
as an exciting quest based in giving as much power to the user-the people
who were not comfortable typing letters and commands like the BASIC
commands that a programmer had to work with daily-it made perfect sense.
For the Apple II marketplace of 1981, that machine had reached critical
mass. Enough Apple IIs were out in the world so that it made some business
sense to write a program for them-you could make money doing it. This was
a watershed. By late 1979, Apple had sold about 50,000 computers. With
the success of VisiCalc the next year, that number more than doubled, to
125,000. Apple was also changing direction in its software development for
the Lisa. The decision had been made to offer a complete set of
application programs that would be created within the company. This was
partly to control the profits, and partly to ensure that there were quality
programs in the key software areas. There was no guidebook on how to write
programs for personal computers, with their extremely limited memories and
erratic operating environments, and there were few people competent enough
to write them. Instead of depending on the Apple II hackers, who had
proved their worth, Steve beliebed his advisors from H-P, who told him that
the Lisa needed classically-trained programmers with experience. It was
the best of choices-but also the worst of choices.
The company employed teenagers and self-taught hackers-Wigginton, Espinosa,
Bruener, Kottke, Tognazzini, Scott, Atkinson, and Markkula, all of whom
loved to cut code. Their attitude toward traditional programming values
was typified by something Wigginton once said about someone's program.
"You've got too many comments," he complained. When the programmer
explained that you had to have comments to tell other people what you were
doing, the teenager replied, "Comments are for sissies." For the original
Apple hackers, the brilliant overall design and haphazard writing of a
program cojnted much more than methodical planning. They were the maestros
of software. Child prodigies and idiot savants, passionate plodders and
inspired amateurs, they pursued programming like Mozart wrote symphonies:
They never outlined and never looked back-it was all intuition. A machisimo
developed among the early hackers that had to do with how fast you could
get something up and running. A program riddled with bugs what took a day
was worth much more than a clean, neat program that took a month. After
only one day, a decision could be made about whether to continue with it by
actually seeing the working model, not by discussing theoretical issues ad
infinitum. As the company grew, it would become a cone of increasingly
cntankerous contention between the classically-trained engineers of
Lisaland and theself-taught hackers from the company's founding. As the
Lisa project gelled and more programmers and engineers with formal degrees
were hired to work on it, the software-by-trial-and-error teenagers were
left out. The new, pedigreed programmers built programs after long
discussions, carefully debugging on paper before ever beginning a
prototype. Theis was programming as a profession. Steve and the jackers
saw themselves as artists, and artists lived by the seats of their pants,
not some cast-in-bronze rules. The dichotomy created dissent and tension
at the heart of the team building Apple's new computer. Steve was at the
center of this controversy. He knew little about designing computers in
the professional world on which the Lisa group was focusing, but he
desperately wanted to know more. He wanted to learn how to build a real
computer system, and he believed the software team models that the H-P guys
were telling him about were the way to proceed. He abandoned the teenagers
and adopted the "professional model" with the same gusto he brought to all
his enthusiasms. By 1980, serious frictions were developing among various
factions of the company. The first and oldest faction, the Apple II camp,
was populated by "the straights," the plodding thinkers and organized folks
who handled the day-to-day details of running a mature product line. These
people were working at noncreative functions, as Steve saw it. They had an
exploding bureaucracy of software and hardware managers, tech support, and
engineering support folks who were far removed from the creative flow of
building new machines. These people had come in after the fun part was
finished. Then there was the team of incremental thinkers who were deep
into creating the interim step, the marginally-improved Apple III. They
were primarily advanced hobbyists, hackers who had learned enough to try to
follow Woz (Steve Wozniak). The gruop was peopled with the early joiners,
the first engineers and technicians the company had hired. It was a true
group effort. All the key people in the company were part of the planning
stages. Finally, there was the Lisa group, which was searching for the
breakthrough computer product to take Apple into the eighties. The Lisa
was meant to be a professional computer, not a hobbyist's hacked up
machine. To do it right, the company had to bring in serious professional
engineers. A large part of this was Steve's doing. He was determined that
if the company was going to strike out in a bold new direction, if it was
going to finally leave the legacy of Woz behind and create a machine
without his indelible stamp on it, they had to start fresh with new people
who wern't tied to the ghosts of the past. He was tired of seeing the Apple
II referred to as Woz's machine. While he could use Woz to stimulate the
hackers who were all in awe of the legendary designer and wanted to emulate
him, he was also increasingly determined to exorcise Woz's oerwhelming
spirit throughout the company. He wanted to have a machine that was his
alone, and he knew that the Lisa, with its mouse and icons, was his answer
to the Apple II. By late summer 1980, they had a crude working prototype
of the Lisa hardware, and were predicting, in all their naivete, product
shipment in 1981.
By late summer 1980, the Apple III was
falling into disrepute internally. It still didn't work right, no software
was available for it, but since they had already announced it, they would
have to ship no matter what, or lose market credibility. Like Pontius
Pilate, Steve washed his hands of the entire project. He would stay out of
their rat's nest and not help them solve their problems, and they were
going to stay out of his baby, the Lisa. He and Couch devised a management
theory that isolated and separated the new team from the rest of Apple.
The Lisa group had an elitism that was quickly apparent to the rest of the
company. You couldn't even enter their quarters, a new building along
Bandley Drive, unless you were wearing a special orange badge. For an
avowedly democratic, humanistic company, it was a startling contradiction
in terms. They wern't going to do it like the hackers of the Apple II
world, and they wern't going to make the mistakes of the Apple III. Lisa
would do it right. Steve had seen Apple go from nothing more than a few
dreams and a computer designed by Woz, to a serious business enterprise
that was making him a rich man. The acid-dropping, India-tripping, Zen
Buddhist meditator had, in the space of three years, surrounded himself
with layers of management and bureaucracy that were enough to stifle
anyone. Success bred management, and whild he knew that the cash cow of
the Apple II had to run smoothly to ensure the company's future growth, he
also knew that he wanted to work on a more spontaneous level. There had to
be a way to mix corporate structure with humanistic values. Steve was
determined to find it, and somehow he thought that the Zen monk's
off-the-wall craziness might be the ticket. He became all the more
impossible. When the company was small and Steve could be reined in by
Scotty, Markkula, or Woz, it was good to have a house loony whose reactions
were sure to be crazed and emotional. Calmer voices could intercede. In
the early days, there was a "no-gloves" attitude at the company, a
give-and-take that allowed anyone to make a comment on any other aspect of
the company. That atmosphere, which Steve fostered and supported both
consciously and subconsciously, grew less prevalent as the company
burgeoned to 200, then 600, them more than 1000 employees. By 1980, apple
had become a place that looked good on a resume. Working there was no
longer powered by passion; it was powered by the career ladder. As the
company grew, corporate culture changed. Apple actively worked at having
an enlightened management style. This was partly a result of Steve's
espousal of the currents and the winds of the time, and partly a matter of
prevailing Silicon Valley culture. H-P had built a company on a foundation
of enlightened management, and in Steve's mind, Apple was going to emulate
and surpass H-P. Furthermore, the Valley, with the explosion of consumer
electronics and computers, had dozens of start-up companies and an (almost)
unwritten rule that they had to provide the most advanced working
environments in the world. Creating a clan of Esalen types was not
compatible with the bang-'em-up abrasive management style of Steve Jobs.
He hated long meetings, with their interminable discussions of petty
details. He wanted to be able to look at an approach to some problem, make
an instinctive decision, and then move on to another decision without
looking back. If you could be passionate about your opposing point of
view, about the reasons he was wrong, you could push Steve back onto the
right track. But you had to use aggression and force in your
counter-attack.
By threatening ittational, emotional
responses, the company co-founder produced remarkably will-informed
employees. Fuzzy, unclear decision-making was unacceptable. So was
deomcracy, when Steve was involved. The constant exchange ofideas, the
building to a consensus as it had developed in Apple's no-confrontation,
modern-management style, never worked for him. He might have been deeply
influenced by aspects of the self-realization movement, but he was not of
that world. Steve never had any trouble saying exactly what was on his
mind, and letting the chips fall where they might. What happened, as the
company went through it paces and tried to deal with its explosive growth,
was that the only person who continued to operate under the aggressive,
say-what-you-will, tell-the-truth-if-it-hurts attitude was Steve. He
became even more combative, abrupt, and yes, obnoxious. "Apple was very
much like a club," says Phil Roybal. "We would have management retreats at
spectacular resorts, like the Pajaro Dunes, south of Monterey and right on
the ocean. There would be a couple od days of meetings, and at night we
would open the bar and dance until we dropped. Apple was asking an
incredible amount of us. We were working around the clock. At the very
least, we had to give everyone a sense of mission and purpose. We decided
to try and quantify what we all believed in. It was called the Apple
Values project." In 1979 and 1980 "Apple Culture," and the definitions of
it, were a focus of attention in the company. Up to then it had been an
unwritten set of rules that only Apple could ever have tried to write, or
to quantify. They did it as part of the Apple Quality of Life Project.
They created memos that included lines such at the following, most of which
were quotations from Chairman Steve:
*One person, one computer.
*We are going for it, and we will set aggressive goals.
*We are all on the adventure together.
*We build products we believe in.
*We are here to make a positive difference in society as well as make a profit.
*Each person is important; each has the opportunity and the obligation to make a difference.
*We are all in it together, win or lose.
*We are enthusiastic!
*We are creative; we set the pace.
*We want everyone to enjoy the adventure we are on together.
*We care about what we do.
*We want to create an environment in which Apple values flourish.
As the company developed an extraordinarily relaxed
corporate culture-a culture with health club memberships, lots of parties,
T-shirts, and pweonsal computers at cost for every employee-Steve was
becoming more of a monster. He was approaching his tewnty-fifth birthday
as 1980 began, with money, success, unrelenting drive, ambition, and no
social graces-or an interest in developing them- to soften the blows that
his Zen-trained, reactive mind dealt out. He seemed to have taken half the
message of Zen. He took the mental clarity and he emphasis on intuition,
but he didn't weld it to the contemplative nd thoughtful personality that
could never make a cutting or dissmissive remark to another human. Zen
Buddhism was founded on the Japanese belief in respect for elders and the
timelessness of the universe. Steve was a brash American who had the
counterculture's diddain for previous generations, and an obsession with
cramming as much as possible into every day. He was creating a new kind of
"Zen business," and apple was his testing ground. Steve's meddling in the
Lisa group finally got to Rothmueller, who made it cleat that he wasn't
getting on Steve's bus. he departed about halfway through 1980. John
Couch took over the project. It became apparent that this scheme of
Steve's was a real alternative to the way computing was done in the rest of
the world, and through the year, more and more of the company's key
engineers hopped onto the bandwagon. The company started to believe that
this was indeed the proper direction for the Lisa project, and steve's
preaching the gospel didn't hurt. With the hardware and software teams
charting a new course for personal computing, some of the excitement and
enthusiasm says Hawkins, "everybody, Steve included. Lisa became a kind of
kitchen sink where we were trying to do evrything that could possibly be
done with a computer, and suddenly the cost factor, which in the original
plan was set at $2000, went out the window. "We made two radical
underestimations: how much things were going to cost, and how long it would
take to do them. Steve was such a biddler, always changing things, that
many things were done again and again, because he would get bored with it
being a certain way and want to change it, which just produced interminable
delays." As 1980 proceeded, and the Lisa design and engineering teams went
through paroxysms of change created by Steve's whims, other people in the
company looked on in horror. John Couch was a friendly, low-key person
with an unfailingly optimistic mindset, and no desire to buck the vice
chairman's unrealistic schedules. He didn't have the personality to stand
up to Steve, and as the Lisa's design issues looked like they were about
resolved, he and the cofounder started to snipe at each other. Steve
decided he had no time for Couch, who had been his prime supporter in
shifting the direction of the Lisa project, and started to dismiss him. He
thought that his product vision had now been vindicated, and in his
inexperience thought that the top management of the company, the executive
staff, was ready to hand over the actual implimentation of the product line
to him. Couch, who was in his late thirties and very good at the politics
of a corporation, cultivated another ally, Mike Sctt. It was quickly
apparent at the top of the company that the Apple III was not going to be
the kind of success that the Apple II had been. The circuit board was too
complex, and the trace lines of solder-the rivers of electric current that
make a circuit do its magic-were far too close. The connectors for
components didn't seat correctl. Mysterious, nonrepeating bugs terrorized
operators. The press and public smelled the problems almost immediately,
and the machine was fatally tainted. If the Lisa were to be the company's
savior, they had to do something radical about turning the project into a
serious and substantial product group, not just a whim of Steve's. The
hapazard, friendly way that the III had been designed was not the way to do
it.
Couch plumped for the H-P model of work groups, secrecy, and insularity, a close-knit group that could make all the decisions democratically. Steve was flying off the handle, having wild and amazing ideas, working in secrecy with Atkinson and Page, and making preemptive strikes and unilateral decisions. In 1980, the company's revenues approached $117 million, every penny of it earned through sales of the apple II and the burgeoning library of software that Ale was publishing. There was urgency in the corridors of Apple. The company was defining the world of personal computers on every front, and eveyone was on the firing line. However, behind the bulging coffers, concern was building on many levels.
On his side, Couch wanted to create a semblance of equality in the Lisa group, and that was the last kind of arrangement in which Stee was interested in working. Up until then, Aple had always been driven by the edicts of the few, especially Steve's. Something had to give.
"Steve had an incredible ability to rally people towards some common cause," says Howkins, "by painting an incredibly glorious cosmic objective. One of his favorite statements about the Lisa was, 'Let's make a dent in the universe. We'll make it so important that it will make a dent in the universe.'
"On its face, that is a completely ridiculous idea. But people would rally around stuff like that, especially engineers who had spent their lives bottles up in a lab somewhere, missing out on all the fun. He had a very charismatic style of communicating, and it works because deep inside, he really wants to make a massive contribution. You have to admire that. A lot of capable people are just looking for their own security, the trappings of wealth."
As Couch tried to make sense of the ever-changing demands for an entirely new generation of computers, and the sudden elevation of the Lisa from just another project to the company's "great white hope," he and Steve found themselves increasingly at odds. Then another set of events occurred that made the young founder even more difficult to control, and which swelled his youthfull head. In the summer of 1980, the publicity engine of Regis McKenna's agency was introducing a new ad campaign that would thrust Steve into the public's eye as the boy wonder. It would also position him as the creator of personal computing, the new field that was sweeping the country as the bad news from Iran continued to come in. It was a new field that was all-American, homegrown, and almost magical.
The success of the firm was starting to create rumblings about a public stock offering. It seemd like the right time to develop an "institutional" advertising campaign aimed at influencing professional investors. This would be the initial step in going public.
"It was the Wall Street Journal campaign that really put us in the public eye," recalls Fred Hoar, Apple's first director of corporate communications, who was hired in 1980. "The most famous headline was 'When We Created the Personal Computer, We Created a Twenty-First-Century Bicycle.' The first one featured Steve, with an extensive quote about computers."
A few years ago, I read a study, I believe, in Scientific American, about efficiency of locomotion in various species on the earth, including man. The study determined which species was the most efficient in terms of getting from point A o point B with the least amount of enery exerted. The condor won. Man made a rathr unimpressive showing, about one-third of the way down the list. But someone theere had the insight to test man riding the bicycle. Man was twice as efficient as the condor.
This illustrated man's ability as a tool maker. When man created the bicycle, he created a tool that amplified an inherent ability. That's why I like to compare the personal computer to the bicycle.
The Apple computer is the twenty-first-century bicycle, if you will, because it's a tool that can amplify a certain part of out inherent intelligence. There's a special relationship that develops between one persona dn one computer that ultimately improves productivity on a personal level.
It went on in that vein, filling a full page in the Wall Street Journal. Following that series, the company was suddenly in the public eye, and Steve was high-tech's poet laureate. In the photo of him that accompanied the ad, he had a beard and looked very much like a modern-day John the Baptist. The campaign made some outrageous claims, such as "Steve Wozniak and I invented the personal computer."
The ads were written by Arlene Jaffe, a copywriter at the McKenna agency. (She, ironically, would later wite the Charlie Chaplin ads for IBM.) The ads were filled with the extravagant, yet compelling, claims that Steve was used to making in the company, but they were now directed to the business public. It was a perfectly timed, deftly designed campaign, and Steve captured the imagination of a number of editors.
The second ad, which also featured Steve, was headlined, "When we created the personal computer, we created a new generation of entrepreneurs," which was garanteed to hook everyone who hadn't read the first one. It was this brilliant series of advertiseing moves that lifted Apple out of the obscurity of electonics, from the hobbyist world of Apple IIs into the consciousness of America's mainstream of business. It also gave Steve a swollen sense of self-importance, especially since it was only at the last minute that they had changed the copy from "I" to "we", The original idea had been to make the campaign personal to him. Woz was furious. Even though he had slipped out of the mainstream of Apple life with the completion of the disk drive in 1978, he was still around enough to be consulted. Hurriedly, the agency epople added Woz into the prose, but it was plain that in his heart Steve Jobs believed that it was indeed he alone who had taken Apple over the top as a company. And he was probably right. Regis McKenna remarked once that "Woz designed a great machine. But it would have sat on the shelf had he not discovered an evangelist."
In 1980, benchmark market testing showed less than a 10 percent name recognition for the company with the public at large, but apple was just beginning to come out of its cocoon. The first enormous "event," which as to become an ongoing part of the emerging marketing strategy of the company, had been held for the Apple III's introduction at Disneyland. It would be a year of firsts for Apple: the first event marketing extravaganza, the first ads in the Wall Street Journal. It was also the first for something else. Just as Steve was riding high, featured in a smashing series of ads, at the helm of a new line of computers, and with the company that he had founded making oodles of money, his wings were clipped. The only person at Apple who could cut him down to size did just that.§12 Apple and Xerox
§13 Tessler and the Alto
§14 Redesigning Lisa
§15 Hackers and Teenagers
§16 Internal Choas
§17 Apple Culture
§18 Steve and the Media