Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, senior writer or how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com, covering all things technology and how
Speaker 1: they relate to us and how we relate to them, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And I've covered a lot of kind of dark and
Speaker 1: gloomy topics over the last couple of months. I've tried
Speaker 1: to change them up with some more fun stuff here
Speaker 1: and there. But I really wanted to look at a
Speaker 1: piece of technology that had been around for a while
Speaker 1: that we are familiar with, but maybe you don't all
Speaker 1: know the backstory too. And this time I thought I'd
Speaker 1: look at the Macintosh computer. The Macintosh came out in
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about its debut towards the end of
Speaker 1: this podcast, because we're really looking at the early stages,
Speaker 1: what was happening back when they were first talking about
Speaker 1: starting the Macintosh project over at Apple, and kind of
Speaker 1: explaining the thought process that went into the formation of
Speaker 1: that computer. Uh, maybe in later episodes I'll continue to
Speaker 1: trace the evolution of the Macintosh, but it's a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting story. Just the beginning alone is an interesting story,
Speaker 1: and you have to put yourself in the mindset of
Speaker 1: the early nineties, really the late seventies and early eighties,
Speaker 1: and what was going on at that time, and the
Speaker 1: really the birth of the personal computer industry as a whole,
Speaker 1: because it was brand new back in the late seventies
Speaker 1: early eighties. Now, I know a lot of my listeners
Speaker 1: are younger than I am. That's awesome. I'm glad you
Speaker 1: guys enjoy the show. I will be talking a lot
Speaker 1: about the seventies and eighties. I know it sounds like
Speaker 1: ancient history to some of you, but that's when I
Speaker 1: grew up, So just be nice. I'm old and my
Speaker 1: feelings are easily hurt. All right, All that's all the way.
Speaker 1: Let us dive into the world old of the Macintosh.
Speaker 1: You know what I do for a living? Or as
Speaker 1: my favorite character from cinema, Quint from Jaws, would say,
Speaker 1: you all know me, you know what I do for
Speaker 1: a living. I don't just talk about technology. I have
Speaker 1: to backtrack fifteen years before the thing began, just to
Speaker 1: tell you all the stuff that happened before the beginning thing.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about some history of Apple first
Speaker 1: leading up into the launch of the Macintosh project. So
Speaker 1: let's begin with the date of April one, ninety six,
Speaker 1: April Fools Day, nineteen seventy six. That was when to
Speaker 1: Steve's one known as Steve Jobs and the other known
Speaker 1: as Steve Wozniak, decided in a garage to form a
Speaker 1: very special relationship with one another to become partners in
Speaker 1: a brand new company that would be called Apple Computers.
Speaker 1: That garage was in Coopertino, California, and that's where Apple
Speaker 1: Computers was born on April first, nineteen seventy six. Now,
Speaker 1: the actual story, of course, starts a little earlier than that.
Speaker 1: Wozniak and Jobs originally met in nineteen seventy one through
Speaker 1: a mutual friend named l Bill Fernandez, and the two
Speaker 1: of them found that they shared a couple of really
Speaker 1: big interests in common. They both loved technology, and they
Speaker 1: both loved mischief. They really loved pulling pranks. Uh. Steve
Speaker 1: Wozniak had come from a phone freaking background, and if
Speaker 1: you want to know what phone freaking is, freaking is
Speaker 1: spelled with a pH. I did a full episode about
Speaker 1: phone freaking in the past, so you can search the
Speaker 1: text off archives in short, it involves manipulating the phone system.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like hacking, but for telephones. And it
Speaker 1: was all about being able to make long distance calls
Speaker 1: for free by fooling the phone system that you were
Speaker 1: some sort of administrative tone. You know, you could actually
Speaker 1: produce a sound a tone using a device. One of
Speaker 1: the early ones was a whistle from Captain Crunch Cereal
Speaker 1: and make long distance calls for free. Well, Steve Wozniak
Speaker 1: was a guy who was interested in this. He was
Speaker 1: interested in the way that the phone system worked, and
Speaker 1: he also kind of liked the idea of pulling a
Speaker 1: fast one on people. Uh. In fact, there's a great
Speaker 1: story about jobs in Wozniak making a call to the
Speaker 1: Vatican this way and they at least reportedly nearly got
Speaker 1: the Pope on the phone, but he didn't pick up
Speaker 1: because it turned out his fridge was running, so he
Speaker 1: went out to catch it. Anyway, the two joined the
Speaker 1: Homebrew Computer Club in the mid seventies. This was a
Speaker 1: big club in California, primarily where people who were enthusiasts
Speaker 1: of computers would get together start building kits from scratch,
Speaker 1: trying to make their own computers. Wozniak took inspiration from
Speaker 1: an early it called the Altear. So, yeah, this was
Speaker 1: a computer that you would get all the parts for,
Speaker 1: but you would have to put it together yourself. It
Speaker 1: wasn't something you bought straight on the box, although there
Speaker 1: were companies that would do that for you, where they
Speaker 1: put it together and you would just buy the completed
Speaker 1: all tear. That's not what Wozniak was interested in. Wassniac
Speaker 1: decided he wanted to make his own computer. So he thought, well,
Speaker 1: what if I made a typewriter interface, which was innovative,
Speaker 1: no one had done that with a personal computer yet.
Speaker 1: And what if instead of just a bunch of lights
Speaker 1: that would indicate the results, I created a display, or
Speaker 1: I allowed this computer to connect to a display and
Speaker 1: show things on a monitor. And so he used a
Speaker 1: television set, just an old TV set that he could
Speaker 1: wire to his computer, and thus the Apple one was born.
Speaker 1: It was a brand new idea. The Apple one computer
Speaker 1: was a far cry from the personal computers that would follow.
Speaker 1: It was really a hobbyist computer. Uh. Steve Jobs was
Speaker 1: able to go to a retailer and convince the retailer,
Speaker 1: why don't you put in an order for these Apple
Speaker 1: one computers because they're gonna be a hot ticket item.
Speaker 1: People are really interested in computers, and now they can
Speaker 1: finally get their hands on one. Steve Jobs is a
Speaker 1: great salesman, or was a great salesman, and he was
Speaker 1: able to convince the retailer to put in an order,
Speaker 1: which was the only way they could actually afford to
Speaker 1: build the Apple computer. So they couldn't they couldn't deliver
Speaker 1: upon the order until they had managed to secure the order,
Speaker 1: and then once they did, they started building these things.
Speaker 1: But even then they had to cut some corners, so
Speaker 1: the original Apple one didn't have a case. It was
Speaker 1: all just naked hardware and you had to build your
Speaker 1: own case for it, or just have all these different
Speaker 1: pieces wired together, but without any sort of protective covering
Speaker 1: around it. Still, it was enough to get people's interests
Speaker 1: and it was enough to finance Apple computers in those
Speaker 1: early days. They decided, immediately after they made about two
Speaker 1: hundred of these, they were only two of the Apple
Speaker 1: one computers ever in existence, that they were gonna go
Speaker 1: onto the next step, which was to build a more
Speaker 1: fully functional, self contained personal computer, and they decided to
Speaker 1: incorporate the company on in January and nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: Now in April n seven, they were able to debut
Speaker 1: the Apple two computer. This one had originally tape based storage.
Speaker 1: So you know cassette tapes. Maybe some of you know
Speaker 1: what cassette tapes are. Well, we also use those to
Speaker 1: store computer data back in the day. But that's what
Speaker 1: the original Apple two computer used as its storage system
Speaker 1: was cassette tapes. Those are not ideal because obviously the
Speaker 1: tape is stored on reels, so if you're trying to
Speaker 1: find a specific piece of information, you have to scan
Speaker 1: through the reel till you get to it. Uh, and
Speaker 1: this just takes up time. Eventually they would switch over
Speaker 1: to five and a quarter inch disk drives, and if
Speaker 1: you don't know what a five and a quarter inch
Speaker 1: disc is, you really miss doubt the big black, flimsy disks.
Speaker 1: And if you told people they were floppy disks and
Speaker 1: they weren't familiar with the concept, there was a good
Speaker 1: chance they would fold it in half and put it
Speaker 1: in their pocket and thus ruin the disc For all time.
Speaker 1: It was still a form of magnetic storage. It was
Speaker 1: just in a disc form rather than a tape form.
Speaker 1: Once they were able to do that, they were able
Speaker 1: to speed things up considerably. The most advanced version of
Speaker 1: the Apple two when it was first coming out, had
Speaker 1: a stunning amount of memory, sixty four whole kilobytes of memory.
Speaker 1: That seems like nothing now, and I guess you could
Speaker 1: argue it is nothing now, but at the time it was,
Speaker 1: it was really innovative. The monitor resolution was also kind
Speaker 1: of funny. When you look at today's monitors, you know,
Speaker 1: you look at the ultra high definition displays that we
Speaker 1: have today, four K displays, you look at the retina displays,
Speaker 1: They're amazing. That's not how things started. The original Apple
Speaker 1: To monitor had a resolution of two picks sles by pixels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the original monitor had so few pixels you could, if
Speaker 1: you were determined, count them all. That's pretty amazing now.
Speaker 1: If it weren't for the fact that someone actually made
Speaker 1: some useful productivity software, the Apple Too probably never would
Speaker 1: have gone anywhere. It was a good idea, but you
Speaker 1: had to have a killer app to convince people, hey,
Speaker 1: this is something worth buying. And the first real killer
Speaker 1: app for the Apple Too was one called VisiCalc VISCUC
Speaker 1: was essentially a spreadsheet program It was an application that
Speaker 1: was like something you would see an Excel or Lotus
Speaker 1: one to three. Uh. It was new. It was a
Speaker 1: brand new idea. I mean, people just didn't have access
Speaker 1: to that. They had to do all their factoring on
Speaker 1: paper and then they would transfer that over into whatever
Speaker 1: format they needed. This would allow them to do that virtually.
Speaker 1: You could create your cells, you could create your formula is,
Speaker 1: and so this was a huge demonstration of how powerful
Speaker 1: and useful personal computers could be. It seems pretty silly
Speaker 1: now to think about it, but at the time this
Speaker 1: was truly new. So it was the thing that helped
Speaker 1: really convince people that the Apple two computer was the
Speaker 1: way to go. It was an advantage over some of
Speaker 1: the other personal computers that were starting to debut around
Speaker 1: that time, things like the Commodore sixty four, the Texas
Speaker 1: Instruments computers. Now I can talk a lot about the
Speaker 1: Apple Too a lot. My dad owned an Apple Too. Technically,
Speaker 1: it was an Apple to E. He purchased it. He
Speaker 1: wrote a book on typewriters, sold the book, use the
Speaker 1: money from that book to buy the Apple to E,
Speaker 1: and then use that to write other books. So my
Speaker 1: dad's an author. If you did not know. He writes
Speaker 1: all sorts of books, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, children's literature.
Speaker 1: If you want to check out his stuff, his name
Speaker 1: is Brad Strickland. But yeah, those early books he wrote
Speaker 1: he wrote on an Apple to e, which meant he
Speaker 1: stored them all on floppy disks. He could store about
Speaker 1: a chapter per floppy discs, so each book would be fifteen, sixteen,
Speaker 1: maybe even twenty floppy disks in size. We had entire
Speaker 1: sleeves of these floppy discs that represented the books that
Speaker 1: my dad had written. In fact, I had dinner with
Speaker 1: him very recently and he tells me he still has
Speaker 1: all of those. We don't have a computer that can
Speaker 1: read them because we don't have an Apple to e
Speaker 1: disc drive and emulator to read off of these things.
Speaker 1: But he still has the discs now. I use the
Speaker 1: Apple to E mostly to play games because I have
Speaker 1: my priority straight. I played a lot of Ultima on
Speaker 1: the Apple to E. Love my Ultimate series. I thought
Speaker 1: it was awesome. Now. While the Apple Too and its
Speaker 1: variants began to earn some serious cash for Apple, they
Speaker 1: were very successful comparatively speaking, the founders were already looking
Speaker 1: at what comes next. It wasn't just about let rest
Speaker 1: on our laurels. Now that we've made a personal computer,
Speaker 1: we've made it a success. We've managed to make a
Speaker 1: mark on this brand new, fledgling industry. So the logical
Speaker 1: successor for the Apple Too would be the Apple three,
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's what the company began to develop.
Speaker 1: People began to work on the successor, and they began
Speaker 1: to work on the Apple three computer. Uh it would
Speaker 1: eventually debut. It was faster, more capable than the Apple Too,
Speaker 1: and it was meant to be primarily a business machine,
Speaker 1: not a personal computer. And it had built in five
Speaker 1: and a quarter inch disk drives as opposed to the
Speaker 1: external disk drives that you would have to connect to
Speaker 1: your Apple to computer back in those days. And it
Speaker 1: had an integrated high resolution graphics chip. But it didn't
Speaker 1: sell very well. If you are thinking I've never really
Speaker 1: heard of the Apple three, I've heard of the Apple Too.
Speaker 1: The reason for that is it just was a failure
Speaker 1: at the market. It wasn't a total flop, but they
Speaker 1: didn't sell nearly as well as Apple was hoping. The
Speaker 1: reasons for that, well, there are quite a few. Bye
Speaker 1: IBM had entered the personal computer picture. So you had
Speaker 1: a saturated market. Not only did you have the Apple machines, Commodore,
Speaker 1: you had Texas instrument, you had other devices that were
Speaker 1: starting to come out to IBM got into the game,
Speaker 1: and IBM had a huge name in business technology, so
Speaker 1: IBM was able to leverage that and move forward creating
Speaker 1: these business machines and dominating that market. This was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the IBM and IBM compatible era of personal computing.
Speaker 1: So Apple three just couldn't really keep up. It was
Speaker 1: a more expensive machine and it was not as well
Speaker 1: supported as the Apple two was. In other words, there
Speaker 1: weren't as many people developing software for the Apple three
Speaker 1: as they had been for the Apple too. And meanwhile
Speaker 1: IBM was catching up a lot of ground. So even
Speaker 1: though you had the Apple three team and Apple, some
Speaker 1: of the other folks there were already thinking about the
Speaker 1: step beyond, where do we go beyond just creating the
Speaker 1: next version of this particular personal computer. What can we
Speaker 1: do to really innovate and push what personal computing is
Speaker 1: all about. So one of those people who was really
Speaker 1: concerned with this was Steve Jobs. He really wanted to
Speaker 1: look at a way of branching out from this traditional approach.
Speaker 1: So while there was a team working on the Apple three,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs began to look at another project that got
Speaker 1: started around nine. Now this was not the Macintosh. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was called Lisa. Lisa was a different project that
Speaker 1: was taking form at the same time as the Macintosh
Speaker 1: project within Apple. Lisa was a different a different kind
Speaker 1: of computer mob All Jobs really wanted to take a direct,
Speaker 1: dramatic step away from the early PC. Those early PCs
Speaker 1: were all text based. That meant that you would get
Speaker 1: a command prompt and you would have to type in
Speaker 1: a command and a file extension or a file and
Speaker 1: its extension in order to have something happen. You had
Speaker 1: to navigate directories through actual text commands and you would
Speaker 1: get a text result, So you have to read through
Speaker 1: everything there. There was no graphic representation of what you
Speaker 1: were working on. It was all text based and it
Speaker 1: was such a wonderful time, my friends. I loved this
Speaker 1: time because I actually learned all the different commands and
Speaker 1: I can very speedily get through any system because I
Speaker 1: understood how they worked, and uh, it didn't require any
Speaker 1: overlay on top of the basic system which would slow
Speaker 1: things down. But then I'm a computer geek. Even though
Speaker 1: I'm an English literature geek, I'm also a computer geek.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people are not computer geeks. And
Speaker 1: in fact, there were a lot of technology enthusiasts who
Speaker 1: were worried that if we stayed in that realm of
Speaker 1: text based architecture, it would keep people from adopting computers.
Speaker 1: The mainstream would never latch onto it because it was
Speaker 1: too hard to use. So Jobs thought perhaps they could
Speaker 1: create a better system for consumers, and he wanted to
Speaker 1: move towards a graphic user interface or a gooey. Now,
Speaker 1: he was not the first person to think about the
Speaker 1: gooey that. Really one of the earliest would be Douglas Inglebart.
Speaker 1: Douglas Inglebart had been working on early versions of a
Speaker 1: graphic user interface since the nineteen sixties, and we're almost
Speaker 1: at nineteen eighty at this point of the story. We're
Speaker 1: beyond night as of right now. Just in case I
Speaker 1: confused you at that moment, Inglebart also designed a mouse
Speaker 1: as a navigational tool to help with graphic user interfaces.
Speaker 1: So before that you would just use a keyboard or
Speaker 1: a data pad, something along those lines. Angle Bart said, well,
Speaker 1: if we can represent information as graphics and we can
Speaker 1: create an interface that allows you to drag and click
Speaker 1: and point and select things, that would make it a
Speaker 1: much more intuitive interface and allow people to understand more
Speaker 1: easily how to navigate through the computer angle. Bart would
Speaker 1: then take on this information and bring it forward. He
Speaker 1: had started his work at s r I International, but
Speaker 1: then continued his work at a research and development place
Speaker 1: called Xerox Park Park as p A r C. So
Speaker 1: there's a research and development brand of of Zerox. There's
Speaker 1: branch of Xerox, I should say, and Xerox Park. A
Speaker 1: lot of very innovative stuff came out of there, and
Speaker 1: I think I've done a couple of episodes that at
Speaker 1: least relate to Xerox Park, but maybe I need to
Speaker 1: do a full one about what the organization was and
Speaker 1: the things that came out of Xerox Park because it's
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating. Well, Steve Jobs said he knew about Xerox
Speaker 1: Park and he wanted to learn more about the stuff
Speaker 1: that they were developing, so he asked Xerox, hey can
Speaker 1: we come and take a look, and some folks from
Speaker 1: Apple come over and check out what's happening. At Xerox Park.
Speaker 1: I realized that this is all mostly proprietary, hush hush
Speaker 1: stuff that you don't want to get out there. But
Speaker 1: come on, we're buddies, right, And Xerox said, essentially, show
Speaker 1: me the money. So here's what happened. They struck a deal.
Speaker 1: Apple said, tell you what we'll do. We will sell
Speaker 1: you up to one thousand shares of Apple stock at
Speaker 1: ten dollars a share, which was a huge discount at
Speaker 1: what Apple stock was trading for at the time. So
Speaker 1: I said, if you, if you want, you can buy
Speaker 1: up to a hundred thousand dollars at ten bucks to share.
Speaker 1: In return, all we want is three days time at
Speaker 1: Xerox park. And zero said, you're on MR and this
Speaker 1: was the deal of the century, and let me explain
Speaker 1: to you why. So let's make a couple of assumptions here.
Speaker 1: Let's assume that Xerox opted to buy all one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars one hundred thousand rather of those shares at
Speaker 1: ten bucks to share. And let's also assume that Xerox
Speaker 1: has held onto all one hundred thousand of those shares
Speaker 1: since then. Since nine Uh, that's impressive. First of all,
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand shares at ten bucks a share, that's
Speaker 1: a million bucks. That's not a small amount of money.
Speaker 1: That's a good chunk of change, but it's peanuts compared
Speaker 1: to what it's worth now. So you might have heard.
Speaker 1: Apple's done pretty well for itself over the years, so
Speaker 1: well that the company has split its stock four times
Speaker 1: since it's first started becoming a publicly traded company. Now,
Speaker 1: that means that they would uh ex span the number
Speaker 1: of shares that they had out in the market, and
Speaker 1: that increases the value of the company as a result,
Speaker 1: And it means that if you own shares after the split,
Speaker 1: you own more shares. How much more depends upon the
Speaker 1: nature of the split. So in in two thousand and
Speaker 1: in two thousand five, Apple split with a two for
Speaker 1: one share split stock split, which meant that you would
Speaker 1: get two shares for every instead of just one share.
Speaker 1: So if you owned one share of Apple stock after
Speaker 1: one of those splits, you would own two shares, and
Speaker 1: then after the next split you own four, and after
Speaker 1: the next split you own eight. It's a great way
Speaker 1: to keep seeing value from your shares. Well. The fourth
Speaker 1: time that they split was in two thousand fourteen and
Speaker 1: that was a real doozy. That was a seven till
Speaker 1: one split, so for every share you owned, you would
Speaker 1: get seven shares, an enormous return. So one thousand, let's
Speaker 1: go back to zeros here one d thou and that
Speaker 1: they get nineteen nine at doubles to two hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: Then it doubles to four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: Then you get the seven to one split, which means
Speaker 1: that you get up to five million, six hundred thousand
Speaker 1: shares of Apple's stock. So for one hundred thousand, they
Speaker 1: now have five million, six hundred thousand, assuming that they
Speaker 1: bought all one hundred thousand and that they held onto
Speaker 1: it for that long. If in fact Xerox still has
Speaker 1: those one hundred thousand shares that they bought for ten
Speaker 1: bucks a share back in the day, they are sitting
Speaker 1: pretty because today, assuming that the price hasn't changed dramatically,
Speaker 1: I checked it before, why did anything else? This morning?
Speaker 1: I looked at Apple's trading price. Stocks were trading at
Speaker 1: one hundred forty six dollars fifty three cents per share,
Speaker 1: So the share price is more than ten times what
Speaker 1: it was when Xerox bought it. And because of the splits,
Speaker 1: they now own five point six million stocks, not a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand stocks. So you multiply those two numbers together,
Speaker 1: the five point six million and a hundred forty six
Speaker 1: point fifty three dollars, and you factor in how much
Speaker 1: it's actually worth today. That one million dollar investment would
Speaker 1: now be worth eight hundred twenty million, five hundred sixty
Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars. So a million dollar investment returns almost
Speaker 1: a billion dollars today. Again, that's assuming all of those
Speaker 1: other factors fall into place for a three day tour.
Speaker 1: A three day tour, we'll find out if Dylan keeps
Speaker 1: that or cuts it, but the life people understand anyway.
Speaker 1: You could argue also that without this visit to Xerox,
Speaker 1: jobs and Apple would have been way behind on innovation.
Speaker 1: They would not have allowed Apple to transform into a
Speaker 1: company that would eventually grow to be worth as much
Speaker 1: as it was as it is today. So you could say, yeah,
Speaker 1: Xerox made a huge return on its investment, assuming all
Speaker 1: those other factors are true. But Apple really benefited from
Speaker 1: this too. It wasn't like it's a one sided thing.
Speaker 1: So Apple was able to redefine again what a personal
Speaker 1: computer is all about because of the stuff they learned
Speaker 1: from this visit. This was a machine that they saw.
Speaker 1: The Xerox Alto was a machine they saw on this visit.
Speaker 1: This was a machine that incorporated Inglebart's ideas about the graphics,
Speaker 1: user interface, and the computer mouse. It was a system
Speaker 1: that wasn't available for purchase. You could not buy one
Speaker 1: of these as just a member of the general public.
Speaker 1: They had made a couple of thousand of them, but
Speaker 1: they were all pretty much internal machines. Very few people
Speaker 1: had had a chance to actually see them outside of Xerox.
Speaker 1: Jobs was beyond impressed, and he decided that Apple Compute
Speaker 1: from that point forward should have a gooey and a
Speaker 1: mouse system, and he felt very strongly that it would
Speaker 1: open up the computer industry to a wider audience. The
Speaker 1: text based approach just had too steep a learning curve.
Speaker 1: It was discouraging people from getting into computers because only
Speaker 1: computer geeks understood it. And this is really the era
Speaker 1: where we began to define what a computer geek was.
Speaker 1: It was that these people who acted like the machines
Speaker 1: they were really obsessed with, They spoken jargon, they were unrelatable.
Speaker 1: The reason we have that image of the computer nerd
Speaker 1: is because of the text based approaches we had to
Speaker 1: computing early in the days of personal computers. It required
Speaker 1: this dedication and learning curve that not a lot of
Speaker 1: people possessed. Necessarily. Going the graphics user interface removed a
Speaker 1: lot of those barriers and opened it up to the mainstream.
Speaker 1: Although the image of the nerdy computer geek would stick
Speaker 1: with us for many years and still to this day
Speaker 1: is there as evidence by shows like The I T.
Speaker 1: Crowd and The Big Bang Theory. Anyway, this was sort
Speaker 1: of the beginning of momentum toward developing both the Macintosh
Speaker 1: project and the Lisa project within Apple, and Jobs new
Speaker 1: that he could really break free of that narrow stereotype
Speaker 1: if they went this route. Now I have a lot
Speaker 1: more to talk about as far as the development that
Speaker 1: went into the Macintosh, but before I get into that,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, So,
Speaker 1: an Apple, you've got two teams forming to work on
Speaker 1: the next big thing within the company, and they're independent
Speaker 1: of one another. They are not working with each other,
Speaker 1: so it's two self contained groups within Apple. One of
Speaker 1: those groups was led by Jobs and this was the
Speaker 1: LISA team. Now LISA, which was the name that Jobs
Speaker 1: had given to his own daughter, ostensibly stood for Local
Speaker 1: Integrated System Architecture. The LISA machine was meant to be
Speaker 1: a business device, not a personal computer. So this was
Speaker 1: going to be something that Apple would end up marketing
Speaker 1: to big businesses to use for their their you know,
Speaker 1: operational use and you know, maybe employees would have these
Speaker 1: machines on their on their desks, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: It was gonna be a high end machine, complete with
Speaker 1: a high end price tag. We're talking to price tag
Speaker 1: of ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, so you're talking more like twenty grand today.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the price of a car. Essentially, is
Speaker 1: what we get down to. But the other team was
Speaker 1: led by a guy named Jeff Raskin. Jeff is spelled
Speaker 1: j E F only one F. Raskin earned the EASE
Speaker 1: in physics and mathematics at State University at New York
Speaker 1: at Stony Brook, and he later earned a master's degree
Speaker 1: in computer science at Pennsylvania State University. He actually first
Speaker 1: started with mathematical logic but ended up having a disagreement
Speaker 1: with one of his professors and switched his focus to
Speaker 1: computer science UH and got a master's and technically, according
Speaker 1: to reports, he was actually qualified for a PhD, but
Speaker 1: there was one problem. The Pennsylvania State University wasn't accredited
Speaker 1: to award PhDs and computer science at that time, so
Speaker 1: while he may have had the academic standing for a PhD,
Speaker 1: there was no authorized UH unit to to designate him
Speaker 1: as such. He then studied a lot of art as well.
Speaker 1: He was really interested in not just technology but art
Speaker 1: and UH. He was a really smart guy and a
Speaker 1: little older than the two Steves which Obbs and Bosniac.
Speaker 1: Raskin would go on to teach several subjects at the
Speaker 1: University of California, San Diego, including computer science, art and photography,
Speaker 1: and it was really interested in that intersection between art
Speaker 1: and tech, which I think is fascinating, and people who
Speaker 1: have that sort of obsession, the people who really focus
Speaker 1: on that intersection between art and computers, I think makes
Speaker 1: some of the best and most innovative designers in the world.
Speaker 1: So when you see a product out there that just
Speaker 1: as gorgeous and elegant in its design and it works
Speaker 1: well with whatever it's intended purposes. I think that ultimately
Speaker 1: you have to look for the person who has that
Speaker 1: vision of where art and technology cross in order to
Speaker 1: understand what were the decisions that led to that. This
Speaker 1: guy was one of those people. So it sounds like
Speaker 1: he was a really groovy guy, someone that I probably
Speaker 1: would have enjoyed chatting with. H He has passed away sadly,
Speaker 1: so I am not able to do that, but I'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about his life. He joined
Speaker 1: Apple as the thirty first employee after the company launched
Speaker 1: the Apple Too, so he came on board after Apple
Speaker 1: two had become a thing. He had already worked a
Speaker 1: bit with Apple, uh the Apple had hired his company
Speaker 1: to write the programming manual for the Apple Basic programming language,
Speaker 1: so he had already worked with Apple in that respect,
Speaker 1: but now was coming to work full time for the company,
Speaker 1: and his original role was manager of Publications and new
Speaker 1: product review. But he had this passion project he really
Speaker 1: wanted to do. He wanted to develop a personal computer
Speaker 1: that was more accessible to a wider audience. That was
Speaker 1: his real desire. He wanted to push personal computers beyond
Speaker 1: the hobbyist and the early adopter phases. So he was
Speaker 1: the one who started the Macintosh project back in nine
Speaker 1: seventy nine, and he named it after his favorite type
Speaker 1: of apple, the Macintosh, although it's spelled a different way
Speaker 1: than the apple the actual apple is. Now you could
Speaker 1: argue and probably convincingly, that Raskin was somewhat responsible for
Speaker 1: pushing jobs as shift toward designing a computer for the
Speaker 1: general public, because Raskin was writing memos to the rest
Speaker 1: of the company really to direct it to Steve Jobs, saying,
Speaker 1: I really think we are missing an opportunity here. If
Speaker 1: we're able to tap into that market, it's so much
Speaker 1: larger than just the hobbyist market. It's a huge beneficial
Speaker 1: business decision, and it will really push the development of
Speaker 1: personal computers. Uh, And he was one of the people
Speaker 1: who really championed that idea. Now, one thing he didn't
Speaker 1: do was talking about graphic user interfaces and computer mice
Speaker 1: or a computer else's nieces whatever. He was looking at
Speaker 1: keeping costs down. So his original plan was to make
Speaker 1: a personal computer that was still text based but more
Speaker 1: accessible than previous machines were. So it was a little
Speaker 1: different than the Lisa development, which was really looking at
Speaker 1: using the graphics, user interface, and the computer mouse, but
Speaker 1: a slightly different version. The mouse they saw at Xerox
Speaker 1: Park was a three button mouse, and the mouse that
Speaker 1: they talked about for the Macintosh was a single button mouse.
Speaker 1: This was in part to simplify things that also to
Speaker 1: bring down costs. They didn't want the components to be
Speaker 1: more and more expensive because the price tag for the
Speaker 1: Lisa was already pretty astronomical as it is. So Jobs
Speaker 1: was more or less on the Lisa team. He was
Speaker 1: kind of supposed to be adjacent to the Lisa team,
Speaker 1: but he kept involving himself more and more in their activities,
Speaker 1: and Raskin was leading the Macintosh team. And they weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily competing because they were looking at developing computers for
Speaker 1: two different consumer groups. Right Jobs wanted to build computers
Speaker 1: for businesses and Raskin wanted to build computers for personal users,
Speaker 1: so they weren't directly competing with one another, but there
Speaker 1: was some professional competition going on between the two and
Speaker 1: kind of a race to see who could develop their
Speaker 1: machine first and who was going to make the next
Speaker 1: iteration of the personal computer. They were both relying on
Speaker 1: similar philosophies to make computing more intuitive to the average person,
Speaker 1: although again Jobs was looking at the gooey route, whereas
Speaker 1: Raskin was saying, how can I make the text route
Speaker 1: more accessible and keep those costs down. Meanwhile, over on
Speaker 1: the corporate side of Apple, the company began to bring
Speaker 1: on more experienced folks from the business world to help
Speaker 1: make sure Apple became a quote unquote real company. These
Speaker 1: were the people who formed the policies and practices of Apple,
Speaker 1: the ones who kind of codified what the rules were
Speaker 1: and determined how business would be done, uh, making sure
Speaker 1: it would maintain a position of dominance in the computer marketplace.
Speaker 1: But they also began to change the culture of Apple,
Speaker 1: and some of Apple's employees were a little chafed by this.
Speaker 1: They didn't really want to see things change that much,
Speaker 1: and it caused some growing pains as a result. One
Speaker 1: person who caused some serious growing pains was Apple's first
Speaker 1: president and CEO, whose name is and I'm not making
Speaker 1: this up, Michael Scott. This is not the Michael Scott
Speaker 1: from dunder Mifflin. It's not Michael Scott from the office,
Speaker 1: but it is a guy named Michael Scott, sometimes called Scottie. Now,
Speaker 1: some people would go on to say that Michael Scott
Speaker 1: would end up wreaking havoc through Apple. Uh. He had
Speaker 1: been brought on by one of Apple's early investors, Michael Marcula.
Speaker 1: Marcula was technically the third employee of Apple after Wozniak
Speaker 1: and Jobs. Markula spent much of his own money as
Speaker 1: an investment in the company and then some more money
Speaker 1: as a loan to the company. So not only did
Speaker 1: he invest, he also loaned an extra amount of money
Speaker 1: to Apple in its early days, and he was the
Speaker 1: one who kind of brought Michael Scott on board to
Speaker 1: become a leader for the company. Now the leaders had
Speaker 1: almost canceled the Macintosh project a few times. It was
Speaker 1: a very small project, very humble beginnings. Jeff Raskins had
Speaker 1: a group of like three people working with him to
Speaker 1: develop this idea and design the Macintosh computer. And it
Speaker 1: was always on the verge of the chopping block because
Speaker 1: the management was saying, well, could we not dedicate your
Speaker 1: attention somewhere else, someplace that we're definitively going to make money,
Speaker 1: And each time Jeff Raskin would argue to allow the
Speaker 1: project to continue, and it would kind of be allowed
Speaker 1: to continue for a little bit longer until the next
Speaker 1: time this would happen, and then you'd rense and repeat.
Speaker 1: The project was almost canceled in nineteen seventy nine and
Speaker 1: in nineteen eight despite the fact that again it was
Speaker 1: very modest, it wasn't taking a huge amount of Apple's
Speaker 1: resources away. Then in nineteen eight one, we had a
Speaker 1: really rough year for Apple, very rough year. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, a lot of bad things happened. For one thing,
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak was in a plane crash and was severely injured.
Speaker 1: His recovery would take a huge amount of time, and
Speaker 1: he stepped away from Apple because he had to concentrate
Speaker 1: on his health. That same year, Michael Scott in February one,
Speaker 1: fired more than forty Apple employees, which was a significant
Speaker 1: number considering this was a very small company at the time.
Speaker 1: It was on a day that was called Black Wednesday
Speaker 1: within the company. That was the day Michael Scott came in,
Speaker 1: fired a bunch of people, rolled a keg of beer
Speaker 1: into the office, and then proclaimed himself Lord and master
Speaker 1: of all. He surveyed, that's probably going a bit far,
Speaker 1: but apparently the keg of beer thing is true, which
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna leave that. It's a little too soon
Speaker 1: for me to talk about kegs of beer and and
Speaker 1: triumphing over other people's misfortune. Enough commentary. At any rate,
Speaker 1: the move did not go over very well with a
Speaker 1: lot of Apple employees, and in fact, Mark Coula himself
Speaker 1: said that's a bit much and decided, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to pull some rank here. I am
Speaker 1: the big investor, I'm a majority owner of Apple. You
Speaker 1: are out, And he pulled Michael Scott from position of
Speaker 1: president and CEO and made a vice chairman. Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: had become the chairman of the company, so he was
Speaker 1: in charge of that. Markola himself would step in as
Speaker 1: the president of the company. Vice Chairman was a title
Speaker 1: that had practically no actual responsibilities or power associated with it,
Speaker 1: so it's almost a title in name alone, and later
Speaker 1: on that year Michael Scott would actually resign somewhat defiantly. Um,
Speaker 1: it all seems very mel a dramatic to me looking
Speaker 1: at it in hindsight. So Mike Marcoola, who was a
Speaker 1: man who had retired at the age of thirty two
Speaker 1: because he made so much money from stock options, he
Speaker 1: had worked for fair Child Semiconductor in the marketing department,
Speaker 1: and as a result of his work there, he had
Speaker 1: been awarded stock options, and the stock options ended up
Speaker 1: being worth millions of dollars because of the success of
Speaker 1: fair Child Semiconductor, it's a good time to get into
Speaker 1: semi conductors, just before the computer age dawned, and so
Speaker 1: he was a multimillionaire already. He had retired at age
Speaker 1: thirty two. That blows my mind. Now he becomes the
Speaker 1: acting president of Apple, and Steve Jobs is acting as chairman. Now,
Speaker 1: the reason I tell you all of this is not
Speaker 1: just to give you a history lesson of Apple. It's
Speaker 1: so that you understand how things happened. Next, you've got
Speaker 1: Jeff Raskin, who was working on creating an affordable intuitive
Speaker 1: computer for consumers, and his project had been on that
Speaker 1: verge of cancelation a couple of times. You have Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: who was getting more and more involved in a project
Speaker 1: that technically wasn't his. Lisa was being spearheaded by other people,
Speaker 1: but Jobs was getting more and more involved in it.
Speaker 1: And you had Markola as the man who's leading the company.
Speaker 1: And then things turned south a bit. Jobs as team
Speaker 1: was in trouble largely because of Steve Jobs. He was
Speaker 1: getting personally involved in the development of Lisa, and this
Speaker 1: was upsetting the managerial structure of the project as a result,
Speaker 1: because it's you know, it's the guy who isn't in
Speaker 1: charge who comes in and says, like, hey, I founded
Speaker 1: the company. You should do things this way, not that way.
Speaker 1: If you've ever worked on any project where someone who
Speaker 1: was not in charge starts to try and take charge,
Speaker 1: you've probably varience this kind of level of friction. Well,
Speaker 1: this was that on a pretty grand scale, and things
Speaker 1: were becoming really problematic as the project was progressing, so
Speaker 1: much so that Mark Coula made the decision to remove
Speaker 1: Jobs from the team entirely, essentially saying you aren't allowed
Speaker 1: to work on that project, stop bothering them, and put
Speaker 1: him into limbo. Essentially, Steve Jobs had really nothing to
Speaker 1: do at that point, and the control of the project
Speaker 1: went over to a guy named John Couch. Jobs was
Speaker 1: left with no real position of his own, something that
Speaker 1: would become a recurring theme with an Apple. If you've
Speaker 1: heard our other episodes about Steve Jobs and Apple, you
Speaker 1: know how at times in his career and Apple he
Speaker 1: rubbed people the wrong way, and so the people in
Speaker 1: charge would just kind of tell him, going to your
Speaker 1: own office and do whatever you want to do, but
Speaker 1: stop bothering these people. And part of it was Steve
Speaker 1: jobs fault. Part of it was the fault of the management.
Speaker 1: It's no one is blameless in this. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to say say that Steve Jobs was a total nightmare
Speaker 1: to work for. Some people felt that way, but I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that that's definitively the case, rather than it
Speaker 1: was complicated. So Jobs is removed from the Lisa project,
Speaker 1: he decides that he needs something else to do, and
Speaker 1: then he takes a good look at the Macintosh project
Speaker 1: and then says, ah, I want to work on this.
Speaker 1: Here's the problem. Jeff Raskin was working on that. That
Speaker 1: was his project and his team, and Steve Jobs wanted
Speaker 1: all of it. He wanted to jump in there and
Speaker 1: take over the Macintosh project and turn it into something
Speaker 1: that it wasn't when it got started. At that time,
Speaker 1: Raskin was really working hard with a small team to
Speaker 1: develop a low cost consumer computer. Jobs immediately began to
Speaker 1: make changes, demanding changes to the work and redesigning the
Speaker 1: computer pretty dramatically changing it from the track it had
Speaker 1: been on since nine Remember this is like two. This
Speaker 1: was enough to exasperate Jeff Raskin, who ultimately decided to
Speaker 1: resign his position in two after enduring multiple changes to
Speaker 1: a project he had defended numerous times from cancelation. So
Speaker 1: think about that for a minute. He had worked very
Speaker 1: hard to keep this project alive, arguing for its viability,
Speaker 1: and then one of the founders that the company comes
Speaker 1: in and starts making dramatic changes to his design decisions.
Speaker 1: It was very frustrating, and so ultimately he decided to resign.
Speaker 1: And in the book Becoming Steve Jobs, they publish a
Speaker 1: memo that was written by Raskin upon his resignation, and
Speaker 1: it reveals some of the issues. The passage reads, while
Speaker 1: Mr Jobs as stated positions on management techniques are all
Speaker 1: quite noble and worthy, in practice, he is a dreadful manager.
Speaker 1: He is a prime example of a manager who takes
Speaker 1: the credit for his optimistic schedules and then blames the
Speaker 1: workers when deadlines are not met. He also said that
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs miss his appointments, does not give credit, has favorites,
Speaker 1: and doesn't keep promises and In another interview, Jeff Raskin
Speaker 1: said that Jobs would have made quote an excellent King
Speaker 1: of France end quote. That is a sick burn. I'm
Speaker 1: assuming that Raskin was specifically meeting the kings of France
Speaker 1: who were in power directly before the French Revolution. That's brutal.
Speaker 1: Raskin would actually go on to found a company called
Speaker 1: Information Appliance, Incorporated, and later would teach computer science at
Speaker 1: the University of Chicago, and after that, after the Macintosh debut,
Speaker 1: he would be kind of referred to as sort of
Speaker 1: an eccentric uncle to the Macintosh, not the father of
Speaker 1: the Macintosh. And the reason for this is because the
Speaker 1: Macintosh that debuted was so dramatically different from the one
Speaker 1: that he had been designing since nineteen seventy nine. It
Speaker 1: had changed enough so it was no longer really the
Speaker 1: same computer. Raskin himself passed away in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: and I am sad that I never had a chance
Speaker 1: to meet him, as he does sound like he was fascinating.
Speaker 1: Now back to the Macintosh team, Jobs wanted to overhaul
Speaker 1: the computer's aesthetic design, both from a hardware and a
Speaker 1: software level. He wanted something sleek and different from previous computers,
Speaker 1: and he really wanted a design that would set the
Speaker 1: Macintosh apart from IBM's personal computers. IBM PCs started hitting
Speaker 1: store shelves in one and they poisoned direct threat to
Speaker 1: Apple's position, particularly among businesses. IBM had that reputation and
Speaker 1: was leveraging it, and Jobs wanted his team to finish
Speaker 1: their work before the Lisa team finished their work. Now
Speaker 1: that he had been removed from the Lisa team, that
Speaker 1: last part didn't happen, though Lisa would launch a year
Speaker 1: ahead of Macintosh. Lisa came out in three but the Lisa,
Speaker 1: unlike the mac did not see much success. It was
Speaker 1: just too expensive, it had too limited UH software. It
Speaker 1: just didn't have a lot of applications developed for it,
Speaker 1: so there wasn't much of a reason to buy one.
Speaker 1: It would like it would be like buying a very
Speaker 1: expensive video game console, but there are no games out
Speaker 1: for it yet that would be a problem. So very
Speaker 1: few of them were sold. I mean there were ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollars apiece. The Lisa won the race to the
Speaker 1: finish line. It was ready before the Macintosh was, but
Speaker 1: it it lost the long game. UH. Apple didn't give
Speaker 1: up on it right away, they launched the Lisa. It
Speaker 1: didn't see a whole of success. They then designed and
Speaker 1: launched the Lisa too, so the second computer in this
Speaker 1: line at a slightly lower price point, actually significantly lower
Speaker 1: price point, with some new UH hardware, some of it
Speaker 1: taken from the mac Tosh computer to make it less expensive,
Speaker 1: So instead of using more expensive components, they used the
Speaker 1: components that kept the Macintosh below that exorbitant price point. UH.
Speaker 1: They also rebranded the Lisa too. They gave it another overhaul,
Speaker 1: really kind of. They spruced it up a little bit,
Speaker 1: and they renamed it the Macintosh XLI. But none of
Speaker 1: this really kept the Lisa treading water. So ultimately Apple
Speaker 1: pulled the plug figuratively and literally, I guess, since it
Speaker 1: was a computer now. Jobs version of the Macintosh incorporated
Speaker 1: a graphics user interface because he had been so impressed
Speaker 1: by Xerox's computer. Raskin's original design had, like I said,
Speaker 1: stuck with the text based approach. That this was a
Speaker 1: big change. It required a lot of work on the
Speaker 1: part of the team to go from text base to
Speaker 1: graphic user interface. Raskin really felt that it was appropriate
Speaker 1: to go with text base to keep the price down,
Speaker 1: although he did eventually endorse the use of a comp
Speaker 1: a her mouse. Raskin's goal was to make sure that
Speaker 1: the Macintosh debuted at a price of around five dollars,
Speaker 1: between five hundred and a thousand dollars. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: that did not happen, but we'll get to that. He did, however,
Speaker 1: think you know, jobs, Jobs didn't wanted to go super
Speaker 1: expensive like Lisa, but he did want to have this
Speaker 1: graphic user interface and mouse in it because he felt
Speaker 1: that it was just worthwhile. He ultimately came to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that incorporating those while it would mean a price
Speaker 1: hike in the mac it would be worth it. People
Speaker 1: would see the value of the graphics user interface in
Speaker 1: the mouse, and so it would make the final product
Speaker 1: more expensive than what Raskin then OpEd, but it would
Speaker 1: be a justifiable expense because of the nature of computing.
Speaker 1: On that team were several people here are just a
Speaker 1: few of them, Daniel Cottke Rod Holt, Mark Lebrun, Larry Tesler, Ramnach,
Speaker 1: among others, and in various interviews they said their goal
Speaker 1: was to create a computer that they themselves would want
Speaker 1: to own, which to me, seems like a really good
Speaker 1: strategy if you're developing anything. I think that developing something
Speaker 1: that you yourself would want to use is important. If
Speaker 1: you're just throwing in features and stuff in order to
Speaker 1: make it shinier, you're probably on the wrong track. If
Speaker 1: you're incorporating stuff that you yourself would want to use,
Speaker 1: you're probably on the right track. And I see this
Speaker 1: in all areas, not just in technology. The Monty Python
Speaker 1: crew were famous for saying that they wanted to make
Speaker 1: sure the stuff they wrote made each other laugh, and
Speaker 1: if when they got together and they read out the
Speaker 1: stuff they had been working on, if other people were laughing,
Speaker 1: they knew they were on the right track, and that
Speaker 1: stuff would go in the yes pile. Stuff that might
Speaker 1: be amusing but isn't really getting a good response might
Speaker 1: go into maybe pile, and stuff that wasn't landing winning
Speaker 1: a no pile. So whether it's high tech or low
Speaker 1: brow comedy, you should follow the same general philosophy. At
Speaker 1: least that's my view and the view of the Macintosh
Speaker 1: team now. Developing that graphic user interface was actually a
Speaker 1: really painstaking process because this was a whole new thing
Speaker 1: for personal computers. No one had done it. Xerox Park
Speaker 1: had done it for their in house computer system, but
Speaker 1: no one had done it for a personal computer. So
Speaker 1: it required a lot of trial and error designing the programs,
Speaker 1: testing them, debugging them. In fact, some of the designers
Speaker 1: would say that the mac operating system got debugged into existence,
Speaker 1: that essentially they started with a bunch of different code,
Speaker 1: much of it didn't work, and then they eliminated the
Speaker 1: stuff that didn't work until they willed it around down
Speaker 1: to a workable operating system. Seems like it worked out
Speaker 1: for them. It had to be programmed and debugged over
Speaker 1: a long time, but they still had a real goal
Speaker 1: to get McIntosh shout as soon as possible, even though
Speaker 1: the lease had come out in and really jobs had
Speaker 1: gotten really involved in in Macintosh. At the end of
Speaker 1: and into two, they knew they wanted to debut by
Speaker 1: and they did. And we'll go and more into what
Speaker 1: happened next in our next section, but first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsor. The Macintosh was
Speaker 1: finally ready for its unveiling, and it had taken a
Speaker 1: bit longer to come out than Lisa and the Macintosh
Speaker 1: team had to contend with jobs, making lots of demands
Speaker 1: and changes, but in the end they were able to
Speaker 1: create a computer design for the average consumer. The specs
Speaker 1: of the machine were impressive for the time, not for today.
Speaker 1: The Motorola processor they were using as the CPU ran
Speaker 1: at a blistering six Mega hurts, which they cranked up
Speaker 1: to seven point eight may hurts, and they marketed as
Speaker 1: an eight Mega Hurts machine. The nine inch screen a
Speaker 1: massive nine inch screen on this computer, which was an
Speaker 1: all in one by the way. You had the computer
Speaker 1: body and the monitor all in the same form factor,
Speaker 1: although the keyboard was separate. It was a monochromatic nine
Speaker 1: inch screen and had a resolution of five twelve by
Speaker 1: three hundred twelve pixels, so only slightly better than the
Speaker 1: Apple to monitor resolution. The name for the graphic user
Speaker 1: interface operating system was called System Software one point oh.
Speaker 1: Later on they would call it mac OS, but it
Speaker 1: was System Software one point oh in the early days.
Speaker 1: Unlike the Apple Too, which had a separate display from
Speaker 1: the computer itself, this one, like I said, was incorporated
Speaker 1: directly with the machine, so the whole thing was in
Speaker 1: a big plastic body and you had computer and monitor
Speaker 1: right there, including a disk drive but then you would
Speaker 1: connect the keyboard to it. It had a three and
Speaker 1: a half inch disk drive, so they had advanced beyond
Speaker 1: the five and a quarter inch discs. Now you were
Speaker 1: in the the more firm, plastic of the three and
Speaker 1: a half inch discs. People started calling those hard disks
Speaker 1: because they didn't know what a hard disk drive was.
Speaker 1: That's not a hard disk. It was still a floppy disk.
Speaker 1: It was just a different form of a floppy disk.
Speaker 1: It also had a handle. The Mac had a handle
Speaker 1: on it so you could carry it around, making it
Speaker 1: a semi portable machine. It was really a bit heavy
Speaker 1: and bulky for toting it around everywhere. It weighed about
Speaker 1: sixteen and a half pounds or somewhere around seven and
Speaker 1: a half kilograms, so that's kind of hefty. You don't
Speaker 1: want to carry that around very far. But it did
Speaker 1: have a handle so you could if you needed to.
Speaker 1: The original Mac had two serial ports. You might remember
Speaker 1: I talked about Cereal ports in the USB episodes, so
Speaker 1: that is Sereal as an S E R I A L.
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about Captain Crunch. If you want to
Speaker 1: hear about that, go back to the earlier part of
Speaker 1: the episode where I was talking about phone freaking, had
Speaker 1: no modem, had no microphone. Sound was in glorious eight
Speaker 1: bit format, so whenever you hear chip tunes, that's the
Speaker 1: good old eight bits sound. For the most part, you
Speaker 1: could upgrade the RAM to twelve kilobytes. But when I
Speaker 1: say you could upgrade the RAM, I really mean a
Speaker 1: reseller could upgrade the RAM. The mac was designed in
Speaker 1: a way where you were not, as a user, supposed
Speaker 1: to make any alterations or change it or upgrade it yourself.
Speaker 1: Like you couldn't just crack open the case and put
Speaker 1: in an expansion slot. That's not how it worked. And
Speaker 1: anyone who's used Macintosh computers since that day can tell
Speaker 1: you this is kind of how Apple likes it. They
Speaker 1: really like to create a closed off system that you
Speaker 1: aren't supposed to mess with, so it became a recurring theme. Also,
Speaker 1: it had no hard drive, so anything had to run
Speaker 1: off a disk drive. If you wanted to boot up
Speaker 1: your computer, you had to put the system boot disc
Speaker 1: into the disk drive, turn your machine on. It would
Speaker 1: read the operating system from its boot disc, launch into it,
Speaker 1: and then if you want to change another you know,
Speaker 1: to another software, another piece of software you would go in,
Speaker 1: you would activate it, you would be prompted to put
Speaker 1: in the appropriate disc. You'd pull out the system operations disc,
Speaker 1: put in your application disc. Then you could use your application.
Speaker 1: Such were the dark days of the personal computer industry. Now,
Speaker 1: eventually you could end up buying a secondary drive that
Speaker 1: would be dedicated solely to the system boot disc, which
Speaker 1: meant that you could use the other drive for all
Speaker 1: your applications. But that cost extra. So let's talk about cost.
Speaker 1: Remember Raskin wanted his machine to cost between five hundred
Speaker 1: and a thousand dollars. So how much did the original
Speaker 1: mac cost when it went on sale? The original Macintosh
Speaker 1: cost two thousand, four hundred nine five dollars. If you
Speaker 1: were to adjust that for inflation and say how much
Speaker 1: would I need to spend today to be equivalent to
Speaker 1: the spending power the purchasing power of that two thousand
Speaker 1: four money. The answer to that is nearly five thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred dollars. So that translates into saying that the
Speaker 1: first Macintosh computer would have cost you about the same
Speaker 1: as five thousand, seven hundred bucks in today's money. Pretty
Speaker 1: expensive computer, extremely expensive, about honestly. Now, eventually, like I
Speaker 1: said they would release the hard disk twenty that was
Speaker 1: the drive that would be the sole purpose of keeping
Speaker 1: the system to itself, so that you could use the
Speaker 1: other drive just for your applications. That was an additional
Speaker 1: one thousand four d dollars, so very expensive, more than
Speaker 1: half of what the computer itself cost. Uh, not exactly
Speaker 1: a budget machine. On the software side, the coding side,
Speaker 1: who had Bill Atkinson who had coded a method for
Speaker 1: displaying overlapping windows to make it smooth and useful for
Speaker 1: Apple users. That allows you to actually have numerous applications
Speaker 1: open at the same time and you could navigate between them.
Speaker 1: Anyone who's used a Gooey based computer system and at
Speaker 1: all is familiar with this. That you can have multiple
Speaker 1: windows open and switch between them. That was new back
Speaker 1: in something that you you know, normally you would have
Speaker 1: to quit out of an application and open a new
Speaker 1: application if you want to do something different on the computer.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just switch back and forth. So this was
Speaker 1: a new thing and very innovative. Meanwhile, you also had
Speaker 1: other designers who are working on the iconography for the
Speaker 1: operating system, so the different little icons you would see,
Speaker 1: the designs that would pop up whenever the machine was
Speaker 1: processing information. All of that went through rigorous design before
Speaker 1: it ever launched with the Macintosh, and it made the
Speaker 1: computer more appealing to use, as like it was a
Speaker 1: more friendly type of machine than the cold text based
Speaker 1: devices of the past. Oh and there was a commercial
Speaker 1: that didn't hurt too much either. It was the infamous
Speaker 1: Apple nineteen eight four commercial and it was directed by
Speaker 1: the famed director Ridley Scott. So, yeah, the same guy
Speaker 1: who directed Blade Runner directed an Apple commercial in that
Speaker 1: blows my mind. I mean, this is a visionary director.
Speaker 1: And if you watch that commercial, it's very powerful. It's
Speaker 1: an incredible ad. It has often been listed among the
Speaker 1: best commercials of all time, and I think it's still
Speaker 1: holds a place up there just for its dramatic impact.
Speaker 1: So in the commercial, uh, and it was all a
Speaker 1: matter of timing. It was so well done. We see
Speaker 1: a dystopian futuristic society, kind of like a bunch of
Speaker 1: people dressed in gray shaved heads, staring straight ahead, marching
Speaker 1: down the hallway into like a lecture hall, taking seats
Speaker 1: in a in almost like an auditorium setting, staring at
Speaker 1: an enormous screen where there is the very large face
Speaker 1: of a man. The man's face is probably normal size,
Speaker 1: but the image makes it look huge, yelling out various
Speaker 1: authoritarian nonsense, stuff like you will conform and you will
Speaker 1: obey that kind of thing, very big brother ish and
Speaker 1: dictating to the group how things must be. And you
Speaker 1: also keep cutting back over to this woman in a
Speaker 1: colorful outfit as she's jogging down the hallway and she's
Speaker 1: carrying a massive hammer, like a like a big warhammer
Speaker 1: style hammer, and she runs. It's really an Olympic hammer.
Speaker 1: I guess she runs into this this lecture hall does
Speaker 1: a spin throw and throws the hammer into the screen,
Speaker 1: destroying it, and it shows this beautiful bright light, and
Speaker 1: the the people snap out of their dystopic funk and
Speaker 1: they look around, and then you get hit by the
Speaker 1: tagline which says, on January, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh
Speaker 1: and you'll see why nine eight four won't be like
Speaker 1: Night four. So what they mean is the year nine
Speaker 1: eight four won't be like the classic George Orwell novel four,
Speaker 1: which features Big Brother in this authoritarian government that dictates
Speaker 1: everything has to be a very specific way, the message being, hey,
Speaker 1: the Macintosh breaks free of the mold you get to
Speaker 1: be you. You aren't some drone, You're not some just
Speaker 1: faceless entity inside a larger company or corporation. You are
Speaker 1: a person. That was the message. So it's really selling
Speaker 1: the idea, uh that the Macintosh was all about individuality
Speaker 1: and not about conformity, and it was incredible. I didn't
Speaker 1: own the Macintosh. I had an Apple to E and
Speaker 1: then we switched over to IBM compatible machines in my house,
Speaker 1: so I don't have any personal steak. I have no
Speaker 1: nostalgia for the Macintosh computer as a thing, but I
Speaker 1: certainly think the marketing scheme for the Macintosh was nothing
Speaker 1: short of a masterpiece. Jobs really loved the ad, and
Speaker 1: so did John Scully, who at that time was the
Speaker 1: president and CEO of Apple. Mark Coola had stepped down
Speaker 1: John Scully, who had come from PEPSI, had now taken
Speaker 1: the helm of Apple, and Scully and Jobs both thought
Speaker 1: the ad was tops. They showed it off to the
Speaker 1: board of directors and they were less happy with it.
Speaker 1: They thought it was too oppressive, too dark, too gloomy,
Speaker 1: so they wanted to scrap the ad and Jobs and
Speaker 1: Only really didn't want that to happen, so they kind
Speaker 1: of dragged their feet a little bit and there uh
Speaker 1: their ad agency, the Commission. The commission the add from
Speaker 1: said eventually, you know, we can get rid of most
Speaker 1: the ad spots, but there too, we cannot offload. One
Speaker 1: of them was in Idaho. The other was a national
Speaker 1: spot during the Super Bowl, right we we can't. We
Speaker 1: can't drop that one. It's no one's gonna buy it.
Speaker 1: You would lose a huge amount of money because the
Speaker 1: ad space is so expensive. Whether that was true or
Speaker 1: whether this was all an attempt to kind of get
Speaker 1: the ad to the public despite what the Border directors
Speaker 1: had said, who's to say. But ultimately Apple went ahead
Speaker 1: and ran the ad during the Super Bowl, reaching more
Speaker 1: than ninety million people in the process, and it was
Speaker 1: an enormous impact. News agencies ran stories about this ad
Speaker 1: because it was just so effective, and they called it
Speaker 1: a groundbreaking commercial, which gave Apple even more marketing reach
Speaker 1: that they didn't pay for. Because news agencies were talking
Speaker 1: about a commercial for them. It was a gold mine
Speaker 1: for Apple, and they were able to sell more than
Speaker 1: seventy thousand Macintosh computers within a couple of months of
Speaker 1: it debuting. It debuted late January by March, they had
Speaker 1: sold more than seventy thousand computers at more than two
Speaker 1: thousand bucks a pop. That was a really expensive computer
Speaker 1: in and selling seventy thousand of them was a huge
Speaker 1: success story. And it was just the beginning for the Macintosh.
Speaker 1: And there's so much more I could say about this computer,
Speaker 1: but for today, I'm gonna call this a close. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna bring this to an end because this was the
Speaker 1: birth of the Macintosh, it's debut to the world. I
Speaker 1: think it makes a good ending for this part of
Speaker 1: the story. And in a future episode, I'll explore how
Speaker 1: the Macintosh evolved into the Mac and the trials and
Speaker 1: tribulations of its evolution, how it changed so dramatically, how
Speaker 1: Jobs being forced out of his own company effectively changed
Speaker 1: the way that the Mac developed, How the mac almost
Speaker 1: perished before Jobs came back and changed things dramatically. Again.
Speaker 1: So love him or hate him, jobs got results done
Speaker 1: and he sold a lot of computers. Uh, So that's
Speaker 1: another story. I'll probably take that on. Who knows, maybe
Speaker 1: that will be my next episode. I have not decided yet,
Speaker 1: but maybe next episode will be the Macintosh Story Part two,
Speaker 1: where I talk about how it changed from its initial
Speaker 1: version over the years to turn into things like the
Speaker 1: iMac and that'd be kind of fun. But for now,
Speaker 1: I gotta go. If you guys have any suggestions for
Speaker 1: people I should have on the show topics I should cover,
Speaker 1: questions or comments about anything I've chatted about, you can
Speaker 1: write me. My email address for the show is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: always get in touch over social media. The handle for
Speaker 1: the show on Facebook and Twitter is tech Stuff h
Speaker 1: s W. Remember you can go to twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: slash tech stuff to watch me record these shows live.
Speaker 1: There's a chat room you can actually engage in chat
Speaker 1: while I'm talking, uh as the people who are there
Speaker 1: right now can tell you I am happy to chat
Speaker 1: with folks whenever I'm not directly recording my from my notes,
Speaker 1: but yeah, check that out. Go to twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: slash tech Stuff. You'll be able to find a schedule
Speaker 1: of my appearances there and find out when you can
Speaker 1: tune in to hear me record these shows. You get
Speaker 1: to see everything, including all the mistakes. There aren't a
Speaker 1: whole lot of them, but they do happen, and if
Speaker 1: you are there, you'll get to enjoy that Also, you'll
Speaker 1: hear shows about a month before they publish. And until
Speaker 1: next time, I'll tell if you guys again really soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it,
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