The History of the Macintosh Posted by zepa on 8:16 AM

Some people forget that Apple, formerly known as Apple Computer, was in business for almost ten years before the Macintosh debuted. In fact, in the late 1970s the firm had two of the best-selling "conformist" computers around, the Apple II and IIe. Still, it was the "1984"-themed commercial that ran during the January 1984 Super Bowl broadcast that introduced most of the non-nerd world to Apple and its new Macintosh - new because of its mouse pointer, small size and "insanely great" Graphical User Interface (GUI). Times were not simply "a-changing." Times changed, forever.

The first Mac was a drastic departure from Apple's previous "new thing," the $10,000 Lisa. The Lisa had the GUI, it had the mouse and it had the beginnings of a good product, but it cost too much, was too big and had a supremely expensive 1MB of RAM. Under Steve Jobs' direction, the Macintosh rose from an appliance computing project started by Jef Raskin at Apple and was tasked with being the "computer for the rest of us." Apple concentrated on bashing the bland conformity of DOS computing, the regnant standard of the early 1980s, so the Macintosh attracted artists, musicians, activists and evangelists from the very start. An early Apple employee, Guy Kawasaki, even wrote a Zen-like tome, "The Macintosh Way," celebrating the advent of an era where many people could be non-conformists together, a slick bit of marketing if there ever were one.

The 1980s through the mid-1990s Steve Jobs quit his job (before he could be fired) after losing a board of directors battle with John Sculley, the former Pepsi CEO that Jobs fought so hard to woo for Apple's "business minded" executive. From the mid-1980s through 1996, Jobs was out, Wozniak went back to college - and the Macintosh, and its parent firm, foundered and floundered. Criticized throughout its first decade as underpowered and overpriced, with little business software, the Macintosh survived because of a confluence of factors that created the "desktop publishing revolution." Had it not been for the introduction of the LaserWriter printer, a page layout program (PageMaker) from Aldus and an increase in RAM capacity from 128K in the original Mac to 4MB in the Mac Plus, the Mac may have died by 1987.