Macintosh turns 20

Steve Jobs' company has undergone highs and lows

On January 24 Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."
With this slogan, Apple announced to the world the birth of a computer that would revolutionize the history of information technology.
The year was, of course, 1984, and from the Tampa, Florida, stadium the most important media event of the year was being televised: the 18th Super Bowl, pitting Los Angeles vs. Washington.
Under Ridley Scott's masterful direction, the commercial followed a script that was inspired by the Big Brother metaphor conceived by George Orwell in his famous book, 1984. Orwell would be amazed by a TV commercial showing an audience of grey and mute people, harangued by a figure projected on a large screen. The totalitarian society was enslaved by Big Brother and depicted in Orwell's work. In the commercial, a girl dressed in bright colours threw a hammer into the big screen, breaking Big Brother's grip on the minds of his slaves.
Twenty years have passed since the first time the world heard of the Macintosh. That commercial, shot specifically for the Super Bowl, was never broadcast again, but the Macintosh did not cease to amaze.
It sported 128KB of RAM, an 8-MHz MC68000 processor, 400-KB floppy drive, 9 inch integrated B/W screen, audio output, mouse, keyboard, and two serial ports, but the real revolution was in the software. Its innovation on competing computers was the introduction of the GUI (Graphical User Interface), which nowadays allows users to operate a computer with extreme ease.
While contemporary MS-DOS based computers by IBM still worked (and would continue to do so for quite a while) in the classic command-line mode, the Macintosh used a mouse to move a cursor on a screen with windows and icons. Even today, the desktop of the first Macintosh, despite being small (just 9 inches) and in black and white, looks remarkably familiar: it already had pull-down menus, directory icons, the trash basket.
The idea for this interface between man and machine was originally conceived in a laboratory at XEROX, and Steve Jobs had the merit of understanding its efficiency.
The new computer was a huge success: in the first 100 days 50,000 units were sold. By the end of that fiscal year, Apple posted record sales: $1.5 billion, 54 percent more than the previous 12 months.
To tell the truth, the first Apple computer using a GUI was not the Macintosh but the Lisa, a machine launched in 1983, equipped with 512-KB RAM (expandable up to 2MB), three expansion slots, two floppy drives, an external hard disk and a 12 inch B/W screen. Despite these advanced features, Lisa was not a success, for a very simple reason: it cost $10,000. Even the second version, sold for half that much, did not appeal to a market where IBM PCs were already established as dominant.
In the past 20 years, Apple's history was a seesaw of highs and lows, blunders and extraordinary inventions, which changed the world of computers and inspired innovators even in other industries.
In 1985, Microsoft released version 1.0 of Windows, an application that superimposed a rather crude GUI over the DOS, but in the meantime Apple had imposed itself in DTP (DeskTop Publishing) thanks to two tools that were decisively superior for the time: PageMaker (a desktop publishing software) and the LaserWriter (a PostScript printer at an affordable price).
In the fall of 1985, co-founder Steve Jobs was dismissed from Apple due to differences of opinions with then-CEO John Sculley, and founded a new company, NeXT, in an exile that lasted 11 years.
The rest is current history, with the arrival of Windows 3.0 and a full decade later of Windows 95 and the spread of PC clones.
In the first half of the Nineties, Michael Spindler (new CEO of Apple Computer) decided to try to imitate the competition and allow Mac clones to be made, but it was too late: the new Mac compatibles eroded Apple's market share without contributing to the diffusion of MacOS.
In the winter of 1995/96, Apple posted disastrous financial losses, for $68 million. Gil Amelio replaced Spindler, and his first move was a complete restructuring of the Cupertino-based company. Amelio's decisions were met with mixed feelings; his reorganization saved Apple from financial collapse, and following two more negative quarters the company returned profitable. Despite that feat, Amelio lacked the genius and intuition required for leading a company as creative as Apple. That was a period of stagnation, with users awaiting a new OS and a sign of strong comeback.
That's when Amelio took the strongest decision in his career in Apple: in late 1996 he announced the acquisition of NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs. NeXTstep was to be the foundation of later releases of MacOS, and Jobs' return would bring back Apple's original spirit.
In 1997, after Amelio resigned, Jobs became CEO ad interim; the situation was critical and every choice from then on had to be right and timely. First of all an alliance with Microsoft: in exchange for the withdrawal of charges of plagiarism for the interface and 7 percent of the company shares (but no voting rights), Apple obtained $150 million and the certainty that MS Office, the most popular office productivity package, would be updated under MacOS.
Other decisions that Jobs took upon his return included the cancellation of the Newton project (constantly in the red), progenitor of the Palm Pilot; the gradual retirement of the licenses for the manufacture of clones; and the launch of the Applestore for on-line sales.
From then on, excluding a few small slips, Jobs' intuitions have brought Apple to a comfortable position, also from a financial standpoint. From the iMac to the G5 to ultra-lightweight portables, the Cupertino-based company managed to get new blood by matching technical and computational capabilities with style and functionality in its products.
Regardless, the success of 20 years ago is likely unimaginable for the Macintosh of today, which cannot pass the 5 percent mark in its share of the PC market.
This does not seem to concern Steve Jobs. After 20 years, despite his beard and hair turning grey, he still harbours the same spirit of the kid who, in 1976, with his college mate Steve Wozniak, founded a computer company in his garage. Nowadays, he and Apple find satisfaction on a different market, revitalized by the company itself: digital music. The iPod, the company's mp3 player, holds 31 percent of the market, while iTunes Music Store, the service allowing customers to download music for 99¢ a song, just reached 30 million songs downloaded.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that a 2004 edition of the 1984 commercial shows the same girl launching her hammer against the screen... with an iPod hanging from her wrist.

Best wishes Apple.

Publication Date: 2004-02-01
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3587