Welcome to Macintosh Page #3

And that was what you could get with it

at this point in time.

That was every piece of software

Apple had.

And then this is the real deal.

This is the real deal.

It's a used computer.

It was actually used, but here's the key.

There's the serial number.

And as you can see,

this was serial number five.

Fifth machine

to ever come down the line...

...assuming they put stickers

on one through four.

This machine was in regular use

probably up until...

Well, it was in regular use past

the introduction of the Macintosh...

...so probably up until 1984 or '80...

No, '86 or '87.

- This machine was in regular use.

That's what you came

all this way to see.

So basically you had this

before anybody else did.

Yes, we...

I guess I have to say

I identified the potential of the product.

We were the first dealer/distributor

that Apple ever had.

I wrote Apple's first distributor

agreement, which was liberally plager...

I mean, inspired by

a Pioneer car-stereo agreement...

...went through

and defined the terms...

...and what would be done

and sent it back.

And Apple had their lawyers

take a look at it and we signed it.

And we were the first-ever Apple dealer.

The Macintosh began with Jef.

Jef Raskin was a professor at UCSD.

Jef was a music professor

as well as a computer professor.

Jef was hired at Apple

to start the Pubs Department at Apple.

Jef is a great writer. Was always...

Just had a great sense of humor,

was really articulate...

...had a great rebel attitude.

In... I believe February '79

was the very beginning...

...of the Mac project, where he

approached Mike Markkula to ask...

To talk about his ideas about a low-cost,

easy-to-use computer.

And so he started writing

a series of papers...

...later became called, I guess,

the Macintosh Papers.

And then around the fall of '79, he...

Mike Markkula was impressed enough

with the papers...

...that he gave him some budget

to pursue starting a project.

Jef needed hardware for a prototype.

Jef had sort of the basic idea

of the hardware spec'd out.

He had the notion

of the bitmap display...

...which was, of course,

crucial to it being a Macintosh.

But anyway, he needed to find

a hardware designer...

...and Bill Atkinson ran into Burrell,

who was working in Service Department.

Bill had seen glimmers

of Burrell's genius.

He introduced him to Jef as:

"Here's the guy who could design

your Macintosh for you."

Jef said, at the first...

"We'll see about that."

Jef was very proud of himself.

But he quickly...

To Jef's credit, he quickly saw

Burrell was the man to do the job.

The project really took on reality...

...when Burrell did his first design

over Christmas vacation...

...at the very, very end of the decade.

I think that's a notable point about

the Mac that writers don't really make.

It was really born with the 1980s...

...because it was designed

right at the cusp of the decade ending.

But meanwhile, once he got that going...

...Steve Jobs got wind of it,

as well as other people at Apple, that...

...boy, here's this board that is

one-third the price of the Lisa...

...that's twice as fast. That's amazing.

The most common inspiration, clearly,

was the Apple II.

Steve Jobs was even

explicit about that...

...telling us we were reincarnating

the Apple II for the '80s.

I realized, as we were trying

to complete the software...

...that, boy, the Mac was so heavily

graphics-based...

...we needed someone who was

a world-class graphic designer.

I had basically asked Susan

to come as my date...

...to a few of the

Macintosh parties we had.

That was kind of the first connection.

And she met some of the team

and really liked them...

...and so I proposed that she work on it.

But the Mac prototypes

were too rare to get her one.

So I first started her off

with graph paper.

Went and just bought

some pretty fine graph paper...

...and told her to make drawings

by filling in the squares or not.

And she did some fantastic work,

doing some drawings that way...

...that I think I still have somewhere.

And so I showed them to people

on the team and they said:

"Boy, yeah, she's good."

Jef made one other key hire,

a woman named Joanna Hoffman...

...who became the Macintosh's

first marketing person.

She has a great story about being

interviewed by Jef...

...while Jef was at his piano keyboard.

And when he liked something she said,

he'd play a happy little melody.

If he didn't like it so much,

he'd express his reactions musically.

And those original Mac team members,

to this day, are my best friends...

...my extended family.

I would do anything for them.

Apple, consciously or not...

...positioned itself

as an alternative to IBM...

...which represented the establishment,

the government, big corporations.

In 1977, Apple,

a young, fledgling company...

...invents the Apple II, the first

personal computer as we know it today.

IBM dismisses the personal computer

as too small to do serious computing...

...and unimportant to their business.

And this was at a time...

Post-Watergate, late '70s.

- People were suspicious of the

government and what it represented.

And the PC, the personal computer,

was a revolution in computing.

And at the time,

there was a utopian mindset.

The idea that technology, especially

personal-computer technology...

...would enable people to throw off

the shackles of society...

...and foment a technological revolution.

IBM enters

the personal-computer market...

...in November '81 with the IBM PC.

It is now 1984.

It appears IBM wants it all.

Will Big Blue dominate

the entire computer industry?

The entire Information Age?

Was George Orwell right about 1984?

He made a lot of money out of Apple...

...but he dropped out of Silicon Valley

and he taught high school for 10 years.

He volunteered in, you know,

the local high school...

...to teach kids engineering

and computer science.

When Apple lost Steve,

they lost their way, to some extent.

They became a shadow

of what they were.

You know, the first half of the '90s,

they were sort of all over the place.

They didn't know exactly

what the best thing for them to do was.

Didn't know if they were supposed

to be licensing the operating system...

...or if they should be making the Newton

and trying to do the next big thing.

Well, I think the main thing that

touched most people was at the time...

...all the press was bad about Apple.

Apple's gonna die...

...Macintosh's market share

was slipping.

There's no software,

there's no hardware.

Everything was coming unglued.

My first job at Apple

was software evangelist.

So my duties were to find developers

or meet with developers...

...and convince them to write

Macintosh versions of their software...

...as well as hardware manufacturers,

to create peripherals.

So it was basically

to proselytize Macintosh...

...to the third-party-developer

community.

Well, the first time I was there, we were

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