Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And in our last episode, I talked about the many different computers that appeared in the late seventies and early to mid eighties as the home computer market began to coalesce. But there were numerous contenders. Obviously, there were companies like Texas Instruments and Commodore and Tandy, and they had all put forth various computer systems onto the market. And while the computers those and other companies made had an impact, For example, the Commodore sixty four was the best selling computer of all time, ultimately none of those machines stuck around to define the market. Instead, there were essentially two entities that one out over everyone else in very different ways, and those were Apple and IBM. I'll talk about IBM in an upcoming episode. We'll we'll learn how the company's strategy played out. But and this and the next episode, I'm going to focus on Apple and how it weathered many storms to become the company it is today. I've chatted about Apple in the past, from profiles on Steve Jobs to an overview of the company's history. This episode is mostly going to focus on what Apple was doing in the seventies and eighties. The next episode will continue through the late eighties and into the nineties, and we'll investigate how Apple was able to outlast competitors despite some extremely shaky corporate moves. And that's putting it lightly. First, let's start at the beginning. The classic story of Apple is that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom were scamps and computer enthusiasts, dropped out of college to form their own computer company out of Steve Jobs as family's garage. A third partner named Ron Wayne provided some startup cash and wrote the operation manual. He also designed the company's original logo. But the whole Apple was formed inside a garage story is kind of an oversimplification. According to Wozniak, it was a romanticized version of the real history. Wosniak has said in interviews, specifically in an interview with Bloomberg, that the garage story is mostly just that a story. It's one of those stories that fits right into the history of Silicon Valley because there are a lot of companies that were said to have emerged from a garage somewhere in the California area see also Google, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, and even Disney, but Apple was not one of them. When Wosniak, in jobs mainly wosnia let's be honest, designed the first Apple computer, the Apple, and they didn't do it in a garage. They did use. The garage is kind of a halfway point between their workspace, which was actually Steve Wozniak's bedroom, and the stores where they were planning on selling their computer kit, the Apple one. They would go to the garage make sure everything worked properly before they would continue on to the stores. At least that's what Wosniac said happened. Most accounts state that Wosniac designed and built the printed circuit board that was the heart and soul of the company's first computer. And if you listen to my last episode, you know the real brain on that circuit board was the six five zero two microprocessor from Most Technologies that was a company that Commodore had purchased. Wozniak also decided to design the computer to run Basic Basic stands for Beginners all Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, and it's a high level programming language that Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kimminey created back in nineteens sixty four at Dartmouth College. Now they created it as a teaching tool. They wanted something that would let students build programs without having to create their own customized software. By the time Wosniak was working on the Apple One, it was common practice among many computer designers to hard code Basic into the firmware of their machines, into the read only memory or ROM. Wozniak wanted the Apple one to be much more user friendly than the binary based kit computers like the Altare eight hundred. Wosniac used hexadecimal code to build a basic language assembler by hand, directly into the Apple ones read only memory. Now, Ron Wayne was busy working on the operations manual, and Steve Jobs was kind of the hype man. He was marketing this upcoming computer to anyone who would listen. It was nineteen seventy six when the two introduced the Apple one computer at a May meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. This was a hobbyist computer club in California, where people were working with various kits that they had ordered and and assembled computers out of all these different parts. One of the attendees at that meeting was a guy named Paul Terrell, who owned a computer store called the Bite Shop. He made a deal with the Apple partners, and that deal was to build fifty fully assembled computers, which he would then purchase for five dollars apiece. A fully assembled computer didn't mean that Apple one had all the bells and whistles. In fact, it didn't have really that many bells and whistles at all. It didn't have a display, it didn't have a keyboard. Technically, the Apple one was a bare circuit board housed in a wooden case. The partners took out loans to buy the various components they needed to make fifty of these computers. They had just one day left to pay back those loans when they rolled up to Terrell and delivered the Apple one computers. They weren't as fully assembled as what Terrell is expecting, but he did pay the founders enough for them to be able to pay off those loans. At that stage, Ron Wayne resigned from Apple. He had invested money in the company, and he was worried that Apple was destined to crash in on itself. He returned his ten percent share of Apple ownership, and he was paid out the princely sum of five hundred dollars. Now, in case you're the curious type, on the day I am recording this, Apple's market capitalization value is approximately eight hundred fifty four point one six billion dollars with a B, so ten percent of that company would be essentially about eighty five billion dollars. He got out for five hundred. But of course there was no way to know back then what would happen with Apple, and there were plenty of times between Apple's founding and today when it seemed like the company was on the verge of bankruptcy and sometimes seemed was being too generous. It really was on the virgin bankruptcy. Apple would go on to sell Apple one kits for six hundred sixty six dollars and sixty six cents. That price was likely arrived at not just because it represented more money than it costs to build the machines, but also because both jobs in Wosniac were known to have a mischievous sense of humor, though there is another story that said Steve Jobs originally wanted to sell the Apple One for seven hundred seventy seven dollars. Wozniak objected, saying that that was too much to charge for the computer he was building. He said, that's that's overcharging people. So he countered with the six hundred sixty six dollar figure, saying he didn't do it to be cheeky. He wasn't saying, oh, I'm going to choose the number of the beast to be the price of this computer. Rather, he just took seven seven seven, and he subtracted a one from each of those digits, and that's how he arrived at his price. According to Wozniak, while Jobs in Wosniac worked on selling and deliver ring Apple one kits, Wozniak was also looking ahead at what should be the company's next step. He wanted to create a computer that had everything a person would need to get started. This would help push computers out of the realm of just the dedicated hobbyists. It's a very small slice of the population. They had time and interest to learn how computers work, and so they were willing to take something that was bare bones and go the rest of the way to make it something that was useful. That's not true with the general public. They need something that's more robust, more user friendly. So to do this, the computer had to contain all the components necessary to work. He began to design the Apple to the Apple two, use the first Apple computer design as its foundation. It had the same most technology six five oh tube microprocessor running at the same one mega hurts clock speed. They had basic hard coded into the Apple two's read only memory, but it also had stuff the original Apple computer lacked, like a plastic case. Steve Jobs concentrated on making the Apple to look esthetically pleasing, while Wozniak concerned himself with the computer's innards. Jobs just wanted to make sure that looked like a product that people would feel compelled to buy. He wanted it to be an appliance, something that would be a a ready adoption into the standard American home, something akin to like a refrigerator or a washing machine. It also had a video connector that would let users link the Apple Too to a television and use that as a monitor. With such a TV, who could display up to sixteen colors at low resolution and by low resolution, I mean really low forty by forty eight pixels. At high resolution, which was just two eighty pixels by one ninety two pixels, it could only display six fixed colors. It could also produce sound, and a lot of those early computers were silent. They didn't have anything that could produce sound. The Apple two entry came with four kilobytes of RAM, so if you're buying the basic Apple two computer, four kilobytes of random access memory was what you got. You could, however, buy versions of the Apple two that had up to sixty four kilobytes of random access memory. It had expansion slots, eight of them, in fact, but the first one was reserved for upgrades to the computers RAM or ROM. If you were a pure hobbyist, you could even opt to buy the computer's circuit board as a standalone product. You would then have to supply the case, the keyboard, the display, and other peripherals all on your own. The base model of a fully assembled Apple two at four kilobytes of RAM was one thousand, two hundred ninety eight dollars when it hits store shelves. The forty eight kilobyte RAM version sold for two thousand, six hundred thirty eight dollars, and if you went bare bones with the circuit board, that sets you back five bucks for the four kilobyte RAM version. The computer debut in April nineteen seventy seven, almost a year after the founding of the company, which was on April Fool's Day of nineteen seventy six, and then it would go on sale a little bit later in seventy seven. A couple of months after that, Apple signed a big deal with a company that would be both an ally and a competitor over the years, and that company was Microsoft. The deal was that Apple could use Microsoft's software called Apple Soft Basic. The licensing agreement term was eight years and cost Apple twenty one thousand dollars. Now, the reason for the switch to Apple Soft Basic was that the integer basic that Wozniak had designed for the Apple Too had limitations. It didn't have support for floating point math, which meant that you could have well, you had restrictions essentially on what you could program on the Apple Too. Now, Wosnia's reasoning originally for using integer basic was one it was easier to program for or to code for, and thus it would take less time to actually build into the Apple too. But also he was thinking of the Apple too as a computer for games and for programming games, and at that time games didn't require sophisticated operations, so there was no need to go more complicated, because what Wozniak was thinking was that this Apple two was going to be meant for less ambitious projects. Wozniak at that time was already working on other technologies that would be released in nineteen seventy eight. He didn't have time to develop a new dialect of Basic, and so they decided to go with Microsoft's solution. Apple employee Randy Wigginton, who was a teenager at the time, helped adapt the Microsoft designed Apple sauce for the Apple Too. He added in some additional features in the process. Wigginton would go on to become one of the more important people in the Macintosh development team a few years later. Upon launch, the external media device available for the Apple two was a cassette drive. This used cassettes with magnetic tape to store information. In nineteen seventy eight, Apple would introduce the Disc two or disc close bracket open bracket because they use the little brackets as Roman numerals at those times. I don't know how you're supposed to say that. Apart from Disc two it was a five and a quarter inch disk drive. If you guys remember those, A lot of save icons still look like discs, so maybe you know what a five and a quarter inch disc looks like. And Apple two's new operating system was DOSE three point one. Just kidding, it's DOS. DOS three point one. DOS, by the way, stands for disc Operating System, and DOSS is a generic term. It's not it's not something doesn't mean that all operating systems called DOSS are related. In fact, the Apple version of DOSS is not related to MS DOS or IBMPC DOS. A computer is only useful if you can buy or build good soft air for it. The Apple, too, was fortunate and that it was the first home computing platform that could support a computer program called visit calc so visual calculation if you if you are, vision calculation if you prefer. This was a spreadsheet program capable of running basic operations on figures entered into the spreadsheet. So for the first time, a personal computer could run software that small businesses and accountants depended upon to do their work. It could speed up a laborious process considerably, and it was far more affordable than the computers intended for big enterprises, which were routinely around ten thousand dollars. The Apple Too became a popular computer, not just because people were adopting it for their home, but as a business machine for various companies, as well as an educational tool in schools. It was pretty much perfectly positioned for its time. In nineteen seventy seven, Apple two sales hit only seven seventy thousand dollars. Remember it didn't launch until the second half of nineteen seventy seven, but they sold seven hundred seventy thousand dollars worth of units. The following year, Wozniak launched the disc To that perphal had a price tag of four dollars, which was actually much lower than a lot of other disk drives that were hitting the market at that time, and Apples sales skyrocketed. They were boosted by the components that were being released, like the disc To as well as the killer app VisiCalc and by skyrocketed, I mean that their sales increased more than tenfold. In nineteen seventy eight, the company racked up seven point nine million dollars in sales, So they went from seven hundred seventy thousand in seventy seven to seven point nine million dollars in seventy eight. That gave Apple a very strong position and the home computer market. As other machines like the Commodore Pet, the Atari four hundred and the Atari eight hundred machines, and the TRS eighty we're all vying for a spot, but Apple's position was not yet guaranteed. I'll tell you a little bit more about this story in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. The success of the Apple to encourage Wozniak and Jobs. But then something happened that set the two at odds with one another. Jobs had seen that visitalc really propelled sales of the Apple too, and it turned the Apple too into a must have computer for anyone who needed an easier way to perform accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Wozniak had designed the Apple to originally as a machine upon which you could program games and do some simple software. But what if Apple went after the business market on purpose instead of just kind of accidentally falling upon it. That was a big move. From a corporate point of view, IBM had a dominant position in that realm. The company had yet to enter into the home computer market, but it definitely had a huge presence business machines. I mean, that's what part of IBM stands for, right, business machines. Jobs saw this as a chance to push Apple into the same league as IBM, and he began to lead work on the Apple three computer. Unlike the previous Apple computers, this one was intended to be a business machine first and foremost, and according to Wozniak, the other big difference between the Apple three and the previous two computers that Wozniak had designed was that marketing was in charge of the design process rather than engineering. It was a marketing driven product, not an engineering driven product. Wozniak said. This marketing focused approach created frustrations among the development team, particularly when they were given seemingly impossible tasks. One of those tasks was to design a computer with a form factor that was literally too small to fit all the necessary components inside it. This was not a simple error on the part of marketing. It was an understandable, though preventable mistake. At the time teams and Apple were working on the Apple three. The f c C was creating a new set of standards that computers were going to have to follow with regard to radio frequency emissions. Without those standards codified, without them actually set, Apple designers couldn't be sure that the computer they were designing was actually going to meet those standards. So there was a danger that they could create a computer that would not meet f CC standards and then it would be recalled and that would be a huge waste of time, energy, and money. So they decided they were going to make the case out of aluminum, and that would help block any radio frequency emissions and avoid problems further down the line. It also would make the computer incredibly heavy. The big problem was they settled on the case size and shape based off the engineer's list of requirements early in the process. So the engineers get a list of requests saying we want the computer to be able to do X, Y and z. The engineers look at the requests and they say, all right, in order to do X, Y and Z, these are the components that are going to have to go into the computer. Here's the size that we're gonna need to work inside, and then you have the case folks saying all right, well, we're gonna design a case that is of this size these dimensions, and then we're gonna get started. And once you go over to get the finalization of the chassis and you cast the mold for the case, you kind of committed because that's a fairly expensive process all in itself, and if you go back to the drawing board, you've wasted all that time and money. So once you've cast the mold, you're pretty much stuck with the form factor you've chosen. The other problem was that the management marketing was looking at what the computer was going to be able to do instead, you know, it would be great if it could also do A, B and C in addition to X, Y and z. And then the developers would say, you told us you wanted x, y and z, and that's what we told the people who are making the case, and so the case is going to fit X, y and z, but it can't fit x y and Z and A B and C. And then marketing would say, make it fit, and then developers would start to sweat bullets. This is called feature creep in general, the idea that features keep on creeping into the design of a product. It doesn't have to be a computer, it could be literally any product. Feature creep is a terrible thing to have happened to you when you're working on one of these projects. If you are not the one dictating feature creep, if you're the one dictating it, then you just wonder, why is this such a big deal? Why is this such a problem? Come on, just at it. But if you're actually the person who's trying to execute this, it's a huge problem because every feature that's added creates more complications, in this case literally In this case, the complication was that the components were taking up way too much space there were getting crammed together. In addition to that, Steve Jobs had a specific design that he wanted that was really going to cause a problem, which was that he did not want there to be a fan inside this computer to dissipate heat. Uh. The story goes that he felt that the fans were too noisy and inelegant, and they kind of violated his design principles of making a computer and appliance. So Wozniak and several of his team began to feel that Jobs, as ideas stressed form over function to a point that was untenable and later WASNIA would say the Apple three had a failure rate out in the field because of concessions that were made in order to meet the requirements that marketing had put down, but that were not good engineering decisions. This was not great. Apple did announce the Apple three in May during the National Computer Conference, so they had pretty much committed themselves at that point. The computers would eventually go on sale in the fall of nineteen. So let's talk about some of the specs of the Apple three and then talk about some of the problems that the Apple three suffered. On paper, the Apple three sounded great. It had a six five oh two compatible micro processors, so the same style of microprocessor as the Apple one and the Apple two. Uh. This one, however, was made by Center Tech, not by most technologies, but still it was a compatible processor is in that same general family. The processor at a clock smeat of two mega hurts, so essentially double what the Apple two was capable of doing. The computer shipped with a hundred bytes of RAM as the standard amount of memory that was expandable all the way up to five kilobytes, so that was great because with more memory you can run more sophisticated applications and programs. It had an internal five and a quarter inch floppy disk drive. This was the first of Apples computers to have an incorporated drive built directly into the case, so it wasn't an external drive that sat next to the CPU unit. It was actually incorporated into the case itself, which you know you often will see with PCs these days if they still have a floppy disk drive or an optical drive, they're usually built into the main case. But for a while that was not what you would find with home computers. They would find an external drive that you would connect via cables to your CPU um but this one had it built into the case, so put it all onto a nice form factor. Unlike earlier computers, the Apple three had a separate keyboard from the main computer chassis, so that would eventually become a standard characteristic for many computers moving forward, but at the time it was pretty standard have the keyboard actually built into the case. So while the drives were frequently external, the keyboard was incorporated directly into the CPU case. For a lot of early computers, in fact, a lot of Apples computers that follow this one would also have the keyboard built directly into the chassis, but for this one it was separate. The Apple three also had a brand new operating system called Apple s O S. S O S stood for Sophisticated Operating System, but perhaps given the problems Apple three and and encountered, the traditional interpretation of the letters S O S being used as a call for help would be more appropriate. While Wasnia criticized the hardware of the Apple three, he actually praised the operating system. He later would declare that was the best OS on any micro computer system at that time. One problem the s O S had was that it was not backwards compatible with the Apple two system, so that meant you could not run Apple to software natively on the Apple three. You could do it if you used an Apple DOSS boot disk in the Apple three, so you can actually run a program on the Apple three that would essentially emulate Apple too. Unfortunately, the demands that Steve Jobs and his marketing team had placed on the design team resulted in a pretty unreliable computer. Lots of people reported problems with the machines. According to Wozniak, a hundred percent of them did. For one thing, these machines got really hot. Now that's not a big surprise. The case was made of aluminium, there was no fan in there. The components were crammed together, so they would heat up inside these cases, and eventually that heat would be enough to warp the circuit try Sometimes chips would become unseated from their positions on the circuit board, and according to some accounts, a common way to fix this problem was to physically lift the computer several inches off a desk or table and then drop it, and that would reseat the chips. I believe that falls under the general category of what we call percussive maintenance. In other words, when it breaks, you hit it and hope that it works again. The Apple three quickly earned a reputation for being unreliable. Can't imagine why. This had a huge impact on sales, A negative one, that is. And even though Apple would revise the design and release a couple of upgraded versions later on, the Apple three never got much momentum in the marketplace. Apple had to continue to depend upon the Apple two platform sales to keep things going. In the early nineteen eighties, the Apple to sustain the company while other computers were getting a better foothold in the market. So just as Apple had eyed ibm S position in the corporate world, IBM was now looking at home computers as a possible market. In one IBM released the personal computer or PC. Now that term had been around before IBM used it, and we often will use personal computer as sort of a generic category for all computers meant for home use, but at the time it was very much the domain of IBM. So when you said PC, you meant an IBM machine, and for years later, if you said PC, you may in an IBM compatible machine, and more specifically, you meant something that was running either MS DOSS or later on Microsoft Windows. I'll talk more about the PC in an upcoming episode of Tech Stuff when we cover ibm s approach to the market. In two, Commodore launched the Commodore sixty four home computer, and that machine would go on to be the best selling computer of all time. So Apple had a great head start with the Apple too, but it was in danger of becoming irrelative irrelevant excuse me, as other companies were putting up challengers to the Apple two platform, and to make matters worse around this time, Apple had to start playing whack a mole with various companies that were offering up clones of the Apple to computer. Apple chose not to license its designs, including both its software and it's hardware. They had made this decision that all Apple products were to come from Apple itself, not third parties offering up copies of the hardware or the official Apple software. But of course that didn't stop companies from trying to do that anyway. Some of them made blatant copies of the Apple hardware. They were literally opening up Apple two computers and copying the design as closely as they possibly could. Other companies tried to accomplish the same result through reverse engineering, so they weren't opening up an Apple computer and trying to use the exact same components. They were studying how the Apple two worked and trying to figure out how to make a machine that worked exactly like the Apple too, thus creating a semi plausible denial that they had copied Apple's proprietary technology. One of the companies that did this was called Franklin Computer Corporation, that created an Apple two clone called the Franklin Ace that ended up being pretty popular. Apple sued the Franklin Computer Corporation, and the US Court would ultimately rule in favor of Apple, which was a landmark decision because it established the computer software, including a computer's operating system and need only memory firmware, could be protected by copyright. The Franklin Ace was introduced in ninety two, and Apple was eventually able to force the company to stop selling the clone devices in nineteen eight, six years later. So it was an important victory, but perhaps one that happened a bit too late to be of much help to Apple. There were numerous other Apple clones on the market. In fact, some estimation state that there were about two hundred different clones of the Apple two machines UH and all of its descendants, so not just Apple two, but Apple to E, Apple to C, Apple two, g S, etcetera. The Apple was not able to sue all of these companies. One of them, the Laser one, was actually a reverse engineered version of Apple's software, so or in hardware, it didn't copy it, it was reverse engineered, which eventually made it determined to be a legal clone of the Apple too, and a lot of the clones that were illegal were in other countries, which made it trigg key for Apple to do anything about it. Ultimately, the clones were eating into Apple's sales for the Apple two platform, and the company decided it needed to do something new. So what was next? In Apple launched two new computers. One was an update of the Apple to model called the Apple to E. I had one of those when I was a kid. The other was an experimental high end computer called the Lisa. But let's start with Apple to E. When the Apple Too E debut in January three, no one could predict it was going to become one of the most successful computers of all time. Internally, you wouldn't guess that it would do so well because it had the exact same microprocessor that both the Apple one and Apple two had, that would be that six five O two, and it was running at that one mega hurts clock speed, so it wasn't going any faster. Really. The Apple to E did get an operating system update, so it was running on a new system called pro DOS, which was evolved from that Apple three s OS operating system. It had thirty two kilobytes of read only memory, upon which Apple Soft Basic was burned, and it had sixty four kilobytes of RAM that was upgradeable to a kilobytes using an eight column card. Later, you could get third party expansions that would allow the Apple to E to have several megabytes of RAM, which would make it a really versatile machine for lots of different projects. This was part of the reason the Apple to E was able to remain relevant despite relying on a CPU that was more than five years old. When the Apple to E launched, the two introduced another new feature in Apple products, garyy. For this, you could type letters in lower case yeah. Until the Apple to E you were restricted to upper case letters, but now you had a shift and a cap slut key on the Apple to E keyboard. The Apple to eat could also support color displays, though I remember the one we had when I was a kid was a monochromatic display because I remember it being all green. The Apple to E would get some enhancements later on in its life cycle. If you combine the original to E with the enhanced version that came later, the computer remained in production at Apple for a decade. That's pretty incredible. Even as the company pushed forward with other products, the Apple two line remained a steady source of revenue. It was also a bit of a sore spot for Wozniak because he recognized how much of Apple's success depended upon the workhorse that was the Apple to product line, but he felt that the teams on those projects were regularly overlooked in corporate meetings and messaging. Instead, Wosniac felt the company's more experimental and often less successful ventures were elevated over the teams responsible for providing the actual sales figures. Wosniac would eventually leave Apple, not just because of these misgivings, but also because he was severely injured in an airplane crash and decided he would rather work engineering products than being some sort of manager. By June three, Apple had manufactured the one millionth Apple two computer. That's a big number, but remember that Commodore sixty four ultimately sold seventeen million units, so you just want to keep things in perspective. The other computer I mentioned a minute ago was the Lisa. This machine was another victim of design by committee and also a victim of future creep. Steve Jobs wanted to create a powerful computer, specifically with educational institutions in mind. He named the project after his daughter but throughout the design phase, the computer kept getting more complicated. This also made it more expensive. By the time the Lisa was ready to debut in nineteen eighty three, the price tag hit an astronomical nine thousand, nine nine dollars. This was in nineteen eighty three, so if we had just for inflation, that would mean the computer would cost approximately twenty five thousand, four hundred fifty dollars in today's money. For that price, you better be able to ride the computer to working back. Obviously, that put Lisa outside the realm of personal computers unless you're a millionaire. So I'm not gonna dwell on the Lisa here because that's not the focus of this show. But the important thing was it did pull focus away from the home computer market. Apple teams were being dedicated to this project that was for something that wasn't gonna be for the average consumer. Apple was seeing a lot of success in that market and wasn't. The act felt that it was a mistake to look at other areas. It was also a black mark against Steve Jobs, because you know, he had had two failures in a row. The Apple three was something that he was really behind and that didn't succeed and the Lisa was a colossal failure. So it was two strikes against him in a row. Now, a quick word on leadership at Apple. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were both new to the business scene when they formed the Apple Company, and the first CEO of Apple was brought in from outside. His name was Michael Scott, had no relation to dunder Mifflin, and he served as CEO from nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eight one. Scott was a controversial leader. In nineteen eighty one, on a day that became known as Black Wednesday, he fired half of the Apple two team, saying that he believed their jobs were redundant. He was pretty quickly removed a CEO after that, and then Mike Markola, who was an early investor in Apple and gets the credit for being the third Apple employee, took over the role. He would serve as CEO until nineteen eight three, but then would join the board of directors as chairman and stay on until nineteen More on him in a little bit. In nine, the former CEO of PepsiCo, John Scully, joined Apple. He had to deal with the fall out from Lisa, but he was also at Apple while another project was nearing completion. This project would ultimately define the future for Apple. It was a project that Apple developers have been working on since the late nineteen seventies, and it was called Macintosh. I'll tell you more about that in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now we're gonna talk about Macintosh. But it's hard to trace the actual origins of the Macintosh project, as finding the exact moment to say here's the beginning is next to impossible. There were talks of creating an innovative machine while the Apple two was still in development, and even when it was launching, there were talks about what's gonna come next. Those discussions were energized after Steve Jobs and some other Apple folks visited the Xerox Park facility. When I did the Xerox series, I talked about this, uh, Steve Jobs and his team got a chance to see the innovations Xerox had been more or less sitting on since nineteen seventy three. That included a graphic user interface or gooey g u I and the computer mouse. Although I should also point out the computer mouse did not come out of park itself. Xerox essentially acquired the computer mouse, but that's a discussion for a different episode. The talks with an Apple, coupled with these concepts of a gooey based operating system and a computer mouse input device, led to a couple of big projects within the company. One of those was Lisa, the failed educational computer I mentioned earlier, and the other was the Macintosh. So the Macintosh was a project that executives nearly scrapped on multiple occasions. At one point, the team on the project had only four people on it. They had to regularly argue for the projects survival. Jeff Raskin was the chief champion of the Macintosh in the early stages. He was the lead voice of the project until nineteen one when Steve Jobs would join the Macintosh team. So Jobs had been booted from the Lisa project in nineteen eight one after team members were complaining to the CEO. They were saying that Steve jobs demands were unreasonable. He was getting really interfering with their work and moreover, the whole the whole process was untenable. It was it was making it impossible for them to do their jobs. So They said that because of Jobs involvement, the Lisa project was suffering from feature bloat, including what was then a massive and massively expensive amount of RAM at one whole megabyte at the time, that was a whole bunch, and so executive leadership stepped in and removed Jobs from the Lisa project, and then he migrated over to Macintosh, and he brought some of the developers of Lisa along with him. Now, that caused some friction in the Macintosh team, but many on that project credit Jobs with providing some valuable insight. First, he was a genius when it came to making a user friendly physical form factor. The Macintosh design avoided the mistakes of Lisa. Jobs thought that Macintosh was a work of art, and as such, he arranged for the entire design team to sign the case mold for the Macintosh in two The mold was used for nearly all Macintosh computer cases until nine six, So if you bought a Macintosh from that era and you opened up the case and looked inside, you would be able to see the signatures of the design team on the inside of that case. But Jobs also play some tough restrictions on the project. One was that he demanded the original Macintosh ship with no more than a hundes of RAM memory was really expensive, and Jobs did not want to see the price tag of the Macintosh balloon the way Lisa's did, and the original design team of the Macintosh actually wanted the price to be even lower. They were hoping to keep it out around a thousand dollars. Steve Jobs had already added an features that was going to make that impossible, but he did not want it to run away from him like Lisa. This memory restriction was also really hard to work with because the graphic user interface required a lot of computer memory just a function, which meant if you executed a command, there was only a limited amount of memory left over to handle the job. In fact, if you wanted to just copy one floppy disks contents onto a second blank floppy disk, you'd actually have to switch the two discs out multiple times and would take several minutes to complete the task because there just wasn't enough space in the computer's memory to handle all of the operation. The Macintosh did not use a six five O two microprocessor the way the earlier Apple computers had. It relied on a Motorola sixty eight thousand chips six eight zero zero zero, and it had a seven point eight three mega hurts clock speed. It also had a monochromatic screen with the resolution of five hundred twelve by three forty two. Steve Jobs wanted to go monochrome attic because you could go higher resolution to make the everything on the screen look more crisp, and so he didn't want to incorporate color because he felt that that would compromise on resolution. The Macintosh featured several ports for peripherals, and it shipped with a computer mouse, and it launched in January four with a big marketing campaign to differentiate it from what Apple claimed were the boring limited computers like the IBM models, and it cost two thousand four on launch. Within that same year, Apple would release an updated version of the mac with five twelve kilobytes of memory. This was done in defiance of Steve Jobs's insistence to keep memory down to limit the cost. In fact, Apple would end up marketing this new Macintosh with a campaign that alluded to the fact that the designers made these upgrades without the consent of leadership. But these episodes are meant to focus on how Apple got its position in the marketplace. The Apple two had been a huge success, but the computers following it had not done so well. The Apple three was a technical and commercial failure. The Lisa was incredibly expensive and had very few interested parties willing to pony up the cash for what appeared to be an experimental system. You could call that a complete flop. The Apple to E was doing well, but it was essentially an Apple two with a few minor enhancements, and the company couldn't place all its bets on a rapidly aging platform. So could the Macintosh save the company? Well, that was the initial hope. Apple was putting forth a lot of effort to make McIntosh a success. The design included many proprietary components to make it more difficult to clone the Macintosh than the Apple two platform. The advertising campaign was more than a little ostentatious, with a famous ad shown during the Super Bowl. That commercial compared the established computers in the workplace. In other words, IBM machines as big brother in an orwellianlike environment, the Macintosh was poised to break free of the shackles or something. The commercial was a big hit. It was directed by Ridley Scott of Hollywood fame, but would the commercial move units would boost sales so that Apple could wean itself off of the Apple two platform and move into its next phase as a company. When the Macintosh was still in the planning stages in the late seventies, Apple had high hopes for the platform. In fact, initial projections in a business plan dating to nineteen eighty one said that Apple was going to try and sell two point to million Macintosh computers between nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty five. That would be about forty seven thousand machines a month. Obviously, that was not gonna happen because project delays and feature creep, as well as Steve jobs general involvement, had delayed the release of the Macintosh to nineteen eighty four. That meant Apple had to write off two years of sales from its initial projections. Further, after hot sales in the Macintosh first debuted, the figures slowed down considerably to five thousand units per month. Apple was falling far short of those optimistic projections that the company had made. In part of the problem was the price. That was a bit of it, but part of the problem was also that the there was just not any software for the Macintosh. I mean, the gooey interface was taking up a lot of RAM, the cost of the computer was high. But both of those were problems that you could probably get around if there were stuff to do on the Macintosh. There was very limited programming. Apple offered up the mac Wright program that was kind of a word processing program, and there was an art program called mac Paint, and then there were a few other applications, but that was it. Apple to software was not compatible with the Macintosh platform. And so while the IBM computers on the market might not have been as user friendly as the Macintosh, and they might not have had a graphic user inter face the way the Macintosh did, they might not have had a useful input device like the mouse, they did have a very large software library, which meant you could do a lot more stuff on an IBM compatible computer than you could on a Macintosh. The lackluster sales of the first Macintosh created severe tension with an Apple, particularly between the CEO, John Scully and Steve Jobs. By those tensions had reached a point of no return. Scully removed Jobs from the Macintosh team, and they've been struggling to meet jobs as expectations while delivering upon what they thought would be a good computer well suited for its intended market. Jobs was pushed off to a remote part of the company's offices and he was left there. He went to the board to protest this. He said, Hey, do you know what the CEO is doing. You see what he's doing here. He's removing me from my my duties and I've got nothing to do. The board, which included Mike Markola, sided with Scully and said, yeah, but you're kind of part of the problems, so sorry. What happened next is a matter of some dispute. Ultimately, what matters is Jobs and Apple parted company at this point. Now some say that Jobs quit. Jobs said that he had been fired. Either way, the co founder was out of the company. Wozniak was also out after his airplane accident and his general disagreements with the direction of the company. So at this point, Apple is a company that has precisely one or you could argue one and a half successes under its belt, and that would be the Apple two platform and the Apple to E computer. But another computer came out around the same time as the Macintosh and the Macintosh itself wasn't a lost cause obviously, So in the next episode, I'll talk about how Apple carried on during this era, how it nearly sunk under unsteady leadership, and how it was able to come back from the brink of bankruptcy. And then in the next episode after that, we'll take a look at ibm s journey to the home computer market and how it took a very different course. If you guys have suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, get in touch with me and let me know what they are. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter using the handle tech stuff hs W. Join us on Instagram follow us. You can see all sorts of behind the scenes goodies back there. And also if you want to watch me record this show live, go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. There's a schedule there tells you when I record. It's typically on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can watch me in the studio and even join a chat room and say funny things to me or serious things if you like. You know, whatever floats your boat really and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and bathans of other topics because it has to works. Dot com