TechStuffTechStuff Classic: The Macintosh Story Part 2
After its launch, Apple tweaked the Macintosh a bit. Then Apple executives gave Steve Jobs the boot. He would return many years later. We look at the Macintosh during this era.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? It is time for a classic episode. Now. Last week we had the Macintosh Story Part one, so today we're going to continue that with the McIntosh Story Part two. If you have not heard part one, well just check the publication from last Friday. You should be able to pull that and listen to it. But originally this episode published way back on June seventh, twenty seventeen.
Hope you enjoy.
We covered how the mac was born out of strife. It was not an easy berth. As it turns out, there was a lot of argument going on arguing, i should say, going on behind the scenes. It started off as a low priced comput that was the intent that was supposed to make personal computers more accessible to the average person. And then Steve Jobs effectively took over the project and changed it significantly. Rather than having a cheap machine, it became an expensive alternative to the IBM personal computer that had just debuted in the early nineteen eighties. So the IBM Personal computer came out and actually posed a serious threat to Apple. The Macintosh was supposed to be an answer to that. The Apple two and Apple three lines were distinct, and more about them in a little bit, But the Macintosh was really supposed to redefine computing and to put Apple back on track to being ahead of the game, as it were. But what actually happened next, Well, we ended right around nineteen eighty five. Last time, nineteen eighty four, nineteen eighty five. The Macintosh computer debuted in nineteen eighty four, and Apple was trying to rebound from a couple of bit blows. Now. That first one came in nineteen eighty one. That's when IBM got involved in the personal computer market with its own PC. Before long, IBM PC sales were outpacing Apple to sales. And the second blow came in nineteen eighty three. That's when Apple launched Lisa. Lisa was a high end computer. It was a project that was being pushed primarily by Steve Jobs, one of the co founders of Apple. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were the two Steves who founded the company. But Lisa was not a huge success. It had a graphic user interface or gouey gui uh, and it had a mouse, which was very innovative for the time. The only other company that really played with graphic user interfaces and a computer mouse was Xerox, and they had only done it internally. They didn't make this a product that other companies and consumers could go out and purchase. Apple decided to change that. However, r Lisa had a really hefty price tag. It was ten thousand dollars when it went on sale, and it was meant for business applications, but at that price, very few businesses were willing to take the plunge. Remember those are nineteen eighty three dollars. That's significant, even more so than ten thousand dollars is today. Ten thousand dollars is already a huge amount of money. If you adjust for inflation, you're talking around almost twenty thousand dollars.
That's a lot.
So the GUI also ate up a lot of the computer's processing power. So not only did it cost a lot, but the operating system alone took up so much of the computer's processing power that you couldn't run very many applications on top of it. And that's not a great selling point. Like this is expensive, but at least you can't run much software on it. That doesn't make a really good tagline if you're trying to sell a computer, just an fyi in case you ever want to to make and sell computers in the future. Then you also had very few developers who were willing to put forth the effort to create programs for a computer that was so elite, so expensive that it had a very small market. If you are in the business of making software and you have a limited amount of time and money on your hands, you want to dedicate that time and money toward projects that are likely to give you the biggest profit. And if you're talking about the types of organizations that are willing to lay down ten grand per computer, that's a very small market. So software developers were not eager.
To jump on the bandwagon there.
So Lisa was effectively a flop. It was kind of doomed from the start. Now, as I mentioned right at the beginning of this episode, Steve Jobs effectively took over the Macintosh project.
Now, this was after.
The then CEO of Apple demanded that Steve Jobs stop interfering with Lisa. Macintosh was a totally different project than Steve Jobs once he was pulled off the Lisa project and said, you can't bother them anymore, looked around, saw the Macintosh project, which was completely independent, and said, I'm going to make that my pet project. And so he began to involve himself with, or, in the words of some of his contemporaries at the time, interfere with the Macintosh project. And as a result, McIntosh transformed from a humble machine to an expensive consumer level device with a guy and a mouse. It didn't have a graphic user interface before Steve Jobs got involved. It was initially priced at twenty four hundred and ninety five dollars, which is expensive just for a basic computer today before you adjust for inflation. If you do adjust for inflation, that's more like five thousand, seven hundred bucks. That's a huge amount of money.
To ask to pay for a PC.
So if you wanted a Macintosh in nineteen eighty four when they first launched, you'd be plopping down the equivalent of fifty seven hundred dollars in today's money.
And keep in mind that the.
Original plan was that this computer was supposed to cost five hundred dollars, which would be closer to twelve hundred bucks today, which is still expensive. Obviously, if you wanted to pay for a brand new computer, twelve hundred dollars is closer to the top end of your basic machines. I mean, obviously, you can trick out a machine to be much more expensive than that if you want top of the line processors, graphics cards, cooling systems, all that sort of stuff. But if you're just buying off the shelf, twelve hundred dollars is already pretty expensive. It's not the top end, but it's healthy.
Right Anyway.
That was the initial goal was a five hundred dollars price point in nineteen eighty four dollars, which would be about twelve hundred dollars today, and it.
Blew that out of the water.
I should point out, however, that this higher price tag is not entirely the fault of Steve Jobs. I don't want to give you that impression. It's true that Jobs added a lot of features that necessitated a price hike. No matter what, it was going to cost more than five hundred dollars because of the changes Steve Jobs made. But as for that price tag of twenty four hundred ninety five dollars that credit really needs to go to the then Apple CEO John Scully. Scully reportedly decided that the initial price tag for the mac which was originally going to be fifteen hundred dollars back in nineteen eighty four, was too low. He actually said, fifteen hundred bucks, that's that's not high enough for us to really see a huge profit off that. So he knocked it up to twenty four ninety five, and that way the Macintosh would see a profit margin of fifty five percent, meaning you'd make fifty five percent over what you paid to create the computer. He didn't want to have a slim profit margin. However, of course, if you increased the price of a machine dramatically, then you're going to decrease the number of sales you make. So it's a very delicate balance figuring out how much to price a product so that you get the maximum amount of profit from your investment. And Scully decided to go pretty hard for that investment with that fifty five percent profit margin. And this also began Apple's long history of being a company associated with the idea that its hardware is overpriced. You've probably heard that if you've ever taken any look into Apple products, that you're paying a premium just for the Apple brand name because the products are priced more than what they would be priced by a competitor for an equivalent machine. That's not always the case, by the way, but it happened frequently enough in Apple's past that it became associated with the company's identity. People thought of Apple as being an elite company, that you were paying that extra price, and that you could be saving money if you just went with a different computer manufacturer, which in some eras was absolutely true, just not in all eras. Back in those earliest days of Macintosh, it certainly was the case that is undeniable now. Initial reviews of the Macintosh actually heaped a lot of praise on the computer. Consumer Reports wrote an absolutely glowing review of the original Macintosh, saying that the interface really transformed computing. The reviews stated that the interface, including the windows that it would use the mouse that you would use to navigate the guy, were more than just gimmicks, which you know, you could have easily seen them as just being gimmicks. Everyone else was used to using text based interfaces and keyboards, so this wasn't a guaranteed success right all of the gate. But Consumer Reports said, no, they got it right. This actually makes sense. They said that it actually transformed computing from a system of Labrinthian rules to something that the average per could easily grasp. A Macintosh wasn't a cryptic machine that required the user to learn dozens of command line terms, like you know, various file trees and ways to navigate between different directories. You didn't have to do that because it was all graphically presented for you and you just click on whatever it was you needed. It was a device that a novice could learn to navigate within like half an hour of using it.
There were some drawbacks, however.
That same Consumer Reports review pointed out that the operating system on the Macintosh took up an enormous amount of the computer's processing power. The computer had enough memory to store about eight and a half pages of text after you factored in the operating system. That's text, not images or video or audio. All of that stuff would come later. Just eight and a half pages of text. That's all the memory it could have after you ended up booting up the operating system.
This was one of the reasons that I was.
A real snob about Guy interfaces or GUY based computers. I hated the day that my dad decided to install Windows on our IBM compatible machine, which was similar in many ways to the Mac operating system. And the reason I was upset about it was because the Windows operating system required so much of our computer's ability to process information that it limited the kind of software we could run on it. If your software required more than what the computer could supply, you ran into problems, and I attributed a lot of that to the operating system. I much preferred DOSS, which was so slimmed down by comparison that you could run lots of different software on it. Well, the same thing was true with the early Mac operating system. It just hogged up a lot of the initial Macintosh's abilities. And to be fair, the original Macintosh only had one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes of memory, so it wasn't exactly packing an enormous amount of memory into that package. We're going to take a quick break talking about the Macintosh in order to thank our sponsors.
More and more software.
Developers began to create programs that could only run in GUI environments, which kind of forced the issue to switch from the DOSS and other operating systems that involved command lines to shift over to graphic user interfaces because a lot of software ended up only being compatible with graphic user interface systems, and that helped force the issue. I still am bitter about that, even though today I probably wouldn't be able to.
If you put me in.
From an Apple two E or an early IBM PC that was just running DOSS, I wouldn't remember any of the commands besides DR, which is directory DOS, I would be lost. But I still am kind of bitter about all this. Now, I also be fair. I'm an elitist computer nerd type. I'm just an elitist computer nerd type who lacks the information to be able to effectively be an elitist, which is the saddest kind of nerd. Apple obviously had really high hopes for that original Macintosh, but they had also had really high hopes for Lisa, and that didn't pan out back in nineteen eighty one, which was back when the Macintosh was still in development. It didn't debut till nineteen eighty four. Keep in mind, in nineteen eighty one, Apple had a plan, and their plan was that they would sell two point two million Macintosh computers by nineteen eighty five by the end of nineteen eighty five, but that plan was based upon a launch date that would happen sometime in nineteen eighty two, because remember, back then, they were still looking at creating a cheap alternative to the other computers like the Apple two and other competing computers on the market, so they had high hopes that they would be able to sell two point two million units by nineteen eighty five. The computer wasn't even available for purchase until nineteen eighty four, so that set them back, and even if they had launched in nineteen eighty two, they would have had to sell around fifty thousand computers every month to hit that two point two million mark within the end of nineteen eighty five. They did have an enormous start. The Macintosh marketing department was great for the launch of the computer, and they sold quite a bit when they first went on the market because people were really excited about it. But after that initial excitement, they weren't able to capitalize on creating a momentum and it died off pretty quickly. The marketing kind of failed after that initial launch. The Apple blew too much money early on and didn't have enough to support it throughout its an launch, So after a successful couple of first months, sales dropped precipitously down to like five thousand units a month, way below the number they would need. So by the end of nineteen eighty five they had not sold two point two million units as they had originally planned. It was more like two hundred and fifty thousand units, a huge shortfall. The Macintosh was not quite a flop like Lisa, but it wasn't performing as well in the market as Apple had hoped. Now it was impressive, but it was suffering from a similar issue as Lisa. It didn't have a lot of applications available for it, not as many as the competing ibmpcs had. Apple's then CEO admitted as much later on John Scully. He said, Yeah, we didn't do enough to develop software to run this computer. So while the computer was nice to look at, the graphic user interface was interesting, there just wasn't a whole lot to do with it. You didn't have things like spreadsheet programs. There was a severe lack of utility with their computer. Really, they only had two applications They had mac Wright which was a word processing program, and they had mac Paint, which was a simple graphics program, but that was about it.
They didn't have the other stuff you would associate with other computers.
So while it was user friendly, it didn't have a lot of usability to it, like there just wasn't enough to do, so that also hurt Macintosh sales. Now you might also remember from our last episode, Like I said, the CEO of Apple at this time was John Scully, whom Steve Jobs had lured away from Pepsi. The story is that Scully was kind of in line to become the chairman of the board over at Pepsi, but it was on a much longer timeline than Scully wanted, and that Steve Jobs was able to convince Scully to come over by saying to him, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want a chance to change the world once again?
Steve Jobs master salesman.
He could really have a turn of phrase and get you to believe in him even when the odds were stacked against him. Scully himself would say that that phrase really convinced him to come over to Apple, and he said so in a documentary, so you can actually check this out. It's a documentary titled Bloomberg Game Changers Steve Jobs, so it's part of a series. It was a really effective sales pitch, as it turns out, so Scully and Jobs initially worked really well together leading up to the Macintosh launch. Scully's predecessor was Mike Markula, which in the last episode you might remember was the guy who stepped in to remove Steve Jobs from the Lisa project. Markula was an early investor in Apple and had transitioned from CEO to board members, so he retired as CEO. He resigned, transitioning over to the board. He had told his wife that he wasn't going to stay on with Apple for very long, although he stayed on much longer than he initially meant to. He just stayed on in the capacity of member of the board as opposed to the CEO, and then John Scully took over the job as CEO. Now, John Scully would serve as the CEO from about nineteen eighty five to about nineteen ninety three ish. Ninety three ninety four is really when we're looking at that transition. Effectively, ninety three Scully initially got along well with Jobs, but when the Macintosh sales began to drop off, new tensions developed between the CEO and Apple's co founder, and that's not great when you have kind of clashing personalities at the top level of your company.
Now, John Scully also has the dubious.
Distinction of being on the Worst American CEO's List curated by Conde Nas. He's actually number fourteen on that list back when they published it a few years ago. Now more on why John Scully made that list as this episode progresses. Apple at the time had not completely switched over to the Macintosh line as its primary product, so you might think, oh, it went Apple two to Apple three to Macintosh and they discontinued the other computers, but that's not true. They were actually producing different lines of computers simultaneously, and Apple's structure was designed around this, where each product had its own division, so it wasn't like you had one big division of all these different products grouped together. You had an Apple two division, an Apple three division, and a Macintosh division. You also had a Lisa division until they discontinued that product. So the Apple two and Apple three computers continued to be manufactured and sold by Apple side by side with Macintosh computers. The Apple three ended up being a failure. It was a flop, very much like Lisa. It just didn't do so well. It was meant to be, again, a business level machine, not a personal computer, and it was priced as such, and there just wasn't enough there for businesses to jump on board with it. There were cheaper IBM computers coming out, so that was more attractive from an expense side of things. And like Lisa, there weren't a lot of developers creating software for the Apple three, so it didn't make a whole lot of sense to invest in the Apple three platform if the IBM computer platform cost less and had more development. So companies weren't adopting the Apple three. But the Apple two continued to hold its own, so it was still a big product even as the Macintosh came online.
The Apple two.
C computer debuted in nineteen eighty four. That was the same year that the Macintosh came out, so Apple two C stood for well, a more advanced Apple two computer. Actually, the letter system for Apple two computers is really confusing, because the Apple two E came out in nineteen eighty three, and then the Apple to C came out in nineteen eighty four, so they weren't going in alphabetical order, and that is a bit more than a bit confusing. But the Apple two C was Apple's first compact model, so the C kind of stood for compact. The computer's hardware consisted of a case that had an incorporated keyboard and a five and a quarter inch disk drive, and the computer itself, which was separate from a monitor. It was just the computer. You could slide that into a base a stand essentially, and on top of the stand you could put your monitor, so the computer would kind of slot in underneath where the monitor was. The monitor would not sit directly on top of the computer case itself. Apple would continue to make computers in the two C line until nineteen ninety, so the Apple two continued to go on sale to hit store shelves while the Macintosh continued to evolve, so these separate products remained side by side for quite some time. Apple launched an enhanced version of the Apple Too E in nineteen eighty five, so the two E continued as well.
It just got a bit of a beefier.
Version than the one that had launched a couple of years earlier. It did not have a graphic user interface like the Macintosh, and Apple would continue to make these Apple Too computers available for quite some time. In fact, that Advanced two E would continue to be on sale until nineteen ninety three, so extending pretty far. Like you would think that by ninety three you would have just graphic user interface based computers, but you still had the Apple two E Enhanced. And maybe one day I'll do an episode dedicated just to those Apple line computers to talk about the process of their evolution compared to Macintosh. But that's not really what this episode's about. I just went into touch base and explained that was going on at the same time as the development for the mac Now, in January nineteen eighty five, Apple tried to make the best of a bad situation by launching the Macintosh Excel. Only here's the thing. This was not the next Macintosh computer. It was actually a rebranding of a different computer, namely the Lisa Too. So remember the Lisa was a flop. Then Apple decided to make a stripped down version of the Lisa computer and sell it for a lower price than that ten thousand dollars beast of a computer called Lisa. Lisa too did not do well in sales either, so then they rebranded it. They called it Macintosh. Xcel was a Macintosh doing all right initially, but they weren't able to move the Lisa two computers, so they rebranded it. They called it the Excel, but it still didn't do so well, and by April nineteen eighty five they discontinued it. They stopped making the Macintosh Excel.
They still had a ton of inventory, but they weren't making more of them.
They were able to offload some of the Macintosh Excel devices with some big sales deals, so for example, they sold five thousand of the Excel macintoshes to a company called Sun Remarketing back in nineteen eighty seven. But ultimately a lot of those units never left Apple warehouses.
They just sat there.
And so in nineteen eighty nine, they decided to take a note from the video game crash of nineteen eighty three. You might remember, Atari decided to get rid of a lot of excess inventory by dumping them in landfills out in the desert. Apple ended up doing the same thing, only they dumped theirs in a landfill in Utah instead of in a different state. So they all of those Macintosh XL computers ended up in a landfill in Utah. So somewhere in a Utah landfill, if you dig down, you would be able to find old Macintosh XL Lisa to computers. But don't do that. We'd be a colossally bad idea and you could very easily injure yourself if you dug in the wrong landfill. Phil, Plus you'd probably be trespassing. So I'm officially telling you do not go searching for the McIntosh XL because even if you.
Found one, it wouldn't work. At this point.
It's been exposed to elements since nineteen eighty nine, so you don't want one.
Don't do it.
If I hear about you doing it will be very put out. I've got a lot more to say about the history of the Macintosh from nineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety seven, but before I get into the next segment, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, So, a few months after the initial Macintosh hit store shelves, Apple released an update called the Mac five twelve, also known as the Fat Mac. This Macintosh had five hundred and twelve kilobytes of memory, that's why it was called that, so significantly more memory than the initial Macintosh, which remember, only had one hundred and twenty eight kilobytes. That additional memory made it easier to develop programs for the Macintosh because the operating system no longer hogged nearly all of the system's memory. But that extra memory came at a cost. The fat max price tag was three thousand, three hundred dollars in nineteen eighty five. That's equivalent to nearly eight thousand dollars today. Incredibly expensive. Still, the fat mac had a big advantage. It could actually do stuff pretty big when you compare it to the original Mac and some software and one additional piece of hardware really helped increase the value of the Macintosh line. So on the software side you had stuff like Aldice page Maker. It eventually became Adobe page Maker, and it helped usher in a new era of computing. This was the era of desktop publishing. That was not a thing really before the Macintosh and Aldie PageMaker made it a thing. So page Maker, if you've never used it, it's sort of a layout program. It allows you to lay out an attractive esthetic design to stuff like newsletters, flyers.
That kind of thing. A program. If you wanted to make a program.
For a play or some other event, you could use page Maker to size everything and position properly so that you had an attractive layout. And that meant that you could suddenly do this at home, where if you had the right equipment, or with a small business, you could do it there. You didn't have to go to a larger publishing house and contract with them to make your stuff. This was revolutionary. It was one of the reasons why computers, personal computers and small computers that businesses used were so popular. It meant that they gave these entities, whether they were individuals or small businesses, greater opportunities.
So that was very popular.
But there was also some other software that was helping out. In nineteen eighty five, Microsoft began to publish software for the Macintosh. So Microsoft and Apple haven't always had a contentious relationship. In fact, Microsoft has often in Apple's past helped the other company out with loans or with investments. It hasn't always been a I hate you, no, I hate you more kind of relationship. One of the earliest programs Microsoft made available for the Macintosh was Word one point oh, which was the first real competitor to Apple's own Macwright software and eventually overtook Macwright. People began to prefer Word one point oh and its later versions to the Macwright word processing program. Another program that came over to mac was the Excel one point oh software, the spreadsheet program. In fact, it came to the Macintosh first. It was a Macintosh exclusive for a while in the early days. That was just the case because it wouldn't even come to Windows until late nineteen eighty seven. So Apple had a head start on Windows when it came to Excel. But there's a whole story that I've talked about in a previous episode about why that is, so I'm not going to go into it here. On the hardware side was a device called the Laser Writer. This was a printer, a monstrously heavy printer. It weighed seventy seven pounds that's about thirty five kilograms, and it had a three hundred dots per inch resolution, pretty standard for printers of the day, and it cost a hefty amount seven thousand dollars. And let's adjust for inflation because I like to do that. That's about sixteen grand in today's dollars, sixteen thousand dollars for a printer. But you could network multiple Macintosh computers to this one printer, so that increased its value. You didn't have to buy a printer for every computer. If you had several computer workstations at your office, you could network them together to this printer and they could all print from the same printer. That was a pretty big deal, very novel concept when it came to this level of computer enterprise. Normally, you'd be paying a lot more money for a networked system that was created pretty much by contract for your company. So it meant that Apple could actually compete in that space, and they could also print in different fonts. The earliest laser writer only a few different fonts, but that was still a huge advantage over older printers, remember like daisy wheel printers. Actually you may not remember daisy will printers. I do because I grew up with them. Those had a physical font on the device itself, so you couldn't really change it, but the laser writer could reproduce a few different fonts, giving you some options. And later versions of the laser writer and later versions of the operating system and the accompanying software would allow even more fonts, so that made desktop publishing even more attractive. So this combination of software and hardware suddenly made the Macintosh a more attractive device if you wanted to go into publishing. And this really begins the relationship Apple has with creators, people who are into graphics, eventually into film and audio. Apple kind of established that relationship with people at this stage, this early stage, with the fat Mac.
It meant that you were catering.
To people who didn't really feel comfortable with the IBM compatible approach to computing. They found it more intuitive to go to the Mac system and that would remain true for decades. In fact, for a long long time, Apple dominated when it came to production, particularly video and audio production.
Here at how Stuff Works, our video.
Department works almost exclusively on Macintosh computers. So even though I would argue PCs have caught up in a large part and software for the PCs have cut up in large part to Apple's dominant place in that market, there's still people who prefer the Apple approach, and to be honest, depending upon what format you're working in, Apple still.
Does it better than PCs do.
All of that began way back in nineteen eighty five, with the Fat Mac and the launch of the Laser Writer, and the launch of these software programs I've been talking about.
On the corporate side.
Nineteen eighty five was when Apple said goodbye to the co founders, but under very different circumstances. Steve Wozniak, who had mostly been away from Apple ever since he had suffered injuries in an airplane crash and had been working hard to recover from them. He left on his own accord in February nineteen eighty five, and he went back to college. Eventually he went into teaching and then began to do other stuff as well. Steve Jobs, however, didn't really have a choice in the matter, not really when you get down to it. After numerous teams reported being incredibly frustrated with Steve Jobs' managerial style, the executives of the company, primarily CEO John Scully, decided to effectively strip Steve Jobs of all of his power. They removed him from all the projects. They put him in an office in a building that was mostly deserted. Steve Jobs himself referred to it as Siberia and of course Steve Jobs is not one known for making melodramatic statements like that, so you know it had to be awful. But the point being the Steve Jobs had really very little to do with the company that he had helped create. He had been pulled away from it and removed more or less from power. Not everyone was upset about that, because so many people had had issues with his management style, but it still was a difficult story, right to say, we've decided this founder of our company shouldn't be involved in any of the company's projects, but was still effectively an employee of the company. He was still drawing a salary at that point. But Jobs decided he didn't want to just sit at a desk in an empty building and pull a salary from a company. He wanted to see if he could perhaps regain control of Apple, and so he went to some of the executives of Apple to see if any of them would support him and what would effectively be a coup to go to the board of directors demand that John Scully be removed as CEO and perhaps Steve Jobs would take his place. But one of the executives he went to felt very strongly that this was the bad decision. That person was Jean Louis Gaess. Now, Jean Louis Gassy was someone who had risen up in the Apple ranks. He was a manager in their various product division lines, and he did not like Jobs. Jobs and guess did not get along. So Guessay ended up going over to John Scully and tattletaled on Steve Jobs. He essentially told John Scully, who was off on a business trip, Hey, you should know this. Steve is going around stirring up trouble and he wants to try and go to the Board of directors and go over your head and replace you. John Scully rushed back to Apple. He called a meeting of the Board of directors. He was furious with Steve Jobs for what he saw as an act of disloyalty and dishonesty, and so they had it out in front of the Board of Directors. It was, by all accounts, an ugly confrontation, and ultimately John Scully was asking the Board of directors for essentially a vote of confidence and to say, you know who would they go. Would they side with Jobs or would they side with Scully? And then the board sided unanimously with John Scully. Every member of the board, including the people I've already mentioned in this episode, were on John Scully's side, and they effectively pushed Steve Jobs out of his company. Obviously, the story with Steve Jobs and Apple doesn't end here in nineteen eighty five. Will actually revisit Steve Jobs later on in this episode, but we've also covered this story in other episodes of Tech Stuff. So if you want to hear a really deep discussion about what Steve Jobs did in his years away from Apple, there are a couple of different places you can check out, or a couple different episodes you can check out. There's a two parter called How Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Work. They published in two thousand and eight, so they were very early episodes of Tech Stuff Tech Stuff in two thousand and eight, so Chris Pollette and I talked about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who had a lot of not just similarities, but a lot of they worked a lot together in those early days of Apple and Microsoft.
So you can check out that two parter.
And there's also a very sad episode titled One More Thing and that published in twenty eleven. Shortly after Steve Jobs passed away, and in those episodes, I really talk about what Steve Jobs.
Did in his years away from Apple.
So I'm not going to cover it here, but we will revisit Steve Jobs because he does factor back into Apple's history a bit later on. If you want to know more, check out those episodes I just mentioned. Now, Jobs would end up publishing letters of resignation. He sent letters of resignation to the press after he had effectively been forced out of his own company, so it's more like you can't fire me, I quit sort of thing. Presumably he did this in order to get the media on his side, but it did not have the effect that he was hoping for. In fact, Apple stocks rallied as a result of Steve Jobs being pushed aside and sending out these resignation letters. Effectively, the market was saying, whew, we sure are glad you got rid of that guy. Not a great message to receive, not this big blow to the ego, I'm sure, but it gave Scully more confidence in his decisions, which would emerge in physical form with the evolution of the Macintosh line. Now, one of the CEO's first acts once he had been confirmed as being the head of Apple, was to lead a massive reorganization at the company, and a lot of people say it was long overdue. So again, up to that point, Apple's org charts were based on products. If you worked in the Apple two line, you were in one division. If you worked on the Apple three line, you were in another division. If you worked on the Macintosh you were in yet another division, and so on and so forth. Each department was separate from all the others.
And John Scully said, this doesn't make any sense.
What we should do is have a big product development department and everyone who works on various products will be inside this structured department with a manager overseeing that product or product development overall.
So everyone would have a single boss.
They would report to, who in turn would report to John Scully as CEO. Then you would also have a department just for sales. You would have a department just for marketing, and these departments would work together, but they wouldn't be dependent upon individual products. It would largely be these big divisions within Apple. So essentially he was saying, let's go to your traditional corporate structure. It wasn't like he was inventing a new type of leadership. This is something that's common across corporations all over the world.
So he was just saying, let's.
Go to that because it makes more sense. It streamlines things, people know who they report to. There's not this compartmentalized structure between different products. People can actually communicate with each other. We can make sure that people working on one product are not stepping on the toes of people who were working on another product. Everyone can talk to each other, and then ended up being viewed as a positive move in the market. Again, people thought this guy knows what he's doing, and they felt confident in Apple's performance because of this restructuring, Apple stocks would end up performing really well over the next few years. Meanwhile, Jean Luis Gesay that manager I was talking about who tattletaled on, Steve Jobs, became the manager for the product's division.
Effectively, he took.
Over the position that Steve Jobs was inhabiting before he was stripped of all of his responsibilities. So Guess became the manager for product division and decided to make a major change to the Macintosh line.
So remember that last.
Mac was the Fat Mac or the Mac five twelve. The next computer in that line was the Mac Plus. Now, Apple introduced this in nineteen eighty six, and it looked identical to the Fat Mac. If you were to put two side by side, you probably wouldn't be able to immediately tell them apart unless you could actually read the designation on the case. But inside it was actually quite different from the fat Fat Mac. So, for one thing, the Fat Mac was not meant to be expandable. Steve Jobs hated the idea of users being able to alter the computers that Apple designed. He wanted to have closed systems, meaning that you bought a computer, that's the computer you got to use.
You didn't get to expand it in.
Any way unless you were to go to a third party, and that would violate your warranty. The Macplus was different, and it was actually expandable. You could upgrade your machine if you wanted to. It was the first Macintosh to feature a small computer system interface, also known as a scuzzy drive SCSI. But people call it scuzzy, not that it was scuzzy, it's just how we pronounce it. It's actually a set of parallel interface standards that allow you to connect other devices to a computer. So a scanner an external hard drive printer's that sort of thing.
It's just meant to be kind of a.
Universal plug for certain types of computer peripherals. I talked a little bit about it in a recent episode about USB's when I was comparing USBs to serial and parallel ports. Anyway, the scuzzy would remain a feature in every Mac that would follow from that point until nineteen ninety eight. You could also upgrade the memory of the Macplus. The Macplus would come with a whole megabyte of memory. Remember, the previous fat Mac had five or twelve kilobytes. Megabyte was another big jump up, but you could expand that to up to four megabytes using a thirty pen memory module that was easily pluggable into the Macintosh system. You didn't have to do any crazy soldering or anything like that. It had an expansion slot you could plug these chips into. Previous Apple devices didn't allow you to upgrade your memory, so what you bought was what you got, unless you again went to a third party and had it professionally altered. So this was a huge departure from Steve Jobs's philosophy. Guessay's approach was almost one hundred eighty degrees different from jobs, and would continue to be different from jobs over the next few years. The Macplus also included a keyboard with some features that we now consider to be pretty much standard for keyboards, like arrow keys and a number pad. Obviously, not all keyboards have those, especially for things like laptops. You might not have a number pad on all laptops, but for your standard PC keyboards, the kinds for desktops, you pretty much find arrow keys and number pads on most of those these days. But this was novel thinking back in nineteen eighty six, so it was something that differentiated the Mac Plus from other computers on the market. And it also ran the third generation of Max operating system, which was then called System three. This was before Apple started calling the operating system mac os, they just called it System and you could use double sided floppy discs with this device, which allowed you to store a wopping eight hundred kilobytes of data per disc. I remember those days, but anyway, that was a big thing back then. Having a double sided disc effectively doubling the amount of information you could save on a disc.
That was a huge space saver.
Otherwise you had to have twice as many of those stupid discs, and that was a pain in the butt. Later, in nineteen eighty six, Apple discontinued the Fat Mac and replaced it with the five twelve K, which was similar to the Mac Plus. So you had the Macplus, which was sort of the high end machine, and then they said, well, the Fat Mac doesn't really measure up to the Macplus. We'll make a new version of the Fat Mac called Mac five twelve K. It did not have some of the elements that the Macplus had. It didn't have the scuzy port, and it didn't have the expandable memory capability. It had those older traditional Apple style memory chips, and as you might imagine, that didn't measure up well with the Macplus in the market. So you had consumers or small businesses mainly and larger looking at the Macplus versus the Mac five twelve k E and they said, why would I go with the five twelve K E which has fewer features than the Macplus. So ultimately the five twelve KE did not sell very well. The Macplus, however, was a very popular product within the Apple line, in fact, so much so that it would become the longest lived computer in the Macintosh line, meaning it was the one that Apple produced the longest amount of time, from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety, so four years of producing the same computer. That's a long time in computer terms, because parts become obsolete so quickly, right processors get faster, we can put more memory into these machines, but the Macplus would stay on store shelves largely unchanged from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety. Now at this stage, I should mention that I'm not going to cover every single variation of the Macintosh in this episode.
I know it sounds like it because.
I've started with the big one so early on, but that would just be ridiculous.
If I were to do that, it would eventually just.
Lead to me reading off specs for different computers, and that would get incredibly boring incredibly fast. I do want to cover some of the big changes that happened throughout Apple's history and the history of the Macintosh, but I'm not going to cover every variation of every entry into the Macintosh line. There are lots of them, so many that it actually became a problem for Apple.
But I'll go into that in a little bit.
I'm just going to try and get a deeper understanding of not just the growth of the personal computer market, but the evolution of Apple as a company. So that being said, nineteen eighty seven saw some milestones in Apple history. For one thing, Apple built the one millionth Macintosh in nineteen eighty seven. Now that was a bit behind schedule, because you remember, way back in nineteen eighty one, they were hoping to sell two point two million Macintosh computers by the end of nineteen eighty five. It is nineteen eighty seven, and they've just built the one millionth Macintosh, so they're well behind what they were hoping for back in nineteen eighty one. However, that being said, this was a totally different world nineteen eighty seven. You saw massive competition in the market. Not only did IBM have its own personal computers out there, but you had all the clones of IBM computers, the IBM compatible computers, because IBM licensed that technology to other companies. So there was a lot of competition in the space. So hitting that one million mark was still impressive, even though it was much later than what they had hoped for, and it was significant. So that year Apple introduced new computers in the Macintosh line. In nineteen eighty seven, they launched the Mac se and the Mac two. As in the Part two son of Mac, it was the Roman numeral two as well, kind of similar to how they did Apple one, Apple two, Apple three. We start seeing the Macintosh regularly shortened to just Mac. At this point, very few people started referring to them as Macintosh computers.
They just called a max really.
After the first Macintosh, that became pretty standard, and the Mac two marked another big departure from the original Macintosh design jobs and wanted the mac to be that closed system. Like I mentioned, the Mac two had six expansion slots that could support all sorts of stuff, including different types of video cards, which was a huge departure for Apple, plus different types of network cards, scuzzy drives, that sort of stuff. It could also display color the video cards. If you had the right video card in the right monitor, you could have a color display, which was a first for Macintosh computers, and it pushed the Macintosh from the monochromatic world to the world of glorious color, with up to sixteen million different colors that could be displayed, which was actually pretty impressive back in the mid eighties. Later on, that would be dwarfed by what you could achieve with high end video cards and monitors. In nineteen eighty eight, Apple's Macintosh line continued to evolve, but there weren't really any major developments like the ones I just mentioned. Instead, it was mostly revisions and evolutions of the line, but not revolutions on the software side. The operating system grew, with System six coming out toward the end of nineteen eighty eight, but apart from the first Apple CD ROM drive launching, nothing huge really happened in the macline in eighty eight, and the same is true for eighty nine, with one major exception. That was the year that Apple introduced the mac Portable. So this wasn't really a laptop computer. I mean, you could call it a laptop computer, but really it was more of a portable Macintosh computer. In theory you could call it laptop, but only in theory because the thing weighed nearly sixteen pounds or about seven point two six kilograms, which is a pretty weighty machine to call a laptop. It was also bulky and was about the size of a standard briefcase. In other words, it was a giant compared to the Mac Air that you could find today. The Mac Portable had a lead acid battery, which is the same sort of battery you can find in your standard gas powered automobile, like a car battery that's also lead acid. That's the type of battery the first Mac Portable had. Now, it did allow you to have about ten hours of battery life, so that's nice. But it added to that significant weight where it was a rather i should say it made up a significant portion of that weight.
There were two main keyboard layouts you could get.
One had a numeric keypad and the other one had a track ball which would replace the need for a mouse. So track ball sort of like the old centipede arcade machines, And if you don't know what that is, ask your parents. There were This was another one of the ideas of Jean Louis Gassay, so he decided that the portable computer was an interesting approach. He had already made a decision to stick with Apple. He had received an order an offer rather from Commodore. Commodore was making the Amiga line of computers and they wanted Guess to come over as the new head of Commodore. But he actually turned the company down initially and said that he wanted to stick with Apple, and so he really pushed for the portable Mac. It had pretty impressive specs for the time. Apple said they spared no expense, they made no accommodation for the fact that was portable. They didn't want to compromise on quality, and in fact, the specs were pretty impressive even for just a regular desktop machine. However, it meant that the device was incredibly expensive. Again not as surprise with Apple, right. So its price tag was six thousand, five one hundred dollars for this portable machine in nineteen eighty nine, So if we look at inflation, that's about thirteen thousand dollars.
He would have to pay thirteen grand to get this portable Mac.
Now, there was a call for portable machines because more and more companies wanted people to be able to take a machine into the field. You might work for a company like a utility company, and having a computer that your employee could take with him or her on a service call was incredibly valuable. So there was a need for portable machines. People had a desire for them. There was a market there, But thirteen thousand dollars.
For a portable mac.
Was a super steep price, and you might not be surprised to hear that not very many of them were sold as a result. In fact, Apple sales in general were not doing well that year. It marked the first time Apple had an actual drop in sales figures. We were selling fewer computers than they had in the previous year. The following year, Gasse announced his retirement from Apple and vacated the head of product development, So he only lasted a little bit longer than Steve Jobs himself did. Now, nineteen ninety also saw a big shift due to outside competition. That's because in nineteen ninety Microsoft launched Windows three point zero. Now, the previous incarnation of Windows had really not made a huge impact on Macintosh sales. Consumers had not really adapted and adopted the Windows platform. But Windows three was a different story. Windows three and IBM compatible machines were starting to become more popular, and from this point forward, I'm just going to call those PCs. We'll talk about max versus PCs. I don't like that because I think personal computer is too broad a term to just refer to Windows based machines. But just for simplicity's sake, We're going to do that for the rest of this episode. So PCs were really selling well, and Windows three point zero was a dominant operating system, again a graphic user interface similar to what you would find on the Macintosh. There were even people arguing that Microsoft was copying no Macintosh, but the development of Windows was happening at around the same time as the development of the Macintosh guy, And to be honest, both companies really owed a huge debt to Xerox because it was Xerox's Park, the R and D arm of Xerox that developed the graphic user interface. Anyway, the ibmpcs had a huge advantage over Macintosh in that they were less expensive. You could buy an IBMPC for a fraction of what it cost to buy a Macintosh. Then you can get your graphic user interface with Windows three point zero.
In fact, within a.
Couple of years, you would have about five copies of Windows three point zero for every Macintosh that was being sold. That's not great if you're Apple. I should also point out that even at this point, as late as nineteen ninety, I still hated Windows because I still hated the idea of having to surrender so much of my computer's operating system or so much of my computer's processing power to the operating system. So I was still being an elitist computer snob in those days, although I had to give in because more and more games were only Windows compatible, and if I'm going to be honest, that was my main concern with PCs back in the day. Wasn't so much concerned about the productivity software. But if I couldn't play my Ultima series of games, I got grouchy anyway. Nineteen ninety remember it was also the year that the Macplus finally got discontinued from Apple. They decided to stop selling it, to stop making it, but it had a four year run, so that was really strong. Now I've got or to say about this period in Apple and Macintosh history, but before I get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Within two years, so.
Essentially, by the time it gets to nineteen ninety two, Windows machines were outnumbering McIntosh machines by that factor of five to one, and that was super bad news for Apple. Apple stock price suffered dropping twenty percent, so the value of the company decreased by one fifth. Because of this issue and other issues going on in Apple, so the company was.
In a dangerous time in its history.
It really led to an overall operational loss and it was pretty ugly. Stockholders were demanding that something change. So John Scully was on the way out at this point because the performance of the company was suffering. He was being blamed for a lot of that, and so he left in nineteen ninety three. But just before he left, Apple was still trying to right the ship.
Right.
The ship was starting to list. They were trying to get it back on track. I'm mixing metaphors, sue me. Apple introduced System seven, so this was the next generation of its operating system, and it introduced AutoMac support from multiple simultaneous applications, so you could run numerous programs at the same time. It also introduced its QuickTime software in nineteen ninety one, and Apple Max began to run on the Motorola six eight zero three zero processors. And I'm sure there's an easier way of saying that, and I'm sure the computer geeks out there in the audience who are familiar with these processors, these are the ones that Max ran on the sixty eight thousand processors that Motorola made since the beginning. I'm sure there's an easier way of saying them, and I apologize for not knowing that, but I'm just going to stay them the long way anyway. The Apple introduced the Macintosh Quadra seven hundred and the Quadra nine hundred computers in ninety one, which were meant to be new product lines within Macintosh, although they didn't last very long. They ran on Motorola six to eight zero four zero processors, which are comparable to the four eighty six processors that Intel was producing at the time. So you had Microsoft and Windows that were paired up with Intel, and you had Apple pairing up with Motorola, trying to make sure that its computers were of a comparable comparable level of quality to the top of the line IBM compatible machines. Apple introduced a new type of computer called the PowerBook, which was a line of truly portable computers. These were more These were closer to being laptop than that portable Mac was. Remember the portable Mac was really just a portable Mac, but the power Book was meant to be more.
Of a laptop.
The first of the power Books, or rather the lowest in the whole line. The cheapest was not actually made by Apple. Apple contracted with Sony, and Sony made the power Book one hundred. This is unusual because most Apple products are manufactured by Apple itself, but that wasn't true for the power Book one hundred. The battery on the power Book one hundred would last a whole two hours without being plugged in. It didn't sell as well as some of the higher end models because it just didn't have the features. The power Book one forty and the one seventy were launched at around the same time, and they sold better than the power Book one hundred did. The form factor of these ended up kind of defining the look of laptops in the future. So if you unfolded the screen, the keyboard sat back toward the screen, so typically the way you would open up laptop, and you know how the keyboard is back in the back section. In the front section there was space for a first of track ball, so again kind of like centipede ask your parents, and then later on a trackpad, which is what you find standard on most laptops today.
Well, it was the power.
Book that kind of defined that form factor and most laptops following followed along behind it.
They didn't really change that up because it just made sense, but it was the power book that really introduced that.
Now beyond this, you also had in nineteen ninety one an alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. They called it the AIM Alliance, AIM standing for Apple, IBM, Motorola cute right.
The aim of aim yakidishmacaee doo.
Was building new hardware and software to act as a platform for the next generation of computers and to and as a direct competitor with Windows and Intel. So they wanted to make their own version of the partnership that Microsoft had with Intel and make it a competing standard.
They called it PREP, which added.
In uppercase P and uppercase are a lowercase E and an uppercase P. It stood for power PC Reference Platform. It was intended to serve as that competitor, and the goal was to create a new operating system that Apple would be in charge of. So Apple would provide the operating system and it would run on Risk based processors that's RISC, and those would come from IBM and Motorola. Apple's code named operating system was called PINK and why Well, that goes back a little bit earlier in Apple's history. So when Apple was planning out future projects several years before this happened, they would write down ideas on one of two different colors of note cards. If the ideal was considered to be easy to implement, If engineer said, yeah, we can knock that out and it won't cost too much and it won't take up too much time, those ideas went on blue note cards, meaning these are going to be easy for us to do. If it was considered a challenging idea that was going to require more time, more effort, and therefore it was going to cost more internally, they would write it down on a pink note card, saying, yeah, this is going to be harder to do. It might still be worth it, but it's going to be hard.
Well.
The operating system was code named Pink because it was written down on a pink note card. Creating the next generation operating system, one that wasn't rooted in the system versions that had been on Macintosh up to that point was going to take a lot of development time and effort, so it was code named Pink. Now, sadly, prep never really meshed you never got a point where you had the hardware and software married to together to make this rival to Windows Intel.
So ultimately the project was a failure.
But one thing that did come out of it was a new type of processor called the power PC processor, and those would eventually find their way into mac computers. In nineteen ninety two, Apple introduced a line of Macintosh computers called the Performa line, and this was McIntosh's effort to actually say, hey, let's make something for the average consumer. Most Macintosh computers were so expensive and so specialized that they were just going to a narrow niche market. We're talking about those creators I mentioned earlier and small businesses, but that meant they were passing up the opportunity to really target personal computer owners. They had mostly targeted those through the Apple two line. But now the Apple two line was dead. It had discontinued, and really it ended in nineteen ninety three when Apple two E Enhanced stopped being made, although there were a couple of other variations in the Apple two that lasted a bit longer. But they wanted to tackle that same market with the Macintosh line, so they launched the Performa series.
So what was it.
The Performance Series was really just rebranded older models of Macintosh computers.
So the Macintosh.
Computers that debuted a couple of years earlier but now had slower processors compared to the most up to date models, they got rebranded as Performa models of Macintosh and put on the market. However, Apple dumped a whole bunch of different models at the same time, and that really confused consumers in the marketplace. Imagine going to a store and seeing eight different variations of the same basic computer and not really understanding what differentiated one from another. That's kind of what happened with the Performa series. It just added more confusion in the marketplace, and ultimately consumers just weren't sure about which computer they should pie, and not a lot of them got sold. So Apple decided, hey, let's clear up the confusion, and they produced a half hour infomercial explaining the different Performa models, and you can find it online. So if you've got half an hour to kill and you want to see how Apple tried to explain this Performa series to consumers, search for it online.
You can find it.
It's usually divided up into multiple parts, but you can find the performa series of videos that made up a half hour infomercial. Now, the next person to step in as leader of the company, remember Scully had left in ninety three, was Michael Spindler. He came from Apple's European operations division and he worked his way up the chain there. His term was one of real controversy. It wasn't as a smooth transition, and it wasn't without issues.
In fact, there were rumors that he was discussing.
The possibilities of a takeover with other companies like Sun Microsystems or IBM, and he also oversaw projects at Apple that ultimately failed, like Apple's Newton project. I know I've mentioned Newton in previous episodes of Tech Stuff. I think we might have even done a full episode about the Newton, which is kind of a sad and comical story simultaneously. But that was the little handheld device that was meant to be able to recognize handwriting and other and have other features as well, that ultimately had its ambitions were beyond its own grasp. Let's be kind and call it that. But that's another story. So the nickname for Michael Spindler was the Diesel. I don't know what that says about his character, but I have a feeling that I probably wouldn't be compatible with someone whose nickname is the Diesel, unless it was Kevin Nash, because we have a mutual love of professional wrestling. Now, Spindler would end up being replaced by the Board of directors a few years later in nineteen ninety six, and the board of directors chose Gil Emilio to step in as CEO. Gill Emilio had come from National Semiconductor before joining Apple, and Emilio himself would also get replaced by the Board of directors in nineteen ninety seven. But more on that in a little bit. Let's get back to the timeline of Macintosh. So we left off in nineteen ninety four, just took a break to talk about the shuffle at the CEO level over the next couple of years, which really tells you that Apple was in trouble.
When you see a company changing CEO.
So rapidly because the board keeps replacing it, that's not a great sign. Doesn't show a lot of confidence at the Board of directors level, and it probably reflects a lack of confidence at the shareholder level. But the show had to go on. So what was happening Macintosh. Well, in nineteen ninety four, Apple made a big move that was a defining moment in the Macintosh line. They decided to move away from those Motorola processors I talked about a minute ago, and switched to the power PC processors, which remember were still developed partially by Motorola in partnership with IBM. So it's not like they were turning their back on Motorola. Rather they said, from this point forward, our architecture is going to depend upon this type of computer processor instead of this other type of computer processor. But that meant big changes all down the line of the Macintosh. Now, they were hoping that the power PC processors would be able to rival Intel's x eighty six chips. Those are the for eighty six's, the pendums and so on, So that was the hope, and they actually stuck with power PC processors all the way from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and six, and then they changed again.
That's a story for later now.
The first mac to feature a power PC processor was the Macintosh sixty one hundred, which also ran macOS nine. It was the latest version of Apple's operating system. Although it wasn't called macOS nine, it was really System nine. It was the first computer to actually run System nine. Oddly enough, Apple also released a second version of this specific computer with a completely different chip architecture.
So you had the power Pc version.
Of the sixty one hundred, but you also had an Intel for eighty six version of the sixty one hundred. For the first time, Apple decided to try and go with an IBM compatible route, So this version of the Mac sixty one hundred had an Intel forty forty six microprocessor. It was DOS compatible. It could run both mac OS and Windows simultaneously. Later on on Macintosh users would have to do this by setting up a virtual machine that would run an instance of Windows over on top of the Mac hardware. This was also a time when Apple began to stray further away from the concept of making as much in house as it could, and it was a big departure from the way Steve Jobs had run things back when he was still part of the company. Now, the power Pc hardware was incompatible with software that was written for Macintosh computers running the older Motorola chips. You often find this if you change processor types. That change in architecture requires software to behave a different way in order for stuff to get done. So if you were trying to run an older Macintosh program on a power PC Macintosh, you had to have an emulator. This is a piece of software that simulates the way other hardware runs. You might remember I did an episode all about video game emulators. The same thing is true for operating system emulators or chip emulators. So you had this software that was replicating the way old Motorola chips ran, but it would allow the software to run on a power PC processor computer. In other words, you just had to have this other piece of software to kind of act as an interpreter so that you could get stuff done on your new machine. Now, the good news was the power PCs were so powerful, these power macs as they came to be called, were so powerful that it didn't slow down the processing of these older mac programs. So the emulator wasn't so processor heavy that it was impacting the way the program ran. It would actually run more smoothly on these power PC programs or power pc machines than they would on the older Motorola machines. So that was a good story, right. You don't want your emulator to slow stuff down, because then people get the implication that the brand new computer they just bought is slower than their old computer. That's a bad thing. So luckily the emulator ran really efficiently and it didn't slow things down. In nineteen ninety five, that's when things kind of went bonkers over at Apple. For the first time ever, Apple licensed other companies to allow them to bring Macintosh compatible machines to market, So this was the era of the Macclone. They allowed other companies to license the hardware and software and make their own versions of the Macintosh computer, although they would be called different things. This, by the way, ignores the fact that PowerBook one hundred was built by Sony, but that was built by Sony for Apple. In this case, I'm not talking about companies that were building machines for Apple. I'm talking about companies that would license the technology to build their own version of the Macintosh and sell it to consumers. The first was the Radius System one hundred from a company called Radius, and it was similar to Apple's own PowerMac eighty one hundred. The specs were very close, but the computer itself was housed in a tower style case, so very different from Apple's approach where they would try and put the monitor and the computer case all in one unit. That was typical for most of Apple's computers. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
This was totally different.
It was more like your standard IBM compatible where you had a tower desktop. So it was a big departure from Apple's esthetic. There were other computers that also launched at this time that were clones the Macintosh, because there were other companies that licensed the technology from Apple, and perhaps Apple was hoping to dominate the market again and make enough money off the licenses to justify their use. Unfortunately, Apple ended up cutting off its nose to spite its face. In this case, they licensed the technology manufacturers, but that gave companies the opportunity to produce cheaper machines running Apple hardware and software. So you could run Macintosh programs on these computers because they were clones of the mac not physically, but from a hardware and software standpoint, they were, and they were able to sell them for less expensive prices than what Apple was demanding. So Apple ended up undercutting its own sales because it authorized these other users. These other manufacturers to make Macintosh compatible computers. So why would you go and buy what appears to be an overpriced machine from Apple if you can go to one of its competitors and buy a comparable machine for much less money. If you are a consumer or a business, it makes more sense to go the other route, to go the cheaper route. As long as you're reasonably sure that the machine is a good one, that's what you're gonna do. And in fact, that's what Apple saw. They saw a lot of consumers going to these competitors rather than going to Apple. Now, one benefit was that they had a lot more people buying into the Apple ecosystem, But because Apple wasn't controlling that hardware, they weren't seeing any money off of it, besides that initial licensing fee that they charged companies in order to produce these clones. So in the long run it ended up hurting Apple. It was hurting their sales, although it did mean that more people were getting familiar with the Macintosh program and the Macintosh platform because suddenly they could afford a Macintosh, even though it wasn't an official Apple Macintosh.
This is one of those decisions.
That Apple executives today probably look back on and shake their heads and mumble about it, because it really affected profits over at Apple. By nineteen ninety six, Apple was looking for the next generation of operating systems because in didn't work out. So they said, we need a next generation operating system. Our system series is starting to show its age. We need a new operating system. But to spend the money in time to develop an in house is not really practical. So they started looking outside the company and saying, well, what else is out there that maybe we could acquire and then use in future Macintosh computers. They looked at two different companies, and here's the funny thing. Each of those companies was founded by a former Apple executive. The first company was B Incorporated. That's b Inc. And they created the BOS or BOS if you prefer. This company was founded by Jean Louis Gassa, so remember the head of product development from a few years ago who stepped down. The other big contender was next Step, the next Step operating system, which was from a company called next and that company was founded by drum roll please Steve Jobs. So once again you had guess a versus Jobs. With the two operating systems that could potentially power the next generation of Macintosh computers. Now ultimately, spoiler alert, Apple decided that they would go with Next. They decided against bios and decided the next step was the operating system they wanted. So instead of setting up a licensing deal, they did something a little different. They didn't just license the technology from Next. They acquired Next. They spent a lot of money doing it too. They spent nearly four hundred and thirty million dollars on the purchase, and they threw in one and a half million shares of Apple stock as well. Now keep in mind Apple stock at this point was suffering, but it was one and a half million shares. If they could turn things around, and then, spoiler alert, they totally did that, million and a half shares of Apple would be worth way more money. So Steve Jobs came along as part of this part of the deal, They essentially bought Steve Jobs back to Apple because he was the founder of Next and he was part of that company, so they acquired the company. Steve Jobs comes on, so he would return to Apple in nineteen ninety seven after a very long hiatus or as he might refer to it as banishment, and he returned initially as a consultant, but Apple was reeling. The stock price had hit.
A twelve year low, and the board of.
Directors had decided eventually that they needed to replace gil Emilio. And in fact, there was one person who was really arguing for this, and that person was a Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs goes to the board directors and says, hey, you are in real trouble. The decisions that have been made over the past few years have been disastrous for this company and they are leading it to the brink of bankruptcy.
You got to get rid of gill Emilio. And the board of.
Directors agreed and they put Steve Jobs in charge as interim CEO. But that's that's what and last Steve Jobs would eventually become the actual CEO, not just an interim CEO, and would end up taking control of the company he had co founded a.
Couple of decades earlier.
And uh yeah, it was a total different story for Apple from that point forward. But that's the tale for another episode. All right. That concludes this text of classic episode The Macintosh Story Part two. Next Friday we will continue with part three.
Then we'll be all up.
To date as of twenty seventeen, and nothing's happened since then, Right, so we're good. I'm kidding, of course, but I hope you enjoyed this classic episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
