Insanely Great - Evolution of the Mac
What was next for the boys of Apple? Building a machine that was at once sexy, bold, and insanely great was what Jobs had in mind when a team was assembled to begin development of the legendary Macintosh. Absent from the process was Woz, the brains and engineering talent behind Jobs’ vision, who left Apple in 1981 after he crashed his airplane taking off from Santa Cruz Sky Park. As a result, he had temporary short-term memory loss. On board now was Jeff Raskin for the lower-priced Macintosh model and Bill Atkinson for the higher-priced, more business-oriented Lisa.
Development of the Lisa started in 1978, with the Macintosh following one year later. While Jobs focused his attention on the Lisa project, Raskin continued the tradition of the Apple II which was to create an easy-to-use and economical system for everyday users. Both systems had switched to Motorola processors. Raskin’s first prototype of the Mac included the Motorola 6809E processor, 64KB of RAM and monochrome graphics fitting a 256x256 pixel display. One Lisa designer expressed interest in running Lisa’s programs on the Mac, which would require modifications of the Mac architecture. This was achieved by incorporating the Motorola 68000 processor (same as the Lisa) onto the system board, using fewer chips and increasing the speed of the processor from 5 MHz to 8. Lured by the growing excitement of the Macintosh team, Jobs left the Lisa project and hopped aboard the Macintosh bandwagon. By 1981, Jobs was fully immersed in all aspects of the Macintosh, and personality clashes with Raskin hastened the latter’s exit from the company. A subsequent visit to the labs of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and a demo of the Xerox Alto’s GUI (Graphical User Interface) system convinced Jobs that adding the GUI to both the Lisa and Macintosh would heighten its marketability.
The Macintosh computer was released to the public on January 22, 1984, following a Super Bowl Half-Time marketing blitz which premiered the famous Ridley Scott-directed commercial with a woman throwing a sledgehammer into an Orwellian "Big Brother" video screen representing then enemy IBM. The final product featured 128KB RAM (2 64KB chips soldered onto the motherboard) and expandable to 512KB, the Motorola 68000 processor operating at 8Mhz, an internal, 3.5" floppy disk drive, and 384x256 pixel bitmap display. Included were the Xerox-inspired GUI and two user-friendly programs - MacWrite, a word processor, and MacPaint, a simple graphics program. The Mac retailed at a price of $2,495.00, much less than the similarly designed and financially disastrous Lisa model (at $9,995.00 and including an internal hard drive) released a year earlier.
While revolutionary in the way it defined personal computing, the Mac became an object of ridicule by hard-core computer users. At heart was the lack of viable software programs for the new platform, the scant memory included, and the absence of a real hard disk drive. By 1984, new classes of x86 PC clones were providing low cost alternatives to the higher-priced and less feature-rich Macs. Apple knew it had to improve on the design of the original Mac to stay competitive. Internal struggles with then CEO John Scully and Jobs would prove to be Jobs’ undoing and Jobs was finally forced out of Apple in 1985.
Apple released several minor versions of their Mac system after Jobs’ departure, with the exception of one event: in 1985, Apple once again became an innovator when it introduced desktop publishing. Macintosh-specific packages such as MacPublisher and Aldus PageMaker, along with the addition of the first LaserWriter (a laser printer) cemented Apple’s reputation as the desktop publishing giant. One year later, Apple released the Macintosh Plus to address the limitations of original Mac. The Macintosh Plus featured 1MB of RAM (expandable to 4MB), a SCSI hard drive controller that allowed for the possibility of adding 6 additional devices, and increased its floppy disk capacity to 800KB.
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