The Mac was one engineer's cheap computer idea before Steve Jobs took it over
Jef Raskin dreamed up the Macintosh in 1979 as an affordable, easy computer for ordinary people, and named it after his favourite apple, the McIntosh. Two years later Steve Jobs, removed from another Apple team, joined the project and gradually seized control of it. The result launched in January 1984.
Apple was worried. The IBM PC, launched in 1981, had overtaken the Apple II, and Apple's answer, the Lisa, introduced polished drag-and-drop windows but cost 9,995 dollars and flopped. Raskin's small side project, with engineer Burrell Smith and Steve Wozniak, became the vehicle for Lisa's ideas at a quarter of the price. The first Macintosh sold for 2,495 dollars after the famous 1984 Super Bowl advert.
Early buyers loved it more than it deserved. The author Douglas Adams admitted he had fallen for a romantic idea of the machine rather than the slow, underpowered reality, with its single floppy drive demanding constant disk swaps. Sales sagged, and Jobs was forced out by chief executive John Sculley. What saved the Mac was desktop publishing. Its range of fonts, reflecting Jobs's love of typography, plus PageMaker software and the LaserWriter printer, made it the first mass-market computer to show on screen exactly what would print. The maker of PageMaker recalled companies buying a couple of Macs for a newsletter and returning years later to find hundreds.
Strategy then went astray. Sculley kept prices high and refused to license the software to other manufacturers, so the Mac never became the dominant platform. In the 1990s a confusing sprawl of near-identical models, fire-prone laptops and a clone programme that cannibalised Apple's own sales dragged its share from 9.4 percent in 1993 to 3.1 percent in 1997.
The rescue was unexpected. Seeking a modern operating system, Apple bought NeXT, the company Jobs had founded, in February 1997, bringing him back. He struck a deal in which Microsoft invested 150 million dollars and promised five more years of Office for Mac. The name was shortened to Mac in 1999.
Source: Mac (computer)
