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In a packed room of Apple enthusiasts, a group with rockstar status – the original makers of the Macintosh – celebrated the 40-year history of the desktop computer that launched an entirely new way of interacting with the digital world.
From the get go, the sold-out event, which took place at the Computer History Museum on Jan. 24, delighted the crowd. The program, “Insanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40,” featured a star-studded cast of about a dozen panelists that included members of the computer’s original hardware, software, design and marketing teams. The audience was equally distinguished with several tech luminaries, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, seated in the second row.
David Pogue, a tech journalist and author, moderated the discussion, eliciting stories from panelists who spoke about the early history and culture of the company, and some of the challenges they encountered in its quest for greatness.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, loomed large in these stories, with many panelists crediting him as their motivation for sticking with difficult yet intrinsically fulfilling work.
“Steve had a way of motivating, and his motivation was, ‘Come here and help to change the world for the better.’ He called it, ‘Making a dent in the world,’” said Bill Atkinson, a computer engineer who was part of the original Mac development team.
To make this dent, however, required a lot of dedication and hard work. The panelists described Jobs as both inspiring and, at times, incredibly demanding with his “reality distortion field” and cutting criticisms.
Picking up on this point, Pogue asked whether this was the hallmark of visionaries. “There are people like that who have achieved amazing things that people say nobody else could have. How essential is it to have a bipolar (personality),” he said to the audience’s laughter. “Like seriously, is that the requisite to shaking up the world like that?” he asked.
Susan Kare, a graphic designer who worked on the Mac, pushed back on some of these characterizations, and described Jobs’ positivity and his ability to connect with people working in many different spheres.
“I haven’t met that many people who are able to contribute across such a wide band and who can go to the factory and have some ideas,” she said, adding that Jobs also had specific ideas about typefaces and software.
Jobs’ exacting attention to detail was remarked on by other panelists too. He wanted to make personal desktop computers that would be easy to use and accessible to the average person. But it also had to be elegant, not just another functional machine, but something beautifully designed inside and out, Atkinson said.
The artistry differentiated the Mac from other computers at the time. To make this explicit, Jobs had the core team write their signatures, which then were engraved inside the casing of the original Macs. Jobs pushed the team to take pride in their work, just like artists, Atkinson said.
Still, the development of the computer involved a lot of “trial and error and things that didn’t stick,” according to Atkinson. The same could be said of the company’s strategies to get Macs into the hands of users. It was up against a behemoth competitor, IBM, that had cornered the market share of the industry.
Right before the launch of the computer, Apple embarked on an advertising blitz, releasing a 1984 Super Bowl commercial that showed a woman shattering a massive screen with a sledgehammer, in a kind of dystopian David and Goliath moment. An instant success, the commercial helped catapult the little-known computer into a household name.
The focus on norm-shattering became part of the company’s brand and was solidified in later advertisements with its slogan, “Think Different.”
Tech journalist Steven Levy, who covered Apple early on in Rolling Stone, referred to some of these cultural inflection points, and to the enduring legacy of the Mac.
“The very first time I saw a machine and was able to interact with it and produce a folder and open it and words appeared like they would appear on a page, that was amazing,” Levy said.
“There it was on the screen, and interacting with stuff and moving the cursor around, I now could interact with the digital world. And that’s the way it is a thousand times a day now, and we don’t even think about it,” he added.
A mini pop-up exhibit of Mac artifacts is on display at the Computer History Museum until Feb. 25. More information about the exhibit, Hello: Apple Mac @40, is available online.
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