Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
Hello SIGCIS, I'm looking for your opinions. I'm currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I'm facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world's most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley's Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer - but tech wasn't ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs' "reality distortion field" to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn't get real multitasking and other "grown up" OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs' hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn't officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn't sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn't be compatible, and it's clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it's chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the "grown up" managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs' success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I'm still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom
Hi Tom, In case you haven't seen, Jack Brown had a good piece in T&C a few years ago on counterfactuals in the history of technology. It's about 19th c. bridge-building, but there are some analogies, and he does useful methodological work on spinning evidence into productive and analytically responsible counterfactuals. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/551605/pdf Best, Evan On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 4:17 PM Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom _______________________________________________
This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
In addition to Jack Brown's terrific essay in T&C, there are 3 brief rejoinder essays on the Technology's Stories website. The first is by Brown, and the other 2 are by Eric Schatzberg & Lee Vinsel. http://www.technologystories.org/a-different-counterfactual-perspective-on-t... http://www.technologystories.org/counterfactual-history-and-the-history-of-t... http://www.technologystories.org/the-value-of-counterfactual-analysis-invest... Cheers, Andy
On Apr 26, 2017, at 4:34 PM, Evan Hepler-Smith <ehepler@princeton.edu> wrote:
Hi Tom,
In case you haven't seen, Jack Brown had a good piece in T&C a few years ago on counterfactuals in the history of technology. It's about 19th c. bridge-building, but there are some analogies, and he does useful methodological work on spinning evidence into productive and analytically responsible counterfactuals.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/551605/pdf
Best, Evan
On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 4:17 PM Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote: Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom
_______________________________________________
This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
Tom et al., There was no way the Mac in the 1980s could provide the computational power and productivity enhancement of the inexpensive "PC clone" hardware world and the Wordstar - Turbo Pascal - Lotus 1-2-3 software world. The Mac was for one kind of fanatic or another. Where I believe Apple and the Mac failed was in the rejection of the company's true nature, especially as expressed in HyperCard, a software tool that presaged the World-Wide Web, but lacked, after commoditization of the company under Sculley, the commitment to carry its essential ideas to fruition. All Apple had to do, as far back as the 1980s, was enable a click on a HyperCard link to connect one person's computer with a "card" (screen) on another computer. Voilà, the web. They had the WWW in their hands and they dropped it in order to chase after numbers. In recent years, corporations have had to accede to their employees' desire to use iPads and iPhones, integrating them into corporate IT infrastructure. That power of user demand could quite possibly have brought Apple and the Mac into an influential position in the big-biz sphere, if Apple had allowed its (Bill Atkinson's?) creative juices to flow. - Bill ________________________________ From: Members [members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Thomas Haigh [thomas.haigh@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:17 PM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership? Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom
One interesting tidbit: due the paucity of RAM, MacWrite as originally shipped couldn't accommodate documents of more than 7-8 pages. Steven Levy recounts a writers' workshop whose participants were being introduced to the wonders of word processing software c. 1985, and hearing the recommendation to the assembled authors that they create only very short chapters! Mac Plus fixed this. On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 5:20 PM, McMillan, William W < william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu> wrote:
Tom et al.,
There was no way the Mac in the 1980s could provide the computational power and productivity enhancement of the inexpensive "PC clone" hardware world and the Wordstar - Turbo Pascal - Lotus 1-2-3 software world. The Mac was for one kind of fanatic or another.
Where I believe Apple and the Mac failed was in the rejection of the company's true nature, especially as expressed in HyperCard, a software tool that presaged the World-Wide Web, but lacked, after commoditization of the company under Sculley, the commitment to carry its essential ideas to fruition. All Apple had to do, as far back as the 1980s, was enable a click on a HyperCard link to connect one person's computer with a "card" (screen) on another computer. Voilà, the web.
They had the WWW in their hands and they dropped it in order to chase after numbers.
In recent years, corporations have had to accede to their employees' desire to use iPads and iPhones, integrating them into corporate IT infrastructure. That power of user demand could quite possibly have brought Apple and the Mac into an influential position in the big-biz sphere, if Apple had allowed its (Bill Atkinson's?) creative juices to flow.
- Bill
________________________________ From: Members [members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org] on behalf of Thomas Haigh [thomas.haigh@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:17 PM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/ listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
-- Matthew Kirschenbaum Professor of English Director, Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies University of Maryland mkirschenbaum.net
Tom, I believe you meant “Macintosh II” each time you said “Apple II” (three occurrences). (The Apple II, sometimes referred to as the Apple ][, was of course the original late 70s Apple product.) My view is that while Apple as a company almost failed, the Macintosh was an early critical success, helped companies like Adobe create a large market for computer graphics, was widely used in education, and, after the return of Jobs, has become the most profitable personal computer brand ever, to say nothing of providing the technological base for the iPhone. Horace Dediu, the analyst who runs http://www.asymco.com, has plenty of financial information backing this. Paul McJones
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:17 PM To: members@sigcis.org <mailto:members@sigcis.org> Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
… Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
As IEEE Milestone Coordinator for IEEE Region 6 (the 10 western United States, roughly), I worked on the submissions for Milestones for the Apple I <http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestone-Proposal:Introduction_of_the_Apple_I_Computer:_1976>, Apple ][ <http://ethw.org/Milestones:Introduction_of_the_Apple_II_Computer:_1977-1978> and Macintosh <http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestone-Proposal:Introduction_of_the_Apple_Macintosh_Computer,_1984>. These have not yet been dedicated, but they have been approved by the IEEE History Committee and the IEEE Board of Directors. The Macintosh site is the only location anywhere that describes the 7 patents that are exercised by the Mac. It took a lot of work to track down that info, and I was working with over 20 members of the Mac design team. Steve Wozniak was (not surprisingly) a key source of info for the Apple I and ][. He provided some very interesting perspective re: the floppy controller as used with the Apple ][. This controller was implemented as a single IC in the Macintosh and therein called the "Integrated Woz Machine (IWM)" - this is also described in US Patent No. 4,742,448 <http://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/images/6/65/Ref4-US4742448.pdf>. I am not sure how much this adds to the discussion, but I thought that this info would be of interest. _________________________ Brian A. Berg / bberg@StanfordAlumni.org Berg Software Design 14500 Big Basin Way, Suite F, Saratoga, CA 95070 USA Voice: 408.741.5010 / Cell: 408.568.2505 Consulting: Flash Memory/USB/Storage/Patents visit the Storage Cornucopia: www.bswd.com FMS Technical Chair: www.FlashMemorySummit.com IEEE Milestone <http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:List_of_IEEE_Milestones> Coordinator for Region 6 <http://www.ieee-region6.org/> IEEE SCV Section <http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/> Chair (2012) / IEEE-CNSV <http://www.CaliforniaConsultants.org> Board Director IEEE SCV History Committee <http://www.SiliconValleyHistory.com/> Chair On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 3:39 PM, Paul McJones <paul@mcjones.org> wrote:
Tom,
I believe you meant “Macintosh II” each time you said “Apple II” (three occurrences). (The Apple II, sometimes referred to as the Apple ][, was of course the original late 70s Apple product.)
My view is that while Apple as a company almost failed, the Macintosh was an early critical success, helped companies like Adobe create a large market for computer graphics, was widely used in education, and, after the return of Jobs, has become the most profitable personal computer brand ever, to say nothing of providing the technological base for the iPhone. Horace Dediu, the analyst who runs http://www.asymco.com, has plenty of financial information backing this.
Paul McJones
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:17 PM
To: members@sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
…
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/ listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
We installed labs of 128kb Macs in 1985, replacing terminals. For the staff they were a nuisance – endless rebooting and so on, and compromises like the faux folder hierarchy were appalling to UNIX purists. And of course they were hopelessly hobbled for any practical purpose, as others have also noted in this thread. But students loved them and at the time we credited them with encouraging some students to change their major from (say) Physics to CS. They were vastly more successful than the labs of PCs elsewhere in the building, on which the programming environments were no match for MacPascal – from a student’s point of view at least. However I agree that the price meant that they weren’t going to make inroads in the domestic market, and they were near-useless for commercial purposes. Many of our students had PCs at home, and, e.g., used them to draft the programs that they then entered into the Macs in our labs. There may have been a couple of students with those early Macs at home, but no more than that. On this anecdotal evidence I agree with your hypothesis, Tom. Justin From: Members <members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org> on behalf of Matthew Kirschenbaum <mkirschenbaum@gmail.com> Date: Thursday, 27 April 2017 at 8:26 am To: "McMillan, William W" <william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu> Cc: "members@sigcis.org" <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership? One interesting tidbit: due the paucity of RAM, MacWrite as originally shipped couldn't accommodate documents of more than 7-8 pages. Steven Levy recounts a writers' workshop whose participants were being introduced to the wonders of word processing software c. 1985, and hearing the recommendation to the assembled authors that they create only very short chapters! Mac Plus fixed this. On Wed, Apr 26, 2017 at 5:20 PM, McMillan, William W <william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu<mailto:william.mcmillan@cuaa.edu>> wrote: Tom et al., There was no way the Mac in the 1980s could provide the computational power and productivity enhancement of the inexpensive "PC clone" hardware world and the Wordstar - Turbo Pascal - Lotus 1-2-3 software world. The Mac was for one kind of fanatic or another. Where I believe Apple and the Mac failed was in the rejection of the company's true nature, especially as expressed in HyperCard, a software tool that presaged the World-Wide Web, but lacked, after commoditization of the company under Sculley, the commitment to carry its essential ideas to fruition. All Apple had to do, as far back as the 1980s, was enable a click on a HyperCard link to connect one person's computer with a "card" (screen) on another computer. Voilà, the web. They had the WWW in their hands and they dropped it in order to chase after numbers. In recent years, corporations have had to accede to their employees' desire to use iPads and iPhones, integrating them into corporate IT infrastructure. That power of user demand could quite possibly have brought Apple and the Mac into an influential position in the big-biz sphere, if Apple had allowed its (Bill Atkinson's?) creative juices to flow. - Bill ________________________________ From: Members [members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org<mailto:members-bounces@lists.sigcis.org>] on behalf of Thomas Haigh [thomas.haigh@gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com>] Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2017 4:17 PM To: members@sigcis.org<mailto:members@sigcis.org> Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership? Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/<http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org<http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> -- Matthew Kirschenbaum Professor of English Director, Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies University of Maryland mkirschenbaum.net<http://mkirschenbaum.net>
Tom, Glad you’re interested in this as it is stuff I am interested in working on. I think so much of this is a question of perspective and how you see the mythology and history of this playing out. It is kind of telling that you use the term Mac fans a bit pejoratively when in a sense that sense of passion and connection to the device is what Jobs was looking for. I think that along with reviving the company one reason Jobs has been looked at more glowingly in the recent past is that his desire to create a culture of computing around easy-to-use computers was more important to him as creating machines that sold well and turned a profit. That’s probably why he was blind to how expensive that $2500 price tag was and couldn’t see how the difficulty of using the early machines damned it to be a niche product. It is true that this almost sank the company financially, but without this approach Apple floundered until 1998 looking for traction in the business market, when that kind of went against the origins of the ][ and the Mac. For that stretch you could argue that Apple wasn’t Apple, and a “Mac Fan” could go as far as saying that without that initial vision it was just a bad clone company that was doomed to sell market shares because it didn’t have access to the OEM-based platform that made Microsoft profitable but not particularly innovative. So a counter argument (for discussion’s sake) could be that what Jobs was pushing for just wasn’t achievable at that time with the available tech. Is that a dooming strategy or the kind of leadership that you want from a supposedly visionary CEO. That depends on who you are of course. Would Microsoft have come up with equivalent hardware? Probably not, hardware was already not their game at that point. Who does that leave? Commodore? The Amiga was coming and that might have been the next viable option. Radio Shack? Unlikely. Xerox? They did have the Alto a decade earlier and tried with the Star but were even less successful. IBM? Maybe, but they were coming down from the big business model and I wonder what their true innovation into a consumer market might have been if not pushed by Apple. It is an interesting alternate history question, but it’s also important to note that even when Jobs did come back and the new iMac helped revive the company, he was never obsessed with pandering to the market share metrics that often position the clones and then Microsoft as having won the world. Oddly enough by that point he was thinking about selling BMWs rather than Fords (his words, don’t remember the time of the quote). I do doubt that Lisa would have been the answer. It was a business computer without the feel of a personal experience, and the “feel” of the Macintosh was very important and was part of its branding. The fact that so few Macintoshes sold but there were so many dedicated fans who used them for years is an interesting representation of how Jobs saw the industry being about consumer identity, communities, and passion about interface experience in a way that few others have. He was a far better marketer than an innovator after all and that is really what his legacy should be. Also, please don’t read me as a Jobs super sympathizer. He is a problematic historical individual and there are so many conflicting histories, myths, and distortions about his role in this that it is hard to get at what really happened. He did however have some powerful visions and opinions that have inevitably shaped this story for better or for worse. I’ll stop here, I could go on longer as this is at the core of my research, and part of my next research project on the pedagogy of personal computer advertisements and teaching us how to use and want “new” technology. Would love to talk more off of the listerv! Cheers Kimon Kimon Keramidas, Ph.D. Associate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor John W. Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought New York University 14 University Place New York, NY 10003 E kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu <mailto:kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu> P 212-998-3691 T @kimonizer <http://twitter.com/kimonizer> W http://kimonkeramidas.com <http://kimonkeramidas.com/> The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing Exhibition <https://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/10/the-interface-experience> | Web <http://interface-experience.org/> The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide Winner of the 2016 Innovation in Print Design Award from the American Alliance of Museums <http://www.aam-us.org/> Buy Book <http://store.bgc.bard.edu/the-interface-experience-a-users-guide-by-kimon-keramidas/>
On Apr 26, 2017, at 4:17 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org>
It may be useful to remember that one of Steve Jobs’ heroes was Edwin Land and that Jobs was fascinated by Polaroid. (Harvard’s Collection of Scientific Instruments has the Mac that Jobs gave to Edwin Land.) So as you embark into “counterfactual land” another question to ask is: “Suppose Jobs had not been so obsessed with Land and Polaroid, and had looked to another corporate figure such as Herb Boyer and Genentech; Herb Kelleher and Southwest Airlines; or Masaru Ibuka and Sony?” In other words, was Polaroid, a bad example…. Debbie Douglas On Apr 26, 2017, at 8:27 PM, Kimon Keramidas <kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu<mailto:kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu>> wrote: Tom, Glad you’re interested in this as it is stuff I am interested in working on. I think so much of this is a question of perspective and how you see the mythology and history of this playing out. It is kind of telling that you use the term Mac fans a bit pejoratively when in a sense that sense of passion and connection to the device is what Jobs was looking for. I think that along with reviving the company one reason Jobs has been looked at more glowingly in the recent past is that his desire to create a culture of computing around easy-to-use computers was more important to him as creating machines that sold well and turned a profit. That’s probably why he was blind to how expensive that $2500 price tag was and couldn’t see how the difficulty of using the early machines damned it to be a niche product. It is true that this almost sank the company financially, but without this approach Apple floundered until 1998 looking for traction in the business market, when that kind of went against the origins of the ][ and the Mac. For that stretch you could argue that Apple wasn’t Apple, and a “Mac Fan” could go as far as saying that without that initial vision it was just a bad clone company that was doomed to sell market shares because it didn’t have access to the OEM-based platform that made Microsoft profitable but not particularly innovative. So a counter argument (for discussion’s sake) could be that what Jobs was pushing for just wasn’t achievable at that time with the available tech. Is that a dooming strategy or the kind of leadership that you want from a supposedly visionary CEO. That depends on who you are of course. Would Microsoft have come up with equivalent hardware? Probably not, hardware was already not their game at that point. Who does that leave? Commodore? The Amiga was coming and that might have been the next viable option. Radio Shack? Unlikely. Xerox? They did have the Alto a decade earlier and tried with the Star but were even less successful. IBM? Maybe, but they were coming down from the big business model and I wonder what their true innovation into a consumer market might have been if not pushed by Apple. It is an interesting alternate history question, but it’s also important to note that even when Jobs did come back and the new iMac helped revive the company, he was never obsessed with pandering to the market share metrics that often position the clones and then Microsoft as having won the world. Oddly enough by that point he was thinking about selling BMWs rather than Fords (his words, don’t remember the time of the quote). I do doubt that Lisa would have been the answer. It was a business computer without the feel of a personal experience, and the “feel” of the Macintosh was very important and was part of its branding. The fact that so few Macintoshes sold but there were so many dedicated fans who used them for years is an interesting representation of how Jobs saw the industry being about consumer identity, communities, and passion about interface experience in a way that few others have. He was a far better marketer than an innovator after all and that is really what his legacy should be. Also, please don’t read me as a Jobs super sympathizer. He is a problematic historical individual and there are so many conflicting histories, myths, and distortions about his role in this that it is hard to get at what really happened. He did however have some powerful visions and opinions that have inevitably shaped this story for better or for worse. I’ll stop here, I could go on longer as this is at the core of my research, and part of my next research project on the pedagogy of personal computer advertisements and teaching us how to use and want “new” technology. Would love to talk more off of the listerv! Cheers Kimon Kimon Keramidas, Ph.D. Associate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor John W. Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought New York University 14 University Place New York, NY 10003 E kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu<mailto:kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu> P 212-998-3691 T @kimonizer<http://twitter.com/kimonizer> W http://kimonkeramidas.com<http://kimonkeramidas.com/> The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing Exhibition<https://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/10/the-interface-experience> | Web<http://interface-experience.org/> The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide Winner of the 2016 Innovation in Print Design Award from the American Alliance of Museums<http://www.aam-us.org/> Buy Book<http://store.bgc.bard.edu/the-interface-experience-a-users-guide-by-kimon-keramidas/> On Apr 26, 2017, at 4:17 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com>> wrote: Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room N51-209 • 265 Massachusetts Avenue • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 • ddouglas@mit.edu<mailto:ddouglas@mit.edu> • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://mitmuseum.mit.edu • http://museum.mit.edu/150
Following Debbie's lead, I'd like to point out that one can also judge Jobs by different criteria. Tom, you're looking at Jobs as an entrepreneur/businessman. Perhaps his biggest contribution was as an industrial designer. Erik Sent from my iPhone On Apr 26, 2017, at 20:48, Deborah Douglas <ddouglas@mit.edu<mailto:ddouglas@mit.edu>> wrote: It may be useful to remember that one of Steve Jobs’ heroes was Edwin Land and that Jobs was fascinated by Polaroid. (Harvard’s Collection of Scientific Instruments has the Mac that Jobs gave to Edwin Land.) So as you embark into “counterfactual land” another question to ask is: “Suppose Jobs had not been so obsessed with Land and Polaroid, and had looked to another corporate figure such as Herb Boyer and Genentech; Herb Kelleher and Southwest Airlines; or Masaru Ibuka and Sony?” In other words, was Polaroid, a bad example…. Debbie Douglas On Apr 26, 2017, at 8:27 PM, Kimon Keramidas <kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu<mailto:kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu>> wrote: Tom, Glad you’re interested in this as it is stuff I am interested in working on. I think so much of this is a question of perspective and how you see the mythology and history of this playing out. It is kind of telling that you use the term Mac fans a bit pejoratively when in a sense that sense of passion and connection to the device is what Jobs was looking for. I think that along with reviving the company one reason Jobs has been looked at more glowingly in the recent past is that his desire to create a culture of computing around easy-to-use computers was more important to him as creating machines that sold well and turned a profit. That’s probably why he was blind to how expensive that $2500 price tag was and couldn’t see how the difficulty of using the early machines damned it to be a niche product. It is true that this almost sank the company financially, but without this approach Apple floundered until 1998 looking for traction in the business market, when that kind of went against the origins of the ][ and the Mac. For that stretch you could argue that Apple wasn’t Apple, and a “Mac Fan” could go as far as saying that without that initial vision it was just a bad clone company that was doomed to sell market shares because it didn’t have access to the OEM-based platform that made Microsoft profitable but not particularly innovative. So a counter argument (for discussion’s sake) could be that what Jobs was pushing for just wasn’t achievable at that time with the available tech. Is that a dooming strategy or the kind of leadership that you want from a supposedly visionary CEO. That depends on who you are of course. Would Microsoft have come up with equivalent hardware? Probably not, hardware was already not their game at that point. Who does that leave? Commodore? The Amiga was coming and that might have been the next viable option. Radio Shack? Unlikely. Xerox? They did have the Alto a decade earlier and tried with the Star but were even less successful. IBM? Maybe, but they were coming down from the big business model and I wonder what their true innovation into a consumer market might have been if not pushed by Apple. It is an interesting alternate history question, but it’s also important to note that even when Jobs did come back and the new iMac helped revive the company, he was never obsessed with pandering to the market share metrics that often position the clones and then Microsoft as having won the world. Oddly enough by that point he was thinking about selling BMWs rather than Fords (his words, don’t remember the time of the quote). I do doubt that Lisa would have been the answer. It was a business computer without the feel of a personal experience, and the “feel” of the Macintosh was very important and was part of its branding. The fact that so few Macintoshes sold but there were so many dedicated fans who used them for years is an interesting representation of how Jobs saw the industry being about consumer identity, communities, and passion about interface experience in a way that few others have. He was a far better marketer than an innovator after all and that is really what his legacy should be. Also, please don’t read me as a Jobs super sympathizer. He is a problematic historical individual and there are so many conflicting histories, myths, and distortions about his role in this that it is hard to get at what really happened. He did however have some powerful visions and opinions that have inevitably shaped this story for better or for worse. I’ll stop here, I could go on longer as this is at the core of my research, and part of my next research project on the pedagogy of personal computer advertisements and teaching us how to use and want “new” technology. Would love to talk more off of the listerv! Cheers Kimon Kimon Keramidas, Ph.D. Associate Director and Clinical Assistant Professor John W. Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought New York University 14 University Place New York, NY 10003 E kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu<mailto:kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu> P 212-998-3691 T @kimonizer<http://twitter.com/kimonizer> W http://kimonkeramidas.com<http://kimonkeramidas.com/> The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing Exhibition<https://www.bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/10/the-interface-experience> | Web<http://interface-experience.org/> The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide Winner of the 2016 Innovation in Print Design Award from the American Alliance of Museums<http://www.aam-us.org/> Buy Book<http://store.bgc.bard.edu/the-interface-experience-a-users-guide-by-kimon-keramidas/> On Apr 26, 2017, at 4:17 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com<mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com>> wrote: Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org Deborah G. Douglas, PhD • Director of Collections and Curator of Science and Technology, MIT Museum; Research Associate, Program in Science, Technology, and Society • Room N51-209 • 265 Massachusetts Avenue • Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 • ddouglas@mit.edu<mailto:ddouglas@mit.edu> • 617-253-1766 telephone • 617-253-8994 facsimile • http://mitmuseum.mit.edu • http://museum.mit.edu/150 _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org<http://sigcis.org>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
Or, as a recent Nobel Laureate said, “There’s no success like failure.” Paul Ceruzzi ceruzzip@si.edu<mailto:ceruzzip@si.edu> 202-633-2414
Hi Tom, I think the Lisa is really the wrong machine to imagine this counterfactual. Yes, Jobs did pooh-pooh the Lisa in favor of the Mac after he got kicked off Lisa and joined the Mac. But it’s highly doubtful that the Lisa could have been successful anyway. Because a machine with similar characteristics, price point, and target market was also released by Xerox, the Star 8010, and it also failed in the market vis-a-vis a much more rudimentary, but cheaper alternative, the IBM PC. The Lisa, despite being more capable and more modern in software architecture than the Mac, shared these characteristics of the Star. It was too expensive, around $10,000. It was pitched to businesses, but would have targeted secretaries, and corporations weren’t going to spend $10,000 on a glorified typewriter for their secretaries. The Lisa, being designed for businesses, and being managed in a more traditional manner, did not have the fun personality that the Mac had due to people like Andy Herzfeld putting in little easter eggs. The Lisa was supposed to ship with all of the applications you needed, without the need to buy third party applications. The word processor and spreadsheet and other software would have been bundled, and written by Apple. This, again, was like the Star. Yes, third party applications would have come later, but there was not a large push out of the gate to have them. This would have doomed the Lisa as a platform. Also, Apple simply didn’t have the kind of culture to market a machine successfully to business during that era. The Apple III was a notorious failure, and it was supposed to be Apple’s answer to the IBM PC and business. It also suffered from Steve Jobs perfectionist mismanagement. The Mac was not an overnight success, as the 128K Mac was too limited initially. But neither was it an unmitigated failure, as Apple was able to remedy its immediate shortcomings by coming out with the 512K version and the Plus, SE, and Mac II later on, under Sculley. Yes, Jobs bares the blame for a lot of the original Mac’s shortcomings. But its limited operating system, which became a big headache by the mid 1990s, was, because it was much more resource efficient than Lisa’s, key to the Mac’s early success. The Mac was a case where being of limited capability was important to hit its price point and thus gain adoption. The Lisa and the Star had both been too ambitious with their software systems and thus were probably just too ahead of the curve to be successful. The Mac managed to hit a sweet spot between capability and price to gain just enough traction that it could survive its initial shortcomings and build a platform, with third party developer support. The collaboration with Microsoft to make Word and Excel was key. More important was Aldus Pagemaker, which in combination with the Apple Laserwriter and Adobe Postscript, set off the desktop publishing boom and became the Mac’s killer app. Nevertheless, I don’t think Lisa’s failings can be solely chalked up to Steve Jobs wanting to kill it in favor of the Mac, it had its own problems. In terms of sources, while it’s not great, Steven Levy’s Insanely Great is a journalistic account that covers both the story of Lisa and Mac development. Unfortunately it’s very highly biased in favor of the Mac, your mileage may vary. Owen Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential might be better. It covers a wide range of Apple history in quickly digestible form. Michael Moritz’s Little Kingdom had journalistic access inside Apple during the development of the Mac, and was a key source for early Apple history that later accounts, including Isaacson’s, drew upon. Jobs was really upset with Moritz after edited excerpts from Moritz’s reporting came out in Time’s Man of the Year issue with the Computer on the cover instead of Steve Jobs. Andy Herzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley is really a collection of anecdotes from his website, folklore.org, which recount stories from the development of the Mac and some from the Lisa, mostly from Herzfeld but with contributions from Steve Capps, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Susan Kare. I haven’t read Cringely’s Accidental Empires but I have seen his documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” and I don’t fully agree with his general take on Apple, especially as both of those works were written in the 1990s from the perspective of MIcrosoft’s ascendance and Apple’s downward spiral. At CHM, we’ve conducted a few oral histories in the last year that might be very helpful. We’ve done three sessions with Larry Tesler, and two sessions with Bob Belleville. However these are still being processed and haven’t been posted publicly yet.
On Apr 26, 2017, at 5:27 PM, Kimon Keramidas <kimon.keramidas@nyu.edu> wrote:
I do doubt that Lisa would have been the answer. It was a business computer without the feel of a personal experience, and the “feel” of the Macintosh was very important and was part of its branding. The fact that so few Macintoshes sold but there were so many dedicated fans who used them for years is an interesting representation of how Jobs saw the industry being about consumer identity, communities, and passion about interface experience in a way that few others have. He was a far better marketer than an innovator after all and that is really what his legacy should be.
A really interesting take on Steve Jobs from the early 1990s is Randall Stross’s Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing which chronicles Steve’s founding of NeXT in 1985, and carries through to NeXT’s decision to end production of its hardware and become a software company in 1993. Given the time it was written and the consensus at the time that Jobs was a has been who didn’t know squat about how to run a successful company, this is a very interesting counterpoint to the current myth that Jobs was a genius who could do no wrong and shouldn’t have been kicked out of Apple. Unfortunately I think it goes too far in the other direction, painting Jobs as a complete failure of a manager. Though in 1993, this might not have been too inaccurate of a statement. Stross is a business historian, and thus treats NeXT as a case study in failure, especially in comparison to its biggest competition at that time, Sun Microsystems. (This comparison looks very different in hindsight.) It’s very interesting how the choice to end the story in 1993 essentially makes it a narrative of failure. NeXT manages to claw its way to profitability by 1996, mostly by focusing on custom enterprise client-server software development, and with a new web application server technology, could have become a big dot.com player, when the acquisition by Apple occurred, changing both the trajectories of NeXT and Apple. Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzelli’s book Becoming Steve Jobs argues that Jobs’ management acumen in his second stint at Apple came from observing Ed Catmull and John Lasseter’s management styles at Pixar. But I think that the experience of almost failing with NeXT, pivoting it when the reality of the market refused to be distorted and learning the discipline necessary to keep a startup afloat was also critical. With both NeXT and Pixar, Jobs was losing money hand over foot, and was forced to play the long game and build a reliable platform for long-term development, rather than come out with a revolutionary product every few years that was completely incompatible with what went before. This enabled him to do the same at Apple, where NeXT technology was used to deploy first OS X, then iPhone and iPad. Seeds planted in 1997, utilizing work done in 1987, would bear fruit in 2007 and continue into 2017.
On Apr 26, 2017, at 1:17 PM, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market?
I don't think you can conclude either way, but I lean toward "no". Even if Apple were quicker to make the Lisa cheaper, faster, and with more applications, they still would have faced tremendous competition from the Atari ST, AT&T Unix PC, Commodore Amiga, etc. -- along with the cash-cow that was the huge Apple II user base (not to be confused with the Mac II which you accidentally wrote as Apple II.) Another thing that could've happened had they stuck with Lisa is Microsoft might have moved more quickly to develop Windows. ________________________________ Evan Koblentz, director Vintage Computer Federation a 501(c)(3) educational non-profit evan@vcfed.org (646) 546-9999 www.vcfed.org facebook.com/vcfederation twitter.com/vcfederation instagram.com/vcfederation
Dear Tom, A non-theoretical, contemporary alternative to the Mac was the Apple IIGS. This kept going into the early 1990s at Apple as a parallel product line complete with its own Mac-like GUI and mouse-driven apps, as well as backward compatibility with Apple II software. It was cheaper than Macintosh, had multimedia capabilities, full color before the Mac did, and expansion slots as I recall. Apple II software was also still a huge share of the education market, which Apple valued highly. The GS sold very well initially – presumably at the expense of some Macs – but then dropped off; it didn’t help that it speed was apparently purposefully throttled so as not to make the Mac look bad (see "Apple IIGS" in Wikipedia for that). It also apparently lost out as a multimedia machine against the Atari and Amiga, even if it beat early Macs in that department. However, Apple and PC history certainly could have been different depending on how the GS, i.e. the later Apple II line, got handled. In retrospect it seems wild to have had the same company selling two overlapping, incompatible platforms; one fairly open and backward-compatible, the other closed and standalone. I can introduce you to one or two of the key folks for the GS division if you like. I’m sure they’ve explored the counterfactuals countless times over the years ;-) I knew about the IIGS since my first jobs out of college were testing IIGS software at Activision, then Mac software at Apple. Best, Marc
On Apr 26, 2017, at 13:17, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
Marc Weber <http://www.computerhistory.org/staff/Marc,Weber/> | marc@webhistory.org | +1 415 282 6868 Internet History Program Curatorial Director, Computer History Museum 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 computerhistory.org/nethistory <http://computerhistory.org/nethistory> Co-founder, Web History Center and Project, webhistory.org
I’ve heard from some Apple people that the IIgs, like the Lisa, had an object-oriented framework for application development built-in, like the Lisa’s Lisa ToolKit. Whereas the Mac’s Macintosh Toolbox was a very low level API that didn’t do much to make development easy. Larry Tesler, who worked on Lisa ToolKit, developed MacApp, an object-oriented framework for the Mac, but except for Adobe Photoshop it wasn’t used much, and fell victim to political in-fighting in the Mac group in favor of other technologies that never shipped. Eventually it was Metrowerks’ PowerPlant that became the dominant object-oriented framework on the Mac. But the IIgs was supposed to have this capability from the beginning. Can someone verify?
On Apr 26, 2017, at 10:28 PM, Marc Weber <marc@webhistory.org> wrote:
Dear Tom,
A non-theoretical, contemporary alternative to the Mac was the Apple IIGS. This kept going into the early 1990s at Apple as a parallel product line complete with its own Mac-like GUI and mouse-driven apps, as well as backward compatibility with Apple II software. It was cheaper than Macintosh, had multimedia capabilities, full color before the Mac did, and expansion slots as I recall. Apple II software was also still a huge share of the education market, which Apple valued highly.
The GS sold very well initially – presumably at the expense of some Macs – but then dropped off; it didn’t help that it speed was apparently purposefully throttled so as not to make the Mac look bad (see "Apple IIGS" in Wikipedia for that). It also apparently lost out as a multimedia machine against the Atari and Amiga, even if it beat early Macs in that department. However, Apple and PC history certainly could have been different depending on how the GS, i.e. the later Apple II line, got handled. In retrospect it seems wild to have had the same company selling two overlapping, incompatible platforms; one fairly open and backward-compatible, the other closed and standalone.
I can introduce you to one or two of the key folks for the GS division if you like. I’m sure they’ve explored the counterfactuals countless times over the years ;-) I knew about the IIGS since my first jobs out of college were testing IIGS software at Activision, then Mac software at Apple.
Best,
Marc
On Apr 26, 2017, at 13:17, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh@gmail.com <mailto:thomas.haigh@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hello SIGCIS,
I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history.
Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation.
Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system.
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew).
Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization.
The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa.
So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh.
Thoughts? Pointers to sources?
Tom _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org> Marc Weber <http://www.computerhistory.org/staff/Marc,Weber/> | marc@webhistory.org <mailto:marc@webhistory.org> | +1 415 282 6868 Internet History Program Curatorial Director, Computer History Museum 1401 N Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View CA 94043 computerhistory.org/nethistory <http://computerhistory.org/nethistory> Co-founder, Web History Center and Project, webhistory.org <http://webhistory.org/>
_______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org <http://sigcis.org/>, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ <http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/> and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org <http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org>
On 4/26/2017 4:17 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:
The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an [Mac] II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had.
I suspect that Apple never had a chance of overcoming the IBM compatible PCs locking up the market. It seems to me that Apple was flying in the face of a major trend at the time, i.e., hardware-vendor independence. The Internet was giving companies independence of computer vendor proprietary architectures on the communications side of things (and coppanies liked it), and Microsoft was promoting its software as being independent of hardware vendors. (Of course, Microsoft was not promoting independence of operating system vendors.)
participants (16)
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Andrew Russell -
Brian Berg -
Ceruzzi, Paul -
Dave Walden -
Deborah Douglas -
Erik Rau -
Evan Hepler-Smith -
Evan Koblentz -
Hansen Hsu -
Justin Zobel -
Kimon Keramidas -
Marc Weber -
Matthew Kirschenbaum -
McMillan, William W -
Paul McJones -
Thomas Haigh