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Vintage Apple

Vintage Apple Article

The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype. Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple's Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year as Apple employee #282. Over the years, Raskin assembled a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld and Daniel Kottke.

Smith.s first Macintosh board was built to Raskin.s design specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (KiB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×56 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. (The final product used a 9-inch, 512x342 monochrome display.) Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa.s graphical programs on the Macintosh, and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa.s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000, but bumped its speed from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384×56 bitmap display. Smith.s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which made production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had far more programming code in ROM than most other computers; it had 128 KiB of RAM, in the form of sixteen, 64 kilobit (Kb) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 KiB by means of soldering sixteen 256 Kib RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips.

The innovative design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs. ideas than Raskin.s. After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group's own ideas. Jobs also commissioned industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger to work on the Macintosh line, resulting in the "Snow White" design language; although it came too late for the earliest Macs, it was implemented in most other mid- to late-1980s Apple computers. However, Jobs.s leadership at the Macintosh project was short-lived; after an internal power struggle with new CEO John Sculley, Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, went on to found NeXT, another computer company, and did not return until 1997. CEO John Sculley raised the price from US$1,995 to US$2,495 to pay for a massive marketing campaign.