Sejarah Brand APPLE

Rundown kami yang besar dan komprehensif tentang sejarah Apple akan membawa Anda dari asalnya di tahun 1970-an, kepergian Jobs dan kemudian kembali ke Apple. Ikuti kisah Apple bersama kami!

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Nik Rawlinson

, Kontributor

Nik Rawlinson | 25 Apr 17

Jons dan Woz

ISI

> Sejarah Apple> Menjual Apple I > Dasar Apple> Apple II > Bagaimana Jobs bertemu Woz> Apple, Xerox, dan mouse satu tombol > Komputer Apple pertama> Lisa dan Macintosh > Mengapa Apple diberi nama Apple> Iklan Apple '1984'

Dalam fitur ini kami menceritakan kisah Apple. Kami mulai dengan hari-hari awal, kisah tentang bagaimana Apple didirikan, berlanjut melalui Apple I, ke Apple II, peluncuran Macintosh dan revolusi dalam industri DTP ... Ke raksasa industri teknologi yang kami kenal dan cintai hari ini.

Jadi duduk santai saat kita berjalan menyusuri jalan kenangan. Mengapa tidak memoles apa yang sebenarnya terjadi sebelum Anda pergi dan menonton film Steve Jobs , dengan interpretasinya yang menarik dari beberapa peristiwa penting dalam sejarah perusahaan?

Pada 1 April 1976 Apple didirikan, menjadikan perusahaan berusia 41 tahun pada 1 April 2017 - berikut adalah rincian sejarah perusahaan.

Sejarah Apple

Fitur riwayat Apple kami mencakup informasi tentang Dasar Apple dan tahun-tahun berikutnya, kami melihat Bagaimana Jobs bertemu Woz dan Mengapa Apple dinamai Apple. Apple I dan Debut Apple II. Kunjungan Apple ke Xerox, dan mouse satu tombol. Kisah Lisa versus Macintosh. Iklan Apple '1984', disutradarai oleh Ridley Scott. Revolusi Macintosh dan DTP. Baca lebih lanjut: Ulang Tahun Mac.

Kami melanjutkan untuk memeriksa apa yang terjadi antara Jobs dan Sculley, yang menyebabkan kepergian Jobs dari Apple, dan apa yang terjadi selama tahun-tahun hutan belantara: ketika Steve Jobs tidak berada di Apple, termasuk penurunan Apple dan kebangkitan IBM dan Microsoft dan bagaimana Apple bekerja sama dengan IBM dan Motorola dan akhirnya Microsoft. Dan akhirnya, Kembalinya Jobs ke Apple.

Fondasi Apple

Sejarah start-up favorit semua orang adalah dongeng teknologi tentang satu garasi, tiga teman, dan awal yang sangat sederhana. Tapi kami terlalu terburu-buru…

Kedua Steves -  Jobs dan Wozniak  - mungkin adalah pendiri Apple yang paling terlihat, tetapi jika bukan karena teman mereka Ronald Wayne, mungkin tidak ada iPhone , iPad , atau iMac saat ini. Jobs meyakinkannya untuk mengambil 10% saham perusahaan dan bertindak sebagai penengah jika dia dan Woz mengalami pukulan, tetapi Wayne mundur 12 hari kemudian, menjual hanya $ 500 kepemilikan yang akan bernilai $ 72bn 40 tahun kemudian.

Ron Wayne

Bagaimana Jobs bertemu Woz

Jobs dan Woz (Steve Wozniak) diperkenalkan pada tahun 1971 oleh seorang teman, Bill Fernandez, yang kemudian menjadi salah satu karyawan awal Apple. Kedua Steves bisa akur berkat kecintaan mereka yang sama pada teknologi dan lelucon.

Jobs dan Wozniak bergabung, awalnya muncul dengan lelucon seperti memasang lukisan tangan yang menunjukkan jari tengah untuk ditampilkan saat upacara kelulusan di sekolah Jobs, dan panggilan ke Vatikan yang hampir membuat mereka mendapat akses ke Paus.

Kedua sahabat itu juga menggunakan pengetahuan teknologi mereka untuk membuat 'kotak biru' yang memungkinkan untuk melakukan panggilan telepon jarak jauh secara gratis.

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Jobs dan Wozniak bekerja sama dalam game arcade Atari Breakout saat Jobs bekerja di Atari dan Wozniak bekerja di HP - Jobs telah mengikat Woz untuk membantunya mengurangi jumlah chip logika yang dibutuhkan. Jobs berhasil mendapatkan bonus yang bagus untuk pekerjaannya di Breakout, di mana dia memberikan sejumlah kecil bonus kepada Woz.

Komputer Apple pertama

Kedua Steves menghadiri Homebrew Computer Club bersama-sama; kelompok penghobi komputer yang berkumpul di Menlo Park California dari tahun 1975. Woz telah melihat MITS Altair pertamanya di sana - yang saat ini tampak seperti sekotak lampu dan papan sirkuit - dan terinspirasi oleh pendekatan build-it-yourself MITS ( Altair datang sebagai kit) untuk membuat sesuatu yang lebih sederhana bagi kita semua. Filosofi ini terus bersinar dalam produk Apple saat ini.

Jadi, Woz menghasilkan komputer pertama dengan keyboard seperti mesin tik dan kemampuan untuk terhubung ke TV biasa sebagai layar. Belakangan diberi nama Apple I, itu adalah pola dasar dari setiap komputer modern, tetapi Wozniak tidak mencoba mengubah dunia dengan apa yang dia hasilkan - dia hanya ingin menunjukkan seberapa banyak dia berhasil melakukannya dengan sumber daya yang sangat sedikit. .

Berbicara kepada NPR (National Public Radio) pada tahun 2006, Woz menjelaskan bahwa "Ketika saya membuat Apple ini, saya ... komputer pertama yang mengatakan bahwa komputer harus terlihat seperti mesin tik - harus memiliki keyboard - dan perangkat keluarannya adalah TV, bukan untuk menunjukkan kepada dunia [bahwa] di sini adalah arah yang harus dituju. Itu untuk benar-benar menunjukkan kepada orang-orang di sekitarku, untuk menyombongkan diri, untuk menjadi pintar, untuk mendapatkan pengakuan karena telah merancang komputer murah. "

Jobs dan Woz

It almost didn't happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality - he's funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars - but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers." He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.

Let's be thankful he didn't. Jobs saw Woz's computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.

Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984, Woz credited Jobs with the idea. "He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned."

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

Nama tersebut juga kemungkinan diuntungkan dengan diawali dengan A, yang berarti nama tersebut akan berada di bagian depan daftar mana pun.

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Logo Apple

Ada teori lain tentang makna dibalik nama Apple. Gagasan dinamai demikian karena Newton terinspirasi ketika sebuah apel jatuh dari pohon yang mengenai kepalanya, didukung oleh fakta bahwa logo Apple asli adalah ilustrasi yang agak rumit tentang Newton yang duduk di bawah pohon.

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Kemudian perusahaan tersebut memutuskan untuk menggigit desain Apple untuk logo Apple - desain logo yang jauh lebih sederhana. Logo-logo ini mungkin adalah alasan teori lain tentang makna di balik nama Apple, dengan beberapa menyarankan bahwa logo Apple dengan potongan yang diambil adalah anggukan pada ilmuwan komputer dan pemecah kode Enigma, Alan Turing, yang bunuh diri oleh makan apel infus sianida.

Namun, menurut Rob Janoff , desainer yang menciptakan logo tersebut, koneksi Turing hanyalah " legenda urban yang luar biasa".

Sama halnya dengan gigitan apel yang bisa mewakili kisah Adam dan Hawa dari Perjanjian Lama. Idenya adalah bahwa Apple mewakili pengetahuan.

Menjual Apple I

Woz membangun setiap komputer dengan tangan, dan meskipun dia ingin menjualnya dengan harga yang lebih murah daripada harga suku cadangnya - dengan harga yang akan menutup pengeluaran mereka selama mereka mengirimkan 50 unit - Jobs memiliki ide yang lebih besar.

Jobs menandatangani kesepakatan dengan Byte Shop di Mountain View untuk memasok 50 komputer dengan harga masing-masing $ 500. Ini berarti bahwa setelah toko mengambil bagiannya, Apple yang saya jual seharga $ 666,66 - menurut legenda adalah bahwa Wozniak menyukai nomor berulang dan tidak mengetahui koneksi 'number of the beast'. 

Byte Shop mengambil risiko: Apple I tidak ada dalam jumlah besar, dan Apple Computer Inc yang baru lahir tidak memiliki sumber daya untuk memenuhi pesanan. Juga tidak bisa mendapatkannya. Atari, tempat Jobs bekerja, menginginkan uang tunai untuk setiap komponen yang dijualnya, bank menolaknya untuk mendapatkan pinjaman, dan meskipun dia mendapat tawaran $ 5.000 dari ayah seorang teman, itu tidak cukup.

Pada akhirnya, pesanan pembelian Byte Shop-lah yang menutup kesepakatan. Jobs membawanya ke Cramer Electronics dan, seperti yang dijelaskan Walter Isaacson dalam Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography , dia meyakinkan manajer Cramer untuk menelepon Paul Terrell, pemilik Byte Shop, untuk memverifikasi pesanan.

"Terrell berada di konferensi ketika dia mendengar melalui pengeras suara bahwa dia mendapat panggilan darurat (Jobs terus-menerus). Manajer Cramer mengatakan kepadanya bahwa dua anak yang lusuh baru saja berjalan sambil melambaikan perintah dari Byte Shop. Apakah itu nyata? Terrell mengonfirmasi bahwa itu benar, dan toko itu setuju untuk menyerahkan suku cadang kepada Jobs dengan kredit tiga puluh hari. "

Apple I asli (dalam kasus)

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it's ultimately this that saw him duck out.

"Jobs and Woz didn't have two nickels to rub together," Wayne told NextShark in 2013. "If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes."

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom, "Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn't even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn't have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn't be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn't provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case."

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An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collection

Raspberry PI and the BBC's Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, "Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay." The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors' items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren't that deep, Briel Computers' Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth - so much so that the decision to build a successor can't have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.

The Apple II

Apple II

The success of the first Apple computer meant that Apple was able to go on to design its predecessor.

The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.

Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, credits with launching the personal computer industry.

The trouble is, the specs alone weren't really enough to justify the $1,300 cost of the Apple II. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn't until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first 'killer app'.

The first app on an Apple computer: Visicalc

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Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised "a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…"

Of course, we'd recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.

Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today - in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here's our Numbers review.)

Keterbatasan teknologi yang melekat pada perangkat keras berarti bahwa itu tidak berfungsi seperti yang dibayangkan Bricklin pertama kali. Apple II tidak memiliki layar yang tergabung dan meskipun mouse telah ditemukan, itu tidak disertakan dengan mesin. Jadi, tampilan menjadi layar biasa, dan mouse ditukar dengan dayung game Apple II, yang digambarkan Bricklin sebagai "tombol yang bisa Anda putar untuk memindahkan objek game bolak-balik ... Anda bisa menggerakkan kursor ke kiri atau kanan, lalu tekan tombol 'api', lalu memutar dayung akan menggerakkan kursor ke atas dan ke bawah. "

Itu jauh dari sempurna dan bekerja dengan cara ini lamban, jadi Bricklin kembali menggunakan tombol panah kiri dan kanan, dengan spasi sebagai pengganti tombol api untuk beralih antara gerakan horizontal dan vertikal.

VisiCalc diluncurkan pada 1979 dan dideskripsikan sebagai "lembaran kertas ajaib yang dapat melakukan penghitungan dan penghitungan ulang". Kami berhutang budi atas perannya dalam mendorong penjualan Apple II dan mengikatkan Apple dalam industri.

Menulis di Surat Elektronik Morgan Stanley , tak lama sebelum peluncurannya, analis Benjamin M Rosen menjelaskan keyakinannya bahwa VisiCalc "begitu kuat, nyaman, universal, mudah digunakan dan harga terjangkau sehingga bisa menjadi salah satu program komputer pribadi dengan penjualan terbesar pernah ... [itu] suatu hari nanti bisa menjadi ekor perangkat lunak yang mengibaskan (dan menjual) anjing komputer pribadi. "

Betapa benarnya dia, seperti yang diungkapkan Tim Barry dalam bagian InfoWorld selanjutnya di mana dia menggambarkan sebuah pengalaman yang tidak asing bagi banyak orang:

VisiCalc

"Saat pertama kali menggunakan VisiCalc di Apple II, saya ingin mendapatkan versi yang dapat memanfaatkan kapabilitas sistem yang lebih besar dari komputer CP / M saya. Sayangnya, ini tidak akan ... Kami akhirnya membeli Apple II saja untuk menjalankan VisiCalc (alasan yang cukup umum untuk banyak penjualan Apple, saya diberi tahu). "

Apple sendiri memuji aplikasi tersebut karena berada di belakang seperlima dari semua seri II yang dijualnya.

Keberhasilan Apple II: grafis berwarna

So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn't have been a success if it hadn't adhered to the company's already established high standards.

The February 1984 edition of PC Mag, looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that "its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator's hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from ... computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard."

More radically, though, the Apple II "was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics... contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered."

In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century - before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.

Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.

For VisiCalc, the future wasn't so bright, largely because its developers weren't quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc's developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc - it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.

That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.

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Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouse

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Apple has never been slow to innovate - except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We're approaching the eighties in our trip through the company's history and we're at the point where it's followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?

The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.

The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.

Xerox had established a research centre there - Xerox PARC, now simply called 'parc' - where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers (we aren't just talking about photocopiers!) Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.

The Apple I,  II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.

Mengatakan ini murah akan menjadi pernyataan yang sangat meremehkan. Apple telah membagi sahamnya empat kali sejak saat itu - pada 1987, 2000, 2005 dan 2014. Perusahaan melakukan ini ketika harga satu saham mulai terlalu tinggi, dalam upaya untuk merangsang perdagangan lebih lanjut. Jadi, dengan asumsi Xerox memiliki saham tersebut, maka Xerox akan memiliki 200.000 pada tahun 1987, 400.000 pada tahun 2000 dan 800.000 pada tahun 2005. Pembagian pada tahun 2014 dinilai pada tujuh banding satu, sehingga kepemilikan Xerox akan melonjak dari 800.000 menjadi 5,6 juta. Menjualnya dengan harga hari ini akan menghasilkan $ 708 juta (£ 450 juta). Lumayan untuk tur tiga hari.

Jobs terpesona oleh Xerox Alto, mesin yang digunakan secara luas di seluruh taman, dengan tampilan potret dan antarmuka grafis, yang jauh di depan zamannya. Sudah cukup lama, tapi Xerox, yang membuat 2000 unit, belum menjualnya ke publik. Itu tidak kecil - seukuran lemari es di bawah meja - tetapi masih dianggap sebagai mesin 'pribadi', yang dibawa pulang oleh cara penggunaannya yang berpusat pada pengguna. Itu adalah komputer pertama yang mengambil jurusan penggunaan mouse, dengan gadget tiga tombol yang digunakan untuk menunjuk dan mengklik objek di layar.

Jobs memutuskan bahwa setiap komputer yang diproduksi Apple sejak saat itu harus mengadopsi cara kerja yang serupa. Berbicara kepada Walter Isaacson beberapa tahun kemudian, dia menggambarkan wahyu sebagai "seperti tabir yang diangkat dari mata saya. Saya dapat melihat seperti apa masa depan komputasi ditakdirkan."

Lisa dan Macintosh

Ini memulai perlombaan di dalam Apple antara tim yang mengembangkan Lisa dan Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

Kalimat resmi pada saat itu adalah bahwa Lisa adalah singkatan dari Arsitektur Sistem Terpadu Lokal, dan fakta bahwa itu adalah nama putri Jobs adalah murni kebetulan. Itu adalah mesin bisnis kelas atas yang dijadwalkan untuk dijual mendekati $ 10.000. Ubah itu menjadi uang hari ini dan itu akan membelikan Anda mobil keluarga kelas menengah. Proyek ini dikelola oleh John Couch, sebelumnya dari IBM.

Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.

The Lisa

Whichever team got their first, Apple - as a company - wanted them to do it at a price that wasn't prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was a one-button mouse (which maybe hasn't stood the test of time as well as Jobs might have expected, with most of us regularly requiring that ctrl-click or right-click).

Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa's development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.

The Apple Lisa had an advanced gui

Michael Scott was Apple's president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.

Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.

Named in honour of Raskin's favourite edible apple (the McIntosh), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.

However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs - technically - ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the Lisa.

Itu adalah kemenangan yang dahsyat. Macintosh, yang akan kami bahas secara lebih rinci di bawah, sukses, dan jajaran komputer Apple saat ini - selain perangkat iOS - turun langsung dari mesin konsumen pertama itu.

Anda tidak bisa mengatakan hal yang sama tentang Lisa. Harganya empat kali lipat harga Macintosh, dan meskipun memiliki tampilan resolusi lebih tinggi dan dapat menangani lebih banyak memori, itu tidak terlalu berhasil. Apple merilis tujuh aplikasi untuk itu, mencakup semua basis bisnis biasa, tetapi dukungan pihak ketiga buruk.

Meski demikian, Apple tidak menyerah. Lisa asli diikuti oleh Lisa 2, yang harganya sekitar setengah harga pendahulunya dan menggunakan disk 3,5 inci yang sama dengan Macintosh. Kemudian, pada tahun 1985, ia mengganti nama Lisa 2 yang dilengkapi hard drive menjadi Macintosh XL dan mendorong penjualan dengan potongan harga.

Namun, pada titik ini, jumlahnya tidak bertambah, dan Lisa harus pergi. Macintosh selanjutnya mendefinisikan perusahaan.

Pada 1984, Apple telah membuktikan dua kali lipat bahwa itu adalah kekuatan yang harus diperhitungkan. Itu telah mengambil alih IBM, nama terbesar dalam komputasi bisnis, dan membebaskan dirinya dengan mengagumkan. Apple I dan II menggemakan kesuksesan, tetapi meskipun Apple III dan Lisa adalah mesin yang luar biasa, mereka tidak menangkap imajinasi publik pada tingkat yang sama seperti pendahulunya. Apple membutuhkan pukulan lain, baik untuk menjamin masa depannya maupun untuk menargetkan pasar ujung bawah, yang sampai saat ini sebagian besar diabaikan.

Yang paling sukses, kita semua sekarang tahu, adalah Macintosh: mesin yang sangat menjamin masa depan perusahaan.

Jika Anda menginginkan panduan visual untuk sejarah Apple, lihat garis waktu Apple kami dalam gambar dan video

Semua berubah: Jef Raskin versus Steve Jobs

Macintosh

Kami akan selalu mengingat Steve Jobs sebagai orang yang meluncurkan Macintosh, tetapi dia baru tiba di proyek tersebut pada tahun 1981 - dua tahun setelah Jef Raskin mulai mengerjakan komputer murah untuk keperluan rumah dan bisnis. Jobs dengan cepat membubuhkan tandanya di atasnya, dan Raskin pergi pada tahun 1982 - sebelum produk dikirim. Kita harus memberikan kredit kepada Raskin untuk ide orisinal dan namanya (jenis apel favoritnya adalah McIntosh, tapi ini di-tweak untuk menghindari pelanggaran hak cipta), tetapi sebaliknya mesin yang akhirnya diluncurkan jauh dari yang semula dia gunakan. dibayangkan.

Raskin's early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple (he is Vice President of Software Technology), that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.

They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they'd already laid much of the groundwork for Apple's own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.

If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it's unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did - and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.

Find out about the original Mac team members - here are some of their stories.

The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarter

Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.

The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple's fully graphical operating system.

The Macintosh project: good looks

But it wasn't just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.

There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn't have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.

Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We've dropped the 'System' monicker in favour of 'OS' (which stands for Operating System), but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, at least in the UK, but the name lives on for many users).

(You'd be surprised by how many people are confused by the fact that Apple still referrs to the Option key on the Mac keyboard even though on UK keyboards that key is known as Alt, find out more here: What is Option on a Mac?)

The Macintosh project: pixels

The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.

Susan Kare and the Command logo she designed

It’s Kare that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a National Heritage site - not a campsite as has been reported.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.

The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn't cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.

Find out how the iPhone 5s compares to the Original 128k Macintosh

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Apple's '1984' advert

Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.

Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.

You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.

But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to Chiat\Day, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and Chiat\Day turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it's considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age's list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking Chiat\Day to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. Chiat\Day offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, "Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. 'I think we ought to go for it,' he told his team."

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn't have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company's future, and kicked off a line of computers that's still with us today - albeit in a very different configuration.

It's perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

'Lemmings' sekali lagi menggambarkan aliran drone yang melintas di layar. Warnanya diredam, soundtracknya suram, dan mata drone ditutup matanya, jadi hanya dengan memegang drone di depan mereka barulah mereka bisa tahu ke mana tujuan mereka. Hanya ketika pesawat tak berawak kedua dari belakang jatuh dari tebing tempat mereka berbaris barulah barisan terakhir menyadari bahwa diperlukan perubahan arah - dan peralihan ke Macintosh Office.

Itu tidak sukses besar. Seperti yang dijelaskan oleh Apple Matters dari sterndesign, iklan tersebut "membuat pemirsa merasa rendah diri karena tidak menggunakan Mac. Ternyata menghina orang yang Anda coba jual barang dagangan bukanlah ide terbaik."

Wired menjelaskannya dengan ringkas: "Apel jatuh telungkup… Orang-orang menganggapnya ofensif, dan ketika ditayangkan di layar lebar di Stadion Stanford selama Super Bowl, terjadi keheningan yang mematikan - sesuatu yang sangat berbeda dari sorak-sorai yang menyapa '1984 'setahun sebelumnya. "

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Revolusi Macintosh dan DTP

Macintosh memulai dengan awal yang baik, berkat pembukaan spektakuler Jobs, desain inovatif, dan iklan '1984' yang ikonik, tetapi masih membutuhkan aplikasi yang mematikan, seperti VisiCalc ada di Apple] [, jika memang benar akan berkembang. Ini ditemukan dalam bentuk PageMaker, didukung oleh printer Apple LaserWriter revolusioner.

LaserWriter seharga $ 6.995, yang diperkenalkan pada Maret 1985 - lebih dari setahun setelah Macintosh - adalah printer laser pasar massal pertama. Itu memiliki memori internal 1,5MB tetap untuk spooling halaman dan prosesor Motorola 68000 di bawah tenda - sama dengan otak Lisa dan Macintosh - berjalan pada 12MHz untuk mengeluarkan delapan halaman 300dpi per menit.

It wasn't the first laser printer - just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn't the first digital music player - but, in true Apple style, it was different, and that's what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, "Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer."

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing - so far - was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term 'Desktop Publishing', heard of Apple's intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac's graphical interface and the printer's high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn't see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work - which is perhaps why it's favoured by so many designers today. It's hard to believe, in an age where we're used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m - an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe.

PageMaker versus QuarkXPress

But good things don't last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of InDesign and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.

PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here.

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

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Jobs vs Sculley

It's all been good news so far in our story of Apple's founding and early development. We're still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it's offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple's most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn't its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn't yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he'd acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple's initial investors, but he didn't want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking 'Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?'

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley's reminiscences: 'I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.'

That's exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, 'At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others' sentences.'

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it's perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn't like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn't enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn't helped by a downturn in the company's fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn't hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That's exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 - just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012, Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: "When the Macintosh Office [Apple's office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn't afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings - not just to cover the Mac's problems. That's what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support."

But Jobs wasn't ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs' fate was sealed.

Jobs leaves Apple

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple's chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn't Jobs' style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that's what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue, "Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run."

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we'll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn't entirely unexpected - and the news wasn't greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs' departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple's Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line - particularly at a time when the company's focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn't be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should - in theory - deliver similar or higher profits.

Kebijakan tersebut memiliki julukannya sendiri, '55 or die ', yang merupakan anggukan dari diktat Gassée bahwa Macintosh II harus menghasilkan setidaknya 55% keuntungan per mesin, mungkin menjelaskan mengapa harganya sangat mahal. Sistem dasar dengan hard drive 20MB (tidak cukup untuk menampung file Photoshop rata-rata hari ini) mulai dari $ 5500, tetapi meningkatkan spesifikasi, dengan tampilan warna, lebih banyak memori dan hard drive yang lebih besar, dapat dengan mudah melihat harganya berlipat ganda.

Ketika melawan rekan-rekan PC mereka, maka, komputer baru Apple terlihat cukup mahal, tetapi mereka memiliki beberapa manfaat yang membuat penggunanya tetap setia - khususnya, antarmuka pengguna. Penting untuk diingat bahwa meskipun Windows mungkin ada di mana-mana saat ini, itu tidak selalu terjadi.

Ketika Macintosh II pertama kali muncul pada tahun 1987, Windows berumur kurang dari dua tahun, masih pada versi 1.04, dan masih merupakan add-on untuk DOS daripada sistem operasi yang berdiri sendiri dan lengkap.

Begitu para perancang pertengahan 1980-an terbiasa bekerja secara visual, mereka tidak ingin kembali menggunakan komputer berbasis teks, jadi sampai Windows mencapai puncaknya, yang terjadi dengan Windows 3 pada akhir 1980-an , Apple memiliki pasar grafis untuk dirinya sendiri.

Apple menjadi penuh warna: Machintosh II dikirimkan dengan layar berwarna

Ini akan cukup untuk mendorong rasa puas diri di beberapa perusahaan, tetapi tidak di Apple, yang terus berinovasi dengan cara yang setidaknya akan membenarkan sebagian harga yang tinggi. Machintosh II, misalnya, bukan hanya peningkatan spesifikasi dari Macintosh asli. Itu terlihat sangat berbeda, ditempatkan dalam wadah horizontal sehingga pengguna akhir (atau seorang insinyur) dapat membuka diri untuk meningkatkan memori, drive, dan sebagainya. Ini adalah terobosan besar dari cara mapan Apple dalam melakukan sesuatu, di mana semua komputer sebelumnya, kecuali Apple I yang dibuat sendiri, telah dikirim dalam kotak tertutup, sebagian besar karena Jobs melihat ini sebagai cara untuk membuatnya lebih banyak. ramah dan tidak terlalu mengancam.

Itu juga merupakan Macintosh pertama yang dikirimkan dengan layar berwarna, dan meskipun sulit membayangkan perbedaan apa yang akan terjadi hari ini, kita hanya perlu memikirkan kembali ke awal, iPod mono dan membandingkannya dengan iPod touch untuk memahami dampaknya. pasti punya.

Selain memimpin pengembangan komputer konvensional, Gassée juga mengawasi banyak perkembangan di balik layar Apple, di mana para perancang memimpikan produk baru yang suatu hari akan mendorong perusahaan ke tingkat yang lebih tinggi. Dua buah dari kerja keras itu, Newton MessagePad dan eMate, sangat canggih, karena mereka menunjuk pada dominasi Apple selanjutnya dari komputasi ringan melalui iPad dan iPhone, tetapi mereka tidak melihat cahaya hari sebelum kepergian Gassée dari Apel.

Masa jabatannya berlangsung dari tahun 1981 hingga akhir dekade, yang merupakan titik fokus pada produk premium dengan harga tinggi mulai goyah. Klon IBM semakin murah, dan dengan penggunaan Windows dan aplikasi penerbitan desktop yang murah, bahkan beberapa pelanggan Apple yang paling setia tergoda untuk melompat.

Apa yang Gassée lakukan setelah Apple

Kuartal keempat tahun 1989 menandai pertama kalinya Apple mengalami penurunan penjualan. Pasar saham menjadi gelisah, saham Apple kehilangan seperlima nilainya, dan meskipun suatu hari pernah dikepalai sebagai kepala perusahaan, Gassée pergi pada tahun berikutnya. Seperti Jobs, dia kemudian mendirikan perusahaan komputer radikal lainnya - dalam hal ini, Be Incorporated, yang mengembangkan sistem operasi BeOS.

Seperti yang akan kita lihat di episode selanjutnya, karyanya dengan BeOS hampir saja membawa Gassée kembali ke perusahaan. Untuk saat ini, Apple berfokus untuk mencoba memenangkan kembali beberapa pelanggan yang kurang kaya dengan memperkenalkan berbagai komputer dengan harga lebih rendah, termasuk Macintosh Classic (prosesor 8MHz, layar mono terintegrasi, $ 999), Macintosh LC (prosesor 16MHz, kotak pizza, warna mampu; inisial singkatan dari LC, tetapi harganya $ 999 tanpa layar), dan Macintosh IIsi (prosesor 20MHz, casing desktop besar, $ 2999 tanpa layar).

Hari ini, antara lain, Gassée menulis blog, di sini . 

Tidak mengherankan, setelah bertahun-tahun menunggu, pelanggan Apple mendapatkan mesin baru yang terjangkau ini, dan perusahaan menikmati kebangkitan. Memang, dengan kembali ke dasar, hampir secara harfiah, Apple kembali naik, dan akan membuat dunia kagum dengan dua produk paling radikal yang pernah ada, seperti yang akan kita temukan di bawah.

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Penurunan Apple dan kebangkitan IBM dan Microsoft

Jadi Steve Jobs telah pergi, begitu pula Jean-Louis Gassée, penggantinya sebagai kepala pengembangan produk. Secara keseluruhan, masa depan Apple tidak terlihat begitu cerah pada saat ini dalam ceritanya. Meski pada awalnya cukup berhasil mengejar laba tinggi dengan margin yang lebar, namun pasarnya mulai menyusut dan begitu pula dengan pendapatan ditahannya. Untuk pertama kalinya dalam sejarah perusahaan, hasil akhir tahun menunjukkan saldo kas naik lebih lambat dari tahun sebelumnya.

That wasn't its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 - a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today - and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple's Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple's computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn't quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing - so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts.

It's unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we're used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It's hypnotic - and it's hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia, and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded - and to which it has since returned - had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn't always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

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The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP - the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP's legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

Jika Anda membeli komputer Apple baru antara tahun 1994 dan 2006, Anda akan membawa pulang perangkat berbasis PowerPC, yang asal muasalnya telah kami bahas di atas. Buah dari kolaborasi produktif antara Apple, IBM (ya IBM) dan Motorola - AIM Alliance - untuk sementara waktu, merupakan salah satu platform paling maju di planet ini. Memang, itu terbukti cukup serbaguna untuk duduk di jantung segala hal mulai dari iBook rendahan, hingga Xserve yang berfokus pada perusahaan terkuat.

Prototipe Prosesor PowerPC 601

Nama ini merupakan singkatan dari Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, dan teknologi intinya didasarkan pada set instruksi POWER IBM, jadi meskipun itu adalah inovasi awal 1990-an, itu bukan platform yang sepenuhnya asing untuk developer coding untuk Mac.

Ini membantu membuat PowerPC menjadi alternatif yang layak untuk prosesor berbasis x86 yang dikirimkan oleh Intel dan AMD, yang kemudian mendominasi pasar komputasi. Bahkan Microsoft mengirimkan versi Windows NT untuk PowerPC sebelum menskalakan kembali untuk fokus hanya pada x86 dan, kemudian, Freescale.

Macintosh berbasis PowerPC pertama (pra-Mac) adalah Power Macintosh 6100 tahun 1994 yang, seperti namanya, didasarkan pada prosesor 601, berjalan pada 60MHz dan dikembangkan menggunakan kode yang sudah tidak asing lagi bagi para insinyur dari Motorola dan Apple. Sebagai penerus Quadra, ini adalah mesin pertama yang dapat menjalankan Mac OS 9, yang kemungkinan akan menjadi titik penjualan yang cukup besar dengan sendirinya.

Namun, mungkin melindungi taruhannya (transisi platform adalah proyek yang menegangkan, bagaimanapun juga) itu juga merilis versi yang kompatibel dengan DOS, yang sebaliknya menggunakan prosesor Intel 486 dan memungkinkan Windows dan Mac OS untuk dijalankan secara bersamaan, secara efektif melakukan apa yang VMware Fusion dan Parallels Desktop melakukannya hari ini, dan VirtualPC melakukannya di tahun-tahun terakhir lini PowerPC.

Daya Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename 'Carl Sagan'. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company 'Billions and Billions', which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter 'B' when saying the word 'billions' so people wouldn't confuse it with millions.

Meskipun tidak pernah digunakan untuk memasarkan 7100, Sagan mengklaim bahwa pelanggan mungkin telah mempertimbangkan nama kode, yang terungkap di majalah, untuk menyiratkan bahwa dia mendukung produk tersebut. Dia menulis ke majalah tersebut, meminta mereka untuk menjelaskan bahwa dia tidak melakukannya, pada saat itu tim pengembangan Apple menamai ulang komputer BHA, untuk Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan menggugat karena pencemaran nama baik dan kalah, dengan putusan pengadilan bahwa "seseorang tidak secara serius menyerang keahlian seorang ilmuwan menggunakan frase 'pantat-kepala' yang tidak ditentukan" .

Carl Sagan

Akhirnya kedua pihak diselesaikan di luar pengadilan, di mana 7100 diganti namanya lagi, kali ini menjadi HUKUM, atau Lawyers Are Wimps.

Garis PowerPC menikmati babak yang bagus, tetapi pada pertengahan dekade pertama abad ini (kami melompat sedikit ke depan untuk mengikat cerita PowerPC), patah tulang mulai muncul dalam aliansi dan platform tidak berkembang cukup cepat untuk membuat konsumen senang. Notebook kelas atas Apple, PowerBook, mulai terlihat sedikit kurang bertenaga, dan dalam upaya mendorong prosesor di Power Mac G5 melampaui peringkat aslinya, ia menghasilkan tiga edisi khusus yang menggunakan sistem pendingin air canggih yang memungkinkannya untuk melakukan overclock prosesor tanpa membuatnya terlalu panas.

Prosesor PowerPC 970FX, seperti yang digunakan di salah satu Power Mac G5s terakhir

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs' 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they'd frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, 'It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. "As we look ahead... we may have great products right now, and we've got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come," Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. "[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map."'

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they'd have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard, the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn't install it by default - you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it's a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC's dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs' company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple's survival.

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Apple and Microsoft

If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft's on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you'd never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that's probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft's revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can - including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out - and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs' return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn't really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. "To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different," he said in 1984, "it takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh - of all the machines I've seen - is the only one that meets that standard."

That's pretty flattering, but there's a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn't see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple's eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox's implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling "our friends up north".

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system - such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on - should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn't buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they'd been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al's tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox's act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn't, it's possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn't do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn't switch to a platform that didn't support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments - particularly those in mixed-platform offices - often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates, who was then Microsoft's CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

Sebagai gantinya, Apple menggeser Netscape sebagai browser default Mac dan menginstal Internet Explorer sebagai gantinya, yang secara aktif dikembangkan sampai tahun 2003, ketika dihadapkan pada rumor bahwa Apple sedang mengerjakan browsernya sendiri di rumah - Safari - Microsoft mengurangi bekerja di IE untuk Mac ke titik di mana, saat ini, tidak lagi berjalan di OS X.

Apple pada 1990-an

Apple adalah perusahaan yang sangat berbeda di tahun 1990-an dengan yang kita kenal sekarang. Itu memiliki banyak produk dan banyak stok, tetapi tidak cukup pelanggan. Hanya ada waktu lama perusahaan bisa bertahan seperti itu.

Melihat kembali sekarang, Anda akan dimaafkan jika berpikir itu tersesat. Di samping jangkauan komputernya, ia juga memproduksi kamera digital (yang berada di depan sebagian besar pemain terkenal yang sekarang mendominasi fotografi), konsol video, peralatan TV, dan pemutar CD. Itu juga telah berinvestasi besar-besaran dalam platform Newton untuk menghasilkan jalur MessagePad dan eMate.

Dalam banyak hal, untuk menggunakan kata klise yang sudah usang, itu berjalan sebelum bisa berjalan. Hampir semua produk ini setara dengan jajaran produk Apple saat ini di mana mereka menjadi dasar kamera iPhone, Apple TV, iPad, dan sebagainya, tetapi di tahun 1990-an tidak ada cara untuk menghubungkan semuanya. Mereka, untuk semua maksud dan tujuan, adalah produk yang berbeda dan sebagian besar tidak berhubungan; tidak ada alur cerita menyeluruh tentang apa yang diproduksi Apple seperti sekarang, di mana perangkat Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, dan iOS semuanya dapat berbagi data milik iCloud.

Lebih buruk lagi, keputusan untuk melisensikan banyak teknologinya hanya mempersulit Apple untuk berhasil di setiap pasar, karena memungkinkan para pesaingnya untuk menghasilkan versi kloning yang lebih murah dari produk-produk papan atas. Bahkan platform Newton pun tidak kebal, dengan Motorola, Siemens dan Sharp, antara lain, menggunakan sistem operasi dan spesifikasi perangkat keras untuk membuat produk mereka sendiri.

Kloning tetap menjadi masalah yang diperdebatkan dalam sejarah Apple. Selain menjadi berita buruk dari pengembangan perangkat keras internal Apple, banyak konsumen akan mengatakan hal itu sebenarnya baik untuk pengguna akhir, karena mendorong persaingan dan, akibatnya, menurunkan harga. Itu membawa lebih banyak orang ke platform daripada yang akan berhasil ditarik Apple sendiri, yang pada gilirannya memastikan dukungan berkelanjutan dari pengembang aplikasi, termasuk nama-nama kunci seperti Adobe dan Microsoft, yang tanpanya jajaran komputer mungkin akan runtuh.

Tetapi ada sesuatu yang harus diberikan - dan keputusan harus dibuat, yang ternyata menjadi salah satu keputusan paling penting dalam sejarah perusahaan.

Jobs kembali ke Apple

Apple masih mencari sistem operasi baru, karena upaya in-house-nya tidak berjalan seperti yang diharapkan. Pada tahun 1996, perusahaan telah memilih dua kemungkinan pemasok: BeOS dan NeXTSTEP, yang masing-masing memiliki hubungan historis dengan Apple sendiri.

BeOS dikembangkan oleh Be Inc, sebuah perusahaan yang didirikan oleh mantan eksekutif Apple, Jean-Louis Gassée. Dia telah ditunjuk sebagai direktur operasi Apple di Eropa pada tahun 1981 dan, empat tahun kemudian, bertanggung jawab untuk menginformasikan kepada dewan direksi Apple tentang niat Jobs untuk menggulingkan CEO John Sculley - tindakan yang menyebabkan keluarnya Jobs dari perusahaan tersebut