Vladimir Nevzorov

THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

v o l.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD
TIMELINE: 1952–1976
APPLE: THE ­BEGINNING
TIMELINE: 1977–1984
MACINTOSH
NeXT and PIXAR
APPLE AFTER JOBS
TIMELINE: 1985–1989
NEWTON
APPLE: THE '90s
TIMELINE: 1990–1995
THE RETURN OF JOBS and iMAC
TIMELINE: 1996–2000
iPOD and iTUNES
MAC OS X ERA
TIMELINE: 2001–2010
APPLE TV
POCKET COMPUTERS
iPHONE
APP STORE
iPAD
AGAT: THE SOVIET APPLE
 FOREWORD

When the work on this book began, the labor

was estimated to last half a year. At first it seemed
that the task would be tackled quickly and easily – the
base for such affirmation was the gathering of books,
magazines, articles and other materials on the history
of the PC and Apple through many years.
However, soon it was necessary to face the
difficulties encountered.
First, an important amount of information – even
from authoritative sources – was surprisingly very
different, and it had to be rechecked several times.
Secondly, in the course of the work of the chronology
of the five hundred most important events in the history
of the computer in order to show the internal logic, the
cause-effect, and the connection of what was happening,
which now seems the natural course of affairs. So, the
book lays out the history of the personal computer by
date in about two hundred small notes.
Third, there was a need for studio photoshoot
most of the devices, together with notes, because
on the Internet there were images but not of all the
objects and not always in an acceptable quality. This is
how the format, gradually and visually shows Apple's
story on the motley and bright background of personal
computers’ history in general.
Apple did not create the world's first computer,
nor made the world's first smartphone or tablet PC,
but, being one of many among often more successful Macintosh Colour Classic

5 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 About the author

Vladimir Nevzorov was born on May 22, 1978.

In 2000 he graduated from the Higher School of ­Economics
(National University) and in 2002 he defended his Ph.D. thesis.
He began working at school age in 1992, selling floppy discs
with software for the Agat-9. In the second half of the '90s, he opened
a firm of computer assembly and sale, and in the early 2000s, orga­
nized a multimedia publishing house, which released approximately
500 products on discs, from encyclopedias to computer games, selling
over 3 million copies.
In 2005 he moved to Kyiv and opened Sky Horse, a book pub-
lishing house. Since 2011, he has also been developing applications
for iOS and Android.
Co-author of the books "Innovation in Isolation" (about the his-
tory of Ukrainian cybernetics since the 1940s), "Interesting Ukraine"
and "Interesting Romania". Founder of the Nahs Haus publishing
firms, it was the one which determined how those ­(Bucharest) and co-owner of the ARHEVE.org project for the preserva-
things were to be. tion of cultural heritage.
"Apple: The evolution of the computer" – is a
story about the breakthrough success of the largest
computer company, however, this is not a training
manual such as "How to make a million dollars in
two days." Actually, none. Even the best books in
the world will not reveal the secrets of success, nor
teach you how to create worthwhile things. But,
rather tell us about unique achievements, as well as
unique miscalculations, which can be useful for the
thoughtful and active man to discover or develop
their own business.
The book does not pretend to be a novel or
only collected data, but it has a clear and convenient
structure and scope of the topic.
Even if the reader does not read it from cover to
cover, then, at least, it will become a great addition as a
printed guide on its bookshelf.
It should be noted that we are not talking about
the most modern products produced under the Apple
brand, including Apple Watch, and this was a conscious
decision: it talks about an amazing company created
and controlled by Steve Jobs. Everything that happened
after his departure is a completely different story.
The book ends with the first Soviet personal
computer, Agat, compatible with the Apple IIe – one of
the most popular USSR PC from the eighties.

FOREWORD /6
1952 ↘
OXO
Computer game

1956 →
HDD IBM RAMAC 305 system
OXO game on an emulator
The first computer game called OXO (tic-tac-toe), appeared long before
computers became personal. It was written by programmer Alexander Douglas In 1956, IBM manufactured the world's first hard disc with a movable
for the EDSAC computer (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), which head for their computer model 305 RAMAC. The HDD, of the size of a large
was in the library of Cambridge University. The output of the game field was cabinet, could contain 5 MB of data stored in fifty 24-inch discs. In 1957 the
shown on the screen (cathode-ray tube) with a resolution of only 35×16 pixels, IBM 305 RAMAC system together with the hard drive was leased at the price of
and the data input was performed using a disc dialer. As an additional piece 3500 US dollars a month, equivalent to approximately 160,000 US dollars in
of information, the ENIAC computer, made in 1949, was the first practically modern money. IBM built more than a thousand of those computers.
used computing device which could store the program in memory. A fairly large
computer, it took up 20 square meters, which is not surprising since there were
about 3000 lamps inside of it.

1957 ↘
Scanner

The first scanner was made for the US National Bureau of Standards
under the leadership of Russell A. Kirsch. It had a drum-like structure, today
used in high-quality polygraphic scanners. The first digitalized image was with a
resolution of 176 pixels. The scan was a photograph of Kirsch's three-month-old
son (shown in the picture).

7 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1958 ↘
Tennis for Two
Video game

October 18, 1958, in the opening day of the public exhibition of the
Brookhaven National Laboratory at the US Department of Energy, "Tennis
for two" was shown for the first time on an oscilloscope. The arcade game
was written for the Donner Model 30 computer by physicist William
Higinbotham specifically to attract more attention to the exhibition.
During its three days, Tennis for Two featured queues of those who wanted
to participate (mostly students) in an unprecedented event for this sort
of amusement. The game involved two people who, with the help of
specially manufactured manipulators, controlled the flight trajectory of
the "ball", trying not to touch the "grid" in the center of the field. "Rackets"
on the screen were not displayed. By the 1959 exhibition, the game was
somewhat refined, for example, the possibility to change the difficulty
level was added. Yet, after the device was dismantled, Tennis for Two was
forgotten until the second half of the '70s, when Higinbotham testified in
court on the case, related to video game patents between the Magnavox
company and Ralph H. Baer.

1960 ↘
Ruby laser

The first working laser, a concentrated monochromatic radiation

source, using an artificial ruby in its design, was created by Theodore
Harold Maiman. Ruby lasers have found application as range finders and
devices for drilling holes in diamonds, and later for removal of tattoos
and holography. Some of the latter types of steel lasers are widely used in
electronics for information transfer. Also, the length of the laser light wave
is on the average several orders of magnitude shorter than the length
wave of the radio range, which in comparison allows to transmit a much
larger amount of information at the same time.

TIMELINE: 1952–1976 / 8
1963 ↘
Compact Cassette

The Compact Cassette, presented by the Dutch company Philips in

1963, became the most popular audio recording device for three decades.
Because of the mass production and cheapness, for a long time audio
cassettes also played the role of the main setup of home PCs. Apple II was
not an exception.

1965 →
DEC minicomputer

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) released the world's first

commercially successful PDP-8 mini-computer, which was much cheaper
(18,500 US Dollars) and more compact than mainframes. For several
years, there were more than fifty thousand PDP-8 different modifications.
Nevertheless, the powerful DEC company was so blinded by their success
that missed the advent of the PC era, eventually leading to its devastation
and absorption by Compaq (see page 39).

9 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1965 ↘
Hypertext

1965 ↘
Moore's Law

Six years after the invention of the integrated circuit (or simply
"Microchips"), one of the founders of Intel, Gordon Moore, realized about
a pattern: as new models of processors were released, they duplicated the
number of transistors approximately once a year. According to this trend
predicted by Moore, the performance of processors had to grow exponentially.
This observation was given the name "Moore's Law." In 1975, Gordon
introduced a correction according to which the doubling of the number of
transistors was to occur every two years. Law's Moore has been applicable for
more than forty years.
Editing hypertext using a light pen, 1969

In the report "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the
Indeterminate", American sociologist and philosopher Theodore Holmes
Nelson described the concept of "hypertext." In the computer field this term
denotes a text document generated with the help of language markups
enabling the possibility to use hyperlinks. Broad and practical application of
hypertext was widely adopted almost thirty years later, with the appearance
of HTML markup language.
1967 ­↓
Computer mouse

The inventor, Douglas Carl Engelbart Gave filed an application for

a patent describing a computer manipulator in the form of a wooden
box with two metal wheels below and one button on the top. Officially
referred to as the "XY Position Indicator for a display system", because of
its certain external similarity, began to be called a "mouse." Structurally
it was not very comfortable, and the wheels were later replaced with a
ball. Probably, the first computer that used a mouse was the Xerox Alto
1973 (see pages 17, 30).

TIMELINE: 1952–1976 / 10
1968 ↘
OKI Wiredot
Matrix printer

The first experimental matrix printer was the OKI Wiredot. To print
the image on the paper, it used an ink ribbon similar to the ones used
in typewriters. The device was introduced by the Japanese company OKI.
The basic arrangement of a matrix printer is not complicated: The print
head, which is driven horizontally by means of a stepper motor, contains
a set of needles, using accelerated electro-magnets to impact the ribbon.
Two years later, DEC released the commercial model matrix printer LA
30 as a computer peripheral, which printed at a speed of 30 characters
in size and 5×7 points per second. Until the first half of the '90s, matrix
printing technology was the most common due to the low cost of the
consumables and the devices themselves, as well as their reliability.

1969 ↘
UNIX operating system

The employees of the telecommunications firm Bell Labs, that was part
of AT&T, in particular, Kenneth Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy
developed the first version of the operating system for the UNIX mini-comput-
ers for the internal needs of the company. From 1974, this OS was provided to
universities, and appeared as a commercial product only just in 1983, under
the name of UNIX System III, although it was based on the seventh version
of UNIX. The main features of UNIX and UNIX-like systems (having passed an
extensive verification procedure from the official standard Single UNIX Spec-
ification) are: multitasking, the ability of handling simultaneous operations of
several users on the same computer, multiplatform (the system can be adapted
to work on almost any processor), using text files for settings and management
of the OS, interaction with the user through a virtual device – terminal. UNIX
and UNIX-like systems include: Mac OS X, NeXTSTEP, Linux, Solaris, IRIX (used
on computers Silicon Graphics), FreeBSD and many others.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie working
with a DEC PDP-11 computer

11 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1969 ↘ 1969 ↘
ARPANET network Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ
Quartz Wrist Watch
The US Department of Defense decided that, in case of war, the
country would need a reliable information transfer system, implemented
in the form of computer network. The work on this network, called
ARPANET, was commissioned to the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), which was formed in 1958 in response to the launch
of a Soviet satellite. The first successful data transmission occurred on
October 29, 1969, between a computer of the University of California
Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford's Research Institute (SRI), which was
640 kilometers away. ARPANET, used mainly for scientific purposes,
became an international network in 1973 as a result of the connection
via a transatlantic telephone cable between Great Britain and Norway.
In 1983, ARPANET switched to data transfer using the TCP/IP protocol. In
other words, this network became the prototype of the modern Internet. The well-known Japanese company Seiko, which repeatedly took the
role as the official timekeeper of world championships and Olympic Games
since 1964, decided to make an electronic wrist watch that would have a
surprisingly high accuracy of motion (an error margin of +/- 5 seconds in a
month). So in 1969 the Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ model was released, in a
1969 ↘ golden case, which laid the foundation for the industry of electronic gadgets.
Nowadays, quartz watches are, as a rule, cheaper than mechanical watches,

CCD-matrix
but in the beginning they were very expensive: the Seiko Quartz Astron
35SQ was offered for 1250 dollars – the price of an average passenger car.

In one of the laboratories (dealing with video telephony) of

the telecommunication company AT&T, engineers Willard Boyle and
George Elwood Smith invented the so-called "Charge-Coupled Device"
(abbreviated as CCD). Initially it was supposed to use CCD-ICs for data
storage, but it soon became clear that, thanks to the photoelectric effect,
they could be applied to fix the image. So there were CCD-matrices used
in 97% of video cameras until 1989. For a long time, CCD would not have
analogues, until the CMOS technology appeared in the '90s. Nowadays
both types of matrixes – CCD and CMOS – are widely used in cameras. The
latter, due to the relatively low cost of production, low power consumption
and good speed of operation, already holds a noticeably large share of
the market. The iPhone uses CMOS sensors for the cameras. Nevertheless,
the CCD matrix has its advantages, for example, lower image noise level,
which is important when shooting with insufficient lighting. In 2009,
Boyle and Smith, inventors of CCD, became Nobel laureates in physics.

TIMELINE: 1952–1976 / 12
 1971 ↘
1971 ↘
E-mail address
Intel 4004 Network e-mail
Commercially
available
microprocessor
The first e-mail message was sent from one PDP-10 mini-computer
to another using a special network version of the program SNDMSG,
prepared by the programmer Ray Tomlinson. Messages were sent through
the ARPANET network (see page 13). At the same time, the concept of
In 1969, the small Japanese producer Busicom (from Business an e-mail address appeared, in which between the recipient's and the
Computer) ordered Intel chips for its new desktop calculator. Engineer host name, was the customary @ mark. Until the '80s inclusively, various
Ted Hoff (Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff) suggested Intel and Busicom to formats of e-mail addresses were used, until a single form of the Internet-
make a universal (which can be used in other devices) chip instead. This mail was used officially. The term e-mail (electronic mail) was used in
idea was well received and in 1971 the Intel 4004 was released, the first the '70s for any message electronically transmitted, including sending a
commercial microprocessor. Anticipating the promise of the technology, document by fax. Originally ARPANET used FTP to send e-mails, but in
Intel bought the right to develop from Busicom for 60 thousand dollars. 1982 there was a transition to a new standard for Internet mail, the Simple
However, financial success came only on the third generation of Intel Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
processors under the number 8080 in 1974.

1971 ↘
8-inch floppy drive

In 1967, IBM began developing a device to store software code and data
that could work with inexpensive external storage media. After unsuccessful
experiments with magnetic tapes, they opted for a flexible magnetic disc
enclosed in a plastic square, with a fabric layer to protect it from the dust
that might reach the inside. The first Diskettes had a size of 8 inches, could
be recorded only on a special device (the drive could read the data, but not
write it), and stored only 80 KB of information. The IBM 23FD drive began to
be sold in 1971 as a commercial product. Soon, IBM employee Alan Shugart,
who worked on the 23FD drive, moved to Memorex, a company which one
year later introduced its Memorex 650 drive with recording functionalities.
The Model 650 recorded on 8-inch floppy discs and more than twice the data:
175 KB. Allan Shugart himself founded the company Shugart Associates in
1973, which quickly began to dominate the 8-inch drives market. Its product,
the SA800 drive, was recognized as a de facto standard.

13 /
1972 ↘
Dynabook
Concept tablet computer

Alan Kay with

the Dynabook
prototype

Alan Kay, Research Associate at the research center Xerox PARC,

published the concept of a laptop computer with a graphic user interface,
in many respects similar to the modern tablet PCs. The idea came to him
much earlier, in 1968. The device, called Dynabook, of course could not
be physically developed in those years because of the lack of most of the
components necessary, but his idea led to the creation of the first PC with
a graphical interface, being the Xerox Alto (see page 17). The approach
to the concept was serious enough, being that even for the nonexistent
Dynabook, he worked in a new object-oriented programming language
called Smalltalk. Alan Kay believed that the main users of Dynabook
would be children*. But funding research in the field of portable PCs with
graphical interfaces was implemented largely because of the assumption
that such a device would be needed for the army in the future, for example,
to work with interactive instructions for the use and repair of military
equipment in the field, or when difficulties arose when transporting and
storing large volumes of paper documentation. When in the early 2000s
Microsoft introduced its Tablet PC, Alan Kay said: "Microsoft’s Tablet PC, is
the first Dynabook-like computer good enough to criticize. In 2007, after
the presentation of the first Apple's smartphone, Steve Jobs asked Kay
whether the critics to the iPhone were worthy, to which he responded
with a recommendation to make it the size of five to eight inches, and
then Apple was set to conquer the world. It is noteworthy that the iPad,
released three years later, had only a 0.3 inch larger diagonal.

* "A personal computer for children of all ages."

Alan Kay's drafts showing personal computers of the
future, even the children's PC KiddiKomp

TIMELINE: 1952–1976 / 14
 The first version of UNIX was written in Assembler and to modernize it
1972 → easier, a high-level programming language was needed. C was developed by
Dennis Ritchie (Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie), employee of Bell Labs and called

C Programming language
it "C" because it was the heir of the language "B", name which, is probably
due to the abbreviation of the name of the earlier BCPL (Basic Combined
Programming Language) language. At the end of the '70s, the most popular
programming language for BASIC PCs became replaced by C language. Yet,
the special growth in the popularity of C began with its arrival in the 80s
1972 ↘ to the IBM PC. The syntax of C became the basis for popular programming
languages such as C++, C# (C Sharp), Java, and Objective-C.

Sinclair Executive
Pocket calculator Known to the citizens of the former USSR by the clones of its home
computers ZX Spectrum (see page 38), the Sinclair company released the
world's first truly compact calculator in 1972, which could easily fit in the
pocket. The device, called Sinclair Executive, was beautiful, convenient,
but not cheap – almost £80 (in 2016, taking into account the inflation
to the date, it would cost almost a thousand pounds). Nevertheless, the
calculator was in high demand, selling 100 thousand pieces a month,
most of which were produced for export, including Japan. The Sinclair
Executive received the prestigious British Design award in 1973 given
by the Council Award for Electronics, and one of them is exhibited at the
Museum of modern art in New York. In an article of The New Scientist
magazine of that time, this was said about the calculator: "It's not so
much a professional calculator, rather, jewelry."

In August 1972, after approximately six years of development, the

1972 → little Magnavox company under the leadership of the inventor Ralph Henry
Baer, released the world's first television electronic game console, Odyssey,
Magnavox Odyssey at a price of 99 dollars. The device became a best seller: in the first year they

Game console were able to sell 120 thousand consoles, and during its existence in the
market, until the next generation of the device was released – Magnavox
Odyssey² – it sold approximately 330 thousand units. The players were
offered 27 games (all developed by Magnavox itself), being "Table Tennis"
the main of them. Because of plagiarizing the foundation of its gameplay,
Magnavox sued the company Atari, which in autumn of that same year
released their console with the game Pong, that was also very successful.
Magnavox won this case as well as many other similar cases (against the
companies Coleco, Mattel, Activision, etc.). In the course of 20 years, Magnavox
managed to get more than 100 million dollars of compensation as a result of
court decisions on violation of its patents. Also, the first working prototype
of the Odyssey, which was named Brown Box, was assembled much earlier
than the commercial version, in 1967. It can now be found at the National
Museum of American History.

15 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1973 ↘
Xerox Alto
PC with graphical interface

The Xerox Alto, developed at the Xerox PARC research center, was
a real personal computer in the modern sense of the word. At the same
time, it was the first PC using a graphical user interface with a desktop,
folders, icons, and other familiar elements. The Xerox Alto was controlled
with a three button mouse, first a mechanical one, which then evolved
into an optical one. It had 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 512 KB, and a
hard disc with a removable 2.5 MB cartridge. The system unit, although
it was the size of a small refrigerator, could easily be placed under the
table. Xerox Alto Computers could be connected to the network using 1975 →
the Ethernet protocol also developed by Xerox. On the table next to the
keyboard and mouse, there was a conventional monitor with portrait Altair 8800 Microcomputer
orientation and a resolution of 606×808 pixels (quite a lot not only for
their time, but also for the following decade), convenient for editing texts.
Despite the most advanced technologies ahead of their time, the Xerox
Alto did not become a commercial product – obviously, due to is high
price. Nevertheless, over two thousand Alto were produced in the range
The founder of MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems)
of a few years. The computer was used to solve Xerox’s internal problems,
which produced electronic calculators, Henry Edward Roberts, was able to
and was also provided to some universities. The ideas featured in Xerox
convince investors to invest in the production of personal computers first
Alto were developed in the early to mid-80s and applied in the Xerox Star
accessible to a wide range of consumers, a computer built on the basis of the
PC (1981), Apple Lisa (1983), Apple Macintosh (1984) and IBM PC with
modern and prospective processor Intel 8800. As a result, in the January issue
Windows (1985). (See pages 36, 28, 46, 57 respectively.)
of Popular Electronics magazine, an article reviewed the Altair 8800 PC, which
attracted the attention of many radio users and programmers, including the
future founders of companies like Apple and Microsoft. Altair 8800, despite
its modest performance and absolute precariousness of the basic equipment,
sold very well. Instead of the planned 800 pieces per year (which apparently
not even Roberts could believe himself), about a thousand were ordered in the
first month. After three months, MITS, which had a modest production capacity,
accumulated 4000 outstanding orders. For $439, the buyer received a building
set, and for $621 (equivalent to approximately 2,700 current time dollars) – a
ready-made device, which, however, barely could be called a personal computer,
since it had neither a keyboard, nor even the possibility to connect to a monitor
or a TV. The Altair was transformed into a complete PC only after the purchase
of additional expansion cards. Some of the boards offered at the time by MITS
and their prices were the following: 4096 word Memory Board (required for
loading the BASIC interpreter) – $338; Serial Interface Board (RS-232) – $138;
Audio Cassette Interface Board – $174, Serial Interface Board (Teletype) –
$146. The capability to connect the monitor was implemented later.

TIMELINE: 1952–1976 / 16
 1975 ↘
Microsoft BASIC
Commercial PC software

1975 →
IBM 5100
Portable Computer Laptop
Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen
In 1975, IBM introduced a portable desktop, the IBM 5100 Portable
Computer. It's amazing how the engineers succeeded -using the technologies According to the recollections of Bill Gates, when he and Paul Allen
of that time – to fit in a body of the size of a not so large suitcase, not read the article about Altair 8800, they realized that microcomputers
only the basic electronic elements, but also the full-format keyboard, a CRT would soon be on sale to the broad masses, and that the software market
monitor and a tape drive. The device’s price was considerable – from 8975 to could be a great source of income for them. Therefore, they decided
19975 dollars, depending on the amount of RAM and ROM. If the built-in without hesitation to begin writing a BASIC interpreter for this system.
5-inch monitor was inconvenient because of its size, you could connect an Henry Roberts, owner of MITS (see page 17), together with the future
external one to the computer. founders of Microsoft, agreed to distribute their BASIC software with the
Altair computer. Until the early 80s, the BASIC interpreter for many PC
models of different manufacturers was Microsoft's main source of revenue,
1976 ↘ until it launched the MS-DOS operating system (see page 35).

VHS standard
Home video

JVC released a new format for video cassettes and tape recorders –
VHS (Video Home System), which from the first half of the 80s and until
the early 2000s would become dominant in the field of home video.
Estimated by JVC itself, by 2002, there were about 900 million VHS
devices. The last VHS video recorder was released by the Japanese
company Funai in July 2016.

17 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 1976 ↘
5¼-inch
disc drive
1976 →
IBM 3800 and Xerox 9700
The company Shugart Associates released the world's first 5¼-
inch FDD. The new relatively compact floppy format was well received
Laser printers by everybody and soon replaced the 8-inch predecessor. In the '70s there
were several competing drive types from different manufacturers, with
different formatted floppy discs. In 1984, the IBM PC AT came out, using
After six years of development, the first laser printer went on sale. two-sided floppy discs, formatted at 1.2 MB, which became the de facto
However, it only worked with roll paper. The quality was quite high for its standard. In the late 80s, 5¼-inch floppy discs gave way to the leading and
time: 144×180 pixels per inch. It should be noted that the following year, more practical 3½-inch format.
the Xerox 9700 laser printer was released (in the picture), being able to print
in plain paper and with the high resolution of 300 pixels. Many researchers
consider this model to be the first modern laser printer. Both models were
pretty large floor-standing devices that looked more like a mini typographic The development of the supercomputer Cray-1 was completed under
machine than what we understand today by the word "printer." the leadership of the talented engineer Seymour Roger Cray. The National
Center for Atmospheric Research of the USA paid the huge amount of
8.86 million dollars for Cray-1 as the first customer of a powerful system with
a capacity of 133* megaflops. Customers could also rent this supercomputer
1976 → for 210 thousand dollars a month. The central processor of the Cray-1 was a
large floor device weighing more than five tons and containing 144 thousand

Cray-1
chips. The configuration of the system, arranged in circular "columns", was so
because of the optimal positioning of the cooling system along which freon
One of the first and most circulated. The cooling system itself was located at the base of the structure
successful supercomputers and was shaped like a sofa with soft seats. In total, Cray Research managed
to sell more than 80 Cray-1 computers in different versions. As a result of a
change in the international political situation caused by the collapse of the
USSR, the demand for supercomputers, supported by the US Department
of Defense, fell in the early '90s. In addition, new players began to appear
on the supercomputer market – Hitachi, HEC, Fujitsu, etc. As a result of
bankruptcy, Cray Research was bought in 1996 by Silicon Graphics Company
(see page 43) for 767 million dollars, and four years later it was sold to
another firm – Tera Computer.

* Reference: the capacity of a PC with an Intel Pentium 75-200 MHz

processor in 1996 – up to and between 75-200 megaflops.

/ 18
 APPLE:
THE ­BEGINNING
"The most compelling reason for most people
to buy a computer for the home will be to link
it into a nationwide communications network.
We’re just in the beginning stages of what will
be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most
people – as remarkable as the telephone"

Steve Jobs, Playboy magazine, February 1985

20 /
Apple II
I
t is assumed that the first* personal computer appeared
in 1975, when the American company MITS introduced
the Altair 8800 device to the public. It was in fact, a
small metal box with several dozen red lights on the
front panel that looked more like a radar than what we
usually call a "computer." It's difficult to say what was
useful or exciting to do with it, because initially it did not
even have a monitor.

Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular

­Electronics magazine, January 1975
"World's first minicomputer kit
to rival commercial models..."
Altair 8800 Computer

The buyers of Altair – technologists, beginner

engineers and programmers – to the delight of the
* Often it is not so easy to determine who was the first in a manufacturer, were unexpectedly a lot; demand
particular field. The personal computer is no exception. In surpassed all expectations, triggering a wave of
spite of the fact that the specialists most often honor the production – small companies began, one by one, to
title of "pioneer" to the Altair 8800, this can be argued. produce "consumer" computers of this kind. Apple
The concept of a "personal computer" changed over time, Computer was one of those companies.
and although some computers were not initially posi- A year after Altair's success, two friends, Stephen
tioned by manufacturers as "personal computers", they Gary Wozniak and Steven Paul Jobs, showed their
can now be classified as PCs. For example, the HP 9810A child – the Apple I. It was a "real" computer, demon-
device from Hewlett-Packard Company, released in 1971, strated at the meeting of the "Homebrew Computer
was called a desktop-based programmable (with BASIC Club" with a keyboard and a plug-in monitor. Literal-
language) calculator. In the modern sense it's a real PC, at ly, at once, the partners received an order of 50 com-
least it's more a computer than Altair, according to what puters at a price of 500 dollars per a piece from a
we consider a personal computer. specialized store, Byte Shop, where after a margin
it was sold at an ominous price of 666 dollars and
66 cents. This was the beginning of not only the his-
tory of Apple's dizzying success, but, perhaps, the
era of personal computers in general.
Manufacturers of "serious" large computers
(mainframes and mini-computers), such as IBM

21 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), simply
ignored personal computers as a class in the '70s.
Leaders of the huge corporations underestimated
the potential of the newly emerged PC market and
allowed a lot of small shoots to rise in the shadow of
their colossal companies. That's why some of these
newcomers eventually turned into real giants.

By the beginning of the '80s, the personal com-

puter became really personal. With their help, it was
possible to do many useful things: type and edit texts,
Stephen Wozniak
make calculations, keep accounts, and play games.
and Steve Jobs
There was no universally recognized industry stand-
with an Apple I
ard, such as the modern PC or Mac, but there were
computer
a huge number of large and small companies; Com-

Accurate replica of the Apple I

computer (board without
case), complete with original
Sony monitor and Panasonic
tape recorder

APPLE: THE BEGINNING // 22

 The only companies that could survive with
such competition were the ones that, firstly, did re-
ally good and not too expensive devices, and, sec-
ondly, could attract the attention of software com-
panies for writing a sufficient amount of diverse
software.
Thanks to their excellent computer, the Apple II
(heir to Apple I), the private company of the two S­ teves
not only managed to survive, but for several years be-
came the number one company in this market.
Appearing in 1977, the Apple II was similar to the
current PCs: a system unit with a keyboard, a monitor,
and drives – all in light gray cases with rounded edg-
es. In the center there was the new Apple logo – a bit-
Apple's external 5¼ drive designed by Stephen ten apple, consisting of multi-colored stripes.
Wozniak, officially called disc Subsystem. Apple II became a real long-liver: by the begin-
It went on sale in June 1978 with a controller ning of the '90s, from five to six million units of all
and cable priced at $595 of its variations had been produced. This comput-
er was a spearhead for both users and for Apple:
it had produced a good stable income for years,
modore, RadioShack, NEC and other companies that which allowed the development and release of a
manufactured computers incompatible with each new generation PC – the Macintosh, which will be
other, also joined the "computer race." discussed in the next chapter.

Today, the technical specifications of the first

Apple II look rather modest: 1 MHz processor, 4 KB
of RAM (expandable up to 48 KB), and an inter-
face for connecting a cassette recorder.
In high-resolution mode the screen
displayed 280×192 pixels. The device
cost was 1298 dollars – similar to a
current time very good computer.
Of course more advanced versions
were released later: Apple II Plus, IIe,
IIc, IIGS and IIc Plus.

Apple II PC
with a portable black
and white Sanyo VM 4209
(1978 release) monitor and
two external drives

23 //
 One of the main reasons of the high demand for
Apple II was what many analysts and historians call
the appearance of VisiCalc, a spreadsheets program
developed by Software Arts (distributed by Per-
sonal Software and later renamed VisiCorp), now
familiar to all in Excel.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of
this tool, indispensable in modern office work.
VisiCalc proved to be a highly sought-after
product, which in the span of over 6 years had been
purchased more than 700,000 times, despite the
fact that computer piracy had already flourished
in those years. Yet, the developers probably didn't

VisiCalc
­program Apple IIc (the letter "C" in the title – from the word
interface "Compact") was the company's first portable computer,
which could be taken from work to home and back.
Its weight was less than 3.5 kg (without the monitor).
Apple managers predicted sales of Apple IIc at the level
of 100 thousand pieces per month, but it faced an order
magnitude of lower demand – about 100 thousand per
year. Users preferred to purchase the "good old" Apple
IIe because of its wider expansion options

worry too much about their future and did not think
about a patent for their unique invention. For this
reason, more functional spreadsheets from other
companies soon appeared on the market: Super-
calc, Microsoft MultiPlan, Lotus 1-2-3, and others.
In 1985, Microsoft Excel was released, but
there was an agreement with Apple according to
which for the first two years, Excel was exclusive
for Macintosh computers, later appearing for Win-
Magazine advertisement of the VisiCalc dows.
program and Apple PC from 1983. At the turn of the '70s and '80s, the manage-
"How to turn a sea of data into data you can see" ment of Apple (which, by the way, during this pe-
riod held the most successful initial public offering

APPLE: THE BEGINNING / 24

 PC Altair 8800b a
­ d­vertisement,
the second half of the '70s

Stephen Wozniak and the Apple II

in an advertising from the mid-'80s

Advertisement
Apple, October 1976
"Apple presents the first ­lowcost
microcomputer system with
a video terminal and 8 KB of
RAM on a Single PC Card"

25 // APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 Apple PC advertise-
ment Lisa, 1983.
"If you can find the
trash can, you can
run a computer."
"Soon there'll be just
two kinds of people.
Those who use com-
puters and those
who use Apples"

Apple Lisa. "Think of it as a Maserati for your mind"

APPLE: THE BEGINNING // 26

 Revolution?

Despite the widespread use of personal computers in many

spheres of life in the '80s, this phenomenon could not yet be
called a revolution. With their help, indeed it became easier and
more convenient to do many things, but nothing fundamentally
new arose: journalists switched from typewriters to word
processors; accountants mastered the corresponding programs
forgetting about thick accounting books; parents thought that
it was better to buy a game console or an inexpensive computer
(for example, ZX Spectrum) for their children, on which they
could at the same time learn to program in BASIC.
The real revolution happened only after a decade and a
half, when, having matured and being widely spread, millions of
computers created the basis for the emergence of the consumer
Internet: WWW, e-mail, online shoping and various services.

Apple II (Synertek 6502A 2 MHz processor, 128-512 KB

of RAM) is shown here with a monitor (manufactured by
Hitachi), an external drive and an external hard disc Apple
ProFile of 5 MB. Apple ProFile began being sold in the fall
of 1981 at a price of $3,499. The device used magnetic discs
and a mechanical part from the Seagate ST-506 hard drive
(see page 35), and the printed circuit boards were designed
and manufactured by Apple itself

since Ford's IPO in 1956), understood perfectly

well that Apple II should have a worthy successor.
Apple IIe – the most long-lasting model of all the A computer with the predictable name Apple
computers manufactured by Apple, which stayed in III, oriented more to the business audience unlike
production 11 years – from January 1983 to Novem- the "home" Apple II, was released in 1980, but be-
ber 1993. This photo shows the Enhanced version cause of unstable performance (some parts con-
of this PC, which was released in March 1985. It stantly overheated and broke) it did not bring the
featured a 65C02 1 MHz processor, 64 KB of RAM, company the expected benefits, although it was
and a maximum screen resolution of 560×192 pixels produced for five years.
In 1983, another attempt was made to release
a serious PC for the office – Apple Lisa, named after
the elder daughter of Steve Jobs.

27 // APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 It was a very solid PC for the early '80s, sup-
porting up to 2 MB of RAM, an external 5 MB
HDD, a graphical interface (GUI; Graphical User
Interface) and a mouse. But the excellent techni-
cal characteristics were dimmed against a back-
ground of a considerable price – $9,995. In addi-
tion, the computer froze regularly, which was un-
acceptable for a professional business tool. As a
result, Apple faced the second failure. In 1989, an
unsold batch of Lisa computers of two thousand
seven hundred pieces was taken to one of Utah's
landfills and buried in the ground. Apparently,
the computers really turned out to be very bad,
and for six years they were so morally obsolete
that they were chosen to be destroyed, and not
transferred, for example, to the technology offic- The Macintosh XL shown here was in fact a modified version
es of educational institutions. of Apple Lisa, which could run programs for Mac OS using
the supplied MacWorks XL emulator. The PC was only
Steve Jobs, who first took part in the Lisa released during a span of a few months – from January to
project, left the project about a year before its April 1985 and cost about 4000 dollars. It featured a Motorola
completion, taking up a more promising one, in his 68000 5 MHz processor, 512 KB of RAM (expandable to 2 MB),
a built-in floppy drive and a 12-inch black and white monitor
with a resolution of 720×364 pixels
Apple Lisa, 1984

/ 28
 Apple Lisa Advertising. "Apple invents
the ­personal computer. Again."
The first Apple logo
opinion: the development of the computer of the
The first Apple logo, drawn by Ronald Wayne, the third co-owner future (and our present) – the Apple Macintosh.
of the company, illustrates the common legend of the miraculous As you can see in the photos, the graphic interface
enlightenment that Newton had at the moments of his rest under the of the Lisa PC operating system was very similar to
Cambridge apple tree. what we are used to see on our PC screens. The same
The public needs legends, so many significant inventions are familiar elements: windows, folders, various icons, a
accompanied by such naive and vivid tales as this one. bin – all this had been achieved before the Macintosh
"Insight" is really just the last piece of the puzzle that forms and, moreover, long before Windows. But Apple Lisa
in the intelligent head, the last action that completes the long hard was, by no means the first PC with a GUI.
work of the innovator.
Behind such a product, as, for example, the iPhone, there are years As it often happens in the history of invention,
of hard work, experience and reflection of many talented people. Artists firms that have developed some important and
know that it is possible to digest something in the mind for weeks, months useful idea, have difficulty in creating a successful
and even years, and then paint a picture in a matter of days. Can we in this final product. But some other company, following
case consider that the work was actually completed in a few days? the trail of the first passers, brilliantly manages to
realize this idea in an attractive way for consumers.
So it happened with a graphical interface that
was not only invented in Xerox's Palo Alto Research
Center (Xerox PARC) lab, but also used in the fully
functioning Xerox Alto computer.

29 // APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 A PC with a desktop appeared at the Xerox
company 10 years before Lisa – in 1973. This is two
years before the appearance of the "toaster" (as
once Bill Gates called the Altair 8800 computer).
But Alto did not go into serial production, formally
remaining a research model, although for the needs
of Xerox itself and other friendly organizations, sev-
eral thousand pieces were manufactured.

Why was Xerox Alto not for sale? Probably,

because of the high cost of production: in stores
it would cost about 40 thousand dollars, which, of
course, was too expensive even for a wealthy buyer
(especially, when it comes to talk about the pricing
of the early '70s).

Homebrew Computer Club

meeting, 1978

Projects that have impacted society often begin with modest

aspirations. The Apple I computer, originally designed as a product for a
small fan club, is no exception. If Stephen Wozniak wouldn't have had a
friend like Jobs, his computer would probably have remained at a radio
construction level. Jobs' talent, among other things, was evident in his
ability to see greatness in small things.
Product promotion in the "amateur" market is usually not associated
with high costs, since manufacturers literally know their customers.
The time when a wide consumer market for some kind of
products has not yet formed, and the amateur market already exists,
is the most favorable scenario for entrepreneurial firms. Many of them
have the potential to turn into very large companies over time.
Nowadays, there are also thousands of small projects that could
potentially become giants in their field... but most of them, of course,
are missing out.

Xerox Alto computer. A very large by modern standards

unit is portrayed under the table

APPLE: THE BEGINNING // 30

1977 ↘
Tandy TRS-80 and
Commodore PET
Popular home
computers

In 1977, along with Apple II, two home computers appeared on the
market, also becoming very popular – the TRS-80 from Tandy, which owned a
network of 3,000 RadioShack* stores, and the Commodore PET 2001.
The first one had a Zilog Z80 1.77 MHz processor known on the post-
Soviet world as PC ZX Spectrum clones (see page 38), 4 KB of RAM (later –
16 KB), a black and white monitor, a full-size keyboard and a RadioShack CTR-
41 recorder in the kit. The second, designed in the form of an all-in-one, had
a MOS Technology** 6502 1 MHz processor, also 4 KB of RAM (expandable Commodore PET 2001 PC, manufactured from 1977 to 1981
to 96 KB), a small black and white monitor, a not very comfortable keyboard
with a flat rubber surface and a built-in Commodore Dataset for conventional This was not a particular problem for a system of the '70s, but by
compact cassettes (see page 10). Tandy’s management was not sure about how the early '80s PET became inferior in regard to its competitors. In 1980, PET
successful their PC would be, so they first made a relatively small batch of was replaced by Commodore VIC-20 with support for color graphics with a
3000 pieces, counting on the fact that if they were not in demand, then Tandy resolution of 184×176 pixels and three octave sound, the first microcomputer
would be able to use them at least for the purpose of accounting at RadioShack which exceeded sales for one million units (totaling 2.5 million).
stores. But the fears were in vain: in the first month, about 10 thousand TRS-
80 were sold at a price of 599 dollars, and in four years, 250 thousand. * The name of the TRS-80 PC is formed by the name of the company itself
Commodore PET was a little bit more expensive – 795 dollars, but and the name of the chain of stores – Tandy and RadioShack.
it sold quite well. ** MOS Technology was absorbed by Commodore itself a year before, so
It did not have graphical modes, and only monochrome text was displayed. the Commodore PET actually used a proprietary processor.

TRS-80 PC at a
computer exhi-
bition in Boston,
August 1977

31 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1977 ↘ 1978 ↘
Atari VCS (Atari 2600) Intel x86
Game console The most popular
with cartridges processor architecture

Intel 8088
processor
(modified
8086 version).
This was used in
the IBM PC

Intel released the first x86 processor, which has become the most
popular PC in the world and remains so until now. The name "x86" is formed
by the last two digits of the names of the first generations of these Intel
processors, from 8086 to 80486. The x86 architecture is implemented
in processors from many manufacturers, for example, AMD, Cyrix, VIA
Technologies and Transmeta.
A popular TV game console using cartridges appears on the mar-
ket – the Atari VCS (from the Video Computer System). The development
of the device was very expensive (about $100 million), so Atari founder
Nolan Bushnell was forced to sell his company to Warner Communica-
tions in 1976, promising that the console would enter the market in the
1978 ↘
WordStar
near future. The initial price of the Atari VCS was relatively low – $199,
which was achieved largely thanks to the use of a small number of mi-
crocircuits (the main one is the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, The most
also installed in Apple I and the first versions of Apple II). Sales of con- popular
text editor
soles grew from year to year, which contributed to the publication of
cartridges with very popular games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders.
In 1977 they sold only 250,000 devices, then in 1980, 2 million, and in of its time
1982, as many as 8 million! Also, just the Space Invaders sales brought
Atari about 100 million dollars. But seemingly the never-ending stream
of money suddenly stopped: in 1983, the computer games crisis (known
as North American video game crash) broke out, as a result of which
sales of consoles dropped at 97% by 1985. The crisis, which lasted sev-
eral years, was caused by a number of reasons, among of them were: Programmer Rob Barnaby wrote the first version of the text editor
the competition from inexpensive but more powerful and more useful WordStar, which later became the most common program for typing and
home computers; massive amount of cartridges of bad quality games editing text until the mid-80s. MicroPro International, publisher and
from small developers that undermined the credibility of the industry, owner of WordStar, was in 1983 the largest company on the software
and glut in the market. market, owning a 10 percent share of it.

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 32
1978 ↘ 1979 ↘
LaserDisc VisiCalc
Spreadsheets

The idea of spreadsheets came to the mind of a student of the

Harvard Business School, Dan Bricklin, in 1978. Together with programmer
Bob Frankston, he organized a small firm called Software Arts and
developed the idea in just a year. So the program VisiCalc (from Visual
Calculator) was released, which went down for several years with the
circulation of about one million copies. For almost a year VisiCalc was
available only for the Apple II, which gave Apple a certain advantage
over its competitors, as VisiCalc, as said in popular language, was a real
killer application. Byte magazine wrote: "VisiCalc is the first program for
a microcomputer that influences the sale of systems as a whole," and the
review in Creative Computing had a subtitle: "reason enough to buy a
computer." The home PC suddenly turned from a device for enthusiastic
programmers and game enthusiasts, to a tool that helped with business
and making scientific calculations. It is even possible that the very
appearance of VisiCalc led to the fact that IBM decided to develop the
IBM PC.

The first commercial format of optical media appeared under the

name of LaserDisc, developed by Philips. These discs were much larger
than modern CDs and DVDs and contained analogue recording of video
and audio (later the sound was digitally recorded). The LaserDisc players
did not become popular in Europe, but they enjoyed a certain demand
in Japan and the USA. In the late '90s, about 2% of American and 10%
of Japanese families had such devices. The latest LaserDisc units were
produced in Japan in 2001.

VisiCalc Program and

PC Tandy TRS-80 Model III,
early 80s

33 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1980 ↘ 1981 ↘
HDD Seagate ST-506 IBM PC
5¼-inch hard drive

Seagate, formerly known as Shugart Associates, launched the world's

first 5¼-inch format hard drive. A 5-megabyte drive costed 1500 dollars.

In August 1981, just after a year of development by a department

composed of two-thirds of the company's employees, the IBM Personal
Computer 5150, known as IBM PC, was released.
Thanks to its open architecture, the line of IBM PC and compatible
models of other manufacturers, almost completely took over the personal
computer market in a few years. Read more on page 57.

1981 ↘
MS-DOS
The beginning of dominance
Microsoft
Having received and fulfilled the order for the development of the
operating system for IBM PC, Microsoft evolved from an ordinary software
developer with several dozen employees specializing in programming
languages, to a huge corporation. MS-DOS, as it was known, was the most
popular operating system during the '80-90s (after 1995 – already as a
part of Windows).

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 34
 By replacing the unique Xerox Alto workstation (see pages 17, 30),
1981 ↘ Xerox Star became the first commercially available PC with a graphical
user interface: windows, icons, folders and other elements that modern

Xerox Star
users have long been accustomed to. The official name of this computer
was Xerox 8010 Information System, and Star's name refers only to the
PC with GUI for sale software package that came with it for automating the office work. In its
basic configuration, the Xerox Star had 384 KB of RAM (expandable to
1.5 MB), a 10 MB 8-inch hard disc (there were variants with 29 and 40 MB
HDD), an 8-inch drive, a two-button mouse and a 17-inch black and white
monitor with high resolution (1024×809).
At a price of 16 thousand dollars, it was several times cheaper than
the analogous computing power of the DEC VAX-11/750 minicomputer.
For a full-fledged configuration of one office, it was required to minimize
the number of such workstations with server equipment connected via
Ethernet, which cost ranged from 50 to 100 thousand dollars in total. Of
course, such a solid amount of money could be afforded by a small firm. At
the same time, to automate accounting and workflow, the available "home"
PCs such as the Commodore VIC-20 could be used, which was available to
the market in that same year for less than $300. Xerox Star went down in
history as a prototype of the future Apple Macintosh and* Windows PC.

* With the advent of numerous IBM PC clones, the PC word was understood
not so much for personal computers as a whole (as it was in the '70s), but as how
many PCs were compatible with IBM and using the x86 processor architecture.

1981 ↘
Epson HX-20 In late 1981, the Epson HX-20 mobile computer was introduced to
"Handheld computer" the public – the first so-called Handheld PC (a computer with which you
could work with holding it in your hands). The case was about the size of a
pack of A4 paper and weighed 1.6 kg. It housed: two Hitachi 6301 614 kHz
processors, 16 KB of ROM (expandable to 32 KB), 32 KB of RAM (expand-
able to 64 KB), a liquid crystal display resolution of 120×32 pixels, a full
QWERTY-keyboard, a small built-in printer (printing on roll paper, like a
cash register), built-in storage in microcassettes (which were often used
in voice recorders and answering machines) and a rechargeable battery
which charge could last up to 50 hours of operation. The operating system
was proprietary, with a built-in BASIC interpreter. The HX-20 was sold only
in 1983 at a price of $795. But despite its benefits, the system was not
widely used, apparently because of the small number of applications and
the limited choice of peripherals. Nevertheless, in Businessweek magazine
it was said that this was the "fourth revolution in personal computing."

35 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1981 ↘
Hayes Smartmodem
Universal modem and BBS

Most PCs of the early '80s, no matter who was the manufacturer, had a
standard serial RS-232 serial port, which made possible the emergence of a
universal modem that could work with any computer. The first such modem
was the Hayes Smartmodem, developed by Hayes Microcomputer Products*.
Despite the low data transfer rate (300 bauds) and the price of $299, the
modem was in demand, because it was the only one of its kind.
The high price allowed to create, by somebody's expression, in "a
Cadillac among modems", featuring a solid aluminum case with a semi-
transparent plastic front panel, and using only high-quality electronic
components. In 1982, the four-speed Smartmodem 1200 was introduced
at a price of 699 dollars. The spread of modems contributed to the growth
of the specific method of communication of PC users in the pre-Internet
1982 →
Commodore 64
era via the so-called BBS (Bulletin Board System) – "electronic message
boards." Anyone who had a computer with a modem and special software
could organize his bulletin board, which was accessed by other users via The most popular PC
the telephone line**. In fact, the area of application of BBS was not limited
to announcements – it included chat, conference, e-mail, file archives and
even text-based online games. In August 1982, at a price of $595, the most popular computer
model in history reached the market – the Commodore 64 (or
abbreviated – C64). This home PC was produced before 1994 and sold
more than 15 million units, which made it possible to enter the Guinness
Book of Records. C64 dominated the market of low-cost PCs throughout
the '80s. In the period between 1983 and 1986, it held 30-40% of the US
PC market, outperforming IBM-compatible machines and Apple.
However, on the large computer market in the UK, it fell short
to the ZX Spectrum (see page 38). Commodore 64's multimedia
capabilities were good for its time. In addition to the central MOS
Technology 6510 (modified 6502) processor, it had a graphical and
sound coprocessor – MOS Technology VIC-II and MOS Technologies SID.
All of these chips were manufactured by Commodore (remember that
MOS Technology already belonged to the Commodore company).
The presence of a composite video output in the case made
* The small company D.C. Hayes Associates (later – Hayes Microcomputer it possible to connect the C64 to the TV, which made it possible to
Products) was opened by Dennis Hayes and his friend Dale Heatherington in 1978. seriously compete with game consoles. Moreover, the Commodore
Before Smartmodem, the partners managed to develop and release several models of was sold not only in specialized computer stores, but also in consumer
modems, designed primarily for enthusiastic buyers. hardware stores. The popularity of the C64 also contributed to the large
** Customers called via modem to the pre-known phone number to which number of programs created for it – about 10 thousand applications
the BBS was connected. were written during its lifespan.

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 36
1982 ↘
ZX Spectrum

1982 →
Compact disc
To replace the first models of home PCs of the British company
Sinclair – ZX80 and ZX81, – which gained popularity first of all because
of their very affordable price (ZX80 cost only 99.95 pounds), came the new Digital optical disc
ZX Spectrum, which had the following specifications: Zilog Z80 3,5 MHz
processor, 16 or 48 KB of RAM, and 256×192 (16 colors) graphics mode.
The OS and built-in BASIC interpreter were in the ROM and loaded in a few In the summer of 1982, the record company Polygram released the
seconds. After ten years of its release, the ZX Spectrum sold 5 million units, first commercial audio CD in history with the recording of the The Visitors
not counting a large number of both official and non-official clones*. album by the Swedish group ABBA. The Compact disc format itself was
Thanks to a solid library of programs, especially gaming, the developed by Philips and Sony and presented two years earlier. Initially,
ZX Spectrum is today, apparently, the most often emulated platform. digital optical discs were intended for high-quality audio recording, but a
few years later they began to be used as a carrier of any type of digital data.
So the CD-ROM format (Compact disc Read-Only Memory) appeared, which
stored 650 MB (later 700 MB) – a huge amount of information not only
for the '80s, but also for the early '90s. To be fair, the first Apple computer
with a built-in CD-ROM drive – the Macintosh Performa 600 (CD) from
1992 – had an 80 MB hard drive. With ease, one CD carried eight times
more information than the HDD of this Mac.
The first CD computer game was released in 1989: the children's
quest The Manhole, in a fantasy land.

* In the US, the ZX Spectrum was produced jointly with the company
Timex (known for its wristwatches). The original Spectrum was produced by
Sinclair until 1986, then the rights to the PC were sold to Amstrad. Unofficial
clones were made in many countries of the world, having become especially
widespread in the territory of the former USSR and in Eastern Europe.
Sir Clive Marles Sinclair drives an electric Sinclair C5 car of
proprietary production, in the mid-'80s.

37 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1982 ↘
GrID Compass
Laptop

1982 →
Compaq
IBM-compatible PCs

In February 1982, Compaq released the first IBM-compatible PC.

In November of that year, Compaq Portable was announced – a portable
computer with a built-in 9-inch monochrome monitor. With the basic setup
(128 KB of RAM and one drive), it cost about $3,000, which was quite a good
The design of the portable computer GrID Compass, one of the offer compared to the original IBM products.
first laptops*, was invented by Bill Moggridge three years before the For this reason, they built only 53 thousand devices in the first year.
device was released for sale. The case, in which the liquid crystal screen The company grew at a fast pace and by 1986 reached a turnover of half
closes the keyboard, like a lid, received the name Clamshell and quickly a billion dollars a year. The secret of success of Compaq was not only in
became the most popular form factor of a mobile PC. GrID Compass was attractive prices, but also in the high performance of their PCs. For example,
not cheap – it cost more than 8000 dollars, and its main customers were in the same year, 1986, they released the Compaq Deskpro 386 with a new
the United States government and NASA, thanks to which this laptop Intel 80386 processor, seven months ahead of IBM itself. Compaq began to
was used in space, on the shuttle. The GrID Compass's operative system give up its position only in the late '90s, after, apparently, because of the
was proprietary CCOS (Compass Computer Operating System), which not quite successful acquisition of the former leader of the minicomputer
narrowed the range of its use due to the limited choice of software. market – DEC (see page 10). As a result, in 2001, the merger of Compaq with
Nevertheless, it was possible to install MS-DOS on the Compass as it Hewlett-Packard was announced.
had an Intel 8086 processor. Other technical specifications of the GrID
Compass were: 340 KB of memory (Bubble memory, which acted as RAM
and hard drive), built-in 1200-bps modem, and a small display with a
320×240 pixel resolution.

* Several PCs claim for the title of first laptop. Some researchers believe
that the first was the Australian Dulmont Magnum. The term laptop in the '80s
meant not quite what a notebook is.
The first one was a larger PC. Later, when all portable computers
became quite compact, the words "laptop" and "notebook" became synonymous.
For advertising purposes, the word laptop was first used in 1983 by Gavilan Dulmont
Computer Corp. for their Gavilan SC PC. ­Magnum PC

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 38
1983 ↘
1983 ↘
3½" floppy discs
Microsoft
Word

The very first version of the word processor Word, released for
the Xenix* operating system in 1983, had a longer name – Multi-Tool
Word. In that same year, Word was released for MS-DOS. Unlike most
similar DOS-applications, Word featured mouse control. The Mac
version was released in 1985.

* In 1979, Microsoft acquired a license for the 7th version of the UNIX
operating system from AT&T and soon released its UNIX-like Xenix system. The
first versions of it worked on DEC minicomputers, but later Xenix was available
on x86 PCs and others. The latest version was released in 1989.

1983 ↘
Lotus 1-2-3

Lotus was founded in 1982 by Mitch Kapor, a friend of Dan Bricklin,

creator of VisiCalc (see pages 25, 34), and programmer Jonathan Sachs. A
Sony introduced a new 3½-inch floppy format, differing from the year later they released their product Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, almost
5¼-inch with a more protected design: a plastic casing and a metal immediately ahead of their competitors – VisiCalc, Multiplan from
slider that closed the access window to the magnetic disc itself. The Microsoft (the precursor of Excel) and SuperCalc. The figures "1-2-3"
capacity of the two-sided media was 720 KB. Later, a consortium of some in the title indicated that the program was an all-in-one spreadsheets,
manufacturers improved this format by making 3½-inch floppy discs twice DBMS and graph application. The first versions of Lotus 1-2-3 were made
as capacious upgraded to 1.44 MB. They received the designation HD in Assembler and therefore worked very quickly. These electronic tables
(from High Density) and featured an additional square hole in the corner became a real killer application for IBM PC, as well as VisiCalc for Apple
of the casing, which allowed the drive to determine which type of floppy II in the late '70s. Lotus itself literally grew to a large company in a year,
disc was being used. Macintosh computers never used 5¼-inch drives. The becoming the third largest software company on the market: they had a
very first Mac – Macintosh 128K 1984 – had a 3½-inch drive installed, sales revenue of 53 million dollars in the first year (while the business
even though only for their one-sided floppy discs, formatted at 400 KB. plan assumed "only" one million). The popularity of Lotus tables kept on
the top until the early '90s, until the office MS-DOS-programs began to
give way to Windows-applications. As a result, Lotus was absorbed by IBM.

39 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 1983 ↘
Nintendo Entertainment System

1983 →
GNU Project

Richard Stallman, a renowned programmer from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology (MIT), announced the launch of an open public
project in the fall of 1983, to develop a free open source software program.
Five years later, the first version of the GNU General Public License was Initially, Nintendo had plans to create a full-fledged 16-bit
published, according to which the software author transfers his work to computer with a keyboard and a drive, but the company president Hiroshi
public ownership. Yamauchi decided to make a simpler and cheaper 8-bit game console
with regular cartridges. A distinctive feature of the first console, released
in 1983, and first seen on the Japanese-made Nintendo Famicom (from
Family Computer) were the flat gamepads, while the other consoles used
joysticks. The idea of the gamepads was inspired by the case of the pocket
electronic game Nintendo Game & Watch. In the US market, Famicom was
introduced under a different name – the Nintendo Entertainment System
(NES) in 1985 and became popular very quickly, thus putting the end to the
"computer games crisis" that lasted for several years. This was facilitated
by the supply of cartridges with high-quality games only, for which it was
necessary to obtain a license from Nintendo (note that the issuance of
such licenses from the developer of the motherboard was a common
1983 ↘ practice back then). By the end of the '80s NES was an incredibly popular
game console. According to some reports, in 1989 the NES console was

Microsoft
owned by 37% of Japanese families, and in 1990 30% of American families
did, while personal computers stood only at 23%.
Mouse Compute! magazine claimed that Nintendo sold 7 million game
consoles in 1988, which was equivalent to the sales of the very popular
Commodore 64C in the span of five years.
The Microsoft subsidiary, Microsoft Hardware Group, was specifically By 1990, Nintendo had sold more of its NES gaming computers than
organized for the development of Microsoft mouse. In 1983, along with all the manufacturers in the world combined in the previous years.
Word, which supported the mouse control, the first Microsoft Mouse was
released. A new mouse model, – Microsoft Mouse 2.0, which was very good
ergonomically, was released in 1994.

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 40
1984 ↘ AppleWorks
software package,

IBM PC AT mid-90s

1984 ↘
Apple
Works

Apple released a set of Apple Works office applications for Apple

II series computers, including spreadsheets, a text editor and a DBMS.
Later, in 1987, Apple organized a small subsidiary called Claris, which
since 1991 started the production of the ClarisWorks office suite, which
contained besides the spreadsheets, text editor and DBMS, two graphic
editors (raster and vector), and a presentation application among others.
In August 1984, the third generation of IBM computers (after the After completing the development of the software for the Apple II,
PC and PC XT) – Personal Computer AT or IBM PC AT was released. The ClarisWorks was renamed to Apple Works. It came out for both MacOS and
letters AT meant Advanced Technology. The main differences from its Windows until the middle of the 2000s, when it was replaced by iWork.
predecessors were: support for up to 16 MB of RAM (256 KB in the basic
configuration), a built-in real-time clock and the possible equipment of
one of the new video cards – EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adapter) and PGC
(Professional Graphics Controller). The first allowed a resolution up to
640×350 and 16 colors, and the second up to 640×480 and 256 colors
from the 4096-color palette.
One of the founders of Adobe, John Warnock, came up with the
1984 ↘ concept of the language of page description- PostScript back in 1976, yet,
the work was published only eight years later, in 1984. PostScript, designed

PostScript Language
for desktop publishing, had a number of advantages over its analogues:
it was platform-independent (the vector-based file was printed to the
highest possible quality for the device); any equipment manufacturer
could obtain a license for it; language specifications were publicly
available, and software developers could write programs that supported
PostScript. It's hard to imagine how much PostScript would have been in
demand if it were not for Steve Jobs. Sales of the Macintosh in 1985 began
to decline noticeably, and Apple was required to offer something that only
their computer could do.
As a result, Jobs decided to invest $2.5 million in Adobe and Aldus.
They first created a PostScript controller for the LaserWriter Apple printer,
and the secondly – the PageMaker software, a desktop publishing system.
Until 1987, PageMaker was exclusive for the Macintosh PC. Aldus was later
absorbed by Adobe in 1994.

41 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

1984 ↘ 1984 ↘
Dell Motorola DynaTAC
Computers on demand Cell phone

Engineer Martin
Cooper holds a
Motorola DynaTAC
8000C cell phone

Michael Dell, founder of one of the largest computer companies in

the world, ranked third in line with Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard as of 2015,
and began operations on the premises of the branch of the University of
Texas at Austin. He registered the company PC's Limited and proceeded to
assemble private computers on demand, which could be compatible with
the IBM computers, right in his student hostel room, advertising in the press.
Business, at the expense of low prices, individual configuration of
systems and almost absolute absence of competitors working on a similar Motorola began offering the first commercial model of a portable
scheme, grew at an incredible rate – selling $73 million worth of products cell phone – DynaTAC 8000X at a price of $3,995. The battery charge of the
by the end of the year. quite large device by modern standards, could only manage 35 minutes
In 1987 the company changed its name to Dell Computer Corporation. of conversation. It is noteworthy that the first time the experimental
Today it employs more than 100 thousand employees, and the revenue in prototype of Motorola's cell phone was used was much earlier – in 1973.
2015 was 59 billion dollars.

1984 ↘
Silicon Graphics (3D) Founded by scientist James H. Clark, SGI has made a big contribution to
the world of cinema: with the help of their computers, the effects of many
famous films were made, including Jurassic Park, Lawnmower Man and
The first specialized computers (terminals and workstations) that Forrest Gump. SGI's achievements in IT were also great: in the early '90s,
worked with 3D graphics, were developed and released by Silicon Graphics, the company developed the OpenGL specification, which defined a software
Inc. (SGI). The terminals had to be connected to a powerful computer, for interface for writing software with complex two-dimensional and three-
example, a DEC VAX, and workstations worked as stand-alone PCs. The IRIS dimensional graphics.
1400 Workstation (released in 1984), cost $35,700 and had a Motorola * After leaving SGI in 1993, Clark founded Netscape (see page 99) and
86010 10 MHz processor, 1.5 MB of RAM and a 72 MB Seagate hard drive. organized various start-ups that earned him several billion dollars.

TIMELINE: 1977–1984 / 42
MACINTOSH
"We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we
didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it
for ourselves. We were the group of people
who were going to judge whether it was great
or not. We weren’t going to go out and do
market research. We just wanted to build
the best thing we could build. When you’re a
carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,
you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on
the back, even though it faces the wall and
nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there,
so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of
wood on the back. For you to sleep well at
night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be
carried all the way through"

Steve Jobs, Playboy magazine, February 1985

45 /
Macintosh 128K
M
ost users of modern technology don't only tended not only for computer specialists, but for all
associate the name of Steve Jobs with the cultural humanity: architects, musicians, artists,
iPhone, but also the Macintosh. linguists and others like them. However, the digital
But Jobs is just the "adoptive father" of the Mac. world did not pay much attention to this somewhat
He became it, when in 1981 he practically took fanatical work by 1967.
the project from Jef Raskin, an extraordinary collabo- In the mid-'70s, Raskin ran two small firms: Jef's
rator of Apple and the real "father" of the Mac. Friends Aircraft, which produced assemblers for as-
Jef Raskin was a very versatile person: he re- sembling radio-controlled airplanes, and Bannister
ceived bachelor diplomas from the State University of & Crunn, who gave consulting to other programming
New York in mathematics and physics, while studying companies and published manuals for software users.
at the faculties of philology and music. But he decid- One of the clients of the second firm was Apple, for
ed to defend his master's thesis at the University of which Raskin prepared a guide to Integer Basic.
Pennsylvania in computer science, as he was seriously In 1978, at the suggestion of Stephen Wozniak,
interested in programming. Raskin took over as the head of the publishing depart-
His work was called QuickDraw, a graphics sys-
tem. There was a somewhat unusual idea for that
time that when designing a computer, one should
not focus on increasing the power of the system
(speed, memory, etc.), but rather the convenience The very first ­Macintosh
of the user interface. The "graphic system" was in- (model "M0001"), 1984

46 /
 In the five years that were needed to develop this
PC, its specifications changed many times. On Sep-
tember 28, 1979, the following specifications were
approved: 6809E processor, 64 KB RAM, 32 KB ROM,
5¼ inch floppy disc drive (for 200 KB floppy discs),
two-hour battery for stand-alone operation, built-in
printer and modem, 5-inch diagonal monitor (tiny,
by our standards) and a built-in keyboard. The retail
price was $500. At first, no other input device was
proposed, except for the keyboard, but later specifica-
tions included a light pen and joystick (the idea to use
the mouse appeared near the end of the development
and is attributed to Jobs).

The Macintosh had to comply with the WIMP

principle (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device)
invented in the Xerox PARC lab – that is, to have a
familiar graphical interface with the WYSIWYG
property (What You See Is What You Get) meaning
System icons of the first Macintosh, drawn by designer that the document displayed on the monitor and
Susan Kare. During her career, Susan has developed the document in the editing process should look as
graphical elements for various operating systems, similar as possible to the final result – a printout on
including Windows 3.x and OS/2. the printer or a pre­sentation on the screen. The first
The external appearance of the "Solitaire" (Microsoft
Solitaire) popular among office employees, is also
attributable to her
* Young venture capitalist Mike Markkula believed in the
prospects of Apple and invested 250 thousand dollars
in it (80 thousand as investments and 170 thousand as
ment, becoming Apple's thirty-first staff member. He a loan), becoming in 1977 the owner of one third of the
also took up software security. enterprise. Being an experienced businessman, he headed
Soon Raskin turned to Jobs with a proposal to Apple for several years.
realize his old idea of creating an inexpensive com-
puter with a convenient graphical interface, but Jobs
did not like the idea, and he rejected it in a rather
sharp manner.
Somewhat later, in March 1979, Jef was called
to himself by Mike Markkula* (Armas Clifford
­Markkula) – at the time CEO of Apple – and was
asked to develop a gaming computer called Annie with
a price up to $500. Raskin refused and put forward a
counter proposal, which he had already offered Jobs. Mike Markkula
Markkula liked the idea of an inexpensive and conven- with an Apple II
ient computer "for everyone", and the project, code- computer,
named McIntosh (see the side section about the name late '70s
­Macintosh on page 49) soon began.

MACINTOSH / 47
 meaning of course, by the "navy", the main body of
Apple.
"Pirates" made "raids" on Apple's main office,
luring the best employees.
Among them was the talented programmer
Andy Hertzfeld, who later wrote almost a third of
the code for Mac, including the Finder program (to-
gether with another programmer, Steven Capps). As
for Andy, before he developed programs for Apple
II, as many who went to the side of the Mac, worked
within the framework of the competitive Lisa pro-
ject. That's why the interfaces and software of Lisa
and Mac had so much in common despite their soft-
ware incompatibility. "We reached everywhere we
Operating system interface Mac PC 128K, 1984
could ask, borrow or steal the program," Herzfeld
recalled.
As a result, the Mac became so similar to Lisa
program working on the principle of WYSIWYG ap- and moved away from its original specification, that
peared in 1974. It was the Bravo text editor for Xerox it was necessary not only to improve the technical
Alto computers. specifications, but also to add a pointing device.
According to himself, Jef Raskin stated that for Raskin insisted on a pen-based technology or a
the first few years Steve Jobs did not treat the Mac- joystick. "I cannot stand the mouse, the world was
intosh objectively, not forgetting to criticize him at 100% obliged to Jobs for the fact that the mouse
board meetings and from time to time promising to appeared in Mac," he said afterwards. Probably,
close the project. In September 1980, the compa- the mouse seemed to him less intuitively or un-
ny's management even almost decided not to work derstandable for ordinary users than the light pen.
on the Mac. Since Jobs could not be persuaded, as we know,
But the day came when Jobs was interested in (and, thank God), Raskin tried at least to simplify
this small project, funded by a leftover principle. It the mouse, leaving only one button (Xerox Alto,
happened as follows. After the restructuring of the which was largely oriented in terms of the inter-
company and because of the sporadic relationship face, had a three-button mouse, like the IBM PC).
with Apple's management, Jobs was suspended from Taking up the hard part, Steve was strongly
work on the Lisa computer. Then he decided to be- against the previously planned course. They cardi-
come a kind of "dissident" within the company and to nally changed the case format: from a flat one with a
join a small, practically independent group of devel- built-in keyboard, it turned into a vertical computer,
opers who dealt with the Macintosh. "As if back in the excluding the possibility of any upgrade, and with a
past, in the garage...", Steve recalled. separate keypad.
The Mac team occupied the floor of a separate The built-in printer, battery and modem also
building from the company, which only increased disappeared from the specifications at different stag-
the "dissident" status. The rest of Apple's employ- es of development. Jobs even wanted to rename the
ees nicknamed this place "Siberia." Someone from development to... "Bicycle"! The name was strange
the team climbed up on the roof of the building and for a computer, which nobody supported, but never-
rose a black pirate flag with an image of an apple in- theless, was later embodied in the logo of the Apple
stead of a skull, and they rightfully began to consid- University Consortium (the commonwealth of Aus-
er themselves free "pirates." Steve Jobs even said: tralian Apple branch with nine local universities)
"It's better to be a pirate than to serve in the navy," with the slogan "Wheels for the mind."

48 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 McIntosh
Apple

Apple
­University
Logo

The Macintosh Name

The design of the case was completed in early

1982; The names of the specialists who worked on The word "Macintosh", of course, has nothing to do with the ancient
the project – almost 50 names – were added on raincoat, but comes from the name of Jef Raskin's favorite apple – McIn-
the inside. tosh. Since the correct spelling of the name already belonged to the famous
Approximately at the same time, Jobs decided expensive audio equipment company McIntosh Laboratory since 1949, in
not to limit, as before, his participation in the project order to avoid legal confrontation, the decision to call the new computer
to the hardware part. He approached Raskin and said: Macintosh was made (Raskin also proposed management the name Apple V,
"Okay, I'm taking over the software, and you can do but it was not approved).
the documentation." Raskin always tried to endure Despite the difference between the names, they still had problems
the difficult nature of Jobs, but this was the last straw. registering the trademark, and Gordon Gow, president of the McIntosh
"Take it, and the documentation. I quit." – he replied, company, initially denied Apple the permission to use a similar name.
and actually left the company, despite the efforts of Steve Jobs decided to rename the PC to a meaningless "MAC" (although
Markkula and Jobs to persuade him to stay and lead formally abbreviated as Mouse Activated Computer), but later they man-
the new research department. aged to agree with the audio equipment manufacturer, and the name
The development completion time of the Mac Macintosh was used officially.
was delayed many times for various reasons. For ex-
ample, to increase the resolution of the screen from
384×256 to 512×342 pixels, an increase of RAM to
128 was needed, and entailed the expansion of the
volume of software, which by consequence arose the
need of more storage capability.
The standard 5¼ drive was rejected in favor of
the new development of Sony, a disc drive for 3½-inch
floppy discs of twice the capacity, as much as 400 KB.
Branded
Finally, on January 24, 1984, after spending five
logo with
years and $78 million, Apple presented its completed
Apple
Macintosh 128K to a full hall at the annual sharehold-
Macintosh
ers' meeting.
logo
With a fervent speech, Steve Jobs took the Macin-
tosh out of the bag and launched a program showing

MACINTOSH // 49
 1 2

50 //
4 5

6 Advertising booklet Apple Macintosh 128K

1. The cover of the booklet: "Of the 235 million people in

America, only a fraction can use a computer."
2. "If you can point, you can use the Macintosh"
3. This spread tells how engineers and programmers
joined their efforts to create "the most powerful, most
transportable, most flexible, most versatile computer not-
very-much money could buy"
4. Mac 128K in comparison with IBM PC. "Macintosh is one
third the size and volume of the IBM PC... Its brain is the
same blindingly fast 32-bit MC68000 microprocessor –
far more powerful than the 16-bit 8008 found in current
generation computers... Its 3½" discs (400 K) store more
than conventional 5¼" floppies"
5. Inside the Mac 128K
6. Additional numeric keypad, transport bag, external drive
and security kit

// 51
 Jef Raskin and the Canon Cat

After leaving Apple, Jef Raskin opened his Information Appliance

company and began developing the hardware and software for an
inexpensive office computer, mainly focused on text processing.
The computer was released in 1987 by the Japanese company Canon
under the name Cat, selling 20 thousand units at a price of 1,450 dollars.
In that the same year Canon ceased the production of a fairly promising
computer without explanation. It is noteworthy that two years later, Canon
bought a 16.7% of the shares of NeXT for $100 million, owned by Jobs. Was
there any connection between these events? One can only guess.
Information Appliance went bankrupt shortly after the break
with Canon, and Raskin began releasing CDs with classical music and
continued to develop user interfaces and give consultancy in this area.
In 2000 he published his book "The Humane Interface: New Directions

Canon Cat computer, developed by

Jef Raskin, 1987

for Designing Interactive Systems", which became quite famous among

specialists. In 2005, having celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Mac-
intosh, Jef Raskin died of illness.
We can say that Canon Cat had implemented the concept of "a popular
computer" much better than the Mac, so it is, that the Byte magazine even
called it "the spiritual heir to the Macintosh", despite the fact that the
computer did not have either a mouse or a graphic interface.
In general, Cat in many ways resembled to text processors of the late
'70s, but, of course, it had many more possibilities. The all-in-one uniting
the black and white monitor and keyboard contained a 3½-inch drive, a
Motorola 68000 processor (as in Apple Lisa, Mac 128K and a number of
latter Macintosh models), 256 KB of RAM and the same ROM, and a modem.
The application programs were in the ROM and included a text editor, an
English spelling dictionary and programming tools.
The photo clearly shows two red colored keys, located under the
spacebar. They were designed to quickly leap to a desired text fragment.
Jef Raskin

52 // APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

graphical and other capabilities, including a demon-
stration of a synthetized speech.
Mac said: "Hello everyone! I'm a Macintosh. It's
so cool to finally get out of this bag. Although I'm not
used to speaking in public, I want to share with you
the thought that visited me when I ran into the IBM*
unit: never rely on a computer that you cannot lift.
And now I want to sit down and listen. It's an honor
for me to give the floor to the man who became my
own father, Steve Jobs."
From the initial image of the computer con-
ceived by Raskin for "a man in the street", Mac dif-
fered not only in technical characteristics, but also in
a five-fold retail price of $2,495. This is now a signif-
icant amount, and in those years it was considered
frankly high even for a family with a budget above
Steve Jobs, John Sculley and Mac 128K
the average.
The production of one Mac cost the company
about $500, but it was still necessary to cover the
development costs and impressive investments in Of course, compared to other applications, Micro-
advertising. soft's products took a special place: Excel 1.0 spread-
Apple CEO John Sculley** decided to spend sheets (exclusive to Mac OS***, the PC version ap-
15 million on a powerful one-hundred-day advertis- peared in 1987) and Word 3.0, practically replaced
ing campaign, which began with the TV commercial
"1984" now turning into a handbook case for the
marketing specialist. * IBM PC came to light much earlier than Mac – in
Advertising on TV was combined with massive August 1981. More details on page 57.
advertising in the press. Also, Apple spared 2.5 mil- ** Before joining Apple by invitation from Steve
lion dollars to buy all the advertising pages of one of Jobs, John Sculley was first vice president (since
the numbers of the popular weekly Newsweek. 1970), and then president (from 1977 to 1983)
Someone on this occasion joked: "Is this a maga- of Pepsi-Cola. He ran Apple from 1983 to 1993. In
zine or an Apple advertising booklet?" those ten years, Apple's sales increased ten-fold,
Advertising had done its job, giving a good start from $800 million to $8 billion. Those acquainted
to sales. Encouraged by Steve Jobs, he said that it with the history of Apple know that in the process
would be possible to sell up to half a million ma- of persuasion to move from Pepsi to Apple, Jobs
chines by the end of the year, especially since the said to Sculley: "Do you want to sell soda for the
Christmas holidays were expected to lead to a more rest of your life, or do you want to come with me
active market revival. and change the world?"
Hoping to satisfy the demand as much as possi- *** The Macintosh operating system from version
ble, Apple began to produce more than 100 thousand 1.0 to 7.5.5, inclusive, was simply called System
Mac units per month. with the version number added. The name Mac
But the relative success turned out to be short- OS was officially used since 1997, when version
lived: sales suddenly dropped to 20,000 a month, and 7.6 was released. However, for the first time, the
the 500,000th Macintosh found its buyer only in the text "Mac OS" itself appeared a little earlier – on
fall of 1985. the boot screen of the system version 7.5.1.

MACINTOSH / 53
 "1984" commercial

The director of the commercial "1984" was Ridley Scott, the

famous creator of the iconic "Aliens" and "Gladiator", among other
popular films.
We will not retell the story – this video is easy to find on YouTube.
The idea of the video was inspired by George Orwell's dystopian
novel about the horrors of a totalitarian regime.
It seems, while not certain, that Steve Jobs, who commissioned
an ad campaign to the well-known Chiat/Day agency, wanted to
demonstrate that the Macintosh could break the hegemony of the
IBM PC, saving the people from the widespread influence of Big
Brother (namely – The Blue Giant).
At the end of the video, captions that repeat the voiceover appear
on the screen: "On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer will introduce the
Macintosh. And you will see why 1984 will never be like 1984."
Because Markkula and other company executives did not like the
video, it was shown only once during the American Football Super Bowl.
Test Drive a Macintosh

In November 1984, Apple decided to make an unusual

promotion called Test Drive a Macintosh, offering potential buyers to
take a brand new Mac for 24 hours to their home. Tempting.
The proposal was used by about two hundred thousand people,
but the results were rather disappointing, since nearly 2.5 million
dollars were spent on organizing the campaign, and many computers
returned to the company in a non-operating condition.
In addition to the fact that the first Macintosh was not cheap, it
also had a number of significant drawbacks, which, of course, affected
demand. First, not only did it not have a built-in hard disc (Jobs did
not like the noise of the fan, and without cooling about the hard drive
there could be no talk), but it was not even envisaged as an additional
external device (and in fact, it was possible to output the necessary
port on the rear panel). Secondly, the keyboard did not have cursor
keys. Even now it's hard to imagine working with such a keyboard,
and in the mid-80s, when the mouse was still new, this "small
feature" probably scared away many potential customers. Thirdly, the
application programs for the Mac were much less than for the IBM PC
and even for the related Apple II.

54 // APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 Software and Guy Kawasaki

Of course, to have new computer be able to conquer the market,

it was required to create a lot of useful and high-quality applications. By
the time of Macintosh's launch, Apple had prepared only two applications:
the text editor MacWrite (the first version of which could only work with
ten pages of text per file) and MacPaint. Apple decided to engage the
software issue with the help of third-party developers.
In 1983, the company hired a talented young manager, Guy
Kawasaki, instructing him to contact independent developers and
Microsoft Word, ­Microsoft persuade them to write programs for the Mac.
Excel and Microsoft For a year and a half, the Kawasaki team traveled the whole
Multiplan for Macintosh, country and started cooperation with 400 companies and numerous
mid '80s freelance programmers. This activity was unofficially given the name of
"missionary work" by Apple, and Guy Kawasaki's team were nicknamed
"preachers" and "evangelists."

MacWrite. Indeed, these programs came out in 1985,

and by the time Macintosh started selling Macintosh,
the M­ acBasic interpreter and the previous version of
Multiplan (spreadsheets) were ready.
Agreeing with Bill Gates to develop programs for
Macintosh a few years before its release, Steve Jobs
took considerable risk, because he had to reveal cards "Missionary"
to a company that not only worked closely with his Guy Kawasaki
most dangerous competitor, IBM, but also did it for
their own operating system. Moreover, in 1982, Jobs
handed over a Macintosh prototype to Microsoft.
It is difficult to say to what extent Steve was aware
of this risk, but in 1982 the companies signed a contract agreement was effective only until the release of Mac-
saying that Microsoft did not have the right to "engage ... intosh or before January 1, 1983, whichever came first.
in selling, leasing, pricing, publishing or otherwise dis- But Bill Gates did not tell Jobs that as early as in
tributing ... any financial [spreadsheet] modeling, busi- September 1981, six months after one of the confer-
ness graphs, or database management software for any ences announcing the development of the Macintosh,
computer that has a mouse or trackball and that is not he began developing a graphic interface called Inter-
manufactured by Apple Computer." This clause of the face Manager for MS-DOS (that is, for IBM computers

MACINTOSH / 55
 Formally remaining chairman of the board of di-
rectors, Jobs was removed from the management of
the company. After a while, he himself filed a state-
ment of resignation from Apple.
Steve decided to completely break the relation-
ship with Apple and for this reason sold all his 6.5 mil-
lion shares, with the exception of only one, which he
left as a memento.

Original bag for ­storage and t­ ransportation

of the Mac 128K

PC). This shell later turned into Windows, which was

introduced to the public in 1985 – just one year after
the release of the first Macintosh.
After learning about the Interface Manager pro-
ject, Steve Jobs called Bill Gates for explanations. He
was, according to witnesses, quite confident and stat-
ed roughly the following: "Steve, we both have a rich
neighbor called Xerox. You broke into their house to
steal the TV, and found that I was ahead of you. And
now you are outraged that it is not fair, because you
should have been the first."
Thus, the Macintosh 128K became the third
company's failure, after Apple III and Lisa. Despite
the fact that Apple's trade turnover in 1984 grew by
more than half, having passed the mark of 1.5 billion
dollars, 70% of the revenue came from the good old
Apple II. In March 1985, the company's stock price fell
from an all-time-high 63 (two years earlier) to a tough
14.74 dollars.
The first page of the interview, taken by Bout's mag-
Relations between Apple President John Sculley
azine with the makers of Macintosh, February 1984.
and Steve Jobs began to deteriorate rapidly. Everything
On the Mac 128K screen – some of the developers
that Sculley used to admire of Jobs was now annoying:
of the computer
confidence became self-reliance, perseverance – into
stubbornness, emotion – into rudeness. Gradually, the
company's leadership was divided into two factions;
Sculley's supporters won the victory.

56 / APPLE: THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER

 "I was at Apple the day IBM released its PC. They looked calm. It took
them a year to realize what had happened."
Bill Gates

IBM PC

The large company IBM was engaged in the implementation of

big projects and made big computers – mainframes. The unexpected
appearance of the personal computer market was initially not perceived
seriously, but they then realized they were late for sharing the pie, and IBM Personal Computer [IBM 5150] in a doctor's office
under the guidance of engineer Don Estrige, IBM urgently decided to make
their own personal computer with the maximum use of ready devices and Even BIOS ("basic input-output system", which implements the interface
solutions from their and third-party manufacturers. with components of the computer and connected external devices) was
The development of the core set of software, including the operating not patented. This advantage, of course, was taken by a lot of companies*,
system, was entrusted to a still very small firm, Microsoft, which in turn large and small, starting to produce not only a variety of equipment for
acquired the rights to the operating system 86-DOS from the Seattle the IBM PC itself, but, to the delight of Microsoft, also IBM-compatible
Computer Products company. The figure "86" in the title meant that the computers.
system was intended for processors of the Intel x86 family, including Intel After the release of IBM PC, Apple began to noticeably lose market
8088, used in the IBM PC. share of the PC (in only one year, from 1981 to 1982, it fell from twenty-
Microsoft employees took up the modification of the OS purposefully nine to twenty-five percent).
for the IBM PC, changing its name to MS-DOS (Microsoft Disc Operation The IBM PC example shows that it is not so important to be the
System), but by the time the computer was released (and it was developed first to appear on the market in the long term. For the IBM PC, there were
at such a high speed that it was ready in just a year – five times faster certainly many temporary solutions: not the most promising processor
than Apple Macintosh!), it had hundreds of bugs that IBM decided to fix by (the more powerful Intel 80286 second generation processor would
themselves. That modified version of MS-DOS was called PC DOS. have to wait until early 1982), quickly made MS-DOS (later IBM started
IBM PC easily won the market by executing a six-month sales plan developing its own operating system – OS/2)... But the combination of a
for the month, and selling at a price of 1565 to 3005 dollars, depending good time to market, openness of the system and adequate prices, quickly
on the configuration. turned IBM PC de facto into the standard, which it still is and now, after a
Striving to enter the market with the greatest speed possible, and decade since the release of the last** PC brand IBM.
using other people's developments, IBM did not and to some extent could In fact, IBM PC was the second personal computer manufactured by
not even pay attention to the protection of intellectual property rights. IBM. The first was the IBM 5100 Portable Computer, released in the distant
1975, even before the advent of Apple. Although it was not positioned by
Floppy disc with the company as "personal", in all respects it was so. What made it different
PC DOS 1.1 from later PCs was the price.
operating system The IBM 5100 Portable Computer cost from 8975 to 19975 dollars,
and documentation, and only companies bought it.
1982 It is noteworthy that IBM PC was formally called IBM 5150, having
no related connection with the IBM 5100.

* The first of such firms was Compaq Computer Corporation. Read about it
on page 39.
** IBM's computer business was purchased by the Chinese company Lenovo.
See page 147.

MACINTOSH // 57
 Buy an autographed
paper version of this book.

Super limited
first edition, only 100 copies.
 Vladimir Nevzorov
"Apple: The evolution of the computer"

General edition: Vladimir Nevzorov

Translation: Gabriel Zang
Editorial Board: Victoria Ugryumova, Anna Antonova,
Elena Alikova, Alexander Nevzorov
Design: Oleg Gavrishchuk, Vladimir Nevzorov
Layout: Oleg Gavrishchuk, Danil Suglobov

Contemporary photographs: Yakov Khalip,

Igor Borisov (pages 6, 7, 101, 144, 214),
Vladimir Nevzorov (pages 176, 185, 206)

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