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entrepreneurial talents meant that the Apple II was successful in
ways that no other such product had been. Jobs realized that the
amateurism that had characterized the personal computer industry
was no longer appropriate, and employed a marketing director, Mike
Markulla from Intel, and a manager, Mike Scott, from Fairchild
Semiconductor. Both were older, more experienced and looked
more respectable than either Wozniak or Jobs. With this Jobs turned
Apple from two men in a garage into a fully-fledged company, whose
turnover had, in five years, exceeded hundreds of millions of
dollars. Naturally the vast amounts of money to be made in personal
computing put paid to any hope of the more radical aspects that
had characterized the Homebrew clubs, such as the original sense
of sharing and community, continuing to have any real influence.
Nonetheless Apple held, and continues to hold, onto its counter-
cultural image which turned out to be advantageous for advertising
and branding. The success of Apple alerted IBM to both the
possibilities of the personal computer, and the threat it might pose
to their own domination of the industry. By
they had, with
unseemly haste by IBM standards, produced their own machine, the
IBM PC (illus.
1981
). IBM confounded many expectations by adopting
some of the hacker ways of doing things, such as making available
the machine's technical specifications, and encouraging others to
write software for it. This was not as open-minded as it might seem,
but rather a solution to the problem of developing the machine at a
far greater speed than was their normal practice. This entailed using
as many parts from other sources as possible, and thus opening
up the market to other manufacturers. Perhaps the main beneficiary
of this strategy was Microsoft. They supplied the operating system
for the PC, for a flat fee, but were able to make lucrative licensing
deals with producers of PC clones - machines that used the same
off-the-shelf parts as the IBM but were considerably cheaper.
At the time, Apple was working on various possible successors
to the Apple II, the computer that had allowed them to become
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