Computing gets personal - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 155

laser printer and other Star machines. The Star was too expensive (more than
$10,000) to compete with the “good enough” approach of the IBM PC released
later that year. As a result of his visit to PARC, Jobs recruited Larry Tesler to lead
the development of a new Apple computer to be called the Lisa, named after
Jobs's daughter. The Lisa was launched in 1983, but, at a price point of nearly
$10,000 like the Star, it was not a commercial success. However, there was
another new Apple computer in the works.
The Macintosh project had been started in mid-1979 by Jef Raskin, who
had been a professor of computer science at the University of California in
San Diego. He was familiar with the work at PARC, and he wanted to produce
a machine with a built-in screen that was so simple and easy to use that a user
could just plug it in and get started right away. The machine was called the
Macintosh, after Raskin's favorite apple. When Jobs returned from PARC, he
took over the project. Raskin had wanted to produce a machine for less than
$1,000. At Jobs's insistence, Apple added new PARC-like features including a
mouse and this increased the price. The Macintosh finally went on sale in 1984
for nearly $2,500 ( Fig. 8.14 ). To build the hardware and the software for the
Macintosh, Jobs isolated the design group in a separate building over which a
pirate's flag was hoisted. John Sculley, later CEO of Apple, said:

Fig. 8.14. The Macintosh computer was
announced in 1984 in a now-famous
advertisement during the U.S. Super
Bowl football game. The video was made
by Ridley Scott and contrasted the regi-
mented world of IBM's PC dominance
with the creativity made possible by the
Macintosh with explicit reference to Big
Brother and George Orwell's novel 1984 .

Steve's “pirates” were a hand-picked band of the most brilliant mavericks
inside and outside Apple. Their mission, as one would boldly describe it, was

B.8.8. Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was a university dropout who played a key role in shaping today's
computing universe. With the talented engineer, Steve Wozniak, Jobs founded Apple Computer
in 1976 to market the Apple I personal computer kit. The Apple II was released in 1977 as a
self-contained consumer product that was great for playing games but also ran the VisiCalc
spreadsheet software, the first killer application for business. After a famous visit to Xerox
PARC in 1979 at which Jobs saw the Alto personal computer and its GUI, Apple produced the
revolutionary Macintosh computer in 1984.
After falling out with the Apple Board and CEO John Sculley, Jobs was effectively fired from
Apple in 1985 and sold all but one of his shares. He then founded the NeXT computer company
and its first computer workstation was released in 1990 - and used by Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN
in Geneva, to develop the World Wide Web. NeXT reported its first profit of just more than
$1 million in 1994.
In 1986, Jobs bought a 70 percent stake in a graphics company later called Pixar that
helped Disney computerize its ageing animation department. Pixar's digital animation business
was originally just a sideline to their hardware and software business. Jobs was losing money at
both NeXT and Pixar but all this changed in 1995 with the success of Pixar's full-length animated
movie Toy Story , with Jobs credited as executive producer.
In 1996, Apple had lost market share dramatically, and Jobs was invited back to Apple as
an adviser with an agreement that Apple would buy NeXT for around $400 million. By 1997, Jobs
had the title interim CEO, inevitably abbreviated as iCEO. In the first year that Jobs came back,
he laid off more than three thousand employees and Apple lost more than $1 billion in 1997.
After two years of huge losses, Apple had returned a $300 million profit by 1998. As CEO, Jobs
oversaw a succession of phenomenal successes - starting with the iMac, followed by the iTunes
store, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. With its touch interface, Jobs completely reinvented the
mobile phone as can be seen at a glance by the number of people using touch phones in every
situation. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas and although an initial treat-
ment had some success, his health declined and he died in October 2011.