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to blow people's minds and overturn standards. United by the Zen slogan
“The journey is the reward,” the pirates ransacked the company for ideas,
parts, and design plans. 21
Unlike the Lisa, which achieved excellent performance by using more expen-
sive specialized hardware, the Macintosh attempted to provide Lisa-like fea-
tures using the commodity Motorola 68000 microprocessor. Jobs obsessively
oversaw every aspect of the Macintosh's design, even including the colors of
the production facilities and the designers of the case, and his name appears
on the design patent. One of the designers, Terry Oyama, later said: “Even
though Steve didn't draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the
design what it is. To be honest, we didn't know what it meant for a computer
to be 'friendly' until Steve told us.” 22 Jobs got each of the forty-seven people
from the original Macintosh design team to sign their names inside the mold-
ing: these original Macs are now collectors' items.
In spite of the Mac's impressive capabilities, it was not successful as a
consumer product, and the lack of an option to incorporate a hard disk meant
that it could not displace IBM from the business market ( Fig. 8.15 ). It did gain
a loyal following in the publishing and media industries, where it came to the
fore because of its powerful capabilities for desktop publishing , in which editors
and designers used computers to edit text and lay out pages. Unlike the Apple
II and the IBM PC, the Macintosh architecture was closed, and third parties
were not able to add circuit boards offering additional functionality. Although
Microsoft supplied some application software, Apple had developed its own
operating system and it was difficult for developers to write applications that
made optimal use of the hardware.
Users liked the exciting look and feel of the Macintosh's graphical user
interface - abbreviated as GUI and pronounced “gooey.” This was the revolu-
tionary system developed by researchers at Xerox PARC that enabled users to
give instructions to the computer through a WIMP interface - standing for win-
dows, icons, menus and pointers. The use of windows here is not a reference
to Microsoft's operating system of the same name, but to a rectangular frame
called a window that appears on the computer screen. A window can run a pro-
gram at the same time as other windows on the same screen are running other
programs. The user can see the output from all the programs on the screen
and can enter information into any program by selecting the corresponding
window. Icons are small pictures representing specific actions that the user can
select. A menu is a list of available options, typically shown by icons and a drop-
down menu , which lists programs or applications when selected by the user.
Lastly, a pointer is a marker, such as an arrow, that appears on the screen to
allow the user to select an operation. For a long time the most common way of
controlling the pointer has been with a mouse , a palm-sized device that enabled
the user to move an arrow on the screen and to select icons of drop-down
menus by clicking a button.
The success of the Mac GUI made it clear that the next important step
would be the development of a similarly powerful interface for the IBM PC
and its clones ( Fig. 8.16 ). Several companies, including Digital Research and
IBM, attempted to produce a similar interface for the PC. Microsoft had begun
Fig. 8.15. IBM personal computer
advertisement. Marketing computers to
students was a new experience for IBM.
They had certainly never before sug-
gested to customers that they could use
them “under your favorite tree.”
Fig. 8.16. Screenshot of the Cedar envi-
ronment running on a Xerox Alto. The
GUI had windows, icons, menus, and a
pointing device - the WIMP interface we
still use today. Steve Jobs was inspired
by his glimpse of the Alto's GUI that he
saw at Xerox PARC. Jobs was sure that
this was the way forward for personal
computing and he committed Apple to
this approach.
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