Macintosh: All in one

Hey, David Pearce here. Before we get into it, yet another reminder. VersionHistoryPodcast on TikTok, on Instagram and on YouTube. Those are our new channels. That's where we're doing all of our stuff, all of our clips, all of the mini episodes that we have planned that I probably wasn't supposed to tell you about yet. All of the full episodes are going on YouTube. Everything. Version history. You can find VersionHistoryPodcast on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Time for the show. It's the early 1980s, and Apple is still mostly a company making nerdy computers for nerdy computer users. But Steve Jobs just won a power struggle inside the company, and he has this big idea about how to change computers forever. From the Virgin Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history. I'm David Pearce, and today on the show, it's the story of the Macintosh.

0:00

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more with the college branded Venmo debit card and earn up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash. Got paid back with the Venmo debit card. You can instantly access your balance and spend on what you want, like game day, snacks, gear, tickets and more. The more you do, the more cash back you can earn. Plus, there's no monthly fee or minimum balance. Sign up now@venmo.com CollegeCard the Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank. NA Select Schools available. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply at venmo me stashterms max $100 cash back per month. All right, we're back. We have a Macintosh. It's time to talk Macintosh. If you're just listening a go to YouTube, this is the most visual episode we've done, maybe ever. But this beige brick of a computer just brings me joy. We have a big mechanical keyboard. We have a mouse, a very early mouse. We have a Macintosh. This is not, I should say a 1984 Macintosh. I don't know when it's from, but it's not the original. So all the People who just raced to the comments.

1:30

Is it Fat Mac? Is it a 512k? What do we got here? It's also impossible to use because it's single tasking.

2:28

This is Nilai Patel, by the way. Nilai's here.

2:34

I love this thing. You can immediately see why this thing was a sensation when it was released.

2:36

You really can. Also joining us remotely Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber. Jon, welcome. Thank you for doing this with us.

2:41

Thanks. I wish I were there just to play with the Mac.

2:46

I know I normally don't feel that bad for remote guests cause like, you know, it's warm in the studio, but this is like you just have to stare at this this whole time and I very bad for you. I'm curious actually for both of you, but Nilay, you go first. Do you have personal life, Macintosh experience?

2:48

Oh, yeah. My job in middle school, I worked at a computer store, an Apple Computer store that was walking distance from my middle school. It was called Cortech Technologies, which is a great like a mom and pop computer store. It was like two guys in Wisconsin who were like Apple nerds and they bought a computer store and I worked in the basement and I fixed these old Macs and I've taken apart dozens of these Macs. Oh wow. Like over the years. And they only years later did I realize they were just letting a child screw with the power supplies and crts, which is extraordinarily dangerous. But I survived. I survived my eighth grade job.

3:04

Oh, I thought you meant dangerous for the computers. You mean dangerous for a lot of voltage.

3:37

That's a lot of voltage to screw it. And I was just doing it. And so yeah, this era of Max, there's like all over the place. And I worked in computer short repairing them and my school had a bunch of them, but they all had the SCS and SC 30s. I think that was that era of Macs. That was when they were new. This I think is obviously the iconic Macintosh. They're actually very different than the ones that got popular.

3:42

Yeah, yeah. And this I learned ends up being. This is in terms of like mainstream popularity. This is kind of the one before the one in a bunch of ways. John, what about you? Were you a Macintosh guy back in the day?

4:06

Not for like the first. I didn't get one until 1991 when I went off to college. And then in my high school we had one probably an se, but I don't even remember it. And I took. I don't even know if it was called ap, but it Was like a programming class. We had a really great computer teacher, Mrs. Donna Spatz. If she's out there, thank you for my career. Wonderful high school teacher. Middle school, we had a lab full of Apple iis and one Mac. And then I took a class, like, my senior year, so it'd be like 1990. So I really missed, like, the first five or six years of the Macintosh. And it was just me and one other kid, so it was sort of. You know, it was sort of like, even though it was a public school, it was just sort of like a cool thing that she set up for us to have a programming class with just the two of us. And she was like, which one of you wants to use the Mac? And believe it or not, I was like, not me. I wanted the Iigs because it was color, and the Apple 2 was my jam. But I remember touring the Mac and she was so impressed with HyperCard for obvious reasons. And again, this is a lot later than at the time. It felt like the Mac was already off and running. And I was deeply intrigued, but it just didn't seem like what a quote unquote, computer was to me. I mean, to talk about themes that have recurred throughout the last decade, two decades, and in our coverage of iPads and iPhones and stuff like that, but it just didn't seem like what a computer was. A computer was something that turned on instantly and gave you a blinking command line, and you go from there. And I wanted the color screen. So in hindsight, it seems crazy. And I remember thinking, this is awesome. And I just remember thinking, that's not what I want in my programming class. And then I went to college and got one, and the rest is history.

4:17

Yeah. I think it turns out. I think a lot of people around that time went through about that same thing of not completely getting why this thing needed to be like this. And then a little bit later, it's like, oh, no, it actually was. It should.

6:07

I'm looking at it right now. Like, more things should be like this right now.

6:20

Yes. Yeah. More computers should weigh 100 pounds.

6:23

Yeah. And have handles and be beige. Like, honestly, the country might be in a better condition if more computers looked and felt like this.

6:27

You're not wrong. All right, so let's. Let's sort of rewind all the way back to the beginning here, which I think is, like, the early 80s. And I think the way at least I understand Apple of this era is Apple has gone public. It has the Apple ii, which is. Which is a hit. It's going well. The other project going on at Apple is the Lisa. And the Lisa is a fascinating story that is not really our story for today. But John, can you very briefly just describe sort of what the Lisa was supposed to be at this time? Because this was not quite a like, bet the company kind of computer. But this was before the next big thing is sitting in front of us. The Lisa was going to be the next big thing, Right?

6:33

I guess, you know, there was the famed meeting where the Xerox PARCS team where they'd sort of invented what we call the graphical user interface and overlapping Windows. I don't even know if there's overlap, but you know, Windows icons, a mouse pointer, wysiwyg, word processing, a lot of the concepts of GUI computing. Famously famous, famous meeting. And it's misunderstood that Apple came in and then ripped off all their ideas. They were like, come in and take all the ideas you want. It was like an invitation to borrow ideas. They were like, we've been working on this and wondering why it's not taking off and we'd really like it to. And then a bunch of the people who worked at parc, like Larry Tesler, ended up working at Apple. But the Lisa was Apple's first attempt to bring those ideas to life in an actual computer, to make a graphical user interface as opposed to a command line interface on a computer. And I forget what the retail price on Alisa was.

7:12

It was like $10,000.

8:07

It was so expensive.

8:08

Yeah, yeah. It might have been more. Yeah.

8:09

Which is like 25, 30,000, inflation adjusted today.

8:11

It was a big bet. It was Steve Jobs, baby. He will denied through most of his life that he named it after his daughter Lisa.

8:15

Yes.

8:24

But it's like, dude, it's also named Lisa. Like, I don't. This is a very difficult thing to deny. And you can see what he's trying to get to. And my sense of it is Apple's very good at completing its thoughts, right? At having a philosophy of the things that it makes. And in making the Lisa, they realized how incomplete all those philosophies were. And so then the thing is too expensive and it's too big and too complicated. And when they take the second shot with the Mac, a bunch of very smart people get to finish all those thoughts. They get to say, oh, this thing needs to have a very strong point of view about how the Windows work, about what applications should do, about what the system is going to provide for you and what the applications will build on from there.

8:24

Yeah, I think it is it is maybe too simple, but only slightly too simple to say the Lisa's price killed it. Like, there's. It had other things that were going wrong. But like I would say, too, from.

9:09

From the stuff that I've read, it's not just that the price killed it, but the price. It's almost like the price was both a cause just because it was so, so, so high, but also the high price was an effect of how mismanaged and unguided the whole project had gotten. And you go back and read the biographies of Jobs and the histories of Apple, and you can see, you can read it from multiple points of view and multiple perspectives that the. The team was too big. Apple actually bet too much on it. And it was, you know, famously. I mean, Jobs was run out of the company by the end of 1985, so he was already wearing his welcome thin in the company he founded and sort of working his way towards the eventual exile. And yes, he was leading at some point, the Lisa team. And the Lisa team was this big bet. And I think it's fair to say, long story short, that they were like, we got to get this guy out of here. He's driving us nuts. And they're like, what if we let him run this, take over Jeff Raskin's smaller Macintosh project just to get him out of our hair and lead a much smaller team. But it was sort of like the fact that the McIntosh team was so much smaller, but almost every single person on it is like a Hall of Famer.

9:23

It is wild hall of Fame Hardware

10:42

Engineers hall of Fame. Multiple hall of Fame Software Engineers hall of Fame. Graphic designer Chris Espinoza, employee number six, who was hired at, like, Child Against Child Labor Laws and is still working at Apple continuously today. Right. It was like this much smaller team. And so it was this unbelievable chance to refocus and like, hey, let's do something people could actually afford and that, you know, might actually reach people and just focus, focus.

10:44

Yeah. My favorite part of this, by the way, there's all these famous photos of the Mac team, and they have pirate flags up in the office. Yeah, yeah. And Jobs has this line, which is an absolutely famous Steve Jobs line, which I love, which is it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And it's like, dude, you ran the Navy. You got your ass kicked out the Navy.

11:15

Yeah. You got thrown out of the Navy.

11:35

Like, what are you talking about? Like, the Navy was your idea. And then he is like, no, we're pirates now. And that is the early myth making magic of Steve Jobs.

11:37

Well, yes, but also inside of Apple, it was kind of true. Like, I think, John, your characterization is kind of right, that they, they wanted him off the Lisa project for a bunch of reasons that I think are kind of his fault and kind of not his fault. Personality issues, all kinds of stuff going on. And basically the way I understand it is he just needed something to do.

11:47

Yeah.

12:07

And so the way that this started is so Steve Wozniak had been working on this thing that he called Annie, which was basically a 5, $500 game console, and that was never going to go anywhere. Wozniak just liked to do things. But then this guy, Jeff Raskin, who you mentioned, pitches the idea of doing a cheaper, simpler computer. Right. Learn all of the lessons from Lisa, start with price and be like, okay, what does a $500 computer look like and what can we do and how can we make it? So he gets approval. He decides he doesn't want to call it Annie and decides to call it Macintosh. And they, they, it's, it's obviously Macintosh is an Apple, which makes sense, but he spelled it with an A because they wanted to avoid a trademark fight with the company Macintosh Laboratory, which they didn't do, and wound up paying Macintosh Laboratory a bunch of money anyway. But that's fine. The goal was like, start with the price and work backwards. Which again is, I think this lesson from the Lisa that wound up being really important. It's like they wanted it to be $500. Spoiler alert. It wasn't. They failed this spectacularly, but they wanted it to be $500. So they started with this relatively cheap, even for the time, underpowered Motorola processor that they could just get. And it was cheap. They build out the first prototype. This is like 1979. So all of this stuff is kind of happening concurrently, which I didn't really realize. There's like three sort of different computer companies happening inside of Apple at this point. There's the Apple ii, there's the Macintosh, and there's the Lisa, all happening kind of competitively next to each other, which is a very strange way to think about this kind of product development. And I feel like is not how most companies are run, but basically. So Jobs sort of looking around for something to do, finds the Macintosh, gets really interested in the Macintosh, and decides essentially that he's going to take over the project. Not everyone on the team, as I understand, was super excited about this prospect. I had not realized, John, to your point, that this was already like, you Said Jobs was starting to wear his welcome thin at the company that he founded. He drove a lot of people really crazy in those last years. So he shows up and immediately starts clashing with Jeff Raskin. And Raskin wanted to make this simple $500 computer with no mouse, no icons, no graphics. Like, run away from everything the Lisa did and do something else. Just like a blisteringly fast $500 text machine. Um, he eventually did build this thing much later at Canon, A computer that no one remembers. So we'll see.

12:07

It's called the Canon Cat.

14:35

It's called the Canon Cat.

14:36

Insist that you not disrespect the Canon cat.

14:37

Okay, listen. Shouts to the Canon cat. I have a picture. Would you like to see a picture

14:40

of the Canon Cat? Beautiful computer.

14:43

Yes, I would.

14:44

Here's the Canon Cat. It is. Frankly, it's an awesome looking computer.

14:45

It is.

14:50

It has a signature that says Cat on it. There's just a lot going on. You could dial phone numbers, like, genuinely. A very cool computer that has been completely memory hold.

14:50

In a weird way, I forget, what are the name of those keys under the space bar? They were very important to the interface.

15:01

They're called leap keys.

15:07

Leap keys. I was going to say jump keys. Leap keys. And in one way, obviously the leap keys under the spacebar didn't have staying power, but the idea that the space under the spacebar would be useful. Every single person watching this show on a. On a laptop of any kind, looking at their trackpad is like, yeah, that actually is interesting Space.

15:08

Totally what I love about this, by the way, and not again, you cannot

15:30

disrespect the Canon Cat episode. I'm so sorry. Spoiler alert. This is the Canon Cat episode.

15:33

Well, it's like, throw this thing off the table. Reveal the Canon cat. Your point about there being three different computers happening inside of Apple? This is an era of computing when literally any idea required you to build the whole thing from the ground up again.

15:38

Yep.

15:54

Right. We didn't have operating systems, really. We did not have standardized hardware. Really. We did not have standardized input.

15:54

Really.

16:02

Like, it was all up for grabs. And so any idea you wanted to try, you're like, well, I have to invent the computer from scratch again. And you just see this happen across the whole industry. Everybody is like, yeah, this is called the Texas Instruments computer. It's totally different than the one Atari makes for some reason. And it's just down the line. Like, we didn't really even have IBM clones yet. Right. So you just see that there's this explosion of new ideas about what a computer could even look like and certainly how it could work. And you get this famous, I believe it's Alan Kay quote, where he's like, people who really care about software have to build their own hardware. Which also is repeated throughout Apple's history. But in this case, it's like, no, literally, if you have a software idea that is new, you're gonna have to build your own computer. Because every other computer is so tightly integrated with software, you can't try new things.

16:02

Well, and there's a very practical outcome of this too, which is that the LISA was running a lot of these graphical user interface ideas. And so the Macintosh team, you would think, would just essentially run LISA software like they've done the thing already. But I think both for practical reasons and for Jobs being petty reasons, decides, no, we're going to rebuild something very similar from scratch. And John, this is what you're talking about. This group of all star engineers comes in and builds a series of, like, truly remarkable bits of software to run on this thing that is incredibly power constrained, incredibly memory constrained. Like, it's a crappy computer. Like, even for the time, it is not an impressive piece of hardware. And. And they have to do this unbelievable amount of work to make any of it possible. And they just do it over and over and over. They just do it. It's nuts.

16:54

It's. You know, I guess we should throw out some numbers. The original, when the Macintosh shipped in 1984, it cost $2,500, and again, inflation adjusted, that's like up to like 7,500 today.

17:49

Yeah.

18:01

And so, and I, I keep tossing that up. I have those numbers in my head because I keep tossing them out when I write about the Vision Pro, which I do think compares. I do think the analog to the 1984 Mac is the optimistic story for the whole Vision platform.

18:01

I was going to say that's the meanest thing you could ever say about the Macintosh.

18:18

Yeah, no, I think it's sort of a tale of shipping ahead of its time and needing a few years to build up a library. And then all of a sudden, when the hardware and the price kind of catches up to where it should have really been at the start. There's actually a library of software and. Or in the case of Vision Pro content, but it was $2,500. It had 128 kilobytes of RAM. But up until late in the game, they really were trying to ship with 64 kilobytes of ram.

18:21

Yeah.

18:53

And they realized that they needed 22 kilobytes just to fill up the screen with pixels. Right. There is so little left, it's like, ah, we're gonna have to go to 128. But really that 512K. And they called it the Fat Mac. And it didn't get fatter physically. It was the same footprint. It was just like 512 kilobytes. Felt so luxurious that they called it the Fatmac.

18:54

I'm reasonably sure that this one sitting here is a Fat Mac.

19:19

It might be. It's very possible.

19:22

Yeah.

19:24

But yeah. So to the price thing, actually one of the first things Jobs did, he wins this fight with Jeff Raskin. Raskin ends up leaving Apple. And again, everybody else at Apple is very happy to just let Steve Jobs have something to do. I don't think anybody thought this project was going to really go anywhere. So they're like, sure, knock yourself out. Go have fun over there with your friends. Which is cool. I would like that Job. But the first thing Jobs does right, is he demands that they do the graphical interface. And from that comes we have to up to the more expensive processor, we have to double the memory. And so all of a sudden, this idea of a $500 computer is like immediately out the window. They kept pushing at that idea for a while because everybody likes to have insane goals, I guess. But it was very clear immediately that as soon as this became Steve Jobs version of the Macintosh, that it was not going to be a $500 computer anymore. You just couldn't do it. You literally couldn't do it. He also tried to change the code name of it, which I thought was very funny. This was when he was obsessed with the idea of the bicycle of the mind. Do you remember this?

19:25

Yeah.

20:25

This is like one of the. The Jobs isms. He wanted to call it Bicycle, and the team hated that. So it stayed the Macintosh. They tried to rename it a bunch of times. Apparently, that it was like this was always supposed to be a codename. It was eventually going to be something else. And it just sort of kept being Macintosh, which is actually, I think the best way to successfully name a product.

20:25

Yeah.

20:44

Is just give it a name and then discover you kind of can't get rid of it. That is always how good names come from.

20:45

Absolutely.

20:50

But yeah, so they're. They're making this thing and they immediately set out to make a bunch of. And the first one, I think is like this very visual thing here. They made it vertical. This was like a Brand new idea that I had really sort of forgotten. The idea that like computers used to be these horizontal things that sat on your desk and the disk drive would go over here and the screen would go over here and they were, they were like flat sort of television shaped things. And this one, they were, they just decided to stack it. Crazy idea. And they were just like, they wanted it to be a little more approachable. The idea is like having it feel a little smaller and a little more sort of compact and adorable would make people want to use it more, I think. It worked. It works.

20:51

It's still one of the best form factors for computer ever.

21:31

Yeah.

21:34

The other thing, and it really does put that design ahead of its time probably by a full decade, a decade plus. I forget when PowerBooks first became sort of semi affordable, but it's about 1994, 95, like with the PowerBook 100, et cetera, the laptop was ultimately what the PC was going towards. Right. But that this design at the time was considered portable. There is a handle.

21:34

There's a handle in the back.

22:03

Yeah, right. It's £25 or something like that. But Apple sold a case that you could put it in.

22:04

We had the cases in my computer store.

22:11

Wait, like a carrying case?

22:13

Yeah, you could just drop it in the case.

22:15

I'm imagining like a bowling ball bag.

22:16

Yeah, kind of.

22:18

That's awesome.

22:19

Yeah.

22:20

So bowl, you know, everybody who bowls recreationally. Bowling balls are technically portable.

22:20

Listen, with enough work, anything is portable. You know what I mean?

22:27

Right. But they had the right idea. It's just at least a full decade ahead of its time. And CRT technology was not going to get you there.

22:30

No, definitely not.

22:38

By the way, that's the other big decision they made. Right. I mean there's two right here that you can look at. One, they have the black and white CRT when everyone else is trying to do color. And. And then they have the 3.5 floppy drive which they got crushed for because they abandoned the big floppy disks with this thing.

22:39

So okay, we, I made, I made us get these out because I, I had straight up forgotten that floppy disks used to, honest to God, be floppy.

22:55

That's the Apple II days.

23:02

And this is, this is the, the big 5.5 inch one. And then Apple goes at this, which is much, importantly smaller. And the thing that I learned is actually what Apple was debating was whether to do the floppy disk or to do a really expensive hard drive. And then in the middle of this development, Sony basically builds this thing.

23:03

Yeah.

23:20

And all of a sudden they're like, oh, well, that's great. That solves all of our problems and they switch to it. But it is, it's a full. I mean, this is like a classic Apple story, a full format break that made a lot of people very angry, as Apple always does when it makes a full format break. But again, I think these things in general were pretty clearly the right call for a variety of reasons. One other thing that I enjoyed is very early on in this process, Steve Jobs demanded that they remove the cursor keys from the keyboard because he wanted everybody to use the mouse. And he was like, I'm not even, I'm not even going to give people other options. This computer has a mouse. You will use the mouse. You will like it. You can shut up. It's like the true Steve Jobs way. So he's like, he is very much bullying people into this being the computer user experience that he wants. And I just, I think that's so fascinating. He's like, this is the future and I will force you into it.

23:20

And years later, Apple would remain haunted by the ghost of Steve Jobs bad keyboard ideas.

24:07

And sometimes I think about that too. Like when we all got very upset and formed very strong opinions during this stretch where Apple made the left and right arrow keys on MacBooks full height so that instead of an upside down T, left and right were full height. Because what's that extra space doing anyway? And I know it's actually a good question, and as opinionated as I am about every little thing Apple does, I actually prefer the upside down T. And I' glad they went back to it, but I totally get that. Well, that extra space isn't doing anything. And then there's the counter argument that it kind of is doing something, because when you're not looking at the keyboard, you can feel that space and know your hands are on the arrow keys. And it's like every time I got upset about those full height arrow keys, I would take a deep breath and think about the fact that the original Mac shipped with no arrow keys at all and how mad I would be trying to edit text today if you just duct taped over my arrow keys and you said you got to use the mouse. There was also an argument, and I think totally it was just Jobs being Jobs and nobody else would have said no arrow keys, period. But I think the rest of the team kind of got on board with it because there was this whole philosophy of, hey, let's make people learn to do things the GUI way, that there was no command line shell with the Macintosh, when you booted it, you didn't get it. There was no booting and any kind of text screen. The first thing you saw was an icon of a Mac itself. Smiling, hopefully not frowning.

24:13

That was the idea.

25:43

But even when the machine failed, it's actually kind of interesting when the machine did fail, when there was something wrong with the disk or something had gone corrupt, you did get. You still didn't get text on the screen. You got an icon of a frowning Mac. Right. And there was this philosophy of, hey, let's make people do it the Macintosh way. And so if we give them the arrow keys, they're going to, you know, if we give them a command line that runs Apple II programs or something like that, nobody's going to write Macintosh word processors. They're just going to say, run the Apple II word processor. Right.

25:44

And this is very much what I mean about. They learned all the things they needed to learn with the LISA in, like, big ways. So The Lisa is $10,000. Are going to sell it to enterprises. The enterprises are demanding. I mean, it's. It's businesses. You have to do what your clients want.

26:16

Yeah.

26:29

And so they're demanding all this backwards compatibility and all this weird stuff. And the Macintosh team is like, no arrow keys. Right. Like, you're gonna do it our way. And I think they had to learn that they needed to be this opinionated to protect the thing that they were trying to push forward. And that is. I mean, I. It's like, there are very few companies that are like, we're gonna take our all Stars and let them get so worked up that they take the arrow keys off because they hate working for the business customers who are potentially the only people who will pay this much money for a comp.

26:30

Yeah.

27:02

And yet it happened, which is kind of remarkable.

27:02

It was an incredible, like, burn all the boats behind you kind of move trying to do this. And we should. We should hear pivot to software, because this is mostly a software phenomenon, this computer. But first, let's take a quick break, and then I have to tell you about quickdraw. We'll be right back.

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27:55

All right, we're back.

28:23

So let's talk about the the Macintosh's software. Jobs describes the Macintosh in such a perfect way. I just want to read you a quote. He says, we realized that we could build a super cheap computer that would run Bill Atkinson's amazing Quickdraw and have a mouse on it. In essence, build a really cheap implementation of Lisa's technology that would use some of that software. Technology like Quickdraw and the mouse are the Macintosh. It's like, it's, it's. That was, that was the idea. We built a thing that could run Quickdraw for cheap. Quickdraw was, at least as I understand it. Basically, it's the thing that lets the Macintosh have multiple windows and have them overlap. This sounds very normal. This is what Windows are, but this did not exist before. And the idea of having two windows, that one that would go underneath the other, that sort of understood each other was like brand new software and felt like magic to them. And this is like going back to John, what you're talking about about this Xerox park visit this. This is the kind of stuff that they had been thinking about and learning ever since how to make this stuff feel lively and graphical and interactive in new ways. Bill Atkinson. We're looking at, I think, MacPaint on this thing. If you open the about page, it just says Bill Atkinson, like Mac Paint version 1.3, written by Bill Atkinson.

28:24

And there's a picture of him. There's a little picture of him.

29:46

Yeah, it's great. This is what you mean by all stars, John this is fundamentally a handful of people who just sort of achieved software miracles over and over and over in the course of building this thing.

29:49

And including Susan Kerr, the graphic designer slash icon artist, who, nearing the end of the project, drew little icons of everybody on the team. And if you look at them, they're uncanny. And you think like, and they're like 32 by 32 pixels, black and white, 32 pixels on both dimensions. And she absolutely captured every single person. And I'm 98% sure that the Bill Atkinson icon there is Susan Kerr's picture of him. And then you look at a picture of Bill Atkinson circa 1983, and it's like, yeah, that's him. It's like you could absolutely pick him out of a lineup. Like, that's better than most police sketches. You could take that icon and if he had committed a crime, the cops would be like, nope, nope, nope, nope. That you, you. You're the guy. It's that good of a picture.

29:59

It really is. Susan Care is like a total legend of, of design and software. And my, my favorite thing that I learned in this is the original deal was that Susan would come and design some icons and fonts in exchange for an Apple too. That was the trade that's really like, we'll give you a computer. These are expensive. Come do some stuff for us. She ends up coming on board full time and like does a vast more work. But I really liked that as the first trade. Like, you need a computer. Make us a fun.

30:49

Jon, in terms of All Stars or Susan Care for sure. Bill Atkinson feels like the All Star.

31:12

Yeah.

31:17

Probably this whole project doesn't happen without him, right?

31:18

Yeah, I think so. And I think because I think fundamentally what Quick Draw solved was. And Atkinson did other things. He wrote all of Mac Paint. Right. He wrote the application too. But what quickdraw solved, and we can talk about the fact that even at $2,500, which is 7, $7,500 inflation adjusted today, the original Macintosh was very expensive. But for what it did, it was compared head to head against the Lisa that Apple sold for four times as much. And QuickDraw effectively was the way to make a computer that. And even after they knew what the price was gonna be, Jobs was still describing it as super cheap. It was super cheap for a bitmap display that could do overlapping Windows. And if you think about it like what quickdraw solved, I think it's fair to say would be okay. It takes so much RAM just to show the, you know, and again, it's binary. You know, the black and white display translates very well to. Computer think every Pixel is a 1 or a 0, but you've got 300. I think it's 384 by 512. Or maybe it was less. I know it's 512 across, but you've got that many pixels. But then if you have overlapping windows, don't you have to store the RAM for each one of those windows? So three windows would be like three times the RAM. And like QuickDraw effectively solved that problem. By allowing the ones in the background to not be in memory. And yet when you resized a window, it would refresh right away and you could see the contents.

31:21

And again, they're doing this with almost no memory. Like, all of this is up against these impossible physical constraints.

32:51

I feel like I need to point out for our younger listeners, John said black and white, and he means it. This thing cannot display shades of gray.

32:58

Correct.

33:06

The pixels are black or they are white. Those are your choices.

33:06

I never even thought about that.

33:10

And so these memory constraints are like, oh, man, we drew a box. If we want to put another box on the screen, we're going to need more memory and we don't have enough.

33:11

It can't be black and white.

33:21

That's what they're up against.

33:24

That's what they're up against. It's an incredibly slow computer by today's standards. The Motorola 68000 chip. And yet so much of what you do, what you guys could do right there with that Mac in front of you feels fast. Right. When you move the mouse around, the mouse moves like a mouse today, right? There's no lag between moving the mouse. It doesn't feel like it's lagging behind. There's a great story that Herzfeld's folklore.org has about the first time they showed it to Bill Gates. And Gates was just moving the mouse around and watching how the on screen cursor had no lag at all. And he was like, you're cheating here. You've got a graphics accelerator for the mouse. And Herzfeld was like, no. And he goes, you have to be cheating. And he was like, no. And then Hertzfeld was going to explain how doing it and Jobs overheard. He's like, shut up.

33:26

And Microsoft never figured it out? Nope.

34:13

Right?

34:16

God, yeah.

34:17

To this day, Hertzfeld is like the engineer's engineer and all star, but he just knew Bill Gates would understand the elegant explanation for how they solved the problem. But so much that you pull the menus down, you go up to the file menu, the menu pops right down. There's no lag. There are so many things that are laggy by today's standards, but there are so many things that are not.

34:17

One of the actual, the really interesting things about this, the no lag, this thing is basically only running one application at a time. And it's funny that there are parts of this and eventually, you know, like Apple tore itself apart and Steve Jobs has to come back and have to reboot the whole operating system. Because this thing is running one application at a time. It's actually faster in some ways than computers of today. Like it.

34:40

Yeah.

35:05

It has less lag in what it's doing than computers of today because it's only doing the one thing, and it's

35:06

like just direct connection between the hardware

35:12

and the software that's very much in the Macintosh. And so they did. Hertzfeld and his team built a bunch of these, like, mini apps, which are essentially desktop widgets. That was a way you could do very basic things that felt like multitasking, and you could actually have them next to each other on the desktop. But if you wanted to run a proper app, you could literally only do one at a time. If you ran two regular apps at once, the whole thing would just collapse.

35:14

Desk accessories.

35:36

That's what they're called.

35:37

Desk accessories. That's right.

35:38

They are the things in the Apple menu.

35:39

It's also worth pointing out these metaphors that they're using to communicate how the computer works are all new. This all sounds so simple now, right? But the idea that on your desk in your 1980s corporate office, you would have a calculator and a notepad and whatever else Apple's like, oh, we'll have those on the Mac, too. They're your desk accessories. And, like, Steve Jobs is out there being like, how do you open a file on a computer? It looks like a file, you guys. And it's like, no computer has ever worked like this before. No one has ever been like, we should use these metaphors to make the computer operate in this way. And we should make it super visual so everyone can understand it. And also, there's no arrow key, so you have to deal with it. And this is very opinionated design.

35:41

Yes, Very much so.

36:25

I know that we have younger listeners who are like, what are you talking about? And I'm just gonna. I'm gonna make this comparison. My friend made this comparison to me in college. I've thought about it a lot since. I was like, van Halen sucks. And he was like, no, dude, you don't understand. Eddie Van Halen invented all those guitar solos. They just sound cheesy to you now because they're played like all music is Eddie Van Halen guitar solos. And I was like, well, I still think Van Halen sucks. And I'm confident that that is like, what? Many. Many of our younger listeners, they're like, what are you talking about? Like, it's a disc. It shows up. No one had these ideas before. They just hadn't come up and the idea that one tiny little team had all of them, and almost all of them were correct, is the remarkable part of this first Macintosh. Yeah.

36:26

So can I tell you briefly about one feature that didn't make it? Do you guys know about Mr. Macintosh?

37:14

Yes.

37:19

Okay. This I did not know.

37:20

I just want to know more about it.

37:21

So, Mr. McIntosh, I'm just going to read you an excerpt from. This is from Andy Hertzfeld's website. So, Steve Jobs, one day, they're in the middle of building this thing, and Steve Jobs just comes roaring into the room and goes, Mr. McIntosh, we've got to have Mr. McIntosh. And the team goes, who is Mr. McIntosh? And here's a quote. Mr. Macintosh is a mysterious little man who lives inside each Macintosh. He pops up every once in a while when you least expect it, and then winks at you, disappears again. It will be so quick that you won't be sure if you saw him or not. We'll plant references in the manuals to the legend of Mr. McIntosh, and no one will know if he's real or not. I have two things to say about this. One, drugs are fun.

37:23

And two, famously, he was on drugs. Like, did a lot of LSD in his youth. Yeah.

38:02

And, yeah, you know, Steve Jobs saw Mr. McIntosh, like, with both his eyes. And two, this is the funniest, possible, least appley feature I can think of.

38:06

At least modern Apple. Sure. Apple of that time is all about weird Mr. Macintosh.

38:17

That is true. So, but as it turns out, this is a very funny thing because the team loves this idea, and they set out to build Mr. Macintosh, and they go, well, wait, this sounds awesome. We're in. What does it do? And Steve Jobs goes, one out of every thousand or two times that you pull down a menu, instead of the normal commands, you'll get Mr. Macintosh leaning against the wall of the menu. He'll wave at you, then quickly disappear. You'll try to get him to come back, but you won't be able to. They end up not implementing this only because there's no memory on the computer for it. They're like, we can't physically put Mr. Macintosh into this computer.

38:21

This is tremendous.

38:52

Otherwise they would have done it.

38:52

I do think it's important to note that for the whole team, I think the reaction was, oh, that's a great idea. We should try to do this. Not, oh, Steve is, you know, taking too much LSD or something like that. They weren't like, oh, my God, Steve's having one of those days. They were like, oh, yes, we need to have Mr. Macintosh.

38:55

Yes, I love Mr. McIntosh. But anyway, so this team keeps building. They build a lot of software. We're actually looking at MacPaint, which I think ends up being probably the most important piece of software on the original.

39:12

I would say Mac, right. And MacPaint. Right. The two they ship with. Because you gotta be able to do something with the computer, right? You can't just gaze at the floppy disk icon like John Harley was doing with hearts in his eyes. Like, you gotta do stuff. And so what are you gonna do? You're draw pictures. And you're right.

39:24

But I also think.

39:39

And those things were tremendously important.

39:39

Important.

39:41

But it's the draw pictures that immediately tell you this is something different you've never seen before, right. If it's like, if I just want to write text on a computer, you. You had other choices. This looked different, but you're. You can fundamentally write text. But the idea of, like, I can make shapes on this computer is so, like, transformatively immediately new that I think it's like, it's the most Macintoshy of the things that they make, I guess is kind of the way I think about it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

39:41

And there are so many ideas in MacPaint 1.0 that are still present in Photoshop and Photomator and Acorn, and you name it. Any kind of paint application today. The Paint Bucket tool, right? Like, oh, if you draw a box, but you want to fill it with a pattern, how do you do it without the laboriously clicking pixel by pixel to make the whole pattern? Just use the paint tool, click once, and it'll fill in the whole region. That's a standard tool in every paint app today. Every single one. The idea of a palette of tools is a standard idea that's right there in MacPaint 1.0. It's totally familiar to anybody using any paint app today. And it did not exist in ones previously. You know, you'd like hit. You know, you'd get, like, a template to put on your keyboard and be like, hit F3 to switch to this tool. Hit F7 to switch to this tool. And you'd have to memorize them and they'd be different for every app. The idea that you have, like, a little floating sub window, you know, they had just invented or just brought windows to a personal computer and they invented little sub window palettes.

40:04

Totally.

41:14

Yeah.

41:15

So, but I think one thing that was interesting to me about this moment is Apple is building a bunch of software for itself, but Also is very clear that it needs other people to build software for it. So Apple goes out on the road, starts showing people this new device, and is trying to convince them to build software for it. One very funny fact about this is, at the beginning, the only way to build Macintosh software was on elisa.

41:15

Yeah.

41:37

So there are. There are people on the Macintosh team who claimed afterwards that they were the best salespeople that the Lisa ever had, just because it would cost you ten grand and you could then build Macintosh software. But what really happened is a lot of folks got excited about this. Like the. I think it. It gives good demo. You know what I mean? Like, it. It. There is something that immediately grabs people about it. But then people heard about the really bad memory and the fact that this whole thing had been sort of sped up into production and there was a lot of stuff that wasn't finished. And all of a sudden this big pipeline of software they're trying to build kind of starts to disappear. And so this question of, like, what is going to be available to do on this computer at launch becomes very much up in the air. Um, but now we're. We're sort of barreling through 1983 at this point, and we're just getting ready for launch. Apple has, has actually decided to, like, make a big deal out of this thing. They're going to launch it for real. They're going to now have three computer lines. We're just doing this. And Apple starts to think through, okay, how do we. How do we want to launch this? This has been delayed a bunch of times, but they, they set a date on it. It is going to be January 24th. It's a. It's a. A shareholder meeting. They're like, this is when we are going to launch this product. And they do a bunch of things. They give max to a bunch of important people. Mick Jagger got one and was apparently just utterly uninterested in it, which is very funny. Ted Turner got one. Michael Jackson got one. This is like a very normal. You know, if they were doing it now, it would be a bunch of like, Mr. Beast would have gotten one. Like, this is just what they were doing.

41:37

Andy Warhol loved it.

43:12

Yeah, that's right. Apple, also a thing I did not know, decided it wanted a fan magazine. So it funded the entire first year of Macworld to go along with the Mac launch.

43:13

This is all content marketing. I did not know what you would do now.

43:23

Yeah, I had no idea this was the Mac World.

43:25

Netflix being like, we run a site called Tudum. Yeah, but differently, you know.

43:27

Yeah, very much so. But then the big moment is two days before launch. January 22, 1984 is the super bowl. And Apple decides to run an ad which I think you could make a strong case, becomes the most famous tech ad in history. Maybe one of the most famous ads in history. Let me just play it for you.

43:31

Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary

43:52

over the information for

43:56

the first time in all history.

44:00

This is. This is the famous 1984 AD. Everybody's walking. It's a Big Brother ad.

44:02

Yeah.

44:11

Is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or hardy on earth.

44:16

We are one.

44:20

They apparently had a very hard time casting the person who, who could run and throw this hammer as successful as she does.

44:21

We shall prevail.

44:34

It's a good speech

44:37

on January.

44:40

I don't think that's the message.

44:41

There's a number of politicians who would give that speech today. And you'll see why 1980 be like 1984.

44:42

That ad still hits, dude.

44:51

It's good.

44:52

They even hired like one of the two guys who did all the movie trailer voiceovers. You know, like the way that in the, in the 80s, every single movie trailer, comedy, drama, any kind of movie started with that guy or the other

44:53

guy saying in a world where is that Ridley Scott? Is that who directed that?

45:07

Yeah, Ridley Scott directed. I mean it looks, and it looks like a better. It looks like a trailer for a great movie adaptation of Orwell's 1984.

45:12

It really does. So a bunch of things. There are a bunch of like apocryphal stories about this ad, including that it only ran once ever during the Super Bowl. That's not true. It ran a bunch including apparently once before the super bowl in a super obscure market.

45:20

It's like Sacramento just to see.

45:35

Yeah.

45:37

At 11:30 at night.

45:37

So the story I heard about that is they ran it then so they would qualify for the advertising.

45:39

That's what I mean.

45:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

45:44

But they knew people couldn't record it because almost nobody had VCRs at the time.

45:45

And they ran it at like 2 o' clock in the morning or something too. Yeah, yeah.

45:49

Like two o' clock in the morning in Sacramento or something. But it counted.

45:52

Yeah.

45:55

Some stoner in Sacramento being like this computer is going to be super good.

45:56

And he's like telling everybody the next day you can't believe it. And everybody's like, dude, you're so baked.

46:00

Yeah, yeah. They eventually ran it in movie theaters, they ran it on tv. It was like this was a Huge ad, apparently. Also right before it launched. One story I saw was that Apple's board didn't even want to run the ad and actually tried to sell the advertising slot, but it was so close to the super bowl that they couldn't sell the ad slot. So, like, well, all right, whatever. I guess we'll run the ad. And they run the ad and it obviously becomes like this absolute icon of advertising.

46:05

I do.

46:31

I do want to point out that here in 2026, running an ad like this, where the core assumption is that everyone has read a book. It's a good point. Like, fundamentally, it's like, everyone's gonna get it because everyone has sat down and read 1984 and knows what it's about and understands why. There's this guy talking about a garden of pure ideology. It's a very different time.

46:31

Be like the Hunger Games. That's like the only one you could get away with.

46:58

Now you'll see why the Hunger Games will be like the Hunger Games.

47:01

It didn't quite hit the same way. But anyway, I think this ad is really interesting a. Because it's a giant immediate success. It got covered on the news like, it was a big deal, this ad, but it also takes this thing that had been sort of a lark and then kind of a skunk works, and now it is like a. It's a thing. They have just absolutely exploded the excitement for this computer with two days left to launch it. And then we get to January 24, 1984, at De Anza College, which is just down the street from Apple hq at this point, everybody knows this computer is coming. This is very different from Apple now, which, like, is. Is as secretive as it could possibly be. Like, they said, we're going to launch Macintosh. They had been, like, out doing interviews. Like, this is. This is out in the world. Everybody knows what's coming. So the anticipation is through the roof for this thing. And at this point, it's important to note that the computer barely works. It is not finished. They're not going to ship it for some time. This. This is like a classic Steve Jobs thing, like tape and bubblegum. They're going to make this demo work. So Jobs gets up on stage and he makes this argument that IBM, with its PC, is about to take over the world, and we cannot let that happen. And then he plays the 1984 A.D. again, just as a reminder of what IBM is. This. This whole thing is done at IBM.

47:06

Yeah.

48:23

Which is the big bad of this industry, according to Steve Jobs. And he plays the Ad again. And then. And then we get the reveal. And this is where it, like, turns sort of uproarious in the room where people are like, oh, my God, you have invented the future. This is the moment that Macintosh speaks. Now, we've done a lot of talking about Macintosh recently, but today, for the first time ever, I'd like to let McIntosh speak for itself. Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time

48:23

I be a mainframe.

49:11

Never trust a computer you can play. Wow. But right now, I'd like to sit back and listen.

49:13

It's just doing a tight 30.

49:23

Considerable pride. Can I introduce a man who's been like a father to me, Steve Jobs.

49:24

Okay. Can I just say that?

49:33

The tonal paternal look, he's like, I love you, my son.

49:34

The tonal shift between Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh, and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. And then, like Borscht Belt, comedy is very high. You know what'll save you from Big Brother?

49:38

Puns like, never trust a computer that you can't lift. It's such a bad burn.

49:53

But it's so good.

49:59

I do. But I think ultimately it comes back to the fact that when you turn the machine on, you got an icon of the machine itself smiling at you. It's like there was a philosophy of every single person on that team, including Steve Jobs, who was the guy behind Mr. McIntosh, that computers should be fun, and the fun should be explicit. It should be right there. A smiling icon, a Mr. Macintosh. And that. That's the future that IBM is trying to drain out of computing. If you're going to pay all this money for a Super bowl commercial, you better be talking about megahertz and how much faster your spreadsheet's going to compile a column of numbers.

50:01

Yeah. So, fun fact about that demo Mac, by the way. It was a fat Mac. It had 4x. The memory of the thing they ended up shipping because they couldn't run the demos on the actual Mac. The Mac they shipped couldn't do the things they showed in the demo.

50:42

You know what's fabulous about that demo? As soon as the computer started talking, a young Sam Altman said, that computer's alive.

50:54

It has feelings, too. All right, so let me just sort of breeze through the rest of the history here and stop me as you like to go. So the thing ships the reviews are fabulous. People largely love the thing. Apple sells 50,000 of them in two and a half months, which was way ahead of expectations, way faster than other Apple computers. This keeps going. John Scully, who at this time is the CEO of Apple, he had come in during this process. He reorganizes the company, puts Jobs in charge of the Lisa and the Mac and gives this guy Del Yoakum, another executive control of the Apple ii. Jobs basically immediately dumps the Lisa team, just shows up and is like, goodbye to all of you. Um, some of the Mac team ends up leaving out of just sheer exhaustion. Like the, the pace of work over the three years to get this thing done had just been apparently horrific. And a lot of them are just like, I can't do it anymore. I am burnt. And then pretty quickly, like in, in a few months, the Macintosh sales start to slow way down. Uh, people start using the thing and they discover that it wasn't fast enough. Um, business people didn't like the mouse. Turns out they wanted cursor keys. Um, and maybe most importantly, it didn't have enough software. Like overwhelmingly. I think the story of that first year of Macintosh is people loved the idea of it, but the actual reality of it was not quite baked. And there was this great Alan Kay who you mentioned earlier. He referred to the Macintosh as a Honda with a 1 quart gas tank, which is just a fabulous metaphor.

51:02

That's a good metaphor.

52:30

I love that. So then, so by the end of 1984, they're now missing sales targets. The software is not coming. Enthusiasm for the whole thing is kind of waning. They had shipped the fat Mac for $3,200 instead of $2,500 in September. Like super fast. Follow this thing with more memory.

52:30

$700 for that much memory? Sounds like a deal right now.

52:47

Isn't that wild? I know.

52:49

I think it is a deal.

52:50

But even then they couldn't solve the other problem. So they're in this real like, hole potentially. Of like this thing was a super flash in the pan, but we're not sure it's going to catch on. Apple in April launches the Apple iic, which was half the cost of the Mac, also had a handle. It was exciting and cool, but even the IIC didn't quite hit the way that it had. People thought it was underpowered. It didn't have the expansion cards that people wanted. Like IBM is starting to reshape what people want from computers in a way that is potentially bad for Apple. All the way to the point where by the 1985 shareholder meeting a year later. Apple is basically promising to make peace with IBM and play along and be cool, and can't we all just be friends? In 12 months, the pirate ship has, like, I don't know, joined with the Navy again. They've just gotten back on board. They made another super bowl ad the next year, which is weird and kind of bad and pisses everybody off. And I think I have it. Let me just play this for you. It's called Lemmings. Do you remember this?

52:54

I was gonna say, I think it's Lemmings, right?

54:01

This one's funny. Cause in the context of bad super bowl ads, it's not even rate anymore.

54:03

It's just a bunch of lemming people walking blindfolded through, I guess, a desert and off a cliff, and they're whistling

54:12

hi ho, hi ho.

54:21

Right?

54:23

And they're just dying.

54:23

What a bleak ad, dude.

54:25

I'm just saying, like, you would if I told you today, like, oh, this is just another bad GEICO commercial. You'd be like, yeah, it is.

54:26

I guess the gecko is catching everybody.

54:32

Like, this is just what we do now. And at the time, it was like, what a failure of vision.

54:34

On January 23rd, Apple Computer will announce the Macintosh.

54:43

Macintosh Office.

54:47

You can look into it, or you can go on with business as usual. This computer is a real bad call for the Macintosh Office because this alienates business people. And do you know who Apple really, really, really wanted to buy their computers was? Business people. I'm.

54:52

I'm just saying again, just. I'm trying to rewind everyone's brains at the time. This is like a scandal. And, like, we peg Apple's failures to this ad. And if you just ran this ad in 2026 next to any of the AI slop ads we just saw at the super bowl, you'd be like, yeah, it's just. It's fine. Like, it kind of sucks, but whatever.

55:19

I watched the super bowl with a bunch of people, and they kept asking me, like, what does that one mean? And I'm like, just stop asking me, dude. It doesn't mean anything. This is nonsense.

55:37

Yeah.

55:46

So at this point, Jobs is. Is kind of deeply depressed and starts to have fights with John Scully about everything he cared about the Mac. Scully basically saw it as a failure and kind of wanted to move on. Scully and Jobs end up at odds. Scully threatens to quit if Jobs stays on the board. The board sides with Scully. Jobs tries to stage a coup. He loses. He tries to poach a bunch of people to go build Something else. Apple sues him. He ends up resigning, and then eventually, at the end of all of this, he leaves to go literally wander the wilderness for a while.

55:46

I do think one of the funniest moves in all of this is they took the Lisa and they tried to get it to run the Mac software, and they're like, this is now called the Mac Excel, which is just like, what are you doing?

56:18

Yeah. But meanwhile, at Apple, they start to build the software ecosystem. They put back a bunch of the things that the Mac needed. They give it more memory. They add an expansion report. They give business people in particular, the stuff that they want to make their computer work. And it starts to work.

56:31

But those are different Macs. That's not this one.

56:47

No. This one kind of lived and died very quickly. But the idea of what the Mac could be starts to take off with a lot of the same interface ideas like this. A lot of what Steve Jobs wanted stayed in those devices, but he was, I think, as Apple has often been, so precious about so many things that it sort of lost the forest for the trees in some spots. And then the Mac plus ends up launching in 1986, and it's a huge hit, and the Mac is off and running for decades. But that's a story for another day. A thing that I really had not realized was how quickly this thing rose and fell. Like the moment of the Macintosh.

56:49

The first one.

57:28

Yeah. The first Macintosh was so huge and so exciting and sort of lit so many people's eyes up with the future of computing. And then it was gone, like, months. It's crazy.

57:29

To the point where a year later, they ran Steve Jobs out of the company.

57:41

Yes. It's nuts.

57:46

One year after introducing a computer that you can clearly draw a line from to all of today's computers.

57:47

Absolutely.

57:55

Whether they're Apple computers or not.

57:56

Yeah.

57:58

You know, you can draw this line that this computer, this one computer, was the beginning of the future of all of personal computing. You could draw it to the phones, you could draw it to our desktops, you could draw it to our laptops. And one year after deducing it, they ran the man out of the company. Almost out of the country.

57:58

Almost. Yeah. All right. Well, that is actually as good a transition as any into the version history questions, because now we get to litigate whether this thing actually mattered or not. Spoiler alert. It does. But let's. Let's take a break, and then we're gonna come back, we're gonna do the version history questions. We'll be right back.

58:19

Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go get ready for a new case.

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New friends Gary the Snake and your

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last name the Snake Dream Team The

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59:32

It's time for the version history questions. The same eight questions we ask about every product. The first one is Nilay's favorite. It's the Time Matrix.

59:40

Makes no sense.

59:47

The time Matrix, which everyone loves and is scientifically proven to make perfect sense to everybody. It maps ideas and time. Was this the right idea at the right time, the wrong idea at the wrong time, or somewhere in between? John, do you have a theory here on where on the matrix this device belongs?

59:48

I think it was at the right product at the right time. It was ahead of its time, if anything. And it was the fact that it shipped in 1984 when it was underpowered, had too little memory, but was so exciting that by like the time 198788 rolled around, it had a library of software and Adobe had introduced PostScript and the desktop publishing stuff could all happen.

1:00:06

I'm just pointing out John has fallen into the trap set by David with his remarkably asinine time matrix. You're welcome. Which is you just said it was too early so it's the wrong time.

1:00:32

I think what the problem was with their institutional expectations for how it should sell. And that's again that is informs my still optimistic take on the Vision Pro that I think Apple sees the Vision Pro the same way.

1:00:44

I don't know how you brought this back to the Vision Pro too.

1:00:59

Everything you do, your credibility just kind

1:01:02

of wanes for a few more minutes on the podcast

1:01:04

that this isn't meant to sell. Now this is meant. This is meant to get a platform. Get some footing for a platform four years from now.

1:01:08

This is meant to cost the CEO his job.

1:01:16

Yes.

1:01:20

No, no.

1:01:21

That's the point is that they should. They should have had much more realistic sales expectations for the Macintosh and. And been looking ahead for years, not months or quarters.

1:01:23

That's fair.

1:01:34

And if they hadn't. If they hadn't shipped this product in 1984 with the amazing engineering that it took to ship it, as flawed and limited as it was then, by 1987, 88. The Macintosh that was. Began to flourish at that time wouldn't have. Because it wouldn't have had the software library behind it.

1:01:34

I do. I think that's a good case. I think there is an. The argument that I would make for it being the right idea at the wrong time is I think there is a strong chance that if they shipped the Fat Mac as the. The first Mac a year later, when a bunch of this stuff had gotten better and gotten cheaper, and they could have sold the $2,500 Mac with 512 kilobytes of RAM instead of 128, that maybe they immediately solve a bunch of their problems.

1:01:54

No, they would have still sold it for 32. 99. That was the price of the Fat Mac when they launched it.

1:02:22

And then the commercial would have been, this is why 1985 won't be like 1984.

1:02:27

Right. If I'm forced to participate in this time matrix, which you are, then the only argument is you have to run that ad.

1:02:34

Damn, That's a real. That is. I honestly can't argue.

1:02:41

You cannot run the ad with a different slogan. Then this is why 1984 won't be like 1984.

1:02:44

Because even if you talk yourself into this is why 1985 won't be like 1984. You're like, well, yeah, that sucks, Duke. This is. Of course it won't.

1:02:50

And you can't pick a different book. You can't be like, this is why Brave New World won't be brave. Like, that doesn't make any sense. You're stuck.

1:02:56

You're like, damn, that's really good. All right, I'm in.

1:03:04

I know Steve Jobs, like, on one of his many, many acid trips. Like, I got a great idea for an ad. I need to. Where's Jeff Raskin?

1:03:06

Get him out of here. I don't know what we're gonna launch. I don't know what it's gonna be,

1:03:13

but the ad, the tagline is gonna be sick.

1:03:16

Start from the tagline and work backwards.

1:03:19

I still like the idea that somebody looked at Alien and Blade Runner and was like, that's the guy who's gonna be commercial.

1:03:22

All right. No, I'm in. For that reason alone. It's the right ide. I have no comeback for the greatest tech ad in history. All right, question number two. Was this peak anything? I have a couple that I would like to offer you. Was this peak Steve Jobs unveiling? No, I think the MacIntosh is either first or second. You think?

1:03:31

No.

1:03:53

John, is it the iPhone? Is the iPhone. This is not three devices. This is one device. That's the peak thing.

1:03:53

I think the original iPhone. It's not three devices. That's peak.

1:03:59

That's number one. I don't even think this is top five. No, no, no.

1:04:02

Really?

1:04:06

No.

1:04:07

I mean, it's just like, off the top of my head, the Original iPhone, that's one. The MacBook Air out of the envelope. That's obviously number two. The first iPod, that's actually a very important one.

1:04:08

Was it a great intro, though? The first ipod? Because it was like, post 9, 11, and, you know, it was a great product, but the actual intro was.

1:04:19

But that's one where he developed, like, I'm going to show you pictures of everyone else's products and say, they suck.

1:04:28

Right?

1:04:33

Like, it was one of, like. I'm just saying, like, in the annals of this history, like, there are moments where, like, oh, these are his moves. Any of the one more things. Like, I'm just. Again, I'm pointing out, like, the thing about that intro that is peak is

1:04:33

the one with the U2 announcement. You're really into that.

1:04:46

What? The U2 announcement. The first iPad, actually, first iPad was a good one.

1:04:48

What do you think, John? Any peak anythings?

1:04:52

Um, maybe peak monochromatic display.

1:04:55

Ooh, that's good.

1:05:00

Right? But, you know, it goes right back to the ipod, where maybe the original ipod was. Peak monochromatic display. They certainly sold more black and white. Not grayscale, black and white. I think I will say, but looking

1:05:02

at this, it's probably not coming through on camera. This display looks beautiful.

1:05:16

It really does.

1:05:21

It's so crisp. It really is.

1:05:22

It's just something else. And the ipod did not have that because it was a cheap lcd. Right, Right. You look at this, you're like, oh, I can just use it.

1:05:24

Yeah.

1:05:32

So maybe peak monochromatic display. That's good.

1:05:32

I'm into that.

1:05:34

Where even when the ipod came out, it didn't seem futuristic. It seemed like, oh, this is A good compromise for a battery operated thing in your pocket. Whereas in 1984, this was like, this is the nicest computer display I've ever seen. Yeah.

1:05:35

Yes. Is it peak gadget handles?

1:05:46

No, no, no.

1:05:50

I immediately go to the wild color standard laptops. That's the handle I thought my first.

1:05:52

Yeah, yeah.

1:05:57

Or the imac had handles.

1:05:58

Yeah, the imac had a handle, too.

1:05:59

Oh, yeah, that's right.

1:06:00

I mean, you can see a lot of the imac in this product.

1:06:01

Yeah.

1:06:03

Like, he just took another run at it years later.

1:06:04

Yeah. The oneness of it, which, again, was a thing that people hated. Right. Like, the idea of this being a closed, unexpandable system was core to what they were trying to do with Macintosh and was a thing a lot of people absolutely hated about it.

1:06:07

Yeah.

1:06:22

They're like, let me tinker on this thing.

1:06:22

I think they already, even with that first one, already started with the screws that you needed. Some kind of weird screwdriver that nobody else had.

1:06:24

You know, it's so actively hostile and

1:06:31

it's a really long handle. I remember I used to repair these. A little eighth grader. Like, we had a screwdriver, it was this long. You had to go all the way up in the back.

1:06:34

That's awesome. All right, question number three. If you could time travel back, knowing everything we know now and be involved in the development of this thing, could you have made it more successful? Are there any changes you could have told 1982 Steve Jobs that might have tweaked the way that it went?

1:06:43

Cool it with the jokes.

1:06:57

Yeah. Like, be nice to everybody for a minute.

1:06:59

No, I meant the, like, it sure was nice to be out of the bag joke. I don't know.

1:07:02

That worked. That went over huge.

1:07:05

You know, a thing that we have not actually mentioned, really. Maybe only in passing. This thing only runs off of floppy disk. The operating system and all the applications, everything are on a floppy disk. And I know that there was some period of time where they thought about doing a hard drive. There was some period of time where they, you know, eventually you could buy an external disk drive. The limitation of this thing was like, it's an appliance.

1:07:07

Yeah.

1:07:30

I actually wonder if Apple oversold it without the applications in the beginning and they didn't lean into the fact that, like, if what you want is the single best, like, word processing situation, it'll just do that. They got there eventually.

1:07:30

Like, just, it's Mac paint and Mac. Right the end.

1:07:44

Yeah.

1:07:48

I do wonder if trying to be like, it's A computer at a time when computer, to John's point meant you got slots and expansion cards and like, the world is your oyster and this thing is a toaster, you know, like, it's just a very different paradigm. And I do wonder if they kind of. They got too far ahead of themselves.

1:07:49

John, what do you think? Any. Any other ideas?

1:08:08

I would at least pitch arrow keys on the keyboard.

1:08:12

Yes, that was going to be mine too. Like, give the people the keys, Steve. We got there eventually.

1:08:14

Swear to God, if you.

1:08:21

Swear to God, if you missed a letter and a word, you could just go back arrow three times. It's not going to keep people from using the mouse.

1:08:22

Yeah, yeah.

1:08:28

I really do appreciate the extent to which he was like, the mouse is the thing. Screw all of you. Like, we're this close to just like, what if it just didn't have a keyboard? You know what I mean?

1:08:29

It's a good mouse.

1:08:38

Well, that was, I mean, just as a rule of thumb, if you could use that Macintosh, the one right in front of you without the keyboard, but with the mouse or with the mouse without the keyboard, you could get more done with the mouse without the keyboard. Right. Because you could use Mac paint. Right. You could actually make a painting and save it.

1:08:40

You could just draw the words.

1:09:00

Help me. Right.

1:09:02

Without the mouse. I don't know that you could actually get anything done because there were too many things you just could not do without the mouse.

1:09:03

Yeah, totally. All right, question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again?

1:09:10

That's tough.

1:09:18

I don't. I'm going with no on this one. Like, I do. I think this is the thing you and I talk a lot about on the verse cast, actually. I think I am very drawn to the idea that we should go back to the idea of computers as places I think desktop computers are potentially do a comeback in a real way. And we talk about the 1990s computer room all the time. That computing as a space, not a device, I think.

1:09:20

Let me just offer you a situation, Dave. This is my iPhone 17 Pro Max. It's loaded up to the Verge. And this is the screen, the first Macintosh. You see the problem?

1:09:44

I do in fact, see the problem.

1:09:57

I don't think the youth are going back this far.

1:10:00

I don't think we're going back this far. Like, if you were like, david, are we going back to the early 2000s, really cool looking imacs, we could talk about it. I'm not sure we're getting back this far.

1:10:01

Yeah. And it's really heavy. If you want to move it somewhere. So you really do have to find a permanent home for it. To handle the bag aside, you kind of have to find a permanent home for it. And I think that's sort of a deal breaker. Whereas all the kids who are buying up old ipods right now, it's like all you need is a way to get the songs on the damn thing. And then once you do, you've. You. You know, you're actually. It actually is usable.

1:10:10

Totally.

1:10:35

Yeah.

1:10:35

Sorry, Macintosh.

1:10:36

No, no. If someone can get out there, like the old ipods, and start a movement where they're putting SSDs in these things.

1:10:37

Yes. SSDs an Internet connection somehow. I don't know.

1:10:43

Yeah. All right, question number five. What feature of this should every current version have? What would you lift off of the Macintosh and put back onto modern computers? I have one that I'd like to offer you. I think this. You can only use one app at a time, except for the little desk accessories paradigm is great.

1:10:48

Yeah.

1:11:07

And I think, John, you actually. You were writing about your Apple scorecard commentary for the year, and one of the things you said is about the iPad, which is that we're in this interesting position with the iPad, where they have really exploded the amount of stuff that you can do with an iPad. And yet there was incredible power in the simplicity of just giving you one thing to do at a time. Time. And I actually think there is something to that with computers that is like, there is a. I don't want this for all of my computing, but there is something to the focus of this that I find very appealing.

1:11:07

I can't disagree with you more.

1:11:35

I know.

1:11:37

I mean, the iPad, you have a 35 inch phone.

1:11:38

Like, what are we talking about here?

1:11:40

I mean, the reason this thing looks like an S fog is because it doesn't have the Internet connection.

1:11:42

Yeah. It can't do anything.

1:11:45

Would you like to process some words? Have I got the app for you. Like, that's it. The thing I would take away from this, actually, and we've talked about it kind of a lot throughout this entire episode. You can see the personalities and care that went into every pixel on the screen.

1:11:47

One thing we didn't talk about, by the way, was on the inside of this, there are signatures of a lot of the people who made it. They had a signing party and they all signed it. And it is in the plastic that this thing is made.

1:12:02

Yeah, it's molded into the back of the case.

1:12:12

Yeah.

1:12:13

And that persisted for a long time. Again, Taking apart the computers in eighth grade, I got to see all the signatures all the time. It's so cool. But you can see, like, the computer has a personality. Mr. McIntosh is in here somewhere just waiting to get out. The little Susan Kerr icons, the portraits that we're talking about, they're all over the system. The fact that the Windows have pinstripes for no particular reason. This is Steve Jobs being like, make it have more texture. In the earliest possible stage of the computers he's making. Computers do not have this personality anymore. You load up a new iPhone, like, fresh out the box. It's not smiling at you. It's like telling you that the EU regulatory state has required Apple to issue warnings of all this stuff. It is just. No, it's like. It is a series of corporate experiences that you have, and this one is just all personality all the time. And, boy, do I miss that.

1:12:13

Yeah. And, Nilai, I'll just add to that that, yes, the slogan was the computer for the rest of us, but it wasn't. The rest of us weren't dummies. They were people who don't understand how computers really work at a low level, but are very smart. The Macintosh was designed for clever, bright, creative people, not for dummies. That's not who the rest of us were. And I think a lot of these things in Tahoe are like, ah, you're too stupid to resize a window.

1:13:07

Yeah.

1:13:34

Or notice that we can't put the corners in the corners.

1:13:34

Yeah.

1:13:37

So we. Yeah, you won't notice. What do you. What do you catch?

1:13:37

Totally. All right, three more questions about the Macintosh. These are the Version History hall of Fame questions. It has to pass all three of these tests to get in the version History hall of Fame. Question number one. Did this product do something truly new?

1:13:40

Yes.

1:13:52

You've been talking about how the Lisa did it all.

1:13:54

Well, yeah, but, like, quickdraw is truly new on this. Like, the thing that they actually did.

1:13:56

Right.

1:14:04

My $2,500 computer that can run Quickdraw. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing. Like, there's too much in here. That is actually new. I'm just saying Jobs pretending that he hadn't taken a very expensive run at it already is, like, very funny.

1:14:05

Yeah, I tend to agree. John, what do you think?

1:14:19

Oh, I think definitely. And I think you could compare it to the fact that were there touchscreen computers before the iPhone? Yes, of course. You know, but it was making it a $500 or $600 phone that you could put in your pocket. New. Making this a $2,500 computer that you, as a small business or a family buy, taking these concepts and putting them in a computer at a price that, yes, it was very expensive for the time, but people might buy to put it there. Yes. I think the funnier thing would be if, like, Apple was the company that had made that Microsoft Surface table and Jobs, it was like we invented the touchscreen and they were the company that did it. That's what makes ignoring the Lisa so funny, is that Jobs did that so many times until the end of his life by pretending that Apple had invented these things that other companies had done. But I think with the Macintosh and the Lisa, it was the only time it was Apple itself.

1:14:22

Sounds like funny. They're right there. Yeah.

1:15:16

You named it after your daughter.

1:15:18

You stolen people from the team.

1:15:20

Yeah, agreed. All right, question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad?

1:15:23

Remarkably good.

1:15:28

I think it was. I think from a pure software perspective alone, it was remarkably good. Like, the actual machine had its issues, but the thing that it did did was like, it just blew people's minds.

1:15:29

Yeah.

1:15:41

And there's so many things that are still true today. Like I said earlier about the way that Mac paint on that computer in front of you is so similar to paint applications today.

1:15:42

When we were at the break a minute ago, you were playing with Mac paint, and you just, like, you just understand it. Like, it just. It works the way you think it does 40 years later. Yeah, I agree. Question number three, the last one. Did the Macintosh have a lasting impact? Did it, like, Capital M matter? The thing I've been trying to think about is if Apple hadn't done this thing that looked like this and worked like this, how long would it have been before somebody else did? Right. Is this one of those things? Whose idea had come or whose time had come and give it a minute and somebody else would have put this thing out?

1:15:51

No. I will make a very. I'll make an argument that will make a lot of people really mad.

1:16:24

Okay.

1:16:27

If Apple, in particular, Steve Jobs, had not done this, I'm not sure anyone would have done it in this way ever. I think we would be looking at a different timeline of computer evolution entirely.

1:16:27

Like, if IBM wins, like, wins wins, you think we end up. We don't end up here?

1:16:39

Yeah, I don't think we end up here, like, for a long time.

1:16:46

Interesting.

1:16:48

Because, you know, their incentives were to sell productivity software on mainframes to businesses like, they were not interested in the rest of us. As John is saying, like, they had no. Like, I think we would have gotten to a place where creatives desired some kind of computer, and you end up with Amiga made the Video Toaster, which is like a specialized computer for video editing. Like, we would have ended up with these other weird little tools and I don't think we would have ended up with a general purpose creator that was like made by somebody who wanted to speak to creatives, who's given the thing to John Lennon.

1:16:49

Right.

1:17:23

And Michael Jackson. Like, that's not what IBM was going to do.

1:17:23

Do. Yeah.

1:17:27

I really think that if not for that, this team at that time, like, we, we wouldn't be here. We would be looking at a very different branch of computer evolution.

1:17:27

That's a bold, that's a bold claim.

1:17:37

I know it's going to make people mad, but I, I just, I don't see it.

1:17:38

I mean, if that's even remotely true, then the. Did it have a lasting impact? Is the easiest question we've ever had on this show.

1:17:41

Right. Like.

1:17:47

All right, well, I just want to say, John, this does not portend the Vision Pro getting into the Virgin History hall of Fame. Under no circumstances will we be applying this to the Vision Pro, but the Macintosh.

1:17:48

I did not expect to talk about the Vision Pro so much. They are the Macintosh.

1:18:00

This may be the only time the Vision Pro appears on this show, but the Macintosh, I think, deserves to be in the Version History hall of Fame. So here we are. All right, we're done here. Thank you both. This has been tremendously fun. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. If you want to support all of this, read John at Daring Fireball. Listen to the talk show John's equally very long podcast. Read the Verge. Subscribe to The Verge. The Verge.com subscribe It's the best way to support all of this stuff. Thank you both. Thank you as always. We'll see you next time. Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Keifer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino and Alex Perkins. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffern and Joe Nebras. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. You can follow the dedicated Version History podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive. And you can watch full episodes on our new YouTube channel version history Podcast. And to support everything we do and get access to this and all of our other podcasts ad free, become a paid subscriber to the Verge. Thanks.

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