Histoire d'Apple: L'histoire de Steve Jobs et de la société qu'il a fondée

Jobs et Wozniak ont ​​uni leurs forces en proposant d’abord des farces, comme tracer un tableau représentant une main montrant le doigt majeur à afficher lors d’une cérémonie de graduaction à l’école de Jobs et un appel au Vatican qui leur a presque permis d’accéder au Le pape.

Les deux amis utilisaient également leur savoir-faire technologique pour créer des «boîtes bleues» qui permettaient de passer des appels interurbains gratuitement.

Jobs et Wozniak ont ​​travaillé ensemble sur le Atari jeu d'arcade Une pause pendant que Jobs travaillait chez Atari et que Wozniak travaillait chez HP – Jobs avait persuadé Woz de l'aider à réduire le nombre de puces logiques nécessaires. Jobs a réussi à obtenir un bon bonus pour le travail sur Breakout, dont il a donné une petite somme à Woz.

Le premier ordinateur Apple

Les deux Steves ont assisté ensemble au Homebrew Computer Club. Un groupe d’amateurs d’informatique qui s’est réuni à Menlo Park, en Californie, à partir de 1975. Woz y avait vu son premier MITS Altair, qui ressemble aujourd’hui à une boîte de lumières et de circuits imprimés, et s’inspire de l’approche "construction par soi-même" de MITS ( l’Altair est venu en kit) pour rendre quelque chose de plus simple pour le reste d’entre nous. Cette philosophie continue de transparaître dans les produits Apple d’aujourd’hui.

Woz a donc créé le premier ordinateur avec un clavier ressemblant à une machine à écrire et la possibilité de se connecter à un téléviseur ordinaire en tant qu'écran. Plus tard baptisé Apple I, il était l'archétype de tout ordinateur moderne, mais Wozniak n'essayait pas de changer le monde avec ce qu'il avait produit – il voulait simplement montrer à quel point il avait réussi à faire avec si peu de ressources .

S'adressant à NPR (National Public Radio) en 2006, Woz a expliqué: "Quand j'ai construit cette Apple, je… le premier ordinateur à dire qu'un ordinateur devrait ressembler à une machine à écrire – il devrait avoir un clavier – et le périphérique de sortie est un téléviseur, ce n'était pas vraiment pour montrer au monde [that] voici la direction [it] devrait aller [in]. C’était vraiment montrer aux gens autour de moi, se vanter, être malin, être reconnu pour avoir conçu un ordinateur très bon marché. "

Jobs et Woz

Cela n'a presque pas eu lieu, cependant. Le Woz que nous connaissons à présent a une personnalité plus grande que nature: il a financé des concerts de rock et joué dans Dancing with the Stars, mais, comme il l’a dit au Sydney Morning Herald, "j’étais timide et j’avais le sentiment que je ne savais pas grand-chose des derniers développements. dans les ordinateurs. " Il a failli se dérober et donner une occasion au club.

Soyons reconnaissants qu'il ne l'ait pas fait. Jobs a vu l'ordinateur de Woz, a reconnu son éclat et a vendu son microbus VW pour aider à financer sa production. Wozniak a vendu sa calculatrice HP (qui coûte un peu plus cher que les calculatrices actuelles!) Et, ensemble, ils ont fondé Apple Computer Inc le 1er avril 1976 aux côtés de Ronald Wayne.

Pourquoi Apple a été nommé Apple

Parlant au magazine Byte en décembre 1984, Woz a attribué l’idée à Jobs. "Il travaillait de temps en temps dans les vergers de l'Orégon. Je pensais que c'était peut-être parce qu'il y avait des pommes dans le verger ou peut-être juste sa nature fructarienne. Peut-être que le mot lui venait juste d'arriver à lui. En tout cas, nous les deux ont essayé de trouver de meilleurs noms mais aucun d’entre nous n’a pu penser à quelque chose de mieux après la mention d’Apple. "

Selon la biographie de Steve Jobs, le nom a été conçu par Jobs après son retour de la ferme Apple. Il pensait apparemment que le nom sonnait «amusant, fougueux et pas intimidant».

Le nom a également probablement bénéficié en commençant par un A, ce qui signifie qu'il serait plus proche du début de chaque liste.

Le logo Apple

Il existe d'autres théories sur la signification du nom Apple. L'idée qu'il a été nommé ainsi parce que Newton a été inspiré lorsqu'une pomme est tombée d'un arbre en le frappant à la tête est confortée par le fait que le logo Apple original était une illustration plutôt compliquée de Newton assis sous un arbre.

Plus tard, la société a décidé de créer un logo Apple – un logo beaucoup plus simple. Ces logos sont probablement la raison d’autres théories sur la signification du nom Apple, certains suggérant que le logo Apple avec une partie de celle-ci est un clin d'œil à Alan Turing, informaticien et auteur du code Enigma, qui s'est suicidé manger une pomme infusée au cyanure.

Cependant, selon Rob Janoff, le concepteur qui a créé le logo, la connexion de Turing est simplement "une merveilleuse légende urbaine ".

De même, la morsure prise dans la pomme pourrait représenter l'histoire d'Adam et Eve de l'Ancien Testament. L'idée étant que la pomme représente la connaissance.

Vendre la pomme I

Woz construisait chaque ordinateur à la main, et bien qu'il veuille bien le vendre pour un prix légèrement supérieur au prix de leurs pièces – à un prix qui leur permettrait de récupérer leurs dépenses si elles en expédiaient 50 unités – Jobs avait de plus grandes idées.

Jobs a signé un contrat avec le Byte Shop de Mountain View pour lui fournir 50 ordinateurs à 500 $ chacun. Cela signifiait qu'une fois que le magasin avait pris sa coupe, la Apple I vendue pour 666,66 $ – la légende veut que Wozniak aime répéter des chiffres et ignore la connexion «numéro de la bête».

Byte Shop avait des problèmes: Apple n'existait pas en grand nombre et Apple Computer Inc naissant ne disposait pas des ressources nécessaires pour exécuter sa commande. Il ne pouvait pas non plus les avoir. Atari, où Jobs travaillait, voulait de l'argent pour tous les composants vendus, une banque lui refusa un prêt et, même s'il avait reçu une offre de 5 000 dollars du père d'un ami, cela ne suffisait pas.

En fin de compte, c’est le bon de commande de Byte Shop qui a scellé la transaction. Jobs l'a confié à Cramer Electronics et, comme l'explique Walter Isaacson dans Steve Jobs: The Biography Exclusive, il a convaincu le responsable de Cramer d'appeler Paul Terrell, propriétaire de Byte Shop, pour vérifier la commande.

"Terrell était à une conférence quand il a entendu par un haut-parleur qu'il avait reçu un appel d'urgence (Jobs avait été persistant). Le responsable de Cramer lui a dit que deux enfants débraillés venaient d'arriver en brandissant un ordre du Byte Shop. Etait-ce réel? Terrell a confirmé que tel était le cas et le magasin a accepté d’accorder un crédit de 30 jours à Jobs pour les pièces. "

Un Apple I original (dans un étui)

Jobs misait sur la production d’ordinateurs en état de fonctionnement pendant cette période pour régler la facture à l’aide du produit de la vente d’unités terminées à Byte Shop. Le risque encouru était trop grand pour Ronald Wayne, et c’est finalement cela qui l’a fait fuir.

"Jobs et Woz n'ont pas eu deux pièces de rechange", a déclaré Wayne à NextShark en 2013. "Si cette chose a explosé, comment cela va-t-il … être remboursé? Avaient-ils l'argent? Non. Étais-je joignable? Oui . "

Famille et amis ont été convoqués pour s'asseoir à une table de cuisine et aider à souder les pièces. Une fois qu'ils avaient été testés, Jobs les a conduits jusqu'à Byte Shop. Lorsqu'il les déballa, Terrell, qui avait commandé des ordinateurs finis, fut surpris par ce qu'il trouva.

Comme l'explique Michael Moritz dans Return to the Little Kingdom: "Une intervention énergique était nécessaire avant que les cartes puissent faire quoi que ce soit. Terrell ne pouvait même pas tester la carte sans acheter deux transformateurs … Depuis Apple, je n'avais pas de clavier ou une télévision, aucune donnée ne pouvait être acheminée dans l'ordinateur. Un clavier branché à la machine ne pouvait toujours pas être programmé sans que quelqu'un tape laborieusement le code pour BASIC puisque Wozniak et Jobs n'avaient pas fourni le code. la langue sur une cassette ou dans une puce ROM … enfin l'ordinateur était nu. Il n'a aucun cas. "

Un tableau Apple I original, issu de la collection du Sydney Powerhouse Museum

Raspberry PI et Micro Bit de la BBC, à part cela, nous n’accepterions probablement pas un tel ordinateur aujourd’hui, et même Terrell était réticent au début, mais, comme le dit Isaacson, "Jobs l’a laissé tomber, et il a accepté de prendre livraison et de payer." Le pari était payant et la Apple I est restée en production d’avril 1976 à septembre 1977, avec une production totale d’environ 200 unités.

Leur rareté en a fait des objets de collection. Bonhams a mis aux enchères un Apple I en activité en octobre 2014 pour 905 000 $. Si vos poches ne sont pas aussi riches, Replica 1 Plus de Briel Computers est un clone matériel de l’Apple I et est proposé à un prix de 199 $, beaucoup plus abordable, entièrement construit.

Lorsque vous considérez que seulement 200 ont été construits, le Apple I était un triomphe. Il a propulsé sa société mère en plein essor à des taux de croissance presque inouïs – à tel point que la décision de créer un successeur n'a pas pu causer trop de nuits blanches dans les ménages de Jobs et Wozniak.

La pomme ii

Apple II

Le succès du premier ordinateur Apple a permis à Apple de concevoir son prédécesseur.

La Apple II a fait ses débuts à la foire commerciale West Coast Computer en avril 1977, en concurrence directe avec de grands concurrents comme le Commodore PET. C'était une machine vraiment révolutionnaire, tout comme l'ordinateur Apple avant, avec des graphiques couleur et un stockage sur bande (mis à niveau ultérieurement vers des disquettes 5.25). La mémoire atteignait 64 Ko dans les modèles haut de gamme et l'image envoyée à l'écran NTSC atteignait une résolution vraiment impressionnante de 280 x 192, qui était alors considérée comme une résolution élevée. Naturellement, il y avait un gain, et le pousser à de telles limites signifiait que vous deviez vous contenter de six couleurs, mais passer à un nombre plus raisonnable de 40 lignes par 48 colonnes vous permettrait de profiter de 16 tons à la fois.

Oui, le Apple II (ou Pomme ][[[[ comme il a été appelé) était une véritable innovation, et que le biographe de Jobs, Walter Isaacson, attribue au lancement de l'industrie des ordinateurs personnels.

Le problème, c’est que les spécifications ne suffisaient pas à elles seules à justifier le coût de 1 300 dollars de l’Apple II. Les utilisateurs professionnels avaient besoin d’une raison de puiser dans leurs budgets informatiques et ce n’est que quelques mois plus tard que l’excuse parfaite s’est présentée: la première «application phare» au monde.

La première application sur un ordinateur Apple: Visicalc

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin était étudiant à la Harvard Business School quand il a visualisé "un affichage tête haute, comme dans un avion de combat, où je pouvais voir l'image virtuelle. [of a table of numbers] suspendu dans les airs devant moi. Je pourrais simplement déplacer ma calculatrice souris / clavier sur la table, insérer quelques chiffres, les encercler pour obtenir une somme, faire quelques calculs… "

Bien sûr, nous reconnaissons qu’en tant que feuille de calcul aujourd’hui, mais à la fin des années 1970, ce genre de choses n’existait que sur papier. Les convertir pour une utilisation numérique ne serait pas une mince affaire, mais Bricklin était imperturbable. Il a emprunté une Apple II à son éditeur éventuel et s'est mis au travail, réalisant une édition alpha au cours d'un week-end.

De nombreux concepts qu'il a utilisés sont encore familiers aujourd'hui, en particulier les lettres au-dessus de chaque colonne et les nombres en fonction des lignes à utiliser comme références lors de la création de formules. (Vous vous demandez comment il se compare à Numbers aujourd'hui? Voici notre article sur Numbers.)

Les limitations technologiques inhérentes au matériel signifiaient que cela ne fonctionnait pas exactement comme Bricklin l'avait d'abord imaginé. L'Apple II n'avait pas d'écran intégré et, bien que la souris ait été inventée, elle n'était pas fournie avec la machine. Ainsi, l’affichage est devenu l’écran normal et la souris a été remplacée par la console de jeu d’Apple II, que Bricklin a décrite comme étant "un cadran que vous pouvez tourner pour déplacer les objets du jeu dans les deux sens … vous pouvez déplacer le curseur à gauche ou à gauche. à droite, puis appuyez sur le bouton 'fire', puis tournez la raquette pour déplacer le curseur de haut en bas. "

Il était loin d'être parfait et fonctionnait de manière lente. Bricklin a donc décidé d'utiliser les flèches directionnelles gauche et droite, avec la barre d'espace au lieu du bouton de déclenchement pour basculer entre les mouvements horizontal et vertical.

VisiCalc a été dévoilé en 1979 et décrit comme "une feuille de papier magique pouvant effectuer des calculs et des recalculs". Nous lui en sommes reconnaissants du rôle qu’il a joué dans la promotion des ventes de l’Apple II et l’ancrage d’Apple dans l’industrie.

Ecrire chez Morgan Stanley Lettre électroniquePeu de temps avant son lancement, l’analyste Benjamin M Rosen a expliqué que VisiCalc était "tellement puissant, pratique, universel, simple à utiliser et à un prix raisonnable qu'il pourrait bien devenir l'un des programmes d'ordinateur personnels les plus vendus à ce jour … [it] pourrait un jour devenir la queue logicielle qui agite (et vend) le chien de l'ordinateur personnel. "

Comme il avait raison, comme Tim Barry l'a révélé dans un article ultérieur d'InfoWorld, dans lequel il a décrit une expérience qui aurait été familière à beaucoup:

VisiCalc

"Lorsque j'ai utilisé VisiCalc pour la première fois sur un Apple II, je souhaitais me procurer une version capable de tirer parti des capacités système plus étendues de mon ordinateur CP / M.. Hélas, cela ne devait pas être … Nous avons fini par acheter un Apple II pour exécuter VisiCalc (une raison assez commune pour de nombreuses ventes Apple, me dit-on). "

Apple a lui-même attribué à l'appli le fait d'être derrière un cinquième de toutes les séries II vendues.

Apple II succès: graphiques couleur

Ainsi, un logiciel valant un peu plus de 100 dollars vendait un matériel valant dix fois plus. C’était un territoire inconnu, mais même avec le bon logiciel, Apple II n’aurait pas été un succès s’il n’avait pas adhéré aux normes élevées déjà établies par la société.

L’édition de février 1984 de PC Mag, se référant à Apple II dans le contexte de ce qu’elle avait enseigné à IBM, a attribué une partie de son succès au fait que "son emballage ne lui donnait pas l’air de plaire à un radioamateur. Une alimentation à découpage produisant peu de chaleur a permis de placer l’ordinateur dans un boîtier en plastique léger. Son emballage sophistiqué le différenciait des… ordinateurs dotés de cartes et de fils visibles reliant divers composants à la carte mère. "

Plus radicalement cependant, le Apple II "a été le premier du genre à fournir des[u]r graphics … contenait des connecteurs d'extension pour lesquels d'autres fabricants de matériel pourraient concevoir des périphériques pouvant être installés sur l'ordinateur afin d'exécuter des fonctions que Apple n'aurait même jamais envisagées. "

En bref, Apple a conçu un ordinateur qui incarne ce que nous attendions des ordinateurs de bureau dans les années 1980, 1990 et les premières années de ce siècle – avant qu'Apple ne renverse la situation et se dirige de plus en plus vers des boîtes scellées sans possibilité de expansion interne.

Près de six millions de séries II ont été produites sur 16 ans, donnant à Apple son deuxième grand succès. En réalité, la société commençait toujours et les jours les plus brillants restaient à venir.

Pour VisiCalc, l’avenir n’était pas aussi prometteur, en grande partie parce que ses développeurs n’étaient pas assez rapides pour faire face au marché en pleine expansion des PC. Rival Lotus est intervenu et son 1-2-3 est rapidement devenu la norme commerciale. Il a acheté Software Arts, le développeur de VisiCalc, en 1985 et est resté en tête du classement jusqu'à ce que Microsoft lui inflige ce que Lotus a fait à VisiCalc: il l'a usurpé avec un rival qui a établi un nouvel ordre numérique.

Ce rival était Excel qui, comme VisiCalc, est apparu sur une machine Apple bien avant son portage sur le PC.

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Apple, Xerox et la souris à un bouton

Apple n'a jamais tardé à innover, à l'exception peut-être des noms de produits. Nous approchons des années 80 dans notre voyage à travers l’histoire de la société et nous sommes sur le point de poursuivre les Apple I et II avec la III. Prévisible, hein?

Les deux Steves ont fondé la société avec un début très tendance et avaient l’ambition de cibler les plus grands noms de l’industrie avec ses deux suivis. Cela a dû laisser les observateurs de l'industrie se demander où il pourrait aller.

Il s'est avéré que la réponse était Palo Alto.

Xerox y avait établi un centre de recherche – Xerox PARC, désormais appelé simplement «parc» – où il était libre d'explorer de nouvelles technologies très loin des entreprises situées de l'autre côté du pays. Son travail a permis de faire avancer la technologie que nous utilisons encore tous les jours, tels que les supports optiques, Ethernet et les imprimantes laser (nous ne parlons pas seulement de photocopieurs!) Le plus grand intérêt pour les utilisateurs de Mac, cependant, est son travail révolutionnaire sur la conception d'interface. .

Les ordinateurs Apple I, II et III étaient des machines à base de texte, un peu comme les tout premiers PC IBM. Mais Jobs, qui travaillait sur Lisa à l'époque, voulait quelque chose de plus intuitif. Il a convaincu Xerox d’accorder trois jours d’accès à PARC pour lui et plusieurs employés d’Apple. En échange, Xerox a obtenu le droit d'acheter 100 000 actions Apple à 10 dollars chacune.

Dire que c'était une bonne affaire serait un euphémisme énorme. Apple a divisé son stock à quatre reprises depuis lors – en 1987, 2000, 2005 et 2014. Les entreprises le font lorsque le prix d'une seule action commence à devenir trop élevé, dans le but de stimuler les échanges. Ainsi, si Xerox conservait ces actions, il en aurait eu 200 000 en 1987, 400 000 en 2000 et 800 000 en 2005. La répartition en 2014 était de sept contre un, de sorte que la participation de Xerox passerait de 800 000 à 5,6 millions. Les vendre aux prix d'aujourd'hui rapporterait 708 M $ (450 M £). Pas mal pour une visite de trois jours.

La Xerox Alto, une machine largement utilisée dans tout le parc et dotée d'un affichage de portrait et d'une interface graphique, a fait basculer Jobs. Elle était bien en avance sur son temps. Cela faisait un moment déjà que cela faisait mal, mais Xerox, qui avait construit 2000 unités, ne l’avait pas vendue au public. Ce n'était pas petit – environ la taille d'un réfrigérateur sous le comptoir – mais c'était toujours considéré comme une machine «personnelle», qui a été conduite à la maison par la manière centrée sur l'utilisateur utilisée. C'était le premier ordinateur à utiliser la souris avec un gadget à trois boutons servant à pointer et à cliquer sur des objets à l'écran.

Jobs a décrété que chaque ordinateur fabriqué à partir de ce moment-là par Apple devrait adopter une méthode de travail similaire. S'adressant à Walter Isaacson quelques années plus tard, il a décrit la révélation comme "un voile levé de mes yeux. Je pouvais voir ce que l'avenir de l'informatique était destiné à être".

Lisa et le Macintosh

Il a lancé une course à l'intérieur d'Apple entre les équipes développant la Lisa et le Macintosh.

Jeff Raskin

La ligne officielle à l'époque était que Lisa représentait l'architecture de système intégré local, et le fait qu'il s'agisse du nom de la fille de Jobs était purement fortuite. C’était une machine d’affaires haut de gamme qui devait se vendre à près de 10 000 dollars. Convertissez cela en argent d’aujourd’hui et vous achèteriez une voiture familiale de milieu de gamme. Le projet était géré par John Couch, anciennement chez IBM.

Jeff Raskin, quant à lui, dirigeait le développement du Macintosh, dont les entreprises plus petites et les particuliers n’étaient pas la cible, et chaque équipe souhaitait être le premier à fournir un ordinateur Apple doté d’une interface graphique.

La lisa

Quelle que soit l'équipe qui reçoive son premier but, Apple – en tant que société – le souhaite à un prix qui ne soit pas prohibitif, ce qui implique de trouver des solutions moins chères que celles proposées par Xerox. La souris de l’Alto, par exemple, avait trois boutons et coûtait 300 dollars. Jobs voulait quelque chose de plus simple et plafonnait le prix à 15 $. Le résultat fut une souris à un bouton (qui n'a peut-être pas résisté à l'épreuve du temps aussi bien que Job l'aurait prévu, la plupart d'entre nous demandant régulièrement que l'on clique sur Ctrl ou clic droit).

Jobs était tellement excité par le potentiel de la souris et de l'interface graphique qu'il s'est de plus en plus impliqué dans le développement de Lisa, au point qu'il a commencé à contourner la structure de gestion déjà en place. La cause a été bouleversée et en 1982, les choses ont basculé.

Apple Lisa avait une interface graphique avancée

À l'époque, Michael Scott était président et chef de la direction d'Apple. Mark Markkula (numéro trois du personnel d'Apple et investisseur à hauteur de 250 000 USD) a été nommé à ce poste. Les deux hommes ont mis au point une nouvelle structure d'entreprise, qui a immédiatement limité l'emploi à l'emploi et a rendu le contrôle du projet Lisa à John Couch. Jobs, également dépourvu de toute responsabilité en matière de recherche et développement au sein de l'entreprise, n'était guère plus qu'une figure de proue. Cela l’a laissé à la recherche d’un nouveau projet.

Peut-être inévitablement, il s'est tourné vers le Macintosh.

Nommé en l'honneur de la pomme comestible préférée de Raskin (la McIntosh), le Macintosh fonctionnait déjà depuis 1979, et lorsque Jobs a rejoint l'équipe, il était déjà bien avancé. Cela ne l’a cependant pas empêché d’apporter des modifications importantes, notamment la commande d’un nouveau projet externe et l’intégration du système d’exploitation graphique. Raskin a quitté l'équipe Macintosh lorsque Jobs et lui se sont séparés, et Jobs a assumé le contrôle du reste de son développement.

Cependant, ce changement forcé de camp signifiait que Jobs – techniquement – se retrouvait dans l'équipe perdante. La Lisa a été lancée en 1983 avec son interface utilisateur graphique en place. le Macintosh a fait ses débuts l'année suivante. La course avait été remportée par la Lisa.

C'était une victoire à la Pyrrhus, cependant. Le Macintosh, que nous aborderons plus en détail ci-dessous, a été un succès. La gamme actuelle d’ordinateurs d’Apple – à part les appareils iOS – découle directement de ce premier ordinateur grand public.

Vous ne pouvez pas en dire autant de Lisa. Il coûtait quatre fois plus cher que le Macintosh, et bien que son écran soit à résolution supérieure et qu'il puisse traiter davantage de mémoire, il a été moins réussi. Apple a publié sept applications, couvrant toutes les bases commerciales habituelles, mais le support fourni par une tierce partie était médiocre.

Néanmoins, Apple n’a pas abandonné. La Lisa d'origine a été suivie par la Lisa 2, qui coûte environ la moitié du prix de son prédécesseur et utilise les mêmes disques de 3,5 pouces que le Macintosh. Puis, en 1985, il a rebaptisé la Lisa 2 équipée de disque dur en tant que Macintosh XL et a stimulé les ventes avec une réduction de prix.

À ce stade, cependant, les chiffres ne totalisaient pas et la Lisa devait partir. Le Macintosh a ensuite défini la société.

En 1984, Apple avait prouvé à deux reprises que c'était une force avec laquelle il fallait compter. Il avait pris IBM, le plus grand nom de l'informatique professionnelle, et s'était acquitté admirablement. Les Apple I et II ont connu un succès retentissant, mais si les Apple III et Lisa étaient des machines remarquables, elles n’avaient pas captivé l’imagination du public au même degré que leurs prédécesseurs. Apple avait besoin d'un autre coup dur, à la fois pour garantir son avenir et pour cibler les segments les plus bas du marché, marché jusqu'à présent largement ignoré.

Nous savons tous que le succès est celui du Macintosh: la machine qui garantissait en grande partie l’avenir de la société.

Si vous souhaitez un guide visuel sur l’histoire d’Apple, consultez notre chronologie Apple en images et en vidéo.

Tout change: Jef Raskin contre Steve Jobs

Le Macintosh

Nous nous souviendrons toujours de Steve Jobs comme le créateur du Macintosh, mais il n’est arrivé sur le projet qu’en 1981 – deux ans après que Jef Raskin ait commencé à travailler sur un ordinateur à faible coût destiné à un usage domestique et professionnel. Jobs a rapidement apposé sa marque sur le produit et Raskin est parti en 1982 – avant que le produit ne soit expédié. Nous devons attribuer à Raskin un crédit pour son idée originale et son nom (son type de pomme préféré était le McIntosh, mais cela a été modifié pour éviter de porter atteinte au droit d'auteur), mais sinon, la machine qui a finalement été lancée était assez éloignée de celle qu'il avait initialement créée. envisagé.

Les premiers prototypes de Raskin avaient des affichages à base de texte et utilisaient des touches de fonction à la place de la souris pour exécuter des tâches courantes. Raskin a ensuite approuvé la souris, mais avec plus que le simple bouton fourni avec le Macintosh. Ce sont Jobs et Bud Tribble, dont le dernier est toujours chez Apple (il est vice-président de la technologie logicielle), qui ont vraiment poussé l’équipe à mettre en œuvre l’interface utilisateur graphique (GUI) pour laquelle elle est devenue célèbre.

Ils ont compris le potentiel de la métaphore graphique de l’interface graphique après en avoir utilisé une à l’utilisation de Xerox PARC, et ils avaient déjà jeté une bonne partie des bases du système d’Apple dans le cadre du projet Lisa. Tribble a demandé à l'équipe Macintosh de faire de même pour sa propre machine, ce qui, rétrospectivement, pourrait bien être la directive la plus importante jamais émise par quiconque au sein d'Apple.

Si l'équipe Macintosh avait continué sur le chemin du texte et du clavier, il est peu probable que leur produit se soit vendu aussi bien qu'auparavant – et Apple, comme nous le savons, pourrait ne pas exister aujourd'hui.

Découvrez les membres de l'équipe Mac d'origine – voici quelques-unes de leurs histoires.

Le projet Macintosh: plus simple et plus intelligent

Après plusieurs itérations, le prototype Macintosh est devenu à la fois plus capable et moins complexe à construire. Il y avait moins de jetons et les ingénieurs d’Apple ont pu les pousser plus loin et plus vite. Au moment où il était prêt à être lancé, le Macintosh incorporait le type de matériel graphique qui aurait coûté des dizaines de milliers de livres à l'achat de n'importe quelle machine concurrente, mais Apple cherchait à le vendre à un prix qui le mettrait à la portée de l'utilisateur à domicile mieux nanti.

La spécification finale était radicale pour sa journée, avec un processeur Motorola 68000 à 6 MHz évoluant jusqu'à 7,8 MHz, 128 Ko de RAM, et un écran noir et blanc de 9 pouces avec une résolution de 512 x 342 pixels. Pour mettre cela en perspective, il ne suffit même pas d’afficher une icône d’application d’un appareil iOS de classe rétine à sa résolution native, mais cela peut tout de même s’adapter au logiciel système 1.0, le système d’exploitation entièrement graphique d’Apple.

Le projet Macintosh: belle apparence

Mais ce n’était pas seulement ce qui se passait à l’intérieur de la boîte qui en faisait un appareil aussi attrayant. Le Macintosh avait l'air bien à l'extérieur. Bien sûr, il était recouvert de plastique beige – mais le corps tout-en-un intègre le lecteur de disquette et une poignée de transport pratique, de sorte que vous pouvez facilement l’emporter avec vous, où que vous travailliez. Cela avait l'air amical aussi, et cela le rendait plus accessible.

Il y avait toujours quelques limitations, cependant. Le Macintosh d'origine ne possédait pas de disque dur, vous deviez donc démarrer à partir d'une disquette et ne pouviez éjecter temporairement le disque système que lorsque vous deviez accéder à des applications et à des données. Apple a partiellement corrigé cette lacune en proposant un lecteur supplémentaire externe, qui permettait aux utilisateurs de conserver le disque système in situ et de déléguer la responsabilité des applications et des données à un deuxième disque. Il s’agissait toutefois d’un ajout coûteux et le disque dur externe 20, qui coûtait 1495 dollars et ne disposait que de 20 Mo de stockage, était encore dans un an.

Malgré ses limitations, cependant, de nombreuses fonctionnalités établies sur ce premier Macintosh sont toujours utilisées. Nous avons abandonné le pseudo 'Système' au profit de 'OS' (qui signifie Système d'exploitation), mais nous utilisons toujours le nom du Finder, qui a fait ses débuts là-bas, et Command et Option apparaissaient comme des boutons de modification sur son clavier (le dernier alt a été usurpé par alt, du moins au Royaume-Uni, mais son nom subsiste pour de nombreux utilisateurs).

(Vous seriez surpris de voir combien de personnes sont troublées par le fait qu'Apple se réfère toujours à la touche Option du clavier Mac, même si cette touche est connue sous le nom de touche Alt, vous en saurez plus ici.: Qu'est-ce que Option sur un Mac?)

Le projet Macintosh: pixels

Le matériel n'était que la moitié de l'histoire. Le codeur Bill Atkinson avait mis en place un système radical grâce auquel le logiciel Macintosh System permettait de superposer les fenêtres de manière plus efficace que les ordinateurs de PARC. Susan Kare a passé des mois à développer un langage visuel sous la forme d'icônes à l'écran depuis devenir des classiques.

Susan Kare et le logo de la commande qu'elle a conçu

C’est Kare que nous devons remercier pour la montre au poignet à l’écran (pour indiquer un fond de processus accablant) et le Mac souriant, entre autres, ainsi que pour la combinaison apparemment illogique de carrés et de cercles qu’elle a choisie pour la touche de commande. (C’est un symbole courant en Suède, où il est utilisé pour désigner un site du patrimoine national – et non un camping, comme cela a été rapporté.) Son pot de peinture et ses graphiques au lasso sont largement utilisés dans d’autres applications, et les polices qu’elle a conçues pour être utilisées sur le Le Macintosh original, qui comprenait Chiacgo, Genève et Monaco, est toujours utilisé de nos jours, mais sous des formes plus fines.

Le Macintosh a été mis en vente en janvier 1984 au prix de 2 495 dollars. Ce n'était pas bon marché, mais le rapport qualité-prix était bon, et cela se reflétait dans les ventes. Au début du mois de mai de la même année, Apple avait atteint le chiffre historique de 70 000 unités livrées, ce qui a probablement été aidé en grande partie par une publicité remarquable dirigée par Ridley Scott.

Découvrez comment l'iPhone 5s se compare au Macintosh 128k d'origine

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Annonce "1984" d'Apple

Personne ne nierait jamais que le Macintosh d'origine était une œuvre de génie. C'était petit, relativement bon marché (pour sa journée) et sympathique. Cette interface utilisateur graphique – interface utilisateur grand public – nous a fourni tous les outils dont nous pourrions avoir besoin pour produire un travail riche en graphismes dont les coûts seraient bien plus élevés que sur n'importe quelle autre plate-forme.

Pourtant, dès le départ, il risquait de nous décevoir.

Vous voyez, Apple l'avait construit pour être quelque chose d'assez stupéfiant. Cela allait changer le monde informatique, nous a-t-on dit, et à mesure que le jour du lancement approche, le battage médiatique continue de croître. C'était un pari, un gros, auquel toute autre entreprise aurait probablement renoncé.

Mais aucune autre entreprise n’a employé Steve Jobs.

Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.

He put in a call to ChiatDay, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios in the UK, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.

The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.

International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.

So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.

Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and ChiatDay turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’

It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it's considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age's list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.

Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking ChiatDay to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.

One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. ChiatDay offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.

As Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, "Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. 'I think we ought to go for it,' he told his team."

Thank goodness they did.

There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.

Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn't have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.

The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company's future, and kicked off a line of computers that's still with us today – albeit in a very different configuration.

It's perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.

'Lemmings' once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for – and a switch to Macintosh Office.

It wasn't a great success. As sterndesign's Apple Matters explains, the advert "left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea."

Wired put it succinctly: "Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence – something very different from the cheers that greeted '1984' a year earlier."

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The Macintosh and the DTP revolution

The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs' spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic '1984' advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][ifitwasreallygoingtothriveItfounditintheshapeofPageMakerbackedupbytherevolutionaryAppleLaserWriterprinter[ifitwasreallygoingtothriveItfounditintheshapeofPageMakerbackedupbytherevolutionaryAppleLaserWriterprinter[ifitwasreallygoingtothriveItfounditintheshapeofPageMakerbackedupbytherevolutionaryAppleLaserWriterprinter[ifitwasreallygoingtothriveItfounditintheshapeofPageMakerbackedupbytherevolutionaryAppleLaserWriterprinter

The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 – just over a year after the Macintosh – was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood – the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh – running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.

It wasn't the first laser printer – just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn't the first digital music player – but, in true Apple style, it was différent, and that's what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.

It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.

As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, "Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer."

So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing – so far – was the software.

Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term 'Desktop Publishing', heard of Apple's intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac's graphical interface and the printer's high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.

The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn't see again until we all started reading online.

Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work – which is perhaps why it's favoured by so many designers today. It's hard to believe, in an age where we're used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.

By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m – an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe.

PageMaker versus QuarkXPress

But good things don't last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).

Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.

Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.

Quark versus InDesign

Of course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story to anyone in publishing. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of InDesign and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.

PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here.

InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.

Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.

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Jobs vs Sculley

It's all been good news so far in our story of Apple's founding and early development. We're still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it's offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.

To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.

Steve Jobs may have been Apple's most public face, and the co-founder of the company, but he wasn't its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn't yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he'd acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple's initial investors, but he didn't want to run the company long term.

When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking 'Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?'

Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley's reminiscences: 'I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.'

That's exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, 'At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others' sentences.'

Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it's perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn't like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.

From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.

Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn't enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.

That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn't helped by a downturn in the company's fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn't hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.

That's exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 – just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.

Talking to the BBC in 2012, Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: "When the Macintosh Office [Apple’s office-wide computing environment including networked Macintosh computers, file server, and a laser printer] was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn't afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac's problems. That's what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support."

But Jobs wasn't ready to go without a fight.

Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.

The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs' fate was sealed.

Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple's chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.

This wasn't Jobs' style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that's what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.

If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.

DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue, "Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run."

So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we'll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months. Read next: 12 Apple execs you need to know

Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve Jobs

The most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn't entirely unexpected – and the news wasn't greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs' departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple's Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line – particularly at a time when the company's focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.

Apple post-Jobs (the first time)

In the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn't be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.

However, with Jobs now busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should – in theory – deliver similar or higher profits.

The policy had its own nickname, '55 or die', which was a nod to Gassée's dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.

When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple's new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It's important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn't always the case.

When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.

Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn't want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.

Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour display

This would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn't simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple's established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.

It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it's difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the iPod touch to understand the impact it must have had.

Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple's behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple's later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn't see the light of day before Gassée's own departure from Apple.

His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple's most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.

What Gassée did after Apple

The fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple's shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system.

As we'll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).

Today, amongst other things, Gassée writes a blog, here.

Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we'll discover below.

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Apple's decline and IBM and Microsoft's rise

So Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in its story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.

That wasn't its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 – a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.

Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.

It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today – and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.

Apple's Quadra and Performa

Apple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).

The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple's computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).

It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn't quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing – so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts.

It's unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we're used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It's hypnotic – and it's hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.

Macintosh Performa 6300

You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia, and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded – and to which it has since returned – had by now been lost.

Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn't always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.

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The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and Motorola

Together, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP – the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).

Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.

Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.

AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.

If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP's legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.

The PowerPC years

If you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you'll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM (yes IBM) and Motorola – the AIM Alliance – it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.

PowerPC 601 Processor Prototype

The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM's POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn't an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.

This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.

The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994's Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra's successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.

However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line's latter years.

Power Macintosh 6100

The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename 'Carl Sagan'. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company 'Billions and Billions', which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter 'B' when saying the word 'billions' so people wouldn't confuse it with millions.

Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple's development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that "one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'butt-head'".

Carl Sagan

Eventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.

The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century's first decade (we're jumping ahead a bit here to tie-up the PowerPC story), fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn't evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple's high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.

PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5s

Those in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs' 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.

Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they'd frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, 'It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. "As we look ahead… we may have great products right now, and we've got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come," Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. "[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map."'

You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they'd have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.

This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard, the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn't install it by default – you had to add it manually.)

PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it's a popular choice for embedded processing.

Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC's dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs' company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple's survival.

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Apple and Microsoft

If IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft's on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you'd never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that's probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.

IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16% over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft's revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can – including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.

Apple, on the other hand, Besoins Bureau. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.

So, a peace has broken out – and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs' return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn't really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.

Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. "To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different," he said in 1984, "it takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh – of all the machines I've seen – is the only one that meets that standard."

That's pretty flattering, but there's a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn't see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple's eyes, went on to imitate its products a little aussi faithfully.

As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox's implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Windows and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling "our friends up north".

That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.

Microsoft Windows 1.0

Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.

However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system – such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on – should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.

The court didn't buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.

Microsoft Windows 2.0

However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they'd been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al's tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.

Ultimately, Xerox's act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.

Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.

Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn't, it's possible there might be no Mac today. Pourquoi? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn't do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.

Business users wouldn't switch to a platform that didn't support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments – particularly those in mixed-platform offices – often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.

So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates, who was then Microsoft's CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.

In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac's default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house – Safari – Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.

Apple in the 1990s

Apple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There's only so long a company can survive like that.

Looking back on it now, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.

In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple's current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.

To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn't immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.

Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple's in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.

But something had to give – and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company's history.

Jobs returns to Apple

Apple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren't going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.

BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple's director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple's board of Jobs' intention to oust CEO John Sculley – the act that led to Jobs' departure from the company.

NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT – the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT's hardware didn't go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.

The stakes couldn't have been higher for either man – or either company – but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.

If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn't have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself – not just its operating system – for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.

The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.

Making changes

Buying NeXT wasn't enough to fix Apple's ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.

Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company's CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.

Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four – two for consumers and two for businesses – and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.

At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren't doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn't good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple's operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% – but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.

The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple's computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or – worse – decline.

Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, 'What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.'

Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies' relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff.

"Team," the email read. "It turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today."

And were things "different tomorrow"?

Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

If you'd like to reminisce more, visit our Apple History Zone, where you can find:

How the Mac changed, and continues to change, the world30 Apple people from the history of the Mac5 Macs that changed everything Apple timeline in pictures and videoThe 11 worst Apple products of all time24 milestones in the Mac's 30-year historyApple quiz – The Mac