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In the fall of 1983, I was living in San Francisco and writing for Popular Computing, one of the early computer magazines, when I got the call to go down to Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus to see a new product. Neither the Apple III nor the rather expensive Apple Lisa had been hits, but there were lots of rumors about something called the Macintosh.
When I got to campus, I was introduced to many key engineers who worked on the project, including Burrell Smith, the chief hardware designer; Andy Hertzfeld, who designed the input/output system and the user interface; Chris Espinosa, who worked on documentation; and Bill Atkinson, who worked on graphics and created MacPaint, the first modern drawing software for regular users. MacPaint in particular really impressed me. I had worked for an architectural magazine, so I was familiar with professional CAD systems, and MacPaint was much easier to use.
The Macintosh wasn't the first computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse—the Xerox Alto came first, and the Lisa had been out for a year already—but the Mac was much more accessible. The Lisa cost about $10,000, while the entry Mac started at $2,495—about $7,000 in today's dollars—still expensive but not completely out of reach. Of course, that didn't include a printer or a second floppy disk drive, both of which I thought you really needed to make the machine work.
I was impressed by the team and their dedication to making the Macintosh something special. "We designed it for ourselves,” Hertzfeld told me. “It was the greatest machine we could make."
Then I was introduced to Steve Jobs, who, even then, had the charisma and the energy to make him the focus of any room he entered. He told me that the Mac would become an industry standard, and I remember him describing the new computer as "insanely great." It was obvious he was intensely proud of the machine.
I soon received one of the first Macintoshes as a review unit; it had the developers’ names engraved on the inside of the case. In my review, I noted that the Mac’s 32-bit processor was state-of-the-art and faster than the 16-bit Intel CPUs that were then used in most PCs. And I said the graphical user interface made the software work more consistently than on previous machines, making it easier to learn new applications.
But I pointed out the difficulties Apple might have in establishing a third industry standard, after the Apple II and the IBM PC. “With the Macintosh,” I wrote, “Apple once again has demonstrated that it marches to a different drummer. As opposed to the endless stream of me-too IBM clones that are flooding the marketplace, Apple is offering buyers a totally different choice.”
Because I was reviewing the Mac, I had to return that early unit, but I wish I still had it today. I consider the advent of the Mac one of the most exciting times in the history of computing. Below are some more recollections from before, during, and after my 1991-2005 tenure as PC Magazine's editor-in-chief.
Hobnobbing With Jobs and Wozniak
About a year later, I sat down with Jobs, at which point he introduced me to Adobe’s John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who created PostScript, a language for representing graphics and fonts in printers. Apple included PostScript with its new LaserWriter, essentially launching the era of desktop publishing. I still remember how excited Jobs was over what he termed "God's own Helvetica."
During this period, I also met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak on a couple of occasions, usually at parties hosted by a mutual friend. Compared with Jobs, Wozniak was shy, though he was brilliant and often funny. I often think he doesn't get enough credit for creating the original Apple I and II, and perhaps even more important, the controller that made an inexpensive floppy drive possible.
The Macs of the mid-1980s are often glossed over, but one that really stands out in my memory is the Mac II, introduced in 1987. It was a much more powerful computer with a 68020 processor, 20MB hard drive, and support for 24-bit (16.7 million colors). It became my primary computer during my days at InfoWorld magazine. Color and graphics were big deals in a period where Windows was still nascent. Ever since then, I’ve used both Mac and Windows machines regularly.
My PC Magazine Years and Beyond
I started as editor-in-chief at the print PC Magazine in 1991, and for the first few years, the Macs, and later various Mac clones, were pretty much forgettable. But that changed after Jobs returned as Apple CEO in 1997.
That year, we gave Jobs our lifetime achievement award as part of PC Magazine's annual Technical Excellence program. He called to accept the award, waking me up in the middle of the night. He was gracious and said he’d be happy to receive it at the Comdex show later that year. But a few days later, someone from Apple called to say that Jobs would not, in fact, attend the actual award ceremony.
And that was typical of Jobs. Sometimes he could be incredibly persuasive—creating the well-known "reality distortion field." Other times, he could be very rude. I remember talking to him about a review we did that he didn't find positive enough. He said that PCs were boring and that we didn’t understand his machine at all.
Jobs shepherded the introduction of the first iMac, notable for its fancy colors, such as Bondi Blue, in 1998. Our review said the device "succeeds extremely well at being what it was intended to be: a fast, easy-to-use machine that will remain viable long after the warranty runs out."
But because we had also taken on and dismissed Apple's claim that it was up to three times as fast as similarly priced Windows machines of the era. Boy, did we hear from Macintosh fans. Meanwhile, we also get letters from Windows boosters, complaining we shouldn't cover the Mac in our magazine, to which we responded that we covered all sorts of personal computers.
Over the next few years, particularly after the introduction of the modern Mac OS, the Macs got better, resulting in more positive reviews. Sometimes Apple would complain about negative reviews, and other times Jobs would specifically call out a positive review from PC Magazine in one of his famous keynotes, which was nice PR for us.
I remember attending lots of Apple events after that. The one I most vividly recall was the introduction of the iPad 2 in 2011, where a noticeably gaunt Jobs showed off what would be his final hardware product. It’s hard to believe he's been gone for almost 15 years now.
With Tim Cook at the helm, the company has continued to introduce groundbreaking products, although not quite with Jobs' signature flair. One of the company's most impressive accomplishments, in my mind, was transitioning the Mac line to Apple's own processors, which gave the MacBooks great performance and, in general, much better battery life than their Windows-based competitors at the time. I was surprised by how well older applications continued to run and how quickly things migrated to the new processors.
To this day, I use both Windows and Mac notebooks, as well as iPhones and Android devices. I’m still incredibly impressed at what Apple is doing, and I'll be watching closely to see what the next decades will bring.