I was fairly lucky in that I came into computing just in its infancy with the IBM 5150 and a few years later the Apple Macintosh hit the streets...that is when Apple hit mainstream businesses, there were a few before that namely the Lisa and the Apple IIe, but the Macintosh is the one that stirred the imagination.
Now although I'm not what you would call an avid fan of Apple Inc and their closed proprietary business model, I have to admire the man Steve Jobs, love him or loathe him, his single vision to simplify computers by removing them from the hands of geeks (like me) in darkened rooms and transforming them into everyday objects such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which to so many have become must have gadgets.... Back in the 1980's computers were mainly hideous things bolted together with self tapping screws, cumbersome and heavy and by today's standards incredibly slow...
Then along came the stylish Mac, first of all it had 128Kb of ram, but above all it gave the impression of something entirely different to the offering from IBM, it had a mouse !! now that wasn't a new thing the Unix world and X windows had used a mouse for some time, but Apple were the first to bring it mainstream, the monitor was infinitely higher resolution which was paper white with black characters, just like written pages... IBM on the other hand had green screen, low resolution monitors... on looks alone the Mac won hands down.... However in its early days it was seen as a toy, as most mainstream businesses used IBM and DOS (Disk Operating System) or the unimaginative A:> .... yes we were still using floppy disks in those early days, the first hard disks were quite a long way away, and the first ones that came out were hideously expensive.
I remember marvelling at the first hard disk when it had 5MB of storage it was enormous and heavy like a house brick, but WOW it had 5MB of storage on it !!!
a hard drive that size now could hold 9 or 10 Terabytes....
Apple did things differently their floppy disk drives had no eject button and they only had one drive, eventually hard disk started appearing in Macintosh's but Apple always were very expensive to buy in some cases twice the price of the equivalent IBM, so to many it was a luxury they could ill afford... they did however practically take over in the printing and graphics side of the industry, it took IBM compatible computers many years to compete with Apple on graphics and image manipulation, by that time Apple was so entrenched within that industry they could never be toppled.....He was also responsible for the first laser printer hitting the market the Apple Laserwriter...
However not all went well for Apple, Steve Jobs was fired in the 1980's because sales of Mac's bottomed out and slowly Apple lost momentum and market share... to the point where Microsoft had to bail them out with an injection of cash... but it was an entirely selfish act on Microsoft's part because if Apple went under Microsoft would come under the scrutiny of the monopolies commission and could/would be broken up as a result of Apple's demise...
Steve went on to found NeXT and he "dabbled" in a few other companies such as Pixar and he gained stocks in Disney, eventually Apple bought NeXT so that it could implement its technology into Apple products and a few months later Steve Jobs was back at the helm of his first company.... the rest is history and what followed can only be described as a slew of iconic must have devices which captured an entire generation, such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad.... but without Steve's involvement and his vision in the early years Apple would not have become what it is today....
So I'm glad I was around to witness the very first Apple computers and see the humble beginnings they came from, I repaired Apple IIe's and Lisa's and Macintosh's... I even reverse engineered their "Fat Mac upgrade" which at the time cost over £4000 to upgrade via Apple to 512KB of memory, which they were none too impressed about but could nothing about because their customers were willing to void their warranty to get it for £1000....
One thing I will never forget is how badly a humble looking Macintosh could send you flying across the room if you dared to ignore the EHT discharge warnings and accidentally touched the anode cap from the monitor in that tightly packed Macintosh case......even after you had discharged it you kept on discharging it because it seemed to get high voltage from nowhere.... many a time I was caught out with that....
I used to have a letter signed by Steve Jobs sent to the company I worked for at the time to "cease and desist" from upgrading Macintosh's I should have kept it......he was litigious even then....
But it's a sad day, the world has lost a great man, who's drive and ambition probably won't be seen again for a long time, and so young too, he had a lot more to give......
