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What we don't understand is how historians can be so certain about events that happened centuries ago: it is remarkably hard to be precise about details of Apple's history over just the last 40 years. Throughout this anniversary year -- Apple is 40, and MacNN is celebrating its 20th anniversary -- we're slicing the decades week by week. Every single week has proved to be packed with tumultuous failures, huge successes, key people, and not-so-key products. Yet just as we found with January, there are also hugely important milestones that cannot be pinned down to a day or a week.
They're too important to miss, though, so here's the February mop-up of key Apple events. Do read our weekly instalments for extra news, and more on the curiously-repeating parallels that run through Apple history, but here are the highlights, and especially the ones we can only tie to the month of February across 1976 to 2016.
Hold on a moment
Before we focus in on the years since the Apple company was formed, let's take a couple of little peeks further back. For it was in February 1955 -- actually February 23 -- that Steven Paul Jobs was born. Skip forward to February 1974, and the adopted Jobs has grown up, left home and now come back. He returned to live with his adoptive parents in Los Altos, and walked into a job at Atari. Literally.
He saw an ad in the San Jose Mercury that said "Have fun, make money," went to the Atari offices, and refused to leave until they employed him. Steve Jobs got a job as Atari employee #40, earning $5 per hour as a general technician. Woz was already at work: it wasn't his first paid job, but the previous year, on February 20, 1973 was a significant one: Steve Wozniak joined Hewlett-Packard.
Speaking of Woz
On February 7, 1981, Steve Wozniak was in a plane crash that briefly affected his memory, and ultimately made him decide to leave Apple to return to education.
The crash was probably his fault. He had bought a six-seater Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC -- which cost him a quarter of a million dollars -- and had previously flown no more than 50 hours. With his then-girlfriend, the sportswoman and Apple employee Candice Carson Clark, plus her brother and his girlfriend, they planned to fly to San Diego. They were going to design wedding rings there, but on takeoff from what was then the Sky Part Airport in Scotts Valley, Woz appears to have taken off too soon.
The aircraft stalled in the air, and according to the book Apple Confidential "bounced down the runway, went through two fences, and crashed into an embankment." Clark needed plastic surgery, and Woz had "severe facial injuries, a missing tooth, and a concussion that prevented him from forming new memories." The other two passengers had only minor injuries.
After his treatment, Woz chose to leave Apple, and instead complete his degree at De Anza College, University of California, Berkley. Don't look for him as Steve Wozniak, though: he enrolled as Rocky Raccoon Clark.
The Bicycle
It was some time that same month in February 1981, that the name Macintosh was changed to Bicycle. You didn't notice. Nor did anyone else, really: it was a reference to an ad in Scientific American, where Apple claimed that computers were like bicycles for the mind.
However, it probably was less about philosophical pondering, and more about getting rid of other people's ideas. Steve Jobs was about a month into running the Macintosh project, and it's a bit of a question: did he create the Mac as we know it, or was it Jef Raskin's idea? The answer is probably "yes:" while he's less well-known than Jobs, it is Raskin's work that led to the start of the Mac project, and you can even see his design intentions for simplicity in how Apple works today. Yet he got his chance to make exactly the machine he'd planned, and that was the unsuccessful Canon Cat: if you see it, you don't think Macintosh.
So Steve Jobs does deserve at least a lot of the credit for what he engendered in the team, and what he drove them all to produce, but in February 1981, there was no place for both Jobs and Raskin. Jef Raskin had started out in documentation, and was offered the chance to return to that, but declined -- and took a leave of absence that became his leaving the Mac project.
With him gone, Jobs and manager Rod Holt soon decreed that the code name for the new computer would no longer be Macintosh, but instead would be Bicycle. The reason you can't buy an iBicycle today is that the Macintosh team thought it was as daft a name as you do, and simply never used it.
Black Wednesday
The date of February 25, 1981 is significant at Apple because it saw so many redundancies in one day that it became named Black Wednesday. Then-CEO Michael Scott decided that the company had grown too quickly and, moreover, that they'd hired some poor managers, who'd then hired some poor staff to match. So he fired about 40 people. In today's Apple, that's not very many at all, but in 1981 it was huge: it meant three out of four managers, and around half of the number working on the Apple II.
Unsurprisingly, the people left standing at the end of this day of unexpected firings were a bit jittery, and one of them in particular had doubts about staying with Apple. Andy Hertzfeld's comments about this to his manager led to Mike Scott talking to him, and then in very quick order to his being assigned to the Macintosh project under Steve Jobs.
Black Wednesday was a bruise for Apple -- and it would lead directly to Scott's own departure later that year -- but it got Hertzfeld working on the Mac, and that was deeply important to the development of the computer. Just over one year later on February 10, 1982, Hertfeld became one of the people to autograph the inside of their creation: while no user was ever meant to see it, each of the original Macs had the signatures of team reproduced inside the case.
It was a matter of pride, and that was something Apple did differently. Speaking in an interview for Playboy, Jobs said at the time that he thought "the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build."
That interview was published some time in February 1985, and while the Mac wasn't doing brilliantly, Apple was getting a lot of attention, and had been for a long time. Back in February 15, 1982, Time magazine profiled Silicon Valley startup businesses, and put Steve Jobs on the cover. In February 1984, the influential Byte magazine devoted the major part of an issue to the Macintosh, where it revealed that MacPaint had been going to be called Mackelangelo (you may have to say it aloud to see the reason). Then on
Continue on to February 1985, and while his Playboy interview was on newsstands, Steve Jobs was being honored by President Ronald Reagan, along with Steve Wozniak, with the first National Medal for Technology. They got it for forming Apple, and they also got it just a couple of weeks after Woz had acrimonously left the company. Awkward.
The pane of Windows
Ten years later, on February 21, 1995, Microsoft beat Apple over Windows. It was the end of a very long fight, and it was more of a resigned whimper than a clash. On this day, the US Supreme Court refused to hear Apple's appeal, and that was how the seven-year legal battle came to its end. It's hard to imagine that it would've made any difference if Apple had got its appeal, though, as by then Windows 3.1 was dominating the world, and Windows 95 was about to launch.
Steve Jobs
There are many points in Steve Jobs's story that can't be pinned down to more than a month, but we do know that it was in February 2005 that he asked screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to help him write what would become his famous commencement speech at Stanford. If you're now thinking that this explains how eloquent that speech was, how genuinely moving, then no. Sorkin agreed to help, but simply never got around to it in time. Jobs wrote it himself, though Sorkin said he may have tuned a word or two in later interviews.
Clearly part of what made that speech memorable was how Jobs addressed mortality, and another hard-to-specify moment in his story was to do with this in February 2008. Kathryn Smith, a friend of Jobs's wife Laurene Powell, took a walk with him. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, she said that Jobs told her that "when he feels really bad, he just concentrates on the pain, goes into the pain, and that seems to dissipate it." Isaacson habitually follows a Jobs story with someone else contradicting it, and then rarely if ever counters the countering, so in this case he concludes in his own words: "That wasn't exactly true, however. When Jobs was in pain, he let everyone around him know it."
A year later, sometime late in February 2009, Jobs was put on a liver donor list in Tennessee -- he was already on California's list -- and was declining. Around this time, Tim Cook offered to donate part of his own liver, but Jobs refused.
One more year on, and Jobs had gotten a donor, and in late January had been on stage to announce the iPad. Right after that, in early February 2010, he went on a short tour of discussions and meetings to do with Newsstand. He met with the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and with Rupert Murdoch. The latter was a discussion that continued over the next few months, and by June 2010 would have Jobs telling Murdoch: "[Your] Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you're not careful."
FBiOS
No history of Apple is ever going to skip over the events of this month in this year: February 2016. We don't yet have the benefit of historical hindsight, and we can't begin to guess the impact of this month on the company, but right now Apple is refusing to comply with a government order regarding security. It's a big deal for the company that President Ronald Reagan honored in February 1985. We're slicing Apple history into weekly articles, and 1,617 weeks from the company's White House honor to February 16, 2016, Tim Cook wrote a message for Apple customers that said in part: "We are challenging the FBI's demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country."
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