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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > This Week in Apple History: February 20 through 26

This Week in Apple History: February 20 through 26
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Feb 22, 2016, 04:53 PM
 
You know it's got to be coincidence when you're slicing through 40 years of Apple, and you find bad things happening in the same weeks of the year. This week of February 20 through 26 in the years 1976 to 2016 has some of Apple's worst moments -- but arguably, also some of its best.

Just to be clear on one thing: there are many situations where it is far from coincidence that a company has good or bad times in specific weeks of the year -- or rather, when we get to know about them. All companies have a financial year-end, large companies have to have quarterly earnings conference calls, every business that sells anything has peaks and troughs in the year. Yet beside all of that, this is always a tumultuous time for Apple.

But first...

We're looking at the four decades of Apple as a company, but for once let us skip back just a little further. On February 23, 1955, some 61 years ago now -- but just 21 years before Apple was formed -- Steve Jobs was born. Sometimes slicing through history a week at a time gives you an uncomfortable perspective: Steve Jobs would end up living for 2,954 weeks, and that seems such a short time.

Bad days

"Imagine the disincentive to software development, if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name ... Without legal restraints on such copying, companies like Apple could not afford advance the state of the art." (Quote via Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen W. Linzmayer.)

That's typically shrewd, clear commentary -- from Bill Gates. He said that in the New York Times in 1983, after Apple had successfully battled the now-forgotten Franklin Computer Corporation that had copied code to make Apple II clones. Yet 12 years later, Gates's Microsoft Windows finally beat the Mac that it so flagrantly copied.



It had been a long fight: Apple sued on March 17, 1988, Microsoft countersued, and it went to appeal. It nearly went to the US Supreme Court too, but on February 21, 1995, the court said no. It would not hear the case. That the legal contention took seven years is less of a surprise than that it reportedly cost only $10 million.

It had been a long fight, that was also lost well before February of 1995. Windows 3.1 was everywhere, and the Mac was slipping into nowhere. You can argue that Gates and Microsoft brought the GUI to the masses, and you can argue that they wouldn't have done if it weren't for the Mac. However, you can't argue that Apple was blameless: maybe there was nothing it could do, but it shot itself in the foot -- and it aimed very well.

For Apple had sold Microsoft a licence to use certain ideas, and Gates, always a better strategist and business legal mind than designer or programmer, wrung more out of the contract than expected. John Sculley, commenting the next year, said of Apple's contract with Microsoft that the firm "didn't realize we'd signed an agreement that would jeopardize our rights in the future. Our lawyers weren't good enough."

Say all this to Bill Gates, and there's a fair chance he'll throw a quote back at you that he used in a book. Jobs reportedly said: "When we were developing the Macintosh, we kept in mind a famous quote of Picasso: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' What do I think of the suit? I personally don't understand it ... can I copyright gravity? No."

Earlier bad days

Windows won in 1995, but before it was even a gleam in anyone's blue screen of death, Apple was struggling. So much so that February 25, 1981 became known as Black Wednesday, for how many people were made redundant.

Compared to how many people now work for Apple, the number does not seem huge: it was just 40. Yet that number included over half of the total number working on the hit Apple II computer. Everyone who still had a job at Apple at the end of the morning was brought over to a meeting, where CEO Michael Scott provided beer and explained why he'd done it.



He said he "used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn't fun anymore, I'd quit. But now I've changed my mind -- when it isn't fun any more, I'll fire people until it's fun again." That's not the most appealing quote, but the situation was more complicated than it sounded. Andy Hertzfeld, from the original Mac team says, on Folklore.org that Scott "seemed a little shaken and unsure."

His reasoning was that the company was in financial difficulty because it had been growing too fast. More, that some bad hiring decisions had meant some poor managers had then hired some poor staff. Hertzfeld says he was told that morning that three out of four managers had been let go, and: "I thought the managers were more or less incompetent, so that didn't bother me."

If this was Scott's idea of making the firm fun again, though, he didn't get to enjoy much more of it: at the instigation of Mike Markkula, who'd originally hired him, he lost the CEO title, and gained a practically honorary one of vice-chairman. Some 19 weeks and 2 days later on July 10, 1981, Scott was out of Apple, too. Officially he resigned, but he didn't leave to join another company or take up another post anywhere.

Other Jobs

You're wondering what Jobs was doing at this time. He was the one month into running the existing Macintosh project, and on this same day he effectively dismissed Jef Raskin, the originator of the idea. That doesn't appear to have been part of the Black Wednesday redundancies, and Raskin had been on an extended leave, so perhaps might not have chosen to come back.

With him off the Mac and the company unsettled by Black Wednesday, Hertzfeld and probably everyone else thought about leaving. The following day, Scott talked with Hertzfeld and the engineer that was assigned to the Macintosh project. It took a few steps, and Hertzfeld was questioned by Jobs first, who also checked out everyone else's opinion of him.

It just didn't take very long: at 4:30PM on Thursday February 26, 1981, Jobs takes Hertzfeld over to the Mac team. Hertzfeld wanted a few days to finish his work on the Apple II, but Jobs just pulls the mains plug out of his computer and takes it to his car.

Jobs drives Hertzfeld over to where the Mac team was working, showed him where he'd be sitting, and left him. "I returned to my new desk and looked inside the drawers," says Hertzfeld. "I was surprised to see that it was still full of someone else's stuff. In fact, the bottom drawer had all kinds of unusual stuff, including various kinds of model airplanes, and some photography equipment. I later found out that Steve had assigned me to Jef Raskin's old desk, which he hadn't had time to move out of yet.

Better days

Hertzfeld would prove key to the development of the Macintosh, so ultimately this was a very good move for Apple. There were other good moves, and other good news, to come in this week across the years, too. On either February 21 or 22, 2001, Apple engineer Jon Rubinstein was shown a 1.8-inch hard drive by Toshiba. They were discussing other Apple projects, and this new invention comes up as practically an afterthought; Toshiba effectively said it had this device, and no idea what it could be used for.

Rubinstein has an idea. He's in Tokyo when he's shown this miniature hard drive, and Jobs ins actually in town too: he was staying over ahead of delivering a keynote speech at Macworld Tokyo 2001. Jobs and Rubinstein meet, and the deal begins to secure what would become the heart of the iPod.

One year later, on February 26, 2002, Apple won the first-ever Technical Grammy Award. It was for how Apple equipment had so radically altered the way that music was recorded and produced.



Said Jobs: "We love music, and are thrilled to play a part in how music is created and enjoyed. We are honored to be receiving our industry's first Technical Grammy, and we look forward to making many more contributions in the years ahead."

Fast-forward four years to February 23, 2006, and the one billionth song is sold on iTunes. It was "Speed of Sound" by Coldplay, and was bought by Alex Ostrovsky of West Bloomfield, Michigan. He got an iMac, 10 iPods, and a $10,000 iTunes gift card -- and Apple set up a scholarship in his name at the Juilliard School of Music. Newswire called it the Alex Ostrovsky Scholarship for Meaningless Luck, and Silicon Beat said it was the "Lucky Bastard" Scholarship, but whatever you dub it, there's no sign of it today. It probably lasted about as long as a $10,000 credit in the iTunes Store.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Feb 22, 2016 at 11:06 PM. )
     
ibook_steve
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Feb 22, 2016, 09:29 PM
 
It's Andy Hertzfeld, not "Hertzfield".
Celebrating 10 years and 4000 posts on MacNN!
     
   
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