Previously on this week by week slicing of Apple history, we noted how Steve Wozniak had been dangerously tardy in 1976 about getting a legal release from his employer Hewlett Packard. Without that permission, the Apple I computer would've legally belonged to HP, and by the time Woz got the paperwork sorted out, he and Jobs were already deep into making their first sale.
We were sorry to have teased you with how you'd have to wait until this week to see that Woz learned his lesson a little too well. Now we're very sorry to tease you that he would do something even more daft -- that we'll tell you about in November.
For this week, though, remember that in 1976 he had left his paperwork too late. On April 30, 1987, Woz filed for divorce from his second wife, the former Olympic kayak champion Candice Carson Clark, and he cited irreconcilable differences -- but did it too early. According to the
Victoria Advocate newspaper, "one of the issues in their break-up was that he wanted more children." It's a bit more complicated than that, but when Woz filed his divorce papers, Clark turned out to be two months pregnant.
Candice Carson Clark, date unknown, via FamousFix.com/dating
It's complicated and it's messy, but that
Victoria Advocate piece was published when the divorce was finalized in July 1988, and it reported that Woz was now suing Clark for slander. He claimed that she'd alleged he was an unfit father, amongst other accusations, and Clark told the newspaper: "I don't know why he hates [me] so much, but that's what it sounds like. Maybe it's guilt because he left his pregnant wife."
Anyway. This was all near enough 30 years ago, so focus on this instead: their middle child is now USOC Assistant Athlete Ombudsman for the United States Olympic Committee. Her mother was a medalist in the 1973 ICF Canoe Slalom World Championships, and Sara Clark is now working for the Olympics, plus she's swum and dived in competition. We haven't moved from this iMac while looking up her details, and we're exhausted.
Woz and sports
Back to Apple history, and some time in May 1977. We can't pin this down any better than that, but during this month in that year, Steve Wozniak was responsible for whether the company would give a pay raise to Randy Wigginton. This school friend of Woz and Steve Jobs's was Apple employee #6, and ultimately would be responsible for MacWrite, Full Impact, and with Woz, also the software for Apple's Disk II. You're not gasping about that last one, as it's just a disk drive, but in 1978 it was a big deal -- because the software was doing what had previously required expensive hardware to pull off.
So Wigginton is a clever fellow, but in May 1977 he was stopping by the Apple offices after school, and getting paid an hourly rate for developing software. Woz concluded that his work was good, but something more was needed. According to
Fire in the Valley: "Woz was irritated that he had to walk around the block to get to a nearby 7-Eleven, because a large fence blocked direct access to the store. If Wigginton would remove a large board from underneath a section of the fence, Woz could pass under it and Wigginton would get his raise. The next day Woz found the board on his desk, and Wigginton started earning $3.50 an hour."
That Disk II became a key but somewhat forgotten part of Apple history, and without it, no one would remember the Apple II computer -- and there wouldn't be an Apple today. The Apple II has rather faded from view, and now comes a long way behind the Mac in any history of Apple, but it hung around for a surprisingly long time. The first version was launched in 1977 and the final one, the Apple IIGS, was discontinued in October 1993. Even that wasn't quite the end for this stubborn computer: it lasted two more years as an accessory for the Mac.
From J Mayrand's Computer Museum via Apple II History
Again, we can't pin it down further than the month, but in May 1995 Apple ceased production on its Apple IIe Card for Macintosh LC. We tend to think of the Apple II as being replaced by the Mac, but there was this 11-year overlap -- and the older computer was important enough that this card was made. Slotted into an LC, the "low cost" Mac introduced in October 1990, the $199 card made the computer acted like a 128K Apple IIe. Well, it acted like a slow Apple IIe, but there was enough demand for Apple to make it from 1991 to May 1995.
Speed and demand
Flash forward over a decade to the late 2000s, and the fondness people had for the Apple II range seems hard to fathom, and even as Mac fans, we were decreasingly focused on the machine and more on what we could do with it. So on May 1, 2008, what now seems inevitable happened: from that day on, movies were released on the iTunes Store on the same day that they came out on DVD. Now this day-and-date release, as it's called, is fading away again, but only because nobody's buying shiny discs any more.
Back then, it was a big deal. Apple's Eddy Cue said: "We're thrilled to bring iTunes Store customers new films for purchase day-and-date with the DVD release. We think movie fans will love being able to buy their favorites from major and independent studios." He's said more interesting things, but give the guy a break: this is a quote from an Apple press release. That same release gave examples of the exciting movies that were out this week: they included
Alvin and the Chipmunks, and something called
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. There was also
Cloverfield and
Juno, though.
While we pretty effortlessly maintain that Apple gear is the best for getting your work done, it is also rather good at entertainment. At one end of the scale, you have this iTunes Store movie business -- though by this week in 2016, that's surely under threat from the likes of Netflix -- and on the other, you have the iPad.
On May 3, 2010, Apple sold its millionth iPad, and it had taken barely a month. Steve Jobs: "One million iPads in 28 days -- that's less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone. Demand continues to exceed supply, and we're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more customers."
In 2016, Apple has had its worst financial results in a long time, even if the definition of "worst" is laughable when you're making that much money, yet we're clearly still in a golden age for the company. It sounds fawning PR-speak to use terms like golden ages, but the
MacNN week-by-week slicing through the company's history has shown plenty of silver, bronze and wooden ages. Time does tend to make you reevaluate history, and especially when dark patches are followed by preposterous success, you do leap to conclusions about the firm, you do tend to quickly form opinions about the people involved. You're almost always wrong ... almost.
We've been critical of ex-CEO John Sculley, and right now the man is teetering on a return to favor with a
business book, a media tour, and finely-honed revision of his part in Apple history that makes Mac fans sound petty. So forget us fans, and instead turn to a panel of professors from what CNBC described as "top business schools" and survey them on the "records of CEOs who most effectively destroyed value and innovation while displaying the worst management skills throughout their management tenure."
On April 30, 2009, Portfolio.com detailed "The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time," and they nominated John Sculley as number 14. (Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld is top.) Curiously, the Portfolio site itself doesn't retain that list, but you can
read the whole thing via many others, including CNBC. Of Sculley, CNBC's conclusion is that "though he was a brilliant marketer at Pepsi, he proved to be disastrous as the top manager of a tech company, and unsophisticated about the technology field."
Not that we could do any better. Still, for his 1987 salary of $2.2m ($4.6m today), we'd have a good go.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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