We've entered the second quarter of the year, and this is the tenth weekly slice of Apple history: we're taking the company's four decades, and seeing the growth and the similarities in the same weeks from 1976 to 2016. So far, it's been an eventful ride, and also a startling one -- as we've seen both Apple's hits and its misses repeatedly occurring in very similar ways. This week, it's as if the company and the technology industry got together to plan: with the start of Spring, people's minds turn to new ventures and new companies.
To see the most significant one in Apple's history, you have to look back just a little further to March 5, 1975, when at most a couple of dozen people met in Menlo Park, California. It's near Palo Alto and, at least today, is an affluent area -- but then it was the original base of the Homebrew Computer Club.
That initial meeting was at the home of co-founder Gordon French -- actually in his garage -- but after three sessions, he moved away for work, and at some early point the group relocated to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto itself. It's not clear now exactly when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak joined, but it is possible to get the very briefest peek at the club in action.
Take a look at 30 seconds or so of footage from an undated but early meeting.
It was directly as a result of attending the Homebrew Computer Club that Steve Wozniak created the Apple I computer. If nothing else ever came out of that club, that was pretty good. Actually, many companies came out of it, but at a stretch the only other one you may still have heard of was formed by Adam Osbourne, who in 1981 built what is considered the world's first portable computer.
Around that same time, IBM was entering the market with its PC, and on March 8, 1982m
InfoWorld magazine quoted Steve Jobs as saying: "It's curious to me that the largest computer company in the world couldn't even match the Apple II, which was designed in a garage six years ago."
In that same issue,
InfoWorld said that "Apple currently holds 23 per cent of the microcomputer market, which is reportedly worth $5 billion in sales this year. The Apple research-and-development budget has grown to $21 million from $100,000 in 1977. This effort has allowed the company to put more than 200 man-years of development into [Macintosh predecessor] Lisa's software development alone. By comparison, only two man-years went into Apple II development."
New directions and other homes
Take a look at March 5 through 11 in Apple's bleakest years, and you can see the company fracturing off in different directions. One that might have become a big success, and was arguably a vision of the future, was the Newton -- but in this week of 1990 its survival was under threat. Bill Atkinson, who had created HyperCard for the Mac and so perhaps pioneered the links we are so familiar clicking on the web today, called a meeting in his house.
It was March 11, 1990, and as well as Atkinson there was Susan Kare, who designed the Mac icons, plus Andy Hertzfeld, Marc Porat, Steve Capps, and then-CEO John Sculley. What Atkinson wanted to do was spin-off the Newton into its own new company. Scully said he wasn't sure what Newton really was, and asked Steve Capps to create a prototype in time for the next board meeting in April.
There had been an internal Apple project called Paradigm, which was meant to wean the company off its dependency on the Mac, but it hadn't been getting far, and it didn't get far: in May 1990, half of the group who had met in Atkinson's house formed a new company of their own. Atkinson, Porat, and Capps founded General Magic, which amongst other things worked to develop a "personal intelligent communicator." Despite initial promise, and then despite conflicting tensions with Apple over the latter's own Newton development, the company failed.
You can't say Apple didn't try to make Newton work: Sculley later claimed that $100 million had been spent on its development. Then, despite sometimes weak support for the device within Apple, there was a Newton Message Pad 2000 that was released during this week in 1997. It would be followed the same November by the Message Pad 2100, but that was the end for the Newton.
Also in 1997, specifically March 8, Apple renamed Mac OS 7.7 to 8. It was just a rename, OS 8 had nothing worth speaking of that wasn't in the last versions of System 7, and the change was done for one reason alone: it killed off the Mac clones. Apple had been pursuing clones, getting other manufacturers to make Mac-like computers, just as there were IBM PC clones aplenty, but the idea was failing.
Apple had been trying for years, yet wasn't getting a great deal of traction in the clone market: Compaq's vice president of corporate development was particularly blunt about it right at the start. When asked on March 7, 1994 what he thought of building a Mac clone, he said: "We have zero interest. Every application of significance that runs in the Mac environment runs in ours. And while it's attractive in terms of ease of use, Chicago [Windows 95] will blow the doors off the Mac operating system."
Unfortunately for Apple, some companies did take up the clones, and they were doing pretty well –– by taking away Apple's customers. We'll never really know, but it seems that Apple hoped the clones would mop up the cheaper market and bring in revenue while Apple itself continued with its high-value customers. That just didn't happen, and here was the company committed to licensing System 7 to these clone companies. Hence the end of System 7, and the start of OS 8.
Other clones
You don't have to be licensed to make clones of computers, though it helps. After the success in the late 1990s of the iMac, some PC manufacturers released machines "inspired" by Apple. It's similar to what would happen later with the iPhone and Samsung, but here Apple was not only livid, the Mac-like PC was successful. On March 8, 2000, Daewoo and Future Power became the last companies to agree to stop selling eMachines' eOne Windows PC.
If you're thinking that this week in Apple history seems to be mostly all about hardware, you're right. There was one last thing, though: on March 5, 2003,
Billboard magazine confirmed the rumors that Apple would soon be launching a music service.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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