• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“No, no, no,” Murray said earnestly. “For writing, for typing as well.”

They gathered around the long conference table with Murray standing by a flip chart covered with five basic questions about Macintosh.

“Celles sont des bonnes questions,” Folon said as he slid a small tape recorder onto the table.

“Macintosh,” explained Murray, “is a code name. But it has taken on a personality of its own. It is more than a fruit. Mac means the machine. The man. The Personality. The Character.”

“What is a Macintosh?” asked Ghiringelli.

“It’s an apple,” answered Murray.

“An apple?” Paola Ghiringelli asked again.

“Yes,” said Murray. “There are Golden Delicious, Pippins; there are probably ten kinds of apple.”

“Ah! Macintosh is a kind of apple,” Ghiringelli exclaimed.

Folon spoke with his hands. “In Europe,” Millek translated, “the word mac makes people think of machine. He thinks of speed. He thinks of a big guy. He thinks of macho.”

“I think it’s a nice name,” Folon said quietly, “but in Europe it’s far from apple.”

Murray explained the differences among all Apple’s computers and said, “We do not want to sell it as a technology machine. We want the product to have a personality and we want people to buy it because of its personality. We want to make it a cult product. We want people to buy it for its image as well as its utility.”

He pointed to another question on the chart and asked rhetorically, “Who will use it? It will be used on desks. The desks are in offices. The desks are in big offices . . . little offices . . . big cities . . . little cities . . . in colleges . . . . in the U.S. . . . in Europe . . . all over the world.”

Millek exhaled and turned to Murray. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is getting a bit complicated. In French when you say bureau it means ‘desk’ and ‘office.’ When you start saying desk in an office, it gets complicated.”

“Is it secret?” asked Ghiringelli.

“Very,” said Murray.

“We have many friends at Olivetti and IBM,” Ghiringelli added.

“It’s very, very secret,” Murray repeated.

“Don’t talk to me about it,” Folon shivered.

Suddenly Murray paused. “I don’t know how to say this.”

“What?” asked Millek.

“User interface,” said Murray.

“Don’t say that, for God’s sake,” Millek said.

“I want to say it’s easy to use,” Murray continued.

“That’s better.” Millek sighed.

Murray continued with a brief history of Apple, annotated with sales numbers and employee count. He and Folon talked about the possibility of Folon’s designing posters and a series of post-cards and working alongside one of the programmers to produce a game to accompany the computer. He described what he thought would be the eventual world market for personal computers. He then checked off the countries where he thought Apple wouldn’t find buyers for Macs and concluded, “Not China, not Russia, not India. Well, maybe one or two people in India.”

“In China it could be marvelous,” Ghiringelli said with assurance. “They are very lazy. They count with an abacus. They will like it very much.”

WHAT A MOTHERBOARD

The push to complete the successor to the Apple computer was given greater urgency by the immovable threat of the First West Coast Computer Faire. There was an indignant tone to early advertisements for the fair. It was almost as if the Silicon Valley hobbyists felt their rightful place in the world of microcomputers had been usurped by a string of exhibitions held during 1976 in godforsaken spots where people weren’t supposed to be able to tell the difference between a microprocessor and a shift register. There were glum faces at Homebrew Club meetings as fairs took place in cities that were thousands of miles away from microcomputer’s Bethlehem—Detroit, Michigan, Trenton, New Jersey. So there was some relief when, shortly after Jobs and Wozniak had taken their cigar box to Atlantic City, word began to spread that a large fair was planned for San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium in the spring of 1977.

The chief organizers of the fair were both Homebrew