By John Buck
Jef Raskin's tiny Macintosh team was struggling to fulfill the goal of a '$1,000-person-in-the-street' computer. The components were pushing the overall Macintosh cost closer to $1500 at a time when the TRS-80 was $599. Raskin recalled later that Steve Jobs
from ComputerWorld February 3, 1986 https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
As the Homebrew Computer Club met and MITS frantically shipped Altairs, researchers at Xerox PARC were seemingly a decade or more ahead. They already knew what would make personal computers useful, and researchers were working on an ecosystem to support a typical office task. Writing and printing documents.  Gary
Proud to have an extract from my book in The Verge as part of their Apple@50 annniversary. There's a paywall - but you can sneek a look at the start :-) or subscribe -> tinyurl.com/34pb73kw
ATG boss Larry Tesler stood before an employee-only gathering inside De Anza 3: “Part of Apple's identity is innovative leadership in technology for people. Breakthroughs have come from all over Apple, but there's one group that has ‘breakthrough’ as its charter, and
While Steve Jobs told the press, at the Apple II Forever event, that the Macintosh had reached 50,000 unit sales in 100 days, there were growing doubts about how many people wanted a computer with a black-and-white screen. When interviewed by David Sheff for Playboy magazine, Jobs&
Apple ATG engineer Tom Gilley looks back: Bob (Alkire) is a genius, another one of these super-smart people who had already worked at Atari, HP Labs, or Xerox. And a lot of those guys and gals ended up at Apple in ATG at the time, in part because the
Future Apple project engineer, John Couch was among the first graduates of Berkeley University's computer science program, and was immediately recruited by Hewlett-Packard to work on the HP-3000's software. Couch recalled a conversation with company co-founder Bill Hewlett: I remember Bill telling me,
Jon Krakower recalls progress on Project Laguna aka the Macintosh Portable: There are so many stories I could tell you. But one of the more important ones, I think, was the fact that the mechanical design engineers assigned to our team had no experience with designing small, lightweight, portable products.
Jim Gable worked on Jonathan Eder's LaserWriter product management team as it planned the next-generation version of Apple's printer line. The plans were for three new LaserWriter models, code-named Leia, Luke, and Vader. Vader was the high-end, and Leia was an entry-level
From the begining, no two Apple job interviews were the same. In May 1978, Chuck Mauro sat in Apple's lobby waiting for Steve Wozniak. Eventually, perhaps a half hour later, a gentleman named Rod Holt rescued me from ‘lobby limbo’ and brought me back to Apple&
Portables Product Manager Bruce Gee recalls: What's interesting, for context, is if you look back at Silicon Valley in that decade between 1980 and 1990. If you wanted to do something cool and groundbreaking and consumer-facing, Apple was practically the only game in town. There was Apple
Senior Scientist Mike Liebhold recalls his role at Apple: I guess I was an unofficial ‘agent provocateur at Apple'. I had to do two things. One way was to provoke the engineers to build things. The other was to educate the managers and the rest of the company
When you hear current Apple developers and pundits, of a certain age, talk about "the old days" and being connected to Apple, this is an example of what they mean. The computer trade magazine Byte was written, edited and compiled at least four weeks before it was printed
Paul Mercer's "Swatch" handheld had progressed inside Apple as product manager Phac Le Tuan recalls: Soon we had a stripped down, Apple operating system on the Sony PTC-550 device, using a Motorola 68k chip. We were able to run a few Mac OS features and