And I am sure he got well paid for it.

Narrator:
"Steve Jobs had co-founded Apple Computer in 1976. The first popular personal computer, the Apple 2, was a hit - and made Steve Jobs one of the biggest names of a brand-new industry. At the height of Apple's early success in December 1979, Jobs, then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox Parc."

Steve Jobs:
"And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea that was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day."

Narrator:
"It was a turning-point. Jobs decided that this was the way forward for Apple."

Adele Goldberg -Founder, PARC Place Systems:
"He came back and I almost said 'asked', but the truth is, demanded that his entire programming team get a demo of the SmallTalk System and the then head of the science centre asked me to give the demo because Steve specifically asked for me to give the demo and I said no way. I had a big argument with these Xerox executives telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink and I said that I would only do it if I were ordered to do it cause then of course it would be their responsibility, and that's what they did."

Demonstration
The mouse is a pointing device that moves a cursor around the display screen.

Narrator:
"Adele and her colleagues showed the Apple programmers an Alto machine running a graphical user interface."

Demonstration
A selected window displays above other windows much like place a piece of paper on top of a stack on a desk.

Narrator:
"The visitors from Apple saw a computer that was designed to be easy to use, a machine that anybody could operate and find friendly...even the French."

Bill Atkinson -Designer, Macintosh Development Team:
"I think mostly what...what we got in that hour and a half was inspiration and just sort of basically a bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things would make this business computer more accessible."

Larry Tesler:
"After an hour looking at demos they understood our technology, and what it meant more than any Xerox executive understood after years of showing it to them."

Steve Jobs:
"Basically they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer or what it could do. And so they just grabbed eh grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been you know a company ten times its size. Could have been IBM - could have been the IBM of the nineties. Could have been the Microsoft of the nineties."

Narrator:
"For Steve Jobs the road to Damascus passed through Palo Alto. He persuaded the Apple board to invest in technology copying what he'd seen at Xerox Parc - his instrument of change. They hired a hundred engineers and started developing a new PC code-named Lisa. But there were problems. They couldn't get it to work properly and the price-tag was heading toward $10,000 - way too much for the average PC buyer. Jobs' domineering style drove everyone nuts too, so the board ousted him from his own pet project."

Steve Jobs:
"You know I brooded for a few months, but it was not very long after that that it really occurred to me that if we didn't do something here the Apple 2 was running out of gas and we needed to do something with this technology fast or else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was."

Narrator:
"Jobs found his answer from Jeff Raskin, Apple employee number 31. Raskin's idea was a $600 computer - as easy to use as a toaster - code-named Macintosh, after America's favorite apple. Jobs liked the price but not Raskin's design ideas. So Steve took over the Macintosh project, determined to make it a cheaper Lisa."

Steve Jobs:
"And so I formed a small team to do the Macintosh and we were on a mission from God, you know, to save Apple."

Well, to be frank. The Newton might have been a stroke of technical genius, but commercially it as an utter failure.

I doubt Sculley had the genius to package new ideas in a format that could inspire the broader community. The Newton was a PIM device with limited phone-capabilities attached.

That concept utterly failed even in the Windoze mobile market segment. What was needed was a fully functional phone that could also act as PIM and as an email device and as a Web browser.

And when I say Web Browser I don't mean that awful Windows mobile and Palm Pilot concept (anyone still remember those ubiquitous Palm devices?), where every webpage had to be custom designed to be mobile "displayable".

Same goes for many e-mail accounts back then. No, you needed something you could access standard web sites and browse normal e-mail with.

And being able to play music & videos on it - w/o first having to convert them on your PC.

I would like to hear from actual Macintosh owners. I have had one for about a week now, I am content.  I would like to trade and exchange bits of experiance.

  - Headers are best slide under the main window in MacWord.
  - I like the way it will paste into a selection in MacPaint.
  - Have you noticed that you don't seem to be able to select multiple objects and print them all, an act that seems plausable via an analogy with selection of multiple objects and requesting info.
  - The system crashs if one empties the trash when it happens to contain an object who's infomation window is open.
  - Any ideas on how a large disk is going to fit into a system where all     object names on a disk are unique?

My favorite trick is to make bubbles.

  - draw circle,
  - spray on some shadow,
  - fatbit on the edge, and take one bit out,
  - lasso the bubble, the hole you make lets the lasso leak into the bubble,
  - make copies, do scaleing, etc.

The cutting holes into things gimic to get transparent things is very useful.  One easy way to do it is to draw a line, using opion to get a line in the present paint, with clear paint.  This can be used to cut holes in large patterned areas, which one can then pour paint into to get patterned strips.

I would love to hear about some good tricks for working with large drawings.

I've had my Macintosh for about a month.  It continues to be great.  I have found only one bug in the last three weeks, its very obscure and in MacPaint.

The most frustrating thing about the mac is speed. The applications take time to start up, the disk seems to be the bottle neck, I presume that more memory would solve this problem, I wonder if I wouldn't rather have the second drive be ram disk.  It isn't really slow compaired to other floopy based systems its just that I value those few moments every day that I'm willing to work very highly and I hate to watch them dribble away.

The applications are a real pleasure. It is a rare moment in computing when you aren't regualarly irritated by some boundary condiditon in the software.

MacWrite really grows on you, I wish for a little of the vi/emac kind of power but the mouse is so zippy that I rank MacWrite is a close second to vi in my ranking.  As a formater it isn't Scribe but it comes close on the user friendly axis, on the archecture axis is isn't much very special once you've gotten over the increadable power of the what you see is what you get feedback.

 MacPaint is magic.  The author of this program is wizard, I don't think I've ever see a program this perfect.  Its so smooth, no edges, so very accessable. And like scribe there is very substantail power hidden under that surface.

The Microsoft spreadsheet is fine. It has all the limits of a classic spread sheet, I have a lot of trouble viewing the universe as one giant array.  The user interface is everything it should be, Apple has set a good example and Microsoft didn't blow it.  I've found a dozen or so little nits in it, mostly off my one problems, I don't believe they let enough talented users beat on it, and the author wasn't an artist but a competent hacker.  The manual doesn't exactly agree with the implementation either.  If your trying to sell this to a spreadsheet user then the user interface should do the trick, it is very easy to use.

I have used the Microsoft Basic for a few hours at the store.  It's fun  but I can't bring my self to buy a basic for a whole mess of money.  It takes it about 20-30 seconds to draw a thousand lines on the screen, I'd quess.  I don't think you could write an game in it that moved sprites about the screen.

The microsoft programs maybe copied to another disk, and run from the copy but a copy will always request that it see you master disk as it starts up, what a pain.  It only needs to see the master the first time you start it up in the day, if you never turned the machine off this wouldn't be such a problem.  There does not seem to be any copy protection on the Apple software, but then it may know the serial number of the machine some how, I doubt that since the hardware design doesn't seem to admit that as an option.

I heard a funny story about some  guy who'd gone to an interview at Microsoft.  It seems they have this  section of the building all boarded up for Mac development work, paper on the windows, locks on the doors, etc.  The guy he went out to lunch with from that group allowed as he hadn't been out of the building in a month.  The master Multiplan disk has all these 2:00Am, 5:15Am, Jan 30, 1984 dates on the files.

Ben Hyde, Intermetrics Inc, Cambridge, Mass.

The other night I sat down and seriously used Write-Paint to write a 7pp single-spaced with illustrations technical paper. I learned quite a bit about some of the rough edges of write-paint, and I thought I'd pass along some observations and tips.

MacWrite:
I noticed that it is a hassle to use the mouse to do cursor positioning. It's tough for me to get the cursor into the middle of a word, and its an especial hassle to be taking my hands off the keyboard to get the mouse, twiddle it, then go back to the keyboard.

MacWrite won't let you put the cursor right between the header of a page and the first character on the page when the previous page had an "Insert Page Break" done. The solution is to move it after the first character and then erase the first character.

Blinking the typing line makes my eyes tired. Isn't there a better way? Most non-font editors are smart enough to print the line and erase EOL. Can't this be created for MacWrite?

When printing a document, you must have MacWrite, the Imagewriter utility, your document, and room left over for some sort of translated version of the document on your disk. Needless to say, it's easy to run out of room. The solution until the proposed double-density drives come out is to print the document in sections (i.e. pp. 1-3, 4-6, etc.).

At least you CAN print it out that way. Expectedly, there is no data loss if MacWrite runs out of room along the way, but there is also no advance warning of this event, and there is no ``help'' provided either on the screen or in the manual telling you the above empirically-derived hint. Seems they could've put it in the ``!'' box.

Headers and footers must be shown to work, but once you prep them you click the main document window (rather than saying ``Hide...'') to get them out of your way while still taking effect. This is clumsy. Also, page numbers like this: -12- are not really doable.

Printer:
Medium quality timed at about 1 to 1 1/2 to 2 minutes per page, page filled with single-spaced typing, headers and footers.

High quality timed at about 4-6 minutes per page as above, same document. High quality gives less jaggies, but doesn't really help with the roundness of some letterforms. Also, the letters in high-quality mode are heavier (have thicker strokes) than either what's on the screen or medium-quality mode. Bold characters in small fonts have a tendency to fill in.

Line/Page feeding in high quality mode is S-L-O-W. Wonder why?

It appears that Tall Adjust mode is the right thing to do, giving nice pictures and letterforms. But the ruler across the top of the screen doesn't work right then, so you must be careful!

IMPORTANT HINTS: You should always use the full 5 lines of header and footer so you don't end up typing on the roller in cut-sheet mode. Also, leave 1/4 inch between the little rollers and the top of the page in cut-sheet. When printing, the roller first turns DOWN a little before spacing up; if you don't leave extra, the paper gets munched really nicely...


MacPaint:
You can't select anything bigger than a windowful, so you can't put anything big into the clipboard. In order to clip big drawings you will have to dothem in pieces.

MacPaint uses older printing code, so it hangs until the printer is ready, then types with total disregard for the paper-out light. No prompts are given. Thus, don't say print till you really mean it!

All in all, I still can't answer the age old question ``Wouldn't it have been easier by hand?'' positively, but the results are very nice from write/paint, and it wasn't harder than any other word processor. Integrated text and graphics is awesome, especially on bond paper, and seeing the end result on the screen is fabulous. I honestly only had to print the document once. The Mac is the first consumer-league computer to offer this. I can't wait until the GOOD editors and graphic makers show up. I'm looking forward to doing my thesis with Mac.