We're All Mac Users Now

By Leander Kahney
(da Wired News, 6 gennaio 2004)

This month is the 20th anniversary of Apple's Macintosh. To mark the occasion, Wired News is running several stories this week about the groundbreaking machine, the people who created it and the Mac's impact on computing and culture in general.
Designed for ordinary people, not programmers, it dispensed with blinking cursors and inscrutable instructions for a child-friendly interface navigated by a simple and intuitive pointing device, the mouse.
Right from the get-go, it was built as a tool of creativity, not number crunching. Instead of programming tools, the Mac shipped with software for writing and drawing.
It looked good. Instead of a utilitarian enclosure and a big, unwieldy monitor, the Mac came in a dinky little plastic case, monitor and all, and in a beautiful shade of beige, no less.
The Mac had personality. It played music, drew pictures and could speak for itself in a synthesized voice. As it booted up, a friendly, smiley face shone from the screen.
Not only was the technology a good 10 years before its time -- Windows 95 debuted a decade later -- but the launch of the Mac was also an early taste of Apple's special magical formula: a unique ability to blend cutting-edge technology with great design and memorable marketing. (The Mac's 1984 Super Bowl ad aired only once but became one of the most famous in advertising history).
When it debuted, the Mac impressed some, but many were unmoved. It was widely dismissed as childlike and trivial: a toy. (The Mac took off several years later, when married to a laser printer and desktop publishing software).
But 20 years on, it's obvious the machine has had the most profound impact. Although Apple is now a relative minnow in the PC industry, it is fair to say that every personal computer these days is essentially a Macintosh clone, even if it runs Microsoft's Windows. Windows, after all, is the sincerest compliment Microsoft has paid to Apple.
"It's real easy to see that every computer in the world's a Macintosh," said Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun. "There was a time when Windows wasn't Windows. They had Microsoft DOS, and DOS was lines you had to type… And the funny thing is, when they switched over -- Windows 95, Windows 98 -- now they've got a Macintosh."
Twenty years ago, the Mac pointed the way forward for the PC industry, and Apple continues to lead to this day. The company’s products are still a couple of years ahead of the rest of the industry, and in many ways set the standards that all the others adopt. If Apple embraces a technology, the industry usually follows suit down the line. Examples abound – the graphical user interface, Ethernet, USB, WiFi and Bluetooth, which hasn’t taken off yet, but will.
To mark the Mac's 20th birthday, Wired News asked several technologists and pundits for their assessment of the machine's impact on technology, as well as the wider culture.
Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun and co-creator of Berkeley Unix, which underlies Mac OS X: "What I had always wanted was to combine the reliability and beauty of Unix with the user interface genius that was Xerox. Apple got the interface part right with the Mac, but it wasn't until Unix was underneath it, with Mac OS X that it became all that I wanted. It took 20 years, but it was worth the wait.
"I would have taken it sooner, of course, but with the alternative being using Windows -- the OS equivalent of junk food -- I am sure glad that I have the choice of Mac. I recommend it for all human beings, and other creatures as well."
Bob Metcalfe, inventor and technologist, founder of 3Com and an Internet pioneer: "My hero Steve Jobs figured out how to bring Xerox's ground-breaking bit-mapped/windows/mouse/icon/laser-printing/hard-disk/Ethernet technology to market, hitting the right price points and with style. Thank God for Steve Jobs."
Jef Raskin, the Mac's original project leader before Steve Jobs took the role, and the "father of the Mac": "(The Mac) inaugurated a fundamental change in the way we use personal computers, and popularized and improved on the GUI paradigm.
"Windows, awkward though it be to use, further propagated ideas first seen on the Mac (some of which were available still earlier at Xerox). At first the GUI was a great advance over what came before, but the initial simplicity has been lost and now you have to have a good deal of arcane and "inside" information to use a GUI effectively -- or be able to call on a friend for help.
"The ease of use that the Mac introduced made it possible for millions of people to use the next and more important development: a multitude of applications. And then -- most important of all -- came the Internet and the Web. The use of computers as computers, that is, as user-programmable devices, has almost disappeared. They have become, to use my own coinage, information appliances."
"In 1979, I specified a long list (documented here) that covered most of the things we would do with it though I missed four major uses: gambling, pornography, sending spam and spreading viruses.
Author Howard Rheingold: "I remember vividly firing up MacPaint, discovering FatBits, and spending the next several hours lost in the world of pixels. It was the first PC that was actually an extension of my mind. As a writer, I had forced myself to learn geeky command lines for CP/M and DOS. Now I could point and click. It was like turning on a whole new lobe of my brain. Would there have been a Windows without the Mac?
"If we consider the cultural dimension, rather than the economic arena, the Mac's impact was enormous. Designers, educators, writers, artists -- people who generally had not used computers -- were fired up by the Mac. The PC moved out of the world of technically focused enthusiasts into the world of creative thinkers in general.
Technology columnist and author Robert Cringely: "The Macintosh was different from most of the computers that preceded it in that its builders wanted to imbue their machine with a personality and a sense of style. They saw themselves not as building a computer but as contributing to culture. That attitude -- good and bad -- came entirely from Steve Jobs. And the wonder is that despite the passage of 20 years and a lot of mucking with the formula along with way by lesser hands, the Mac feels as it always did.
"The Mac's impact on personal computing was to create a standard for others to emulate. The only time that Windows ever remotely came close to edging past the Mac was when Windows 95 introduced true, preemptive multitasking. But except for that one time, Windows has always aspired to be Mac-like without Microsoft ever really understanding what that even means."
Tim O'Reilly, technology publisher and pundit: "Apple has been able to reinvent itself because it has what is, at bottom, an aesthetic vision, rather than one that is solely based on profit and loss. Like Shaw's proverbial "unreasonable man", they try to bend the world to their vision. And they articulate that vision consistently, and persistently. For example, back in the early days of GUI, it was Apple that pushed out their "human interface guidelines" and made interface consistency an accepted virtue.
"(Macarthur fellow Dave Hickey in Air Guitar) argues that when the automobile became a commodity, Harley Earl, who headed the design division at General Motors after World War II, turned the auto industry from one driven by manufacturing innovation into one driven by design -- in effect, an "art market," one that "stopped advertising products for what they were, or for what they could do, and began advertising them for what they meant."
"I believe that this same transformation is now happening in the computer industry. Apple was far ahead of its time in recognizing this dynamic, and the marketplace is now entering the period during which their strategy is going to be widely emulated.
"Apple started this process with the famous 1984 ad, and has continued right through its Think Different theme, but above all, with a consistent set of design innovations in its products, innovations that are aimed at the self image of the consumer, that again, quoting Dave Hickey, "create desire rather than fulfilling needs."
"No one in the computer industry has come close to Apple in this regard."