History of Apple: how Apple came to lead the tech industry
The history of everyone's favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves
The two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak - may have been Apple's most visible founders, but where it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone, iPad or iMac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling a holding that today would be worth $72bn for just $500.
Jobs met Woz at the Homebrew Computer Club; a gathering of enthusiasts in a garage in California's Menlo Park. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards - and was inspired by MITS' build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. You can see this philosophy shining through in Apple's products today.
So he produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't trying to change the world with what he'd produced - he just wanted to show off how much he'd managed to do with so few resources. Speaking to NPR in 2006, he explained that, 'when I built this Apple I the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter - it should have a keyboard - and the output device is a TV set, it wasn't really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer.'"
It almost didn't happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger than life personality - he's funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars - but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, 'I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers.' He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.
Let's be thankful he didn't. Jobs saw the computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator, and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.
The name was to cause Apple problems in later years as it came uncomfortably close to the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough. Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984, Woz credited Jobs with the idea. 'He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned.'
Woz built each computer by hand, and although he'd wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts - at a price at that would recoup their outlay if they shipped 50 units - Jobs had bigger ideas.
He priced the Apple I at $666.66, and inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View so supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn't exist in any great number, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn't have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend's father, it wasn't enough. In the end, it was Byte Shop's purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, he convinced Cramer's manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.
'Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit.'
Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it's ultimately this that saw him duck out.
'Jobs and Woz didn't have two nickels to rub together,' Wayne told NextShark in 2013. 'If this thing blew up, how was that going to be repaid Did they have the money No. Was I reachable Yes.'
Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found. As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom, 'Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn't even test the board without buying two transformers Since the Apple didn't have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn't be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn't provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip finally the computer was naked. It had no case.'
Raspberry PI and the BBC's Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn't accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, 'Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay.' The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units. Their scarcity has made them collectors' items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000.
If your pockets aren't that deep, Briel Computers' Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.
When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard of rates of growth - so much so that the decision to build a successor can't have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.
The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like its predecessor, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.
Yes, the Apple II (or 'apple ][' as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson credits with launching the personal computer industry.
The trouble is, specs alone are rarely enough to justify a $1300 spending spree. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn't until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world's first 'killer app'.
Dan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised 'a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations'
Of course, we'd recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things only existed on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.
Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today - in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today Here's our Numbers review.)
The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn't quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn't have a heads-up display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn't bundled with the machine. So, the heads up display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II's game paddle, which Bricklin described as being 'a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth... you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the "fire" button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down'.
It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.
VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as a 'magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations'. We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry.
Writing in Morgan Stanley's 'Electronics Letter', shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was 'so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever... [it] could some day become the software tail that ways (and sells) the personal computer dog'.
How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:
'When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be... We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I'm told).'
Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.
So a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn't have been a success if it hadn't adhered to the company's already established high standards. The February 1984 edition of PC Mag, looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that its 'packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator's hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from ... computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard.'
More radically, though, the Apple II 'was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics... contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered.'
In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century - before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.
Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.
For VisiCalc, the future wasn't so bright, largely because its developers weren't quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc's developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc - it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.
That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.
Apple has never been slow to innovate - except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We're approaching the eighties in our trip through the company's history and we're at the point where it's followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh
The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry's biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.
The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.
Xerox had established a research centre there - Xerox PARC, now simply called 'parc' - where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. It's work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers. Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.
The Apple I, II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days' access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.
To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split its stock four times since then - in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox's holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today's prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three day tour.
Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn't been selling it to the public. It wasn't small - about the size of an under-counter fridge - but it was still considered a 'personal' machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.
Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as 'like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.'
It kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.
The official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs' daughter's name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today's money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM.
Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.
Whichever team got their first, Apple - as a company - wanted them to do it at a price that wasn't prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto's mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was the one-button clicker we still know and love to this day.
Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa's development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.
Michael Scott was Apple's president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.
Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.
Named in honour of Raskin's favourite edible apple (the McIntosh), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn't stop him making extensive changes to the program, though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.
However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs - technically - ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the more expensive machine.
It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we'll be covering in more detail in the next instalment of the series, was a success, and Apple's current computer line-up - iOS devices aside - descends directly from that first consumer machine.
You can't say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn't nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.
Nonetheless, Apple didn't give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.
At this point, though, the numbers didn't add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.
By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn't captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.
That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company's future.
Read:
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We'll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 - two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 - before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he'd originally envisaged.
Raskin's early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple, that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.
They saw the potential of the GUI's desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they'd already laid much of the groundwork for Apple's own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.
If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it's unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did - and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.
Through several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.
The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it's not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 - Apple's fully graphical operating system.
But it wasn't just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic - but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.
There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn't have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.
Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We've dropped the 'System' monikker in favour of 'OS', but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, but the name lives on for many users). Read: What is Option on a Mac
The hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, and Susan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.
It's her that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac - among others - as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it's used to denote a campsite.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today - albeit in finer forms.
The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn't cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.
Read about how the name iMac was chosen here: Apple ad man Ken Segall on convincing Steve Jobs to Think Different when naming iMac
Nobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI - graphical user interface - to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.
Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.
You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble - a big one - that any other company would likely have shied away from.
But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.
Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.
He put in a call to Chiat\Day, Apple's retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.
Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner's Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.
The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.
International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn't going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.
So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity's only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John's Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.
Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and Chiat\Day turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, 'On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.'
It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it's considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age's list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.
Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking Chiat\Day to sell off the two ad slots they'd already booked it into.
One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. Chiat\Day offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.
As Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, 'Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. "I think we ought to go for it," he told his team.'
Thank goodness they did.
There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.
Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn't have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.
The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs' now legendary keynote, secured the company's future, and kicked off a line of computers that's still with us today - albeit in a very different configuration.
Read: 12 Apple execs you need to know
It's perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott's brother, Tony.
'Lemmings' once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for - and a switch to Macintosh Office.
It wasn't a great success. As sterndesign's Apple Matters explains, the advert 'left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea.'
Wired put it succinctly: 'Apple fell flat on its face People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence something very different from the cheers that greeted "1984" a year earlier.'
The Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs' spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic '1984' advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter.
The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 - just over a year after the Macintosh - was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood - the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh - running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.
It wasn't the first laser printer - just as the Macintosh wasn't the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn't the first digital music player - but, in true Apple style, it was different, and that's what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe's PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.
It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.
As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985's less popular Lemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, 'Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer.'
So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing - so far - was the software.
Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term 'Desktop Publishing' heard of Apple's intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac's graphical interface and the printer's high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.
The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn't see again until we all started reading online.
Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work - which is perhaps why it's favoured by so many designers today. It's hard to believe, in an age where we're used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh's 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.
By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker's annual sales had reached $18.4m - an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe.
But good things don't last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).
Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.
Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later - in summer 1998 - Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes' words, 'announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose a public company with three times Quark's revenues'.
Of course, the acquisition didn't go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of that and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.
PageMaker's last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It's no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe's site here.
InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that's a shame as there's still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.
Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.
Tune in next time for more Apple history.
If you'd like to reminisce more visit our Apple History Zone, where you can find:
How the Mac changed, and continues to change, the world
30 Apple people from the history of the Mac
5 Macs that changed everything
Apple timeline in pictures and video
24 milestones in the Mac's 30-year history