‘Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything’ Steven Levy (Penguin Books, 2000) ISBN: 0140291776 [Review written for original Viking edition.]
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[E]ach time I turn [my Macintosh] on, I am reminded of the first light I saw in Cupertino in 1983. It is exhilarating, like the first glimpse of green grass when entering a baseball stadium.’ Steven Levy’s description of ‘the computer that changed everything’ sounds over the top, but anyone who has taken time to get acquainted with Macintosh – and baseball – will understand his sentiment.

Levy himself was not a born wirehead, and took the position of most sixties radicals that computers were number-crunchers for the war machine that was then flattening Vietnam. His road to Damascus began with a commission to investigate computer hackers, opening his eyes to the potential of computing. On the launch of Macintosh he convinced Rolling Stone to do a feature on the upstarts behind Macintosh. His intimate contact with the Macintosh team ever since has allowed him to write an enthusiastic and anecdotal account of an eventful ten years.

The ideas behind personal computing can be traced back to the end of the Second World War, specifically to Vannevar Bush, then director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, the agency responsible for directing scientific resources into weapons development. He contended – in an article published in The Atlantic – that with the end of the war these resources should be directed into transforming the way information was managed.

Bush’s initial ideas were picked up by a demobilised naval radar technician – Douglas C. Engelbart – who devoted his civilian life to developing them. His main funding came from the Advanced Research Project Agency of the US Department of Defense. (In an ironic twist, early Apple licences forbade the use of its computers for nuclear weapons development.) Engelbart’s major contributions to personal computing were the mouse and the window – both concepts now so central to our experience that their significance is seldom appreciated. Although Engelbart never produced a successful commercial product, members of his team went on to Xerox’s new Palo Alto Research Centre (better know as PARC), where the spirit of his ideas met hard cash from a company desperate to diversify into office automation. But Xerox fumbled the future, and the ball dropped into the hands of Apple – flush with success from producing the best-selling Apple II – who had seen the ground-breaking work during a visit to PARC in December 1979.

The short visit transformed Apple’s ideas about the next leap they should take in computing. PARC had done the spade work, but – not being obliged to ship a product – they didn’t have to resolve their ideas. Their main advance on Engelbart had been the concept of the bit-map – a method of display that didn’t distinguish between words and images. The team at Apple spent the next three years turning PARC’s ideas into a shipping product, and the legend of Macintosh was born.

In fact it was almost stillborn. The developers had been so immersed in their vision that they assumed Joe Q Public would be equally excited by it. Despite the seminal Ridley Scott 1984 advert – screened during the Super Bowl – the Macintosh failed to meet sales targets, was derided as a toy, and chastised for being underpowered. Macintosh was saved by the advent of desktop publishing, a technology looking for a platform, which it found in the Macintosh with its bit-map display and mouse. Aldus and its PageMaker product turned the graphic arts and publishing industries on to Macintosh where it become the de facto standard. This could not have happened without the development of PostScript – the graphical language that allows a document to be reproduced identically on any compatible printer. (Levy barely mentions PostScript, but without it desktop publishing would have remained just that, and Apple would probably have gone under.)

The Macintosh was a success, and the adulation it received was a reflection of the inspiration of the team behind it. What ingredient did they have that Big Blue didn’t? To quote one of the developers: ‘We all felt as though we had missed the civil rights movement. We had missed Vietnam. What we had was the Macintosh.’ Levy adds that ‘almost all of them believed that the fruits of their labors would empower ordinary people and perhaps even... nudge the collective thought process... toward the keystone of their philosophy’.

In the early seventies Silicon Valley was light years from IBM’s New York corporate bunker. The West Coast was populated by young people who held to the optimistic spirit of the sixties but lacked their elder siblings’ belief in political change. Instead they looked to technology to bring about social progress. Steve Jobs expresses this categorically: ‘I’m one of those people who think that Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world a lot more than Karl Marx ever did. And we have this incredible chance to do that again in the next five years.’

Ten years on a lot of light has been shed on this ideal. Although the Macintosh eventually took off – albeit not in the expected direction – Jobs only lasted until May 1985, a little over a year after its launch. In a well documented twist of fate he was ousted by John Sculley – the CEO he had recruited from PepsiCo – who regarded him as too much visionary and too little businessman. Sculley met the same fate last year at the hands of Michael Spindler, who proceeded to make the largest workforce cuts of Apple’s history. The company’s profits have been squeezed by the price cutting in the PC market and the challenge from Microsoft Windows. And the corporate market is still deaf to the message of Macintosh.

What is the problem? Apple were right to identify the computer interface as the key to empowering users; the Macintosh team built the computer that they would want to use. But although they were closer to the real world than the PARCoids, they missed a fundamental point. Although most corporate computer users don’t understand their computers and fail to exploit them to the full, they can still do their job with minimal training. Database entry and retrieval and word processing are the most common business uses of computers, and neither is particularly complex. Whether or not empowering computer-users improves productivity, it has much wider ramifications for managers – it points to the renegotiating of their whole relationship to their employees. This was not a transition US corporations were about to make in the mid-eighties, and the Macintosh vision failed to impact where it really counted.

Levy touches on some of the debates that went on around the Macintosh, noting the argument that perhaps ease of use was creating sloppy students on US campuses. This debate went by the board when Microsoft introduced Windows, its return salvo to Apple’s shot across the bows. Windows is the real legacy of Macintosh, and should be recognised as such by people who regard Apple and Microsoft as the incarnations of good and evil in the computer industry. You are only as good as the last product you shipped – and Apple don’t have a mandate from God (or Douglas Engelbart).

Levy’s book is thoroughly engaging for anyone in the Macintosh ‘generation’. It also contains a useful history of the development of personal computing and some insights into the business of product development. What it leaves unanswered is why something so insanely great hasn’t made a dent in everyone’s universe.

Reference

Levy's book was published ten years after the launch of the Macintosh. My piece reflecting on what we can learn from twenty years of Apple’s innovation around the Macintosh was published on Silicon.com, 23 January 2004.