As Apple’s Super Bowl ad promised, the Macintosh was introduced to the world on January 24, 1984. Actually it was introduced to Apple shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, at the Apple shareholders annual meeting.
Alan and Priscilla were lucky enough to be in the audience that day, and it’s an experience we will never forget. A local TV station re-broadcast the meeting, which Alan recorded on his VHS VCR and ultimately digitized, helping with some of those memories.
Scott Knaster, in his “Adjacent to Greatness” blog (which is also quite adjacent to this one) recalled that day as well, and asked others who were there about their memories.
Similar to the image above, it was and is a bit of a blur. Both Alan and Priscilla had started at Apple in mid-1983 (soon after John Sculley joined), Alan right out of college. There had already been one major re-org, with Apple shifting resources from the Lisa to the Mac.
The team Alan was on, under Gursharan Sidhu, had originally been working on AppleNet, a standards-based network for Lisa. They rapidly shifted direction, with a goal of creating a network for the Mac in time for the rapidly approaching introduction.
Alan spent much of Christmas 1983 working on this new network, which was called AppleBus at the time. There were many challenges (blog posts to come), but by mid-January the team had things working to the extent that the powers-that-be felt it could be included as part of the big announcement.
There was a lot of anticipation walking into the shareholders meeting at Flint Center that day. The AppleBus team got to sit “up front” with the Mac developers. Priscilla (she and Alan had met in October, and were already “a thing” by that time) was in one of the balconies.
The big question on Alan’s mind was what, if anything, would be said about their forthcoming Mac network. The answer came soon after the 1984 Super Bowl ad was played in response to Steve’s piercing question “will Big Blue [IBM] dominate the entire computer industry?! The entire information age?! Was George Orwell right?!”
When the cheers for 1984 died down, Steve went on to lay out the details of his “insanely great” “industry-milestone product.”
- “Radical ease of use”
- A 68000 microprocessor that “eats 8088s for breakfast”
- 64K bytes of ROM, 128K bytes of RAM
- A 3-1/2 inch floppy disk that “will be the disk of the 80s”
And then: “Macintosh comes with two built-in serial ports. They’re RS-232, RS-422 and an incredible thing called AppleBus Interconnect.”
That was it. We were a small part of a single techno-jargon sentence. But an incredible thing. A tiny piece of an insanely great industry-milestone product.
We had never heard the term “interconnect” applied to our work, and it wouldn’t be again. “AppleBus” would be changed to “AppleTalk,” and there would be a whole lot more work to do before the product saw the light of day a year later as part of the Macintosh Office announcement.
But the incredible thing Steve announced that day would go on to be an important piece of the insanely great computer Steve announced that day. Which, 40+ years later, remains, as promised, an industry-milestone product.