Still, the company was booming and an IPO was already visible on the horizon. “If I wanted to work for a business company, I’d join IBM,” he told Apple’s president Mike Scott. While Apple was trying to trade in their bellbottoms for three-piece suits, Raskin was still living the hippie dream of bringing power to the people. In many ways Raskin’s idea cut directly against the grain of Apple’s corporate strategy, which was to further penetrate the business market, in the short term via the Apple III and in the long via the Lisa both projects were already underway, although the latter was in nothing like the form it would eventually assume. Believing that the standard industry practice of naming prototypes after women (as often as not the prettiest secretary in the office) was sexist, he decided to call his idea Macintosh, after his favorite type of (edible) apples, the McIntosh. Even all the software you’d need would come built right in. He therefore pitched to the executives at Apple his idea for a relatively cheap (about $1000) and portable computer that, far from being the hardware hacker’s playground that was the Apple II, would be a sealed, finished piece - the only one you had to buy to start expressing yourself digitally. He thought even the much-loved Apple II was too complicated, too difficult and fiddly, too aesthetically unpleasant, too big to ever play an important role in anyone’s life who was more interested in what she could do with a computer than the computer as an end in itself. Much later in the decade, Raskin thought he might advance the cause a bit more with an interim Dynabook of his own. Michael Scott, Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, Chris Espinosa, and Steve Wozniak circa 1977 The PARC researchers dubbed the less fanciful workstation they built to be their primary engine of innovation for the time being, the Alto, the “interim Dynabook.” As Kay himself once put it, thinkers generally fall into two categories: the da Vincis who sketch away like mad and spin out a dozen impractical ideas before breakfast upon which later generations can build careers and obsessions and the Michelangelos who tackle huge but ultimately practical projects and get them done. Indeed, nothing that came remotely close would actually appear for another two decades at least. The Dynabook was a tall order in light of the realities of 1970s computer technology. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change. Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Kay called it “a dynamic media for creative thought”: The brain child of still another dreamer and visionary named Alan Kay, who first began to write and speak of it in the very early days of Xerox PARC, the Dynabook was more thought experiment than realistic proposal - a conception, an aspirational vision of what could one day be. It had originally been conceived almost five years earlier by another dreamer, digital utopianist, and early Apple employee named Jef Raskin who believed he could save the world - or at least make it a better place - if he could just build the Dynabook. Jobs wasn’t even the first father the Mac knew. But once it finally was let out of its bag it became, just as its father predicted, the computer that changed everything. It was never even a particular priority of its parent company until, all other options being exhausted, it suddenly had to be. The Apple Macintosh had one hell of a long and winding road to join Steve Jobs onstage in front of a cheering throng at De Anza College’s Flint Auditorium on January 24, 1984.
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