On January 22, 1984, the Apple Macintosh was introduced in the television commercial "1984" issued during Super Bowl XVIII. The commercial was later called by Advertising Age "the largest commercial ever made." A few months before, Steve Jobs said this before showing an advance of the commercial:
- Now it's 1984. It seems that IBM wants everything. Apple is perceived as the only hope to offer a race to IBM for its money. The distributors who initially welcomed IBM with open arms now fear a future dominated and controlled by IBM. They are increasingly turning to Apple as the only force that can guarantee their freedom in the future. IBM wants everything and points its weapons at its last obstacle to the control of the industry: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?
Thirty-six years earlier, another master promoter, who laid the foundations of a great blue domination, intuitively understood the importance of making machines equipped with artificial intelligence (or "giant brains" as they were called at that time) desirable for the general . public.
On January 27, 1948, IBM announced the Electronic Selective Sequence Calculator (SSEC) and demonstrated it to the public. "The most important aspect of the SSEC," according to Brian Randell in Origins of Digital Computers, "was that it could perform arithmetic operations and then execute them stored, it was almost certainly the first operating machine with these capabilities."
As Kevin Maney explains in The Maverick and his Machine, IBM CEO Thomas Watson Sr. "did not know much about how to build an electronic computer," but in 1947, "I was the only person on earth who knew how to sell." one. "Maney:
- The engineers finished testing the SSEC in late 1947 when Watson made a decision that forever altered the public perception of computers and linked IBM with the new generation of information machines. He told the engineers to dismantle the SSEC and install it in the lobby on the ground floor of IBM's 590 Madison Avenue headquarters. The lobby was open to the public and its large windows allowed to see the SSEC for the crowds that crowded the sidewalks of Madison and 57th Street. ... The SSEC show defined the image of a computer audience for decades. They remained dust-free behind glass panels, reels of electronic tape marked as clocks, punched stamped cards and put them in hoppers, and thousands of tiny lights went on and off without a discernible pattern ... Pedestrians stopped to look Astonished and gave the SSEC the nickname "Poppy". Watson took the computer out of the lab and sold it to the public.
The SSEC ran at 590 Madison Ave. until July 1952 when it was replaced by a new IBM computer, the first to be mass produced. According to the Columbia University website for the SSEC, "it inspired a generation of cartoonists to portray the computer as a series of wall-sized panels covered with lights, meters, dials, switches and rotating ribbon rolls."
As IBM was one of the few computer pioneers to establish a new industry, Watson's key selling point for the general public was not to challenge the supposed mind control of a dominant competitor as Steve Jobs will do more than three decades later, but he praised the expansion of thought: "... to explore the consequences of human thought in the limits of time, space and physical conditions". Watson was the first to see that "AI" was not only raised with "artificial intelligence" but also with "augmented" human intelligence. "
Like his best-known successor more than three decades later, Thomas Watson Sr. was a perfectionist. When he reviewed SSEC's "exhibition" before the public opening, he commented that "The sweeping of this room is hampered by those large black columns in the center, make them leave before the ceremony." But since they supported the building, the columns stayed. Instead, the photo in the brochure delivered at the ceremony was carefully retouched to remove all traces of the offensive columns.
IBM became the dominant computer company and, as it "wanted it all," it entered the new PC market in August 1981. Apple failed in its initial response, the Apple Lisa, but after the broadcast of the television commercial "1984" , the Apple Macintosh was launched on January 24, 1984. It was the first mass market personal computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse, and offers two applications, MacWrite and MacPaint, designed to showcase its innovative interface. In April of 1984, 50,000 Macintosh were sold.
Steven Levy announced on Rolling Stones "This [is] the future of computing". The 1984 article of the journal is full of citations. From Steve Jobs:
- I do not want to look arrogant, but I know that this will be the next big milestone in this industry. Every bone in my body says it's going to be great, and people will realize that and buy it.
From Bill Gates:
- People are focused on finding Jobs' shortcomings, but there's no way this group could have done any of these things without Jobs. They have really worked miracles.
From Mitch Kapor, developer of Lotus 1-2-3, a top selling program for IBM PC:
- The IBM PC is a machine that you can respect. Macintosh is a machine that you can love.
Here is Steve Jobs presenting the Macintosh at Apple's shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984. And Mac said: "Never trust a computer that you can not lift."
In January of 1984, I started working for NORC, a social science research center at the University of Chicago. In the next 12 months or so, I have experienced the shift from large, centralized computers to personal computers and the shift from a command line to a graphical user interface.
I was responsible, among other things, for managing $ 2.5 million in survey research budgets. At first, I used the budget management application that runs on the University VAX minicomputer (mini, unlike mainframe). I would connect using a remote terminal, write some commands and enter the new numbers I needed to record. Then, after an hour or two of hard work, I pressed a key on the terminal, telling the VAX to recalculate the budget with the new data I entered. To this day, I remember my great frustration and consternation when the VAX came back telling me that something was wrong with the data I entered. Telling me exactly what was wrong went beyond what the VAX - or any other computer program at the time - could do (this was true in the case of the mini-controller accounting program that I used).
I had to start the job from the beginning and I hope that in the second or third attempt I do everything right and create the new budget spreadsheet. This, by the way, was no different from my experience working for a bank a few years earlier, where I totaled the transactions of the day by hand in an NCR accounting machine. Quite often I would reach the end of the stack of checks only to discover that the accounts were not balanced because somewhere I entered the wrong number. And I would have to enter all the data again.
This linear approach to accounting and finance changed in 1979 when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet and the first killer application for personal computers.
Steven Levy has described how the financial calculations were done at that time (on paper!) And Brickiln's epiphany in 1978 when he was a student at the Harvard Business School:
- The problem with the accounting sheets was that if a monthly expense went up or down, everything, everything, had to be recalculated. It was a tedious task, and few people who obtained their MBA at Harvard expected to work with spreadsheets a lot. Making spreadsheets, however necessary, was a boring task that was better left to accountants, junior analysts or secretaries. As for the sophisticated "modeling" tasks - which, among other things, allow executives to project costs for their companies - these tasks could only be performed on large central computers by the data processing people who worked for the companies managed by the Harvard MBA.
- Bricklin knew all this, but he also knew that spreadsheets were needed for the exercise; He wanted an easier way to do them. It occurred to him: why not create spreadsheets on a microcomputer?
At NORC, I experienced first-hand the power of that idea when I started managing budgets with Visicalc, running on an Osborne laptop. Shortly thereafter, I migrated to the first IBM PC at NORC that executed the invention of another HBS student, Mitch Kapor, who was also frustrated with recalculation and other delights from paper or electronic spreadsheets running on large computers.
Lotus 1-2-3 was an efficient tool for managing budgets that managers could use themselves without wasting time discovering which data entry error they made. You had total control over the numbers and the processing of the data, you did not have to wait for a remote computer to perform the calculations to find out that you need to enter the data again. To say nothing, of course, about modeling, hypothetical scenarios, the whole range of functions at your fingertips.
But in many ways, the IBM PC (and other PCs) was a mainframe on a desktop. Steve Jobs and the Lisa and Macintosh teams changed that and brought us an interface that made computing easy, intuitive and fun. NORC obtained 80 Macs that year, the majority used for computer-assisted interviews. I do not think there is any financial software available for the Mac at that time and I continued using Lotus 1-2-3 on the IBM PC. But I played with Mac any chance I got. In fact, there was nothing like that at that time.
It was some time before the software running on most PCs was adapted to the new personal approach to computing, but finally Microsoft Windows appeared and icons and folders dominated the day. Microsoft also crushed all other electronic spreadsheets with Excel and did the same with other text processing and presentation tools.
But Steve Jobs triumphed at the end with another series of inventions. In the presentation of the iPhone in 2007, I should have said (or let the iPhone say): "Never trust a computer that you can not put in your pocket." Or "Never trust a computer that you can not control with touch." Today, he could have said "Never trust a computer you can not talk with". And in ten years? "Do you never trust a computer that you can not merge with?"
