Celebrating three decades of Apple

Celebrating three decades of Apple

'Audacious, daring, artistic'

Expanding the 'Cult of Mac'

In the 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were going door-to-door at the UC Berkeley dorms selling "blue boxes" -- electronic devices that tricked the telephone network into allowing free long-distance phone calls.

Luckily for the technology world, the duo cleaned up its act and started making computers.

Now, 30 years after its founding, Apple Computer has grown from a tiny start-up to a household name and cultural icon known as much for its iPod digital music players as its computers.

"The technology industry is fundamentally about change and no company can survive for long without reinventing itself," said Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research and developer of the Mach kernel, which serves as the open-source core of Mac OS X. "Companies that can survive for 30 years are the exception rather than the rule, and something to celebrate."

Apple has a brand name as recognisable as Coca-Cola and Nokia and last year had a record US$13.93 billion in annual sales and a US$1.34 billion net profit.

Given the company's current success, it's easy to forget how it fell from the top of the tech heap in the 1990s and scuffled along as Microsoft grew into the largest software company in the world and PC makers such as Compaq Computer and IBM came to dominate the industry Jobs and Wozniak helped create.

But glossing over those years would make it difficult to describe just how remarkable Apple's current renaissance is. While Compaq now only exists as a brand name sold by Hewlett-Packard and IBM no longer makes PCs, Apple is enjoying perhaps its finest hour. The iPod is a pop-culture phenomenon. And, incredible to some, Apple is having an easier time updating its flagship Macintosh operating system than Microsoft is having with Windows.

Some say there are no second acts in business, but Jobs & Co. are making mincemeat of that old chestnut.

Apple didn't invent the computer. But with the Apple II, which went on sale in April 1977, the company introduced a machine people actually wanted to use.

Even as the Apple II was still a star, Apple was hard at work on a pair of follow-ups, the business-oriented Lisa and its consumer sibling, the Macintosh. A team that included Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin was labouring away in a separate building at Apple headquarters, working on the project that would change the company.

"Who cares about the Apple II?" Steve Jobs asked Hertzfeld in February 1981, when he moved the young engineer from the Apple II group to the Mac unit. Jobs didn't even let Hertzfeld save the work he was doing on a new operating system. "The Macintosh is the future of Apple and you're going to start on it now," Jobs said, according to Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, Hertzfeld's book on the Mac's early days.

With the Mac, Apple took innovations that had been lying around -- the mouse, a graphical interface and the laser printer -- and used them as a way to bring publishing to the masses.

The quirky Mac, with its small, 9-inch black-and-white screen and 3.5-inch floppy disks, quickly developed a legion of rabid enthusiasts, a phenomenon that came to be known as the "Cult of Mac".

"It was initially a conscious marketing strategy," said Leander Kahney, who authors Wired News' "Cult of Mac" column and has written a book of the same name. "There they were, going up against IBM. To differentiate it, they always portrayed the Mac as countercultural, the alternative to big companies and big government."

Of course, Apple enthusiasts don't pay heed to such talk of a marketing angle. "To them it's a rational choice," Kahney said. "It's just the best computer around."

Despite the hordes of Mac fans, the company that gave birth to the machine has largely been a loner.

Apple, at least under Jobs, has toiled away at products in secret, handling the hardware and software itself and unveiling its work only when ready -- then returning to its secluded confines.

Over the years, the company has dabbled in licensing its operating system, but it's always decided to go it alone.

The company has struck many notable partnerships over the years, but most have fallen short of the original expectations. Apple's early decision to license its OS to Power Computing and Umax, as well as its chip alliance with IBM and more recent alliances with Hewlett-Packard and Motorola, have all soured in the end.

For all the praise Apple has enjoyed in recent years, the company barely survived its midlife crisis.

In the mid-1990s, Apple was losing hundreds of millions of dollars and had already replaced embattled CEO Michael Spindler in order to right the troubled ship.