Apple and Me

01 Mar Apple and Me

Apple has had a profound effect on the way information and communications devices look and work and this is largely attributable to the innovative and insightful team who set-up and ran the company over the last 40 years.

Over the years I have had a love/hate relationship with Apple. The love started in 1984 when I was writing software user guides for Racal Electronics. At the time we were writing drafts by hand and then having them typed into a lone IBM PC running Wordstar. Just to give you a flavour of what that was like the screen was a phosphorus green and to make a word bold you had to type formatting commands into the text itself. All illustrations were done entirely by hand using basic technical drawing equipment. One day, one of our contractor software engineers arrived at the office in his red Porsche with his new ‘toy’ – an original 128k Apple Macintosh.

I was blown away by the simplicity of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) interface. Just by clicking and pointing you could do so much more than was possible on the IBM PC. Of course, I later realised that the underlying technology had been invented by Xerox but Apple had developed it and made it affordable and truly understood the significance it would have on the future of personal computing. I was responsible back then for making the business case for Racal to buy its first Apple Macintosh. In practice, we failed to get the company to replace the IBM PC as the core publishing system but we did manage to get it adopted as the system for developing all our illustrations. Later Racal did move over to Apple Macs for all their desktop publishing but by then I had left the company to start my own technical authoring business. My first purchase was an Apple Macintosh 512k which cost around £3,000 – a lot of money in 1984. It had no hard disc – just a single 3.5 inch floppy drive. You had to continually swap the disc to run software and store data. Initially, I used three applications – MacWrite (wordprocessor), MacPaint (bitmap editing) and MacDraw (vector drawing). They worked together like a dream. You could copy a drawing from MacDraw and simply paste it into a MacWrite page via the innovation of the ‘clipboard’. To achieve this on a PC was laborious and fraught with difficulties. Later PageMaker arrived on the scene and the Macintosh pioneered the concept of desktop publishing.

For years I used the Mac but eventually made the switch to the PC as Windows became more intuitive and the range of specialist software available made it more suitable for the type of work I was doing with clients. I still work on PCs to this day primarily because they are cheaper, and run the specialist software that I need. One of the main applications I use today is Articulate Storyline which never made it onto the Mac OS.

In 2008 my love affair with Apple was revived when I bought my first iPhone. Strangely this device didn’t have the wow factor that I experienced when I saw that first Macintosh back in 1984 but once I started using it it transformed the way I thought about productivity devices. The iPhone combined several technologies into one elegant and seamless productivity-enhancing experience. The iPad simply adapted that experience for a larger more comfortable but less portable screen. As always it wasn’t so much the invention but the insightful way the device and its underlying technologies were packaged to provide a user experience that even the very latest Android devices struggle to match. According to reliable sources Apple did very little market research – it relied on the instincts of its people to develop products that would transform people’s lives. Steve Jobs wasn’t a geek – he loved technology but his lasting legacy was the way he developed products that put usability at the heart of the customer experience.

Sadly I didn’t keep that trusty 512k Mac but I did keep the MacPaint user guide which was lovingly created in MacPaint in all its pixelated glory!

For a great story about the early days of the Apple Macintosh I recommend ‘Revolution in the Valley’ by Andy Hertzfeld one of the original Mac design team.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Valley-Paperback-Insanely-Great/dp/0596007191