By 1986 the Mac had arrow keys, a bigger screen, more memory, and most important an expansion capability. Now that was all fixed, in relatively short order. The Mac was a statement, that's for sure - but it wasn't a very usable statement, at least in its first incarnation. The mouse was wonderful, but sometimes you need cursor keys. The product came at a time when personal computers were getting hard drives, but the Mac had no ability to expand. The screen was tiny, as were the floppy disks. It didn't have enough memory for a machine with so much graphic potential. The Mac was berry berry good to me (a dated reference to a fictional character from the 1980s on SNL).īut the Mac, while it was a brilliant vision, and its gestalt so lovely, was in its first incarnation, a flawed product. By 1986, with the help of Bill Campbell at Apple, we got Macs for every employee at our growing company and our board of directors, and the die was cast. My startup, when the Mac came out, made most of its money off IBM PC software. I still get goosebumps thinking about it today. We were all gushing, all excited to be there. That day, I was on a panel of developers, talking to the press about the new machine. It's better to have one way to do things, than have two or more, no matter how much better the new ones are. The idea of user interface standards were at the time controversial. They also had strong opinions about how our software should work, which in hindsight were almost all good ideas. Apple took a serious stake in the success of software on their platform. We praised their product, their achievement, and they showed off our work. There were the frat boys, the insiders, the football players, and developers played a role too. The rollout on January 24th was like a college graduation ceremony. I loved the Mac at first sight, but the foundation of our long-term relationship was the mouse (30 years later, I'm writing this story in my outliner Fargo on a Mac, with a mouse). We had been hearing about mice, I had even used one in a demo at Xerox PARC, but now, with the Mac - I had one on my desk. It's no coincidence that the earliest experimenter in the area we were commercializing, Doug Engelbart, was also the inventor of the mouse. You could directly manipulate your ideas that way. The big feature the Mac had that was new then was the mouse. You couldn't move an item with your hands, you had to trick a "cursor" into doing what you wanted. The problem was, you weren't inside the outline on an Apple II or an IBM PC, you were above it. Outlines on paper were rigid, but outlines on a computer screen - they could fly! The ability to quickly revise as you learned more about the problem. Our tool was designed to add what would eventually be called "agility" to your thought process.
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