Was there a lot of buzz already within Apple about the development of the Mac?
It was mixed. For the whole first year I was working on it there was buzz, but it was not necessarily positive. The Macintosh was the price of an Apple II but had the features of a Lisa, so it managed to get at odds with all the big teams at Apple. And it was considered a Skunk Works project.
It wasn't the future of the company; the future of the company was the Lisa and the Apple III, and we were more like a little scruffy research project. It was certainly that way, almost insignificant, when Jef [Raskin] was running it. When Steve [Jobs] took over, that got a lot of attention. But even in those days Steve was thought of as a loose cannon more than, you know, the admiral or anything. Steve was never the CEO of Apple until the late 90s. He was a VP and he became the chairman of the board in 1981, but he didn't really have that much organisational authority.
They thought we were way overambitious, and we were also a much smaller team than the big teams. To do a major project really takes at least 50 people. We were like five people. But then as we made progress, gradually Apple became aware that this is going to be a bigger thing. By the time the Mac shipped, the entire company was pretty excited about it.
Was there a lot of politics at that time?
A lot of politics. In the book, I have a number of stories that address some of the tensions, especially with the Lisa team. I have a story in there called "And Another Thing". That's the name of the story where Larry Tesler, who was the manager of the Lisa applications team, asked Burrell and myself to give a demo to the Lisa team. One of the main Lisa guys, Rich Page, kind of wasn't invited to the demo, but he stormed in and started screaming at us during the demo about how the Macintosh was going to destroy the Lisa and destroy Apple.
He was like raving -- really, really emotional, almost crying -- and then he kind of said his piece. Everyone was shocked and stunned, and he stepped out of the room and he slammed the door. I can still remember how the door reverberated in the stunned silence after that. Larry Tesler was very embarrassed that [Rich] did that, so he's trying to figure out what to say. But as he's trying to figure out what to say, Rich stormed into the room again and started ranting a second time.
Isn't there some truth, though, to what he said -- that the Mac was a threat to the Lisa? It was going to have similar features and cost a lot less but was not slated to reach the market for a couple more years, thus dampening Lisa sales.
Yeah, definitely. Certainly there's a complex nest of issues there with the relationship between the Lisa and the Mac. But hindsight tells us that the Mac was on the right path. If we hadn't developed the Mac, I don't think there'd be an Apple.
Why write a book about Apple and the creation of the Mac?
There's been many books about Apple, and typically they're extremely self-serving. They end up promoting the person that wrote the book. [Former Apple CEO John] Scully's book is a great example, but the quintessential example is Gil Amelio's book, in terms of being self-serving. It was almost like an apology.
Are there any other books on the birth of the Mac?
No. Nobody else who was on the team I think has written a book.
