“After Eve’s lunch in the garden of Eden around 4,000BC and Sir Isaac Newton’s seventeenth century bump on the head, 1 April 1976 is the third date on which an apple revolutionised human development. This is the date on which Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne founded Apple Computer in 21-year-old Jobs’s bedroom at his parents’ California home. Expect a lot of hyperbole as the company approaches its 30th birthday,” Stephen Foley writes for The Independent. “Apple is preparing to launch a slew of new and improved products and is sure to remind us all how the company changed the modern world not just once, but twice. Its early products were hailed as computers ‘for the rest of us,’ so easy to use you didn’t need to be a geek to get it. They popularised personal computing in the same way that Apple’s iPod – 50 million shipped and counting – has turned digital downloading into a mass market phenomenon.”
“Steve Jobs, who was holding down a second job as head of the Pixar film studio until its purchase by Disney, has emerged as one of the most powerful figures not just in computing but in the media world,” Foley writes. “The Macintosh, launched in 1984 with a mouse and a screen that said hello to you, became one of the most successful product launches in computing history… Indeed, Microsoft’s Windows, now the dominant operating system, looks a lot like that of the Mac… now that Apple is the Goliath, and as anti-trust questions begin to be raised over the dominance of iTunes software and its superior inter-operability with the iPod hardware, might its apparently unassailable position crumble as it did after the shooting-star success of the early Macintosh? The difference this time is that everyone inside Apple – from Steve Jobs down – is aware of and determined to learn from the failures of the past.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Macaday” for the heads up.]
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