“Two of the original rainbow apple signs that adorned Apple’s Cupertino (Calif.) headquarters are up for sale. Bonhams auction house expects the signs, which were removed from the company’s headquarters in 1997 and ‘given to a longtime Apple employee,’ will fetch $10,000 to $15,000,” Belinda Lanks reports for Businessweek. “Although the iconic symbol has long been synonymous with Apple, it wasn’t the company’s first logo. That was a 1976 lithographic scene of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree below a dangling apple, wrapped in a banner emblazoned with ‘Apple Computer Co.'”
“As you might expect, that logo didn’t last long. A year later, Steve Jobs ordered a redesign from Rob Janoff, with a single direction: ‘Don’t make it cute,'” Lanks reports. “The resulting, albeit slightly cute, mark came to symbolize the company’s simple, friendly user interface. A monochromatic version is still stamped on all Apple products today.”
“The auction, titled The Story of the 20th Century, also includes a prototype featuring an awkward vertical screen,” Lanks reports. “The model was created by the Apple Industrial Design Group and Matrix Product Design and dates from around 1989, when the company was working on the LC.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BD” for the heads up.]
Actually, the logo symbolized the fact that the Apple II computer had color graphics whereas all the competitors (e.g., TRS-80) had monochrome (if they had graphics at all). It would be many years (nearly a decade) before Apple became well-known for their user interface (indeed, the “user interface” of the Apple II kind of sucked — even worse than CP/M (or MS-DOS, which was a clone of CP/M).
If you thought like Woz, you would see that the Apple //e was the best interface. Call -151 entered Assembler mode, which was unprecedented. Not only did Apple have Basic you had ROM based Assembler. You really felt you could get into the guts of the system and if you took time, feel in control of every bit. Nothing else had this intimacy.
What’s awkward about the LC prototype? It’s a “PAGE” display. The original Xerox Alto had a portrait screen, and this made sense if you are working on documents. 20″ screens were good for two side by side pages.
It just looks different. It might have been as successful as the LC and Color Classic they came out with.
The LC prototype looks very much like a Macintosh IIfx
I miss the rainbow logo. I realize it wouldn’t work today, but I still miss it. I should download a big rainbow Apple and make it my lock screen picture on my iPhone.
——RM