Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh @ BCS
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Thank you.
Good evening.
I'm Steve Jobs from Apple Computer.
We're very glad to be here tonight.
It is 1958.
IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that
has just invented a new technology called xerography.
Two years later, Xerox is born, and IBM
has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is 10 years later, the late 60s.
Digital Equipment Corporation and others
invent the minicomputer.
IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small
to do serious computing and therefore unimportant
to their business.
DEC grows to become a multi-hundred million dollar
corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now 10 years later, the late 70s.
In 1977, Apple, a young fledgling company on the West
Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer
as we know it today.
IBM dismisses the personal computer
as too small to do serious computing
and therefore unimportant to their business.
The early 1980s, 1981.
Apple II has become the world's most popular computer,
and Apple has grown to a $300 million corporation,
becoming the fastest growing company
in American business history.
With over 50 competitors vying for a share,
IBM enters the personal computer market
in November of 1981 with the IBM PC.
19...
1983.
Apple and IBM emerge as the industry's strongest
competitors, each selling approximately $1 billion
worth of personal computers in 1983.
Each will invest greater than $50 million
for research and development and another $50 million
for television advertising alone in 1984,
totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing.
The first major firm goes bankrupt with others teetering on the brink.
Total industry losses for 1983 outshadow even the combined profits
of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
It is now 1984.
It appears IBM wants it all.
Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money.
Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future.
They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom.
IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple.
Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry?
The entire information age?
Was George Orwell right?
We are one
people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own compulsion.
We shall prevail.
On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh.
And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984.
for.
There have only been two milestone products in our industry
to date.
The first was Apple II in 1977.
The second was the IBM PC in 1981.
Come on.
Let's be fair.
What we need now is the third industry milestone product.
And that's what Macintosh is all about.
We've been working on this thing for over two years now.
And those of us that have been really close to it will all tell you, it is insanely great.
and you'll have a chance to see a little bit more of it later on tonight.
And we're introducing it at a mainstream price point, as most of you know, at $2,495.
And what I want to do is run through some of the key milestones and key features of Macintosh
very briefly, just in case you haven't heard all about them,
and then we'll get into some more interesting stuff here.
The first thing is that Macintosh uses Lisa technology.
It's got the identical user interface of Lisa with its radical ease of use,
It's mice, windows, pull-down menus, point, click, cut, and paste.
And to accomplish this, we use exactly the same microprocessor as Lisa,
a 68,000 running at 8 megahertz.
And this thing eats 8088s for breakfast.
Macintosh has about 192K bytes of memory.
64K of it is ROM, 128K of it is RAM.
And inside the 64K bytes of ROM is contained the entire operating system,
the entire graphics foundation and subsystem, and the entire user interface.
All the windowing stuff, the menu stuff, the mouse stuff, all in ROM.
Just like the 5 1⁄4-inch disk was a breakthrough in the 70s,
we think the 3 1⁄2-inch disk is a breakthrough in the 80s.
And we're storing 400K bytes of formatted information on one side of these floppies,
which fit inside your shirt pocket.
Macintosh has two built-in serial ports.
These ports are RS-232 and RS-422.
They go up to a megabit per second.
And they also support a local interconnect scheme called Apple Bus,
which allows you to connect up to 32 of these products together at virtually no additional cost.
Macintosh has four voice sound and speech built in.
And it talks to you on an extremely high definition, super crisp, bitmap 9-inch black-and-white screen.
It's really incredible, as many of you might have had a chance to see at the hands-on.
We have one last hands-on at 9 o'clock tonight.
This screen has over twice the dots of the IBM PC or Apple II on its screen.
Very high definition.
And all of this power fits into a box one-third the size and weight of the IBM PC.
It's a truly transportable product.
And in addition to that, there's a whole family of stuff that goes along with it.
Image writer, printers, external disk drives, modems, carrying cases, and a sort of security kit
so your Macintosh doesn't go anywhere without you.
Now, you've seen some pictures of Macintosh in these slides.
But what I'd like to do now is show you the Macintosh in person.
And all of the images that you will be seeing
will be generated by what's in that bag right there.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now we've been doing an awful lot of talking about Macintosh lately as well, but tonight, really for the second time ever, we'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself.
Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.
Uncustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I made an IBM mainframe.
Never trust a computer you can't with.