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Back in the early 1980s, word spread about an inviting little personal computer that used something called a mouse and smiled at you when you turned it on. Steven Levy relates his first encounter with the pre-released Mac and goes on to chronicle the machine that Apple developers hoped would "make a dent in the universe." A wonderful story told by a terrific writer (Levy was the longtime writer of the popular "Iconoclast" column in
MacWorld; he's now a columnist with
Newsweek, the birth and first ten years of the Macintosh is a great read.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
This sensible and entertaining book outlines "how technology, serendipity, passion, and magic combined to create . . . the most important consumer product in the last half of the twentieth century: the Macintosh computer." Levy ( Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution ) describes the travails that beset Apple, the company run by Steven Jobs that created the Mac--"dippy new-age culture," a "mission from God" mentality and a Silicon Valley image. "What's the difference between Apple and Boy Scouts?" he queries, reviving a long-running joke. Answer: "The Boy Scouts have adult supervision." And Levy's view of Jobs himself seems reasonable: "a con man," and "a slick marketer" whose impulsive management style and overbearing ego "drove people crazy." As the author recounts, in 1985 Apple's directors forced Jobs out; he left Apple while creating a new comuter company, Next. "It made no dent in the universe," Levy reports. John Sculley replaced Jobs, but he too was relieved of his position as CEO in 1993, when Apple's directors judged him "too much a visionary." This solid work adroitly covers the information age.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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