40 Years of Macintosh

This morning, the Steve Jobs Archive remembered the 40th anniversary of the Mac with a message to its email subscribers that tells the story of when Rolling Stone photographer Norman Seeff and reporter Steven Levy visited Apple. It’s a great anecdote that captures the spirit of the team that created the Mac in the time leading up to its public unveiling.

The post also explains Jobs’ approach to building the Mac:

Steve knew that the very best work conveys the ideas and intentions of the people who created it. And he believed deeply that this team of engineers, designers, and programmers, who were also sculptors, photographers, and musicians—a team that integrated technology and the liberal arts—could create a machine for everyday people, “a computer for the rest of us.”

At a time when computers were complex and difficult to use, it was a radical objective. To get there, Steve encouraged the team and protected them; he pushed them hard and shared his critiques. He asked them to sign their work like artists, even while reminding them that they were building a tool for others to use. “We’re going to walk into a classroom or an office or a home five years from now,” he promised, “and somebody’s going to be using a Macintosh for something we never dreamed possible.”

The Steve Jobs Archive has published a handful of stories to its email list since its inception, and today’s is one of my favorites. I do wish, though, that the Archive maintained a blog on its site for this sort of material. Locking these stories up in a third-party service like Mailchimp is a shame for a bunch of reasons.

→ Source: mailchi.mp