login || register

• Home
• News
• Blogs
• Reviews
• Masterclass
• Forums
• Subscribe
• Spotlights
• Shopping

• Latest news
• Latest Mac news
• Newsletters
• News widget
• RSS feeds
• Search news

Over the past 20 years, thousands of people within Apple and in the Mac development community contributed their blood, sweat, and tears to advance the state of the art in computing. Without their hard work, inspiration, and creativity, there would be no Macintosh, and quite possibly, no Apple, either. All of us in the Mac world owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be adequately repaid. Here then, is a tribute to the 20 most influential people in the Mac’s history, presented in alphabetical order.

Dr Gilbert Frank Amelio Public opinion over Gil Amelio is decidedly split. Some feel he did the best he could after inheriting an untenable situation when he replaced Michael Spindler as CEO of Apple in late January 1996. Others believe he was an over-compensated corporate dullard who clashed with Apple’s unique freewheeling culture. Regardless of your opinion of Amelio’s rocky 17-month tenure at the helm of Apple, his decision to purchase NeXT in December 1996 was instrumental in restoring the company to health if for no other reason that it brought Steve Jobs back to Cupertino after 11 years in exile. Less than seven months later, Amelio was ousted by the board, clearing the way for Jobs to assume control.

Question of the day!

Mark Hattersley
Editor in Chief

Do you use Adobe Photoshop with a Wacom tablet?

Question of the day!

Do you use Adobe Photoshop with a Wacom tablet?

% of Macworld readers agree with you

Yes

TBC

No

TBC

How does a Wacom tablet improve the Photoshop experience?

Tweet your answer here...

124 characters remaining

Follow the conversation at @TabletChat

paintings & illustrations, mostly, which i upload to flickr.RT @fragmentedm

I draw manga/anime characters. I also do graphic design and photography.RT @spialelo

Yes. I usually put them up on my #deviantart account for feedback on how to improve.RT @spialelo

Fred D Anderson Even the most ardent Apple advocate can be forgiven for not knowing the name of Fred Anderson. After all, a behind-the-scenes financial deal doesn’t often result in fame and glory, but in this case, it should. Amelio hired Anderson as chief financial officer in March 1996, when Apple was in a death spiral with only a three-month cash supply. In June, Amelio and Anderson pulled off a Wall Street first: they executed a massive convertible debenture offering literally overnight because they simply didn’t have the luxury of the typical month-long road show. In one fell swoop, the $661 million from the convertible bond sale solved Apple’s liquidity crisis. Need further proof of Anderson’s value? He’s the only Amelio-era executive still working for Jobs.

Bill Atkinson While working on the ill-fated Lisa in the early 1980s, Bill Atkinson wrote the QuickDraw routines that handled drawing to the screen. When he joined the original Mac team, Atkinson adapted QuickDraw for the Mac, and he designed much of the initial Mac user interface. To demonstrate the power of the Mac’s simplicity, Atkinson wrote MacPaint, the seminal graphics program. In 1987, Apple released Atkinson’s HyperCard, a remarkable database tool that allowed mere mortals to easily program links between graphics and text. Although HyperCard languished after Atkinson left Apple to found General Magic in 1990, the hyperlink concept it introduced was central to the later success of the Web.

Paul Brainerd In 1985, the Mac was on the verge of slipping into computing history as yet another revolutionary product that was highly praised by not purchased. All that changed when Aldus PageMaker unlocked the potential of Adobe’s page-description language, PostScript, which was embedded in Apple’s LaserWriter printer. Aldus founder Paul Brainerd originally intended to sell PageMaker as a high-end, vertical product, but Steve Jobs convinced him to target consumers instead. By providing a pro publishing tool at a mass-market price, Aldus revolutionized the printing industry and created the Mac’s first killer app: desktop publishing. The DTP revolution made the Mac just as VisiCalc made the Apple II, and it propelled Aldus to a successful public offering and merger with Adobe in September 1994, after which Brainerd resigned.

Steve Capps <br/> One of 15 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center scientists who jumped ship to work on the Lisa at Apple in the early 1980s, Steve Capps was subsequently shanghaied by Steve Jobs in 1983 to help create the Mac. After working on the Mac ROM, Capps teamed up with Bruce Horn to write the Mac’s filing system in only six months. Version 1.0 of the Finder was remarkable in that it consumed less than 50K of memory, yet allowed users to easily point and click their way through icons representing documents in folders on disks. Capps left Apple in 1985, started a music company, returned to Cupertino in 1987 to lead the development of the handheld Newton MessagePad, and was eventually named an Apple Fellow in 1994. Capps went on to become Microsoft’s user interface architect from 1996 to 2001.

Jean-Louis Gassée
The “Flamboyant Frenchman” was indirectly responsible for both Steve Jobs’ original ouster from Apple as well as his eventual return. As vice president of product development, Jean-Louis Gassée learned of Steve Jobs’ intention of overthrowing then-CEO John Sculley in 1985. Gassée warned Sculley, who thwarted the coup. Within four months, Jobs resigned to start NeXT. Gassée’s star rose along with the sales of the expandable Macintosh II he advocated, and fell when he stood by his premium pricing strategy and the laughably heavy Macintosh Portable. When Sculley passed him over for Spindler, Gassée resigned in 1990. Six years later, after Gassée demanded too high a price for his BeOS, he inadvertently drove a desperate Gil Amelio into Jobs’ arms.

William Henry Gates III Say what you will about billionaire Bill Gates (and we’re sure you will), there’s no denying that he is one of the most influential people in the Mac’s history. Back when the Macintosh was just a research project, Gates appreciated the importance of the graphical user interface and began the largest Macintosh software development effort outside of Apple. MultiPlan, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint soon dominated the Mac productivity market and Microsoft has remained a dedicated developer through thick and thin. Granted, Gates did sucker Sculley into a 1985 deal that gave Microsoft the legal right to use the Mac look-and-feel in Windows, but that’s another story altogether…

Ellen M Hancock In July 1996, newly installed Apple CEO Gil Amelio (see earlier) hired his National Semiconductor protégé Ellen M Hancock as chief technology officer and executive VP, R&D. For more than two years, Apple had been squandering hundreds of millions of dollars and virtually all of its software engineering resources on Copland, a next-generation operating system. It took Hancock less than a month to see Copland for what it really was: a bloated piece of inferior vapourware. Hancock immediately froze all non-essential Copland development. Her search for an alternative OS culminated in a dramatic technology shoot-out between Jean-Louis Gassée’s BeOS and Steve Jobs’ OPENSTEP. Despite recommending Apple purchase NeXT, Hancock never enjoyed the respect of Jobs, and she resigned along with Amelio in July 1997. If you are among the millions of users currently enjoying the rock-solid Mac OS X, it’s because Hancock had the guts to kill Copland.

Andy Hertzfeld When Andy Hertzfeld joined Apple in August 1979, he helped create peripherals (including the Silentype thermal printer and the first 80-column card) and system software for the Apple II. Two years later, Steve Jobs literally pulled the plug on his Apple II and drove him to join the Macintosh project, where he designed and implemented a third of the original system software, including the User Interface ToolBox. By placing these tools in the Mac’s ROM, Apple made it easy for programmers to adhere to its all-important User Interface Guidelines, thereby ensuring a consistent, familiar look-&-feel for all Macintosh applications. After leaving Apple in 1984, Hertzfeld went on to co-found Radius, General Magic, and Eazel.

Jonathan Ive <br/> Perhaps the greatest hero of Apple’s recent resurgence is design-guru Jonathan Ive. Born in London in 1967, Ive studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic, designed toilets and wash basins, and then created PowerBook concepts as a consultant before joining Apple’s Industrial Design Group (IDG) in September 1992. Ive designed the Newton MessagePad 110, the AppleVision 1710 displays, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, the education-portable eMate, and the MessagePad 2000, but it wasn’t until the innovative iMac was released in 1998 that he achieved celebrity status. The iMac’s rounded, translucent, candy-coloured case proved irresistible to consumers and helped turn around Apple’s fortunes. As vice-president of IDG, Ive led the creation of a whole family of visually stunning products, including the iBook, flat-panel iMac, iPod, PowerBook G4, Cube, and Power Mac G5 tower; not to mention the MacBook, Mac Pro and Mac mini range of computers. More recently his work has moved away from white plastics and towards aluminium with the integration of Apple's Unibody design process.

Macworld February on sale now! Get the lowdown on the NEW 17-inch unibody
MacBook Pro! PLUS there's a FREE copy of Carrara 5 Pro worth £350 for every
reader! For more information click here.

NEXT: Steve Jobs and the final nine

Email A Friend

Email this article to a friend or colleague:

PLEASE NOTE: Your name is used only to let the recipient know who sent the story, and in case of transmission error. Both your name and the recipient's name and address will not be used for any other purpose.

Permalink This Article

This articles permalink is:
http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?newsid=24582

Disclaimer
Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Macworld. Macworld accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content.
Click here to read the house rules.

Click here for the latest reader comments

Mac Broadband?

Compare 20+ Mac
mobile broadband packages
or enter your postcode below:

Postcode Powered by