How Mac Changed the World

The Macintosh computer has never lacked for enthusiasts ready to paint the machine with cosmic significance. More than any other personal computer, the Mac comes wrapped in hype, most of it directly traceable to Steven Jobs, former chairman of Apple. He loved to tell his designers that the computer they were building -- with its icons, its pull-down menus and its mouse -- would not only change the world, but also "put a dent in the universe." As if to hammer his point home to the rest of America, Jobs launched the new machine in January 1984 with the famously melodramatic commercial -- aired just once, during the Super Bowl -- in which a woman clad in a Mac T shirt smashed a screen image meant to represent the brain-dead PCs of archrival IBM, the Big Brother of computing.

The heavy-handed marketing campaign, as any business-school student can testify, worked for a while and then backfired. After an initial spurt of sales, word got out that the radical new machine was annoyingly underpowered and grossly overpriced -- a yuppie toy. Although Apple eventually solved most of the computer's problems, IBM compatibles still dominate the personal- computer business. The Macintosh today remains stuck in a niche, with a market share that hovers around 10%.

But a look at the information landscape 10 years after the launch suggests that the Macintosh may turn out to be almost as important as Jobs promised. Not only have the icons and pointing devices pioneered by Apple become ubiquitous -- both on rival computers and on new vehicles being designed to navigate the emerging information highways -- but the Mac has also played a key role in making society comfortable with the central technology of the age.

"Macintosh was the crucial step, the turning point," writes Steven Levy in a new book, Insanely Great (Viking; $20.95), published to commemorate the machine's 10th anniversary. (The title comes from Jobs' typically hyperbolic claim for how great the Mac would be.) Levy, the author of Hackers and a columnist for Macworld magazine, believes the Mac set in motion a subtle intellectual process that is changing the way people think about information and, ultimately, thought itself. "In terms of our relationship with information," he writes, "Macintosh changed everything."

That overstates the case, but there's something to what Levy says. The crux of his argument is that the Mac moved computer users into the realm of metaphor. By making the internal workings of a machine as cozy as a living room, the Macintosh allowed people to feel at ease in cyberspace, that "ephemeral territory perched on the lip of math and firmament," as Levy describes it, or, more simply, "the place where my information lives."

The central metaphor of the Mac is the desktop. Like a typical office, the Macintosh screen is filled with folders, documents and stacks of paper. There is even a trash can for throwing things away. Rather than having to memorize ^ abstract commands like A: INSTALL, Macintosh users simply point and click.