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With April 1st, 2006 being Apple's 30th birthday, of course, there's a lot of talk about the birth of the company, Steve Jobs, the Mac, the iPod, and Apple's innovative role in the industry. But so many people look at the GUI and stop there. Now, don't get me wrong, if Apple had only created the first successful mass-market GUI-based OS, the folks who created the Mac could do nothing more than sleep late the rest of their lives and still be a success.

But stopping at the GUI is like limiting Led Zeppelin to "Stairway to Heaven"...that's only part of the story, and not even the start...

The idea that the OS and every application needed to do certain things the same way...cmd-q is always quit, cmd-v is always paste, the menu bar is always in the same place. That consistency, even when it may have not made sense, (I mean, really, what does the letter 'v' have to do with the word 'paste'? Nothing. But if you can't make perfect sense, then perfect consistency is a nice alternative.), meant that you could always rely on things. Remember that in 1982-1984, consistency was almost an anathema. Every program had to do things its way, and if they did them like no one else, good, it meant less likelihood of the user buying a competitor's product. Apple trashed that notion, and said that things working consistently was more important. How important? Windows uses ctrl-v for paste. Yeah, that important.

The idea that "hard" is not a requirement for a computer. That things should be easy, and that a computer should be a toaster. That the computer as a thing was not a goal, but a tool. That what mattered was how you used it. That entire concept was Apple's. Parts of it were started elsewhere, like the GUI at PARC, but Apple created the idea that "ease of use" was not just a nice feature, but a central requirement for a computer.

The idea that networking should be something that just works. That you can run a bunch of wire between computers and printers and have this stuff work. No CNE's, MCSE's, or ABCDE's needed. Apple was the first, and really, to this day even, the most successful computer vendor when it comes to stamping out the myth that using a network must be hard. When you go to Macworld, and you see a tall, rather skinny guy in glasses from Oregon, and his name tag says "Alan Oppenheimer", thank him. If not in person, then in a quiet prayer to the gods of proper computing, because he was part of the team that created AppleTalk.

Plug and Play. Microsoft may have created the marketing term, but Apple started it, and still does it better. They do it so well, it doesn't need a marketing term. On a Mac, adding devices is like working with Alfred the Butler. He's just there, with what you need:

"Ah, a new printer sir. Very good, I've already loaded the driver, so you can just print, no need for me to tell you, it shall work as you expect"

Or

"Ah, pardon me sir, but I'm afraid I don't have that driver, you'll need to install it first, I'm terribly sorry, but you'll not need to do this until you need to print to it, no sense in bothering you about it until then."

On Windows, it's still like dealing with an over-caffeinated Boy Scout:

"youinsertedadevicecaniloadthedriverihavethedriverlooki'mloadingit..."

Apple went beyond just automatic configuration, and made it something that you don't think about unless you need to.

Expansion buses that just work. Yes, now we all laugh at how slow and overpriced NuBus was, but when you compare it to the hells of ISA, MicroChannel, and VESA-LB, it was worth it. Not until PCI did the rest of the world catch up to what Apple had been doing since the Macintosh II.

The idea that the user shouldn't have to care about IRQ's and memory addressing. That's what the computer vendor is for. I was stunned when I started working with NuBus. I expected it to be harder, and honestly, the first time I added a card to a Mac, I didn't think it would work. It was too easy. After that, going back to ISA and the rest was like that line from Billy Madison...I felt dumber for having used it.

The idea that "It just works" is the central vision for a general - purpose computer. That's Apple.

Even when Apple didn't invent a technology, they out innovated everyone else by being the first to make that technology the standard across the product line. They jumped wholesale into PCI far faster than the PC market did, and then there's USB....

If you want the perfect example of how much power Apple wields, USB and the iMac is all you need.

Intel and the rest may have created USB, but even after Windows 98 and years of endless demos of how cool it was, the PC market barely supported it. (Even into 2001/2002, I would get brand new Dells in that required a PS/2 keyboard for the initial setup, even though they had USB support in the BIOS) It took Apple, the iMac, and ninety days to create what is now the massive USB market.

Ninety...Days

In ninety days, the USB market went from almost nothing to damned near everything. Microsoft, Intel, and everyone else couldn't do it in years. Apple did it in a quarter.

Even now, Apple runs towards the future, Microsoft stumbles towards it, sometimes in spite of their best efforts to prevent it.

EFI anyone? EFI has been around for years, but I bet Apple is the number one user of it, and they only have three products that use it. No wonder Intel loves Apple.

The idea that a computer should be elegant, even, dare I say, pretty...that was Apple.

Prior to the Jobsian Apple, the entire PC world reveled in its ugliness and how a computer would turn its area into a web of ugh. Even Apple, thanks to the craptacular designs put out by the CEOs that followed him/preceded him.

Steve Jobs came back, and Apple destroyed that idea, ground it into the dirt like the stupid thing it was, and more power to them for doing that. When the PC manufacturers said "Color doesn't matter, only Power!", Apple ignored them, and the iMac exploded. I imagine the Auto industry was laughing about that one too. Ask any car dealer about color, and if it matters. I almost bought a different car once because of color. It was availability that changed my mind. It took Apple, and Steve Jobs to make the blindingly obvious fact that color counts a reality.

Apple showed the world that Unix was indeed a suitable environment for the home user. Others had been working diligently for years to do this. Apple did it in less than a year. It started the day Mac OS X 10.0 was released, and by the time Mac OS X 10.1 came out, the point had been proven. Unix and "user-friendly" are not mutually exclusive, and Apple's undeniable proof of that has helped both KDE and GNOME with the same quest on Linux.

Even now, Apple is convinced that a server should be easy to set up and administrate. Apple started this with AppleShare, later AppleShareIP and now Mac OS X Server. They're taking a little longer to get there, but you can see the eventual goal. I've confidence they'll do it too.

Why? Because Apple not only fosters brilliance, but they take the risks that brilliance requires.

I was in the room when what would become Zeroconf was proposed. The idea that TCP/IP should be as easy to use as AppleTalk, and that it could be done simply, with existing technology, (some of it created by Microsoft). It is a moment carved into my brain, because I got to see absolute brilliance at work, and an astounding idea created. Right there, I saw the start of something that would, and indeed has changed so many things. I think of that moment every time I'm at an Apple Keynote, and I'm one of many people all editing the TidBITs Keynote article on SubEthaEdit, with no more effort than selecting some menu choices and clicking some buttons. All because Stuart Cheshire had an idea, and he worked for a company that was willing to take risks. It took a lot of people and other ideas to make it a reality, but today, we can do this because of Apple, and its ability to reach beyond the safe, and take risks, and reject the orthodoxy.

To limit Apple's history of innovation to popularizing the GUI, the iPod, and iTMS is to ignore a constant stream of innovations over the last three decades, and the most important quality of all:

Apple, more than every other computer company, takes risks.

Apple leads, everyone else follows. That is Apple's first, best quality, and everything else comes from that. As long as Apple remains true to that, they'll be around for another thirty years, and they'll still be in front of everyone else.

Technorati Tags: Apple, History, Technology

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