"If we don’t do this, nobody can stop IBM."
Steven Levy
It's basically impossible to pick one or two excerpts from Steven Levy's 1984 feature on Steve Jobs and the team at Apple at the time building the Mac (many of whom were back on stage, along with Levy, at the event I linked to yesterday).1
“We’ve made almost every computer that’s ever been made look completely absurd.”
– Chris Espinosa
The entire thing is just an absolute historical document. From Jef Raskin's memo trying to get Steve Jobs fired in 1981. To Jobs telling Levy he was wary of doing press ahead of the launch following a bad experience with Time Magazine – which, not stated because no one would have cared at the time, was written by Michael Moritz. To Jobs' at the time ludicrous goal of having Apple become a $10 billion company – today it's a $3 trillion company. To several quotes from Bill Gates, then Jobs' lesser-known peer and collaborator – not yet rival!
Anyway, I'll quote the intro and implore you to take it from there!
This the future of computing.
Here in Silicon Valley, there is a room ringed with nondescript cubicles. Each contains a small, beige box not much bigger than two shoe boxes stood on end, a box that emanates a whitish glow of a nine-inch video display. The box is a computer called Macintosh, and the people who sit in the carpeted commons in the center of the room are some of its designers. They call themselves pirates. On the wall is a skull-and-bones pirate flag; one of the skeleton’s eyes has been replaced by the rainbow-colored Apple Computer logo.
They are ten weary computer wizards. Average age: well under thirty. Standard dress: blue jeans and T-shirt. Standard look in the eyes: crazed by fatigue. One of the wizards, blond-haired, twenty-two-year-old Randy Wigginton, has been riding the fluctuations in the word-processing program he’s been writing for Apple Computer’s messianic new machine for over two years. Now that it is two weeks from his absolutely, positively final deadline, his face has the dull pallor of a torture victim. His tormentors are two cheerful software hackers, dressed in shorts and hiking boots, who, at this intolerably late date, are blithely revamping the part of the computer operating system called “the Finder.”
1 I'm going to link to it separately (after I have a chance to watch it -- it was live at 3am local time in London), but if you want to watch, here's the replay video.