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By June 1983, Apple Computers was seven years removed from its now-mythic garage beginnings at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, where founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs first launched the company. As Wozniak explained to Bloomberg News back in December 2014, while the garage myth is “a bit overblown, [it] represents us better than anything else.” Still, Wozniak admitted: “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products.
..no manufacturing there.
” The Apple I, in fact, was completed by Wozniak largely “in my cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and a bit in my apartment.” In fact, the duo spent only about “a half-day a week” in the garage, which was Jobs’s family home. “We would mainly drive the finished products to the garage.
..” Wozniak recalled.
“We’d test them, make them work, and then drive them down to the store that paid us cash.” Jobs, Wozniak and business executive Ronald G. Wayne launched Apple on April 1, 1976.
They’d split the profits three ways: Jobs and Wozniak would get 45% each, and Wayne 10%. Less than two weeks later, after Jobs had secured their first deal, Wayne gave up his 10% stake — a business decision that he later told the BBC made sense at the time, even though it ultimately cost him billions. So that left Jobs and Wozniak to push Apple into the marketplace.
In that first year, though, Jobs — sensing massive business potential — was concerned about his well-being. Would this growing “monster” overwhelm him? Would he be unable to create enough space in his life to feel normal? In his first year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Jobs became friends with freshman Daniel Kottke. The two shared a passion for books.
One of Kottke’s recommendations, as mentioned in author Michael Moritz’s engrossing book of Apple’s early history, “ Return to the Little Kingdom ,” was “ Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind ,” by Kanagawa-born author Shunryu Suzuki, who moved to the U.S. and co-founded the San Francisco Zen Center.
Suzuki’s book was revelatory to Jobs, who later commented to Moritz on the practice of Zen: “It placed value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn’t seem to lead too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.
” Jobs’s quest for spiritual understanding only grew. He dropped out of Reed, lived in India for seven months, then came back and continued working for Atari. It was through Wozniak’s technical wizardry, however, that Jobs found some ground to stand on.
As Apple’s success started to skyrocket, Jobs dealt with visions of becoming a corporatized cog. With both his girlfriend and a Zen monk, Kobin Chino, Jobs wrestled with the temptation of leaving Apple and instead traveling to an Eihei-ji monastery. “I had a sense that Apple would be consuming.
It was a real hard decision not to go to Japan. Part of me was a little concerned because I was afraid if I went I wouldn’t come back.” Even Chino urged Jobs to dig in and stay at Apple.
Success soon came, like a slow-rolling storm. The Apple II — with its then-sleek design and color graphics — designed by Wozniak in 1977, transformed the computer industry. As author Ann Brashares shares in her children's book, “ Steve Jobs Thinks Different ,” it was Wozniak’s “technical brilliance” that allowed the Apple II to have color: “Other techies believed you couldn’t hook up a color TV because it would require a whole additional memory board to run it, making the computer much too expensive for home use.
Woz realized that he could divert some unused memory from the microprocessor itself, the central brain of the computer. But instead of trying to wangle the microprocessor to run the color TV, he flipped the entire concept on its head and made the TV run the microprocessor instead. This crazy trick of engineering snapped the ties that connected personal computers to old-fashioned mainframes.
” Sales poured in. Jobs and Wozniak made millions. The Zen monastery idea faded, but Japan as a business target remained on Jobs’s mind.
By June 1983, Apple Computer Japan had been set up in Tokyo, its first subsidiary where English was not the first language. Expectations were high, but the Japanese PC market was already built strongly around NEC, Fujitsu, and Sharp. Turbulence was inevitable.
Perhaps the quickest way to show how Apple saw itself as a company in 1983 is to view a commercial from that same year. The above ad is promoting Apple’s new computer at the time, the expensive “Lisa,” which failed to catch on in comparison to the Apple II. As the Voiceover says at the 30-second mark: “When Apple invented the personal computer, we were all alone in the world, but soon it seemed that everybody was trying to build a better Apple.
Well, somebody finally did. Lisa, from Apple. So advanced it puts us right back where we started.
Alone, again. Soon, there will just be two kinds of people: Those who use computers, and those who use Apple.” Apple may have had this solo trendsetting position in the United States and other English-speaking countries, but in Japan during the 1980s, Wozniak (who’d leave the company in the early ‘80s) and Jobs (who also left in 1985) had a hard time finding ways to break into a market dominated by a triopoly of companies.
As journalist Steven Brull outlined for the International Herald Tribune , Apple entered Japan in a sales ditch, needing to overcome “exorbitant land costs,” as well as unforeseen costs in developing software sophisticated enough to handle kanji. There was also NEC Corp, whose massive “proprietary” presence meant there was little room for a challenging overseas competitor. Apple entered Japan in a sales ditch, needing to overcome “exorbitant land costs,” as well as unforeseen costs in developing software sophisticated enough to handle kanji.
—journalist Steve Brull Before they officially launched in June 1983, Jobs had attempted to solve a problem earlier that year involving the size of the Twiggy drive, which would be necessary for the release of the Macintosh. Jobs and two others flew to Japan to meet with their Japanese disk drive supplier at the time, Alps Electronic Co., and other potential suppliers.
As described in Walter Isaacson’s popular and comprehensive biography, Steve Jobs , the Apple team of three traveled via bullet train to the companies, Jobs disregarding Japanese business etiquette at all stops. Jobs loved Japanese food — especially soba and unagi (eel) sushi. He loved ukiyo-e prints such as Goyo Hashiguchi’s “Woman Combing Her Hair” — shown during the 1984 introduction of Apple’s McIntosh.
He loved the temples of Kyoto, Japan’s ancient culture and its Buddhist essence, but when it came to the way the Japanese conducted business, he quickly grew impatient — petulant even. In early 1983, the Twiggy drive problem brought him to wit’s end. In Isaacson’s words, “As they proceeded to visit other Japanese companies, Jobs [28 at the time] was on his worst behavior.
He wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese managers in dark suits. When they formally handed him little gifts, as was the custom, he often left them behind, and he never reciprocated with gifts of his own. He would sneer when rows of engineers lined up to greet him, bow, and politely offer their products for inspection.
Jobs hated both the devices and the obsequiousness. ‘What are you showing me this for?’ he snapped at one stop. “This is a piece of crap! Anybody could build a better drive than this.
’” In this moment, Jobs sounds borderline tyrannical, but while “most of the hosts were appalled, some seem amused,” writes Isaacson. “They had heard tales of his obnoxious style and brash behavior, and now they were getting to see it in full display.” Without Jobs and Wozniak, Apple scrapped and clawed for space in the Japanese market throughout the mid-1980s, never surpassing more than 5% of the market share.
It wasn’t until 1989 when Apple found some bit of footing. As Brull explained, they fired an American management team and hired instead “a Japanese team led by a former Toshiba Corp. executive.
” They also became far more focused on solving the language barrier, investing in and implementing an operating system called “Kanji Talk.” And, yes, they advertised. From billboards, subway walls, women’s golf tournaments and even Janet Jackson tours, Apple made it seem as if its presence was ubiquitous.
If the Japanese PC market were itself an Apple, it was nibbled at, taking years to reach the core. By the early 1990s, Apple’s Macintosh computer took a large and satisfying bite. As Shigechika Takeuchi, then the president of Apple Japan, explained to the Chicago Tribune in 1992: “The Macintosh is well-designed for Japanese people.
The Japanese language, the characters and the thinking method here is similar to the whole idea of the Macintosh. And the Japanese people envy the California-type culture, and even if they can`t be like Californians or live there, they can buy a product from there. We love California.
” By 1997, Apple was still in the shadows of an ever-growing tech behemoth: Microsoft. The company’s future, after enduring 11 years (1985-1996) without Jobs at the helm, was uncertain. At that time, even in the United States, Apple had cornered less than 10% of the computer market.
However, on Aug. 6, 1997 — in a historic partnership that changed the market — Apple and Microsoft agreed to work together. Bill Gates, who at that time had the reputation of a super-rich villain for creating an insurmountable monopoly, faced anti-trust lawsuits from the Department of Justice.
The Apple-Microsoft deal, Gates hoped, would show an act of good-faith toward a competitor and help get him out of hot water. Around the 30-minute mark in the video above , the mixed reaction to Bill Gates appearing via live satellite alongside Steve Jobs captures how the IT community felt about the Microsoft co-founder at the time: The deal, however, gave Apple the market buoyancy it needed to continue. As early as 1997, frustrated in part by how Apple products were displayed in partner stores, Jobs began exploring the idea of opening retail stores.
The first Apple retail store opened in the United States in May 2001. On Nov. 30, 2003, a five-floor store opened in Ginza — the first Apple retail store outside of the U.
S. Interest was high, to say the least. As Jobs said at the time to the Associated Press while in Tokyo for the opening: “So many customers are walking by the front door.
..we will be able to bring many of them who did not think about going to an Apple store.
” In the video below, notice how people stand in line with nothing to engage them as they wait. Oh how it has all changed..
. Right after dropping out of Reed, and during his time learning about Zen and hanging out with Kottke, Jobs gained a massive interest in keeping a diet centered around fruit, believing it to be natural for mankind. “I believe that man is a fruitarian,” he told Moritz.
“I got into it in my typically nutso way.” This love of fruit continued into 1976. As Wozniak writes in his 2007 memoir, “ iWoz ” : “I remember I was driving Steve Jobs back from the airport along Highway 85.
Steve was coming back from a visit to Oregon to a place he called an 'apple orchard.' It was actually some kind of commune. Steve suggested a name – Apple Computer.
” And that was that. Next up in the series will be how McDonald’s opened its first Japan location in just one day in 1971. Patrick Parr is professor of writing at Lakeland University Japan.
His third book, Malcolm Before X , published by the University of Massachusetts Press, is now available. His previous book, One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation is available through Amazon , Kinokuniya and Kobo ..
