Computer Chronicles Revisited 116 — Macworld Expo/Boston 1988

Computer Chronicles returned for its sixth season in October 1988 with an episode covering the second Macworld Expo of the year, which was held from August 11 to 13 at Boston’s World Trade Center and Bayside Exposition Center. The show featured approximately 350 companies displaying products over 1,200 booths. The three-day attendance was estimated at around 40,000 people.

The Boston Macworld came at the mid-point of Apple CEO John Sculley’s tenure with the company. Steve Jobs was long gone, although as we’ll see later he was about to launch his comeback. The Macintosh II’s success finally enabled Apple to make significant inroads into the business market and report record sales in 1987. HyperCard, the software development tool that was the talk of last year’s Boston Macworld, continued to attract interest, even if it hadn’t quite taken the larger computing world by storm. And there was a growing sense that Apple could become the dominant personal computer company of the 1990s, especially as IBM and its clone makers continued to battle over new standards for the PC platform’s system bus.

Indeed, Sculley himself was so confidant in the state of his company that his appearance to deliver the day-one keynote address at Macworld came in the midst of a nine-week sabbatical. Sculley had been officially out of the office since June 29 and holed up with his family at their home in Maine. This was actually part of an official Apple policy granting six weeks of sabbatical to employees who had been with the company at least five years. Sculley, who joined Apple in April 1983, had recently reached his five-year anniversary, so he decided to combine his six-week sabbatical with his three weeks of annual leave.

Sculley’s time off did not reflect a lack of ambition, however, as he spent much of 1988 pushing the idea that Apple’s continued growth was inevitable. In an interview published by Knight-Ridder just before his sabbatical, Sculley said he “would be disappointed if we were anything less than a $25 billion company” by the turn of the century. (Spoiler: Apple’s revenues were only about $5.8 billion in 2000; the company didn’t hit $25 billion in sales until 2006 at the height of the iPod market.)

Sculley was also bullish on Apple’s ongoing lawsuit against two of its largest third-party vendors, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, over allegations that their graphical operating systems violated Apple’s copyright over the “look and feel” of the Macintosh’s user interface. Sculley maintained the lawsuit was “narrowly defined” to “help define the rights of intellectual property” in the industry. For his part, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates did not take the lawsuit personally, as he delivered the keynote address at the second day of Boston Macworld and dismissed Apple’s lawsuit as a nuisance that would hopefully be resolved by the end of the year.

When asked if he saw himself remaining at Apple five years from now, Sculley proclaimed, “Yes, I have nowhere better to go.” Ironically, Sculley fell just short of that mark. Apple’s board deposed Sculley as CEO in June 1993 and he left the company altogether a few months later. Incidentally, that Microsoft-Hewlett Packard lawsuit was still going on when Sculley left, and Apple ultimately lost.

Would Apple Benefit from PC Schism?

But back to the 1988 Boston Macworld Expo. Stewart Cheifet recorded a brief introduction from a perch overlooking the Expo floor, joined by Macworld editor-in-chief Jerry Borrell. Cheifet quipped that while the United States and the Soviet Union were making progress towards peace, it seemed there was still a major war going on between PC and Mac users. What was the impression about that “war” from the Mac perspective? Borrell enthusiastically noted there were hundreds of new Mac products on the show floor from traditional PC vendors. This showed that Apple’s gamble on the Macintosh II paid off, enabling third-party developers to come in and expand the overall Macintosh market. (The Internet Archive’s recording cut out in the middle of Borrell’s comments to show us a clip from someone’s home movie recorded in 1976.)

Borrell added that as the PC world started to transition to the PS/2 and OS/2, there were simply no products currently on the market to take advantage of this new platform, and overall product development had slowed. So he believed the new Macintosh II products would take advantage of the “disarray” in the IBM market.

Drawing, Animating, and Computer Design Dominated

The remainder of this episode was Stewart Cheifet narrating highlights from the Macworld Expo floor. He began with a look at new graphics and drawing software. Cheifet said if there was any lingering doubt about the appeal of splashy graphics, it was not apparent at Macworld. In almost every aisle of Boston’s World Trade Center, there were highly promoted paint, video, and architectural CAD programs on display:

Taking a short break from software, Cheifet moved on to a couple of new Mac peripherals:

Cheifet noted that while the Macintosh had always been known for its graphics, the real explosion over the past year had been in mainstream business applications, in particular business presentation software:

Just One More Thing–the Apple Scanner!

Cheifet opened the second half of his Macworld montage by noting that Mac users had long put up with snide remarks from PC users over the original Mac’s lack of color. With the advent of the Macintosh II, however, there were now a wide range of software applications that take advantage of its color capabilities:

Apple Computer’s main contribution to Macworld was the debut of a flatbed optical-image scanner–creatively named Apple Scanner ($1,800)–complete with AppleScan and HyperScan software. The monochrome scanner could process line art, halftones, and grayscale images at up to 300 dots per inch, grayscale at 4 bits or 16 levels per pixel.

Apple senior vice president Jean-Louis Gassée, who attended the company’s booth, was pleased that the show had demonstrated the success of the “open” Macintosh II (a not-so-subtle dig at the original “closed” Macintosh championed by Steve Jobs). He noted that Apple could not think of everything, and the benefit of having a modular, flexible product was that other people who knew something could take care of it. A former Apple executive, ACIUS Corporation president Guy Kawasaki, added that for awhile, the question was whether the Macintosh had enough software to support it. That wasn’t a question anymore. Now you could just pick the “finest of the finest.”

Heading back around the Expo floor, Cheifet continued:

Cheifet and Jerry Borrell then briefly reappeared to wrap-up the episode. Cheifet asked Borell about the hot products he saw. Borrell said his pick of the show was Microsoft Excel 1.5 because it introduced color spreadsheets. His other highlights included the Kodak slide processing system, DynaWare’s DynaPerspective, Aldus Persuasion, Electronic Arts’ Studio/8, TrueVision’s Nu Vista video capture card, and Presentation Technologies’ Montage FR-1 scanner.

Jobs Eventually Got His Revenge on Gassée

There was a two-month gap between the Boston Macworld Expo and when this episode first aired in late October 1988. Coincidentally, the airdate was just after deposed Apple co-founder Steve Jobs finally unveiled his long-promised NeXT computer. Stewart Cheifet actually dedicated the first news item in his “Random Access” segment to Jobs’ press conference announcing the NeXT Computer.

In contrast to Jobs’ second tenure at Apple, the tech media in 1988 was far more willing to call out the hippie grifter’s shenanigans at the launch of the NeXT. Wendy Woods reported at NewsBytes that the event was “tightly orchestrated” to ensure that only journalists “hand-picked for their friendliness to Steve Jobs’ company or their publication’s influence” were allowed to attend. Indeed, Woods’ description of the entire presentation would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud:

NeXT planners left no room for unflattering or stray shots either verbal or visual. While all local and national television news operations were invited, none could bring in video cameras. Theirs was a hand-out tape, pre-cut and packaged, for reporter voice-overs.

And in case applause not greet Jobs at the proper times, the audience appeared to be peppered with NeXT cheerleaders. When Jobs announced the machine would have an optional 330 megabyte hard drive for $2,000, people started clapping; when he announced a 660 megabyte drive for $4,000 was also an option, more hysterical clapping.

“It was very weird,” commented one spectator to NEWSBYTES, “I felt I was in a commercial and was the only one who hadn’t seen the script.”

Of course, history would show the NeXT computer never managed to live up to the inital hype, selling only about 50,000 units in various forms until NeXT exited the hardware business in 1993 to focus on its operating system, NeXTSTEP. Indeed, it was the UNIX-based NeXTSTEP that provided Jobs with his entry back into Apple. When his former company needed a new operating system to replace the aging Mac operating system, Apple acquired what was then called NeXT Software, Inc., in 1997.

Ironically, the other operating system that Apple considered acquiring was BeOS, whose developer, Be Inc., was founded by Jean-Louis Gassée, the Apple executive who briefly appeared in this episode. Gassée joined Apple on December 21, 1980, the day the company went public, after executive stints in the European divisions of Hewlett-Packard, Data General, and Exxon Office Systems. Initially appointed to a similar role at Apple, Gassée ended up succeeding Steve Jobs as vice president of product development in May 1985.

Shortly after the Boston Macworld Expo ended, the still-on-sabbatical John Sculley decided to reorganize Apple into four operating divisions. Gassée, who had been senior vice president of research, development, and product marketing, would now be president of the Apple Products group.

But less than 18 months later, in February 1990, Gassée announced his resignation from Apple. This followed yet another reorganization where Sculley planned to let Gassée keep his title but reassign control over Apple’s marketing and manufacturing to another executive, Michael Spindler, leaving Gassée with the “sole job of developing new products and technologies,” according to Wendy Woods.

To be clear, Gassée’s “resignation” amounted to a firing, as he recalled in a December 2020 Medium post. Looking back 30 years later, Gassée said that he and Sculley “disagreed too much and he did what he needed to be done, he showed me the door.” That said, Gassée also credited Sculley with giving him “the professional and financial kick to start my own company, Be, Inc.”

Sculley himself would fall in 1993, replaced by the aforementioned Michael Spindler. Spindler was then replaced in 1996 by Gil Amelio, the former CEO of National Semiconductor. It was Amelio who opened talks with Gassée over acquiring Be, Inc.–or more accurately its BeOS operating system. It turned out that the two sides were simply too far apart on price to make a deal. According to one report, Amelio expected to pay $50 million for Be, Inc., while Gassée’s board demanded $300 million.

After the Be talks collapsed, Jobs and NeXT initiated their own negotiations with Amelio. Apple ended up paying about $430 million to acquire NeXT. Jobs then rejoined Apple, initially as an “advisor” to another former Apple CEO, Mike Markkula, who briefly retook the chairmanship of the board. But of course, a few months later Jobs helped orchestrate Amelio’s ouster and his own installation as CEO.

As for Be, Inc., it was sold to personal digital assistant developer Palm Inc., in 2001. Gassée then joined Palm’s board of directors and briefly served as chairman of one of its spin-off companies, PalmSource, Inc. In 2003, Gassée became the general partner at California venture capital firm Allegis Capital and remained in that role until his retirement in 2022.

Notes from the Random Access File