Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made
quotes from Steve Jobs about the wonders of personal computers. The ad explained how humans were not as fast runners as many other species, but a human on a bicycle beat them all. Personal computers were "bicycles for the mind."
    A month or so after Jef's departure, Rod Holt announced to the small design team that the new code name for the project was "Bicycle", and that we should change all references to "Macintosh" to "Bicycle". When we objected, thinking "Bicycle" was a silly name, Rod thought that it shouldn't matter, "since it was only a code name".
    Rod's edict was never obeyed. Somehow, Macintosh just seemed right. It was already ingrained with the team, and the "Bicycle" name seemed forced and inappropriate, so no one but Rod ever called it "Bicycle". For a few weeks, Rod would reprimand anyone who called it "Macintosh" in his presence, but the new name never acquired any momentum. Finally, around a month after his original order, after someone called it "Macintosh" again, he threw up his hands in exasperation and told us, "I give up! You can call it Macintosh if you want. It's only a code name, anyway."
    But it was a code name that proved to be sturdy and resilient. In the Fall of 1982, Apple paid tens of thousands of dollars to a marketing consulting firm to come up with a themed set of names for Lisa and Macintosh. They came up with lots of ideas, including calling the Mac the "Apple 40" or the "Apple Allegro". After hearing all the suggestions, Steve and the marketing team decided to go with Lisa and Macintosh as the official names. They did manage to reverse engineer an acronym for Lisa, "Local Integrated Systems Architecture", but internally we preferred the recursive "Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym", or something like that. Macintosh seemed to be acroynm proof.
    But there was still a final hurdle to clear - the name was too close to a trademark from the McIntosh stereo company. I'm not sure how the situation was resolved (I suspect that Apple paid them a modest amount), but toward the end of the retreat in January 1983, Steve announced to the team that we had gotten rights to use the name. He dashed a champagne bottle against one of the prototypes, and declared, "I christen thee Macintosh!"

A Message For Adam
by Andy Hertzfeld in April 1981

    The Osborne 1 portable computer
    The Apple II was officially introduced at the First West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, one of the very first trade shows dedicated to the newly emerging microcomputing industry. I loved the Computer Faires because they were attended by passionate hobbyists in the days before commercial forces completely dominated.
    In April 1981, a few members of the Mac team took off the afternoon and drove up to San Francisco to visit the seventh West Coast Computer Faire at Brooks Hall. The biggest splash at the show was the unveiling of the Osborne I, from a brand new company named Osborne Computer, which was touted as the world's first portable computer.
    The Osborne I was the brain-child of Adam Osborne, who was a well known figure in the world of early microcomputers. Adam was a technical writer who founded a publishing company to publish crucial information about microprocessors and software that was sorely lacking at the time, which was eventually sold to McGraw-Hill. He became a controversial columnist, opining on the industry from his pulpit in InfoWorld and other publications. He had a populist vision of computing, touting a no-frills, low cost, high volume approach to the business.
    In 1980, he decided to put his theories into practice, and founded the Osborne Computer Company to design, manufacture and market the Osborne 1, which was a low cost, one-piece, portable computer complete with a suite of bundled applications. He recruited Lee Felsenstein, already a microcomputing legend as the master of ceremonies of the Home Brew Computer Club, to design the hardware. Now, they were introducing the fruits of their labor at the West Coast

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