Interesting post over on ZDNet about the 25th Anniversary of the Macintosh. What we all know as a Mac* could very well have been a ‘bike’.
How the Mac Was Almost a Bicycle
The name Macintosh was originally selected because it was Jef Raskin’s favorite type of apple, but the Mac almost wasn’t an Apple at all. When Raskin took a leave of absence in February 1981, Steve Jobs and Rod Holt made the decision to change Apple to something else. They felt that the name Macintosh was just a code name and that a name change was in order to reflect the change in regime.Holt decided on Bicycle as the new name that would replace Raskin’s Macintosh for the duration of the project and presented it to his design team. When they balked, Holt insisted that all references to Macintosh be changed to Bicycle, telling them that it shouldn’t really matter “since it was only a code name.” The Bicycle name originated from an ad that Apple had placed in Scientific American magazine. The ad featured quotes from Steve Jobs about computers, including one about how personal computers were “bicycles for the mind.”** The logic was that humans could run as fast as other species, but a human—on a bicycle—could beat them all. Rod’s edict was never obeyed. Somehow, Macintosh just seemed right.
The above quote comes from Apple Inc. (Corporations that Changed the World), cited in the ZDNet article.
Perhaps the bicycle will still change the world – but it will be the pedal kind, not the desktop variety.
*anxiously waiting until early next month when I most likely upgrade to a MacBook Pro. I’ll still be running XP on the BootCamp side for some stodgy CAD apps…
**Alan @ EcoVelo has posted vid of the ‘bicycles of the mind’ clip.