Steve Jobs and the original Mac are so intertwined in the haze of personal computing history, that many assume that Jobs came up with the idea or “invented” the Mac itself. But that’s not exactly how things went down.
As I lay out in the quick Mac retrospective below, the original Mac was the brainchild of former Apple engineer Jef Raskin. Raskin wanted to build an approachable, affordable personal computer and got the green light to build a team within Apple to do so in 1979. Soon after, Steve Jobs would drop a gangplank on the project, run Raskin off, and make the Mac his own.
Here’s the thing: the Mac that Jobs and Apple delivered in 1984 was an entirely different computer than what Raskin originally intended. That makes the question “Did Steve Jobs invent the Mac?” a bit harder to answer. Watch below.
