“Bicycle for the Mind”

“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of entrepreneurs.” Steve Jobs said this and a lot more in 1980 as explored in this annotated twitter thread.

1/ “When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of entrepreneurs.” — Steve Jobs, c. 1980

Such a remarkable quote and articulation. Some history and innovation, rockets, privacy, ease of use, h/w <> s/w

Apple Computer bicycle of the mind poster created for anniversary campaign. (via auction house photo)

2/ Searching for this quote one finds a fascinating presentation by Steve Jobs sometime in 1980. In this video we see early days of the bicycle quote.

Apple ][ is ~3 years old.

3/ In particular, Jobs references a Scientific American article. A study of efficiency of motion of various animal species. He recalls in the article that the condor was the most efficient, and humans way down the list until using a bike — efficiency in kcal/kg “or something”.

4/ The article is from March 1973 of Scientific American. A detailed look at the history of the bicycle. The chart that was so fascinating is here. You can see just how efficient a human on a bicycle is. No condor though :-)

Graphic from March 1973, Scientific American article on origin and impact of the bicycle by Wilson.

5/ The remainder of the video 4 super interesting comments that essentially lay out a roadmap for decades.

The motivation for thread was simply how fascinating these points are today, 40 years later.

Reminder, Microsoft revenue from BASIC, etc. ~7M, 40 FTE, SteveB joined.

6/ At 9:15 he talks about how buying a computer is also buying a big problem. Before it can be used you need to learn how to program it (literally in 1980 you programmed a computer if you bought one). Apple wants to solve that problem. Making computing accessible is a core value.

7/ “Our whole company our whole philosophical base is founded on one principle and that one principle is that there’s something very special and very historically different that takes place when you have one computer and one person”

The personal in PC.

8/ At 12:45 he says something few were thinking about which is “we’re going to start chewing up power specifically to help that one-on-one interaction go smoother and specifically not to actually do the number crunching and the database management and the word processing.”

9/ PCs were so under-powered relative to the software at the time, no one was considering doing anything but handling bigger spreadsheets, more records, or more pages in a word processor.

Trying to do ease of use made everything slow. Big tradeoff in memory at this time.

10/ At 18:00 Apple *was* a h/w Co, now over half s/w eng, “more and more software is getting integrated into the hardware — yesterday’s software is today’s hardware so those two things are merging I think and the line between hardware and software is going to get finer and finer”

11/ Four rather profound points:

make PCs easy to use

one PC per person beats a computer for 10 people

use increasing power to make PCs easier to use not compute more

there is no seam between hardware and software

12/ This is all very interesting. But where did it go from here? I guess Steve liked this analogy. Pretty soon Apple was using it in advertising. The legend is that there was a two page ad in SciAm (in Hertzfeld book) but I couldn’t find it in back issues. Here’s April 1980 WSJ.

Wall Street Journal advertisement, August 13, 1980 (scan via Harry McCracken)

13/ In early 1981, Jef Raskin the leader/initiator of Macintosh took a leave of absence. Jobs felt Macintosh was just a codename and then insisted on calling the project “Bicycle” for the duration. This from Hertzfeld’s book/folklore.org—https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Bicycle.txt

Jef Raskin chose the name “Macintosh”, after his favorite kind of apple, so when Jef was forced to go on an extended leave of absence in February 1981, Steve Jobs and Rod Holt decided to change the name of the project, partially to distance it from Jef. They considered “Macintosh” to be a code name anyway, and didn’t want us to get too attached to it. Apple had recently taken out a two page ad in Scientific American, featuring 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”.

14/ Then on April 10, 1981 the Space Shuttle was supposed to launch (whoa, that was a sharp turn). Launch scrubbed because of computer issue — voting computers deadlocked. It was crazy. ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes paper “Bug Heard Round the World” John R.Garman detailed issues. https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/space_.pdf

“The Bug Heard Round the World” by John R. Garman in ACM Software Engineering Notes.

15/ That night, on ABC News Nightline show was on computing. Featured 26 year old Steve Jobs. It is tough to believe that he was booked to support a freak out over the shuttle but I don’t know. There were 4 interesting parts of the show.

16/ BTW, Nightline was just a year old and had quickly become the evening show but was head to head with new Letterman. This is super cool — just seeing him on screen like this. It was the height of being newsworthy. Every nerd watched Letterman with Stupid Pet Tricks, Larry Bud Melman, etc.

Steve Jobs on Nightline set with Ted Koppel interviewing him. Screen grab from youtube video.

17/ Some context. In the full year 1980 about 725,000 personal computers were sold:

225K TRS-80

200K Atari

78K Apple ][

rest “other”!!!

The “personal computer” world was diverse, with a dozen or so companies making thousands of units and maybe a hundred other companies trying stuff out. The standard way to think about a computer was to build or assemble a kit and then start to program. Programs were distributed in newsletters or magazines as printouts and occasionally as tape via postal mail or user groups, but programming was mostly entering octal data. BASIC was the savior and many first programs were tiny basic interpreters. In fact, Dr. Dobbs journal got its start by printing source code to a tiny BASCI interpreter. Then along came BillG and PaulA and a standardized and portable BASIC across all these computers, including Apple.

Dr. Dobbs volume 1, number 1.

Here’s TinyBasic from the issue: