February 22, 1979: Mr. Smith Goes to Apple

Apple has produced more than its fair share of innovations over the years, the original Mac interface being one of the most obvious. More innovative than the interface of the original Mac (which borrowed heavily from the ill fated Lisa) were the hardware innovations that powered the computer.

The original Mac outperformed the Lisa by a factor of 2 though it featured the same chip and was missing many of Lisa's high end components. How did the Mac achieve such impressive performance? Whereas the Lisa was designed by a team of learned engineers, the Mac, like the smash hit Apple II, was designed largely by a single individual.

The individual wasn't, surprisingly, a well-known electronic genius like Woz but rather a lowly service technician more or less foisted on Jef Raskin at the beginning of the project. The service technician's name was Burrel Smith and his intuitive grasp of electronics made the Mac a very powerful computer for its day. Burrel signed on as one of Apple's lowest paid employees this month in 1979.