Fast Company:

The Macintosh Graphical User Interface was a new idiom. It was the first mass-market implementation of a new system of signs and symbols advocated by Douglas Engelbart; it was a new language that both rationally and by osmosis people started to speak. Once you had touched a Macintosh, you felt in control, and the “interface” of any other device, such as your VCRs or your LaserDisc players, came across as an impossible conversation.

By 1997, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, 20 to 25 million Macintosh users had become a movement of people speaking the same language, and this because of various reasons:

Apple survived Jobs’s departure in 1985

Macintosh fans were unrelenting evangelists

The Macintosh had an amazing foothold in education, and

Windows, “the enemy,” was trying everything it could to speak Macintosh too.

The history of the Macintosh’s “survival” is fascinating and many of us participated in it in various ways.