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.
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>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:
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>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.