Nice little piece on Jerry Manock - the original Mac designer

Goes well with the Jobs biography, btw...

iWitness
Burlington Mac maker Jerry Manock remembers his old boss: Steve Jobs
BY PAULA ROUTLY [02.01.12]

Jerry Manock’s Burlington office is crammed with industrial-design jobs that never saw the light of day: a hockey skate with an adjustable blade; a “Cubic” furniture building block that IKEA almost bought; and a model for the “rumbler,” a bathroom-scale-like device designed to vibrate at a frequency to maintain elder bone density.

Any number of factors — timing, money, patent problems — can kill a great invention.

But Manock got at least one product right. In 1977, when he was 33 and Apple had just five employees, Steve Jobs hired him as a consultant to design the Apple II, one of the first personal computers in history to be successfully mass produced and marketed. Manock gets credit for almost everything but the circuit board and the logic (which was engineered by Jobs’ partner and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak): the machine’s “thermal management, the structure, the outside aesthetics, the color — beige, Pantone 453, the color of the deep-space universe,” Manock says, rattling off his contributions to the once-cutting-edge Apple II, which now looks like a yellowing typewriter on a shelf in his office.

Beside it sits the smaller, self-contained, revolutionary Macintosh. A successor to the Apple II, it was the first personal computer to incorporate both a graphical interface and a mouse in a way that inspired the term “user-friendly.” Manock was part of the original team of a half-dozen workers who designed the Mac.

The rest...

http://www.7dvt.com/2012jerry-manock-mac-designer