sages in American Culture.Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1995. Explores the world of “dress codes”
and what they mean in American culture. In-
cludes the chapters “The Image of Power” and
“Gender Images.”
Simels, Steven.Gender Chameleons: Androgyny in Rock
’n’ Roll. New York: Arbor House, 1985. A look at
the ever-evolving androgyny of rock singers.
Whiteley, Sheila, ed.Sexing the Groove: Popular Music
and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1997. Includes
chapters on k. d. lang and Sinéad O’Connor.
Desiree Dreeuws
Boy George and Culture Club
Fads; Fashions and clothing; Feminism; Hairstyles;
Heavy metal; Homosexuality and gay rights; Hurt,
William; Jackson, Michael;Kiss of the Spider Woman;
Mötley Crüe; Music; New Wave music; Pop music;
Power dressing;Torch Song Trilogy; Women in rock
music; Women in the workforce.
Apple Computer
Identification Innovative computer manufacturer
In the early 1980’s, Apple created the mass market for per-
sonal computers with the Apple II. Faced with competition
from IBM, the company marketed the Macintosh, whose
graphical user interface changed the way people interacted
with computers and whose WYSIWYG and printing capa-
bilities made possible the desktop publishing industr y.
A paradigm of the technology firm marching from
garage to mega-success, Apple Computer (later Ap-
ple, Inc.) dominated the early microcomputer mar-
ket with Steve Wozniak’s Apple II series of personal
computers (also known as microcomputers). Color
graphics, 8 expansion slots, and Wozniak’s innova-
tive floppy disk drive attracted thousands of develop-
ers whose applications enhanced the computer’s
usefulness over its sixteen-year lifespan. The first
spreadsheet, Visicalc, hugely boosted Apple’s sales.
A Fortune 500 company in record time, its initial
public offering (IPO) in 1980 was the biggest since
the Ford Motor Company’s in 1956. The Apple II,
Apple II+, Apple IIe, and Apple IIgs became cash
cows, sustaining Apple through costly product devel-
opment cycles and missteps, but it also lured indus-
try giant International Business Machines (IBM)
into producing its own microcomputers.
The IBM PC, first marketed in 1981, assembled
from off-the-shelf components, garnered tepid re-
views and a smugWall Street Journalad from Apple
reading “Welcome.” The smugness soon disap-
peared, however. With Intel supplying the central
processing unit (CPU) and Microsoft providing an
operating system called MS-DOS, the PC was easy to
“clone” (that is, it was easy for competitors to create
and market their own, functionally equivalent com-
puters). The existence of several different clones, all
capable of running the same software, created a de
facto standarized computing platform and simpli-
fied the chaotic microcomputer landscape, allowing
IBM PCs and their clones to surpass Apple’s per-
sonal computers by 1983.Revolutionary Interface Apple stumbled twice at-
tempting to create a primarily business-oriented com-
puter to compete with IBM. The Apple III, rushed to
market before the company’s IPO in 1980, was ini-
tially marred by component failures and lacked soft-
ware that would run on its upgraded operating sys-
tem. The product never recovered. Apple’s 1983
Lisa, overpriced at $9,995 and with similarly limited
software, also failed, but it embodied the future
with its graphical interface. The graphical user inter-
face, or GUI, was pioneered by mouse inventor and
Xerox Corporation’s impressive Palo Alto Research
Center (Xerox PARC). Indeed, Xerox PARC was an
extremely important source of early innovation in
personal computing, having invented part or all
of the GUI, the laser printer, objectoriented pro-
gramming, Ethernet, and what-you-see-is-what-you-
get (WYSIWYG) text editors. Apple engineers visited
Xerox PARC in the early 1980’s, and the company
gave Xerox shares of its stock in return for permis-
sion to imitate aspects of Xerox’s projects in Apple
products.
The GUI simplified human-computer interactions.
It replaced tedious command-line interfaces—which
required accurately typing arcane text strings to con-
trol a computer—with mouse-selectable icons and
menus. It was Apple’s 1984 product, the Macintosh,
that refined and established the superiority of GUIs.
Created by brilliant young engineers, the Mac re-
placed PCs’ fuzzy black screens and crude characters
with a sharp white, square-pixeled, bit-mapped dis-
play supporting superior graphics, multiple propor-
tional fonts, and foreign scripts. Portable, distinc-
tively upright, allowing long natural file names, and58 Apple Computer The Eighties in America