Macintosh Office

Apple announced Macintosh Office in January 1985 with a poorly received sixty-second Super Bowl commercial dubbed Lemmings.

A high-end computer with features geared toward the business professional, it suffered from many technical problems which plagued the system during most of its production run.

As a result, Apple's reputation suffered and it lost any advantage it had entering into the business market – a full year prior to the introduction of the IBM PC.

Apple's second attempt was with the introduction of the revolutionary Lisa, a high-end computer aimed at the business community, based on the graphical user interface that was to become the basis of the Macintosh.

While Apple had a hit with the Macintosh, they still needed a way to make inroads into the professional world and the Mac was already being criticized as a toy by the business community.

[2] When the Macintosh had originally been designed it used the Zilog Z8530 serial driver chip, which had the capability of running simple networking protocols.

[3] By January 1985 Apple was ready to launch the LocalTalk network which would allow a small office to inexpensively share its newly introduced LaserWriter printer.

With its built-in 10MB hard drive, greater RAM and Macintosh System emulation software MacWorks, the XL was positioned to act as the file server until Apple could develop the replacement.

In the meantime, third-party developers working with Apple, such as Infosphere and Centram Systems West (later Sun Microsystems) created AppleTalk-based file sharing applications called XL/Serve (later MacServe) and TOPS respectively.

Though third-party products made good use of it, Apple would not offer another installment of the poorly implemented Macintosh Office for well over a year.

It would take four more months for the release of expandable Macs that could accommodate the growing industry standard, Ethernet, and larger, faster built-in hard drives powerful enough to manage AppleTalk's potential to serve a large office.