Big Mac (also written BigMac and labeled Super Mac on prototypes) is a cancelled

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

Hartmut Esslinger Hartmut Esslinger (born 5 June 1944) is a German-American industrial designer and inventor. He is best known for founding the design consultancy Frog Design, frog, and his work for Apple Computer in the early 1980s. Life and career Esslinge ...

for

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

using the

Snow White design language The Snow White design language is an industrial design language which was developed by Hartmut Esslinger's Frog Design. Used by Apple Computer from 1984 to 1990, the scheme has vertical and horizontal stripes for decoration, ventilation, and t ...

. Its consumer equivalent was Baby Mac (also written BabyMac and simply labeled Macintosh on prototypes). Development on Big Mac and Baby Mac began in 1984 and stopped after

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

left the company due to a clash of ideologies with

John Sculley John Sculley III (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman, entrepreneur and investor in high-tech startups. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer (CEO) ...

. Without the knowledge of Jobs, a project codenamed "Milwaukee" was in development concurrently with the Big Mac and ultimately succeeded it to become the

Macintosh II The Macintosh II is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from March 1987 to January 1990. Based on the Motorola 68020 32-bit CPU, it is the first Macintosh supporting color graphics. When introduced, a basic ...

, causing designer

Rich Page Richard Page is an alumnus of Apple Inc. He was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer in the 1980s, and later joined Steve Jobs at NeXT. Rich was one of the first four Apple Fellows. He was awarded the Apple Fellow position for his efforts in graphics ...

to leave Apple for

NeXT NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later develope ...

. Esslinger described Baby Mac as his "best design never to be produced", while

Jean-Louis Gassée Jean-Louis Gassée (born 24 March 1944) is a business executive. He is best known as a former executive at Apple Computer, where he worked from 1981 to 1990. He also founded Be Inc., creators of the BeOS computer operating system. After leavin ...

considered it to be a toy.

Hardware

Esslinger and the design team investigated flat-screen displays and worked with

Toshiba is a Japanese multinational electronics company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors ...

to create a new

CRT CRT or Crt most commonly refers to: * Cathode-ray tube, a display * Critical race theory, an academic framework of analysis CRT may also refer to: Law * Charitable remainder trust, United States * Civil Resolution Tribunal, Canada * Columbia ...

front to "avoid the cheap look of a CRT screen". Esslinger created low-profile mouse, keyboard, and mouse pen designs, experimenting with wireless RF technology to make the Baby Mac even smaller and "avoid the tangled mess of keyboard and mouse cables". Big Mac and Baby Mac were zero-draft designs and included integrated carrying handles. Big Mac was conceived as a

3M computer The 3M computer industrial goal was first proposed in the early 1980s by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a minimum specification for academic and technical workstations. It requires at least one megabyte of m ...

, with at least 1 megabyte of memory, a 1 megapixel display, and 1 million instructions per second. Similarly to the later Macintosh Portrait Display and the earlier

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It featu ...

display, its display had a vertical orientation for word processing and was monochrome to save on costs. To develop MacPaint 2.0, David Ramsey used a prototype Big Mac without an external case, which he considered "faster and more reliable than the

prototypes available". The design of the Baby Mac has been noted to have a superficial resemblance to the egg design of the

iMac G3 The iMac G3, originally released as the iMac, is a series of Macintosh personal computers that Apple Computer sold from 1998 to 2003. The iMac was Apple's first major product release under CEO Steve Jobs following his return to the financiall ...

from 1998.

Software

Big Mac was intended to have a UNIX-based operating system while maintaining compatibility with existing Macintosh software and using the same user interface.

Notes

References

{{Mac-stub Compact Macintosh Steve Jobs Prototype computers