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In this frequently updated feature we will be telling the story of Apple. We start with the early days, the tale of how Apple was founded, moving on through the Apple I, to the Apple II, the launch of the Macintosh and the revolution in the DTP industry... To the tech-industry behemoth that we know and love today.So sit back as we take a stroll down memory lane. Why not brush up on what really happened before you go and watch the new Steve Jobs movie, with its interesting interpretations of several important events in the company's history? Keep checking back for more as we tell the story in regular installments.On 1 April 1976 Apple was founded, making the company 40 years old as of the 1 April 2016 - here's a historical breakdown of the company.The foundation of Apple: The third founderThe history of everyone's favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves…Trending ArticlesApple Numbers 3.6 for Mac reviewIn recent years Numbers for Mac has had curve ball visual refreshes and…The two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak - may have been Apple's most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iPhone, iPad or iMactoday. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that today would be worth $72bn.Ron WayneThe foundation of Apple: How Jobs met WozJobs met Woz at the Homebrew Computer Club; a gathering of enthusiasts in a garage in California's Menlo Park. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards - and was inspired by MITS' build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. You can see this philosophy shining through in Apple’s products today.So he produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't trying to change the world with what he'd produced - he just wanted to show off how much he'd managed to do with so few resources.Speaking to NPR in 2006, he explained that "When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter - it should have a keyboard - and the output device is a TV set, it wasn't really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer."Jobs and WozIt almost didn't happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality - he's funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars - but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers." He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.Let's be thankful he didn't. Jobs saw the computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator, and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne - now making Apple a 40 year old company!The foundation of Apple: The inspiration for the nameThe name was to cause Apple problems in later years as it came uncomfortably close to the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984, Woz credited Jobs with the idea. "He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned."The foundation of Apple: Selling the Apple IWoz built each computer by hand, and although he'd wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts - at a price at that would recoup their outlay if they shipped 50 units - Jobs had bigger ideas.He priced the Apple I at $666.66, and inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn't exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn't have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend's father, it wasn't enough.In the end, it was Byte Shop's purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, he convinced Cramer's manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order."Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit."An original Apple I (in a case)Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it's ultimately this that saw him duck out."Jobs and Woz didn't have two nickels to rub together," Wayne told NextShark in 2013. "If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes."Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.As Michael Moritz explains in Return to the Little Kingdom, "Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn't even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple didn't have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn't be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn't provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case."An original Apple I board, from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum collectionRaspberry PI and the BBC's Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, "Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay." The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.Their scarcity has made them collectors' items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren't that deep, Briel Computers' Replica 1 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth - so much so that the decision to build a successor can't have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.The debut of the Apple IIApple IIThe Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like its predecessor, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time.Yes, the Apple II (or apple ][ as it was styled) was a true innovation, and one that Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, credits with launching the personal computer industry.The trouble is, specs alone are rarely enough to justify a $1,300 spending spree. Business users needed a reason to dip into their IT budgets and it wasn't until some months later that the perfect excuse presented itself: the world’s first 'killer app'.The first app on an Apple computer: VisicalcDan BricklinDan Bricklin was a student at Harvard Business School when he visualised "a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image [of a table of numbers] hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations…"Of course, we'd recognise that as a spreadsheet today, but back in the late 1970s, such things existed only on paper. Converting them for digital use would be no small feat, but Bricklin was unperturbed. He borrowed an Apple II from his eventual publisher and set to work, knocking out an alpha edition over the course of a weekend.Many of the concepts he used are still familiar today - in particular, letters above each column and numbers by the rows to use as references when building formulae. (Wondering how it compares to Numbers today? Here's our Numbers review.)The technological limitations inherent in the hardware meant that it didn't quite work as Bricklin had first imagined. The Apple II didn't have a heads-up display and although the mouse had been invented it wasn't bundled with the machine. So, the heads-up display became the regular screen, and the mouse was swapped out for the Apple II's game paddle, which Bricklin described as being "a dial you could turn to move game objects back and forth... you could move the cursor left or right, and then push the 'fire' button, and then turning the paddle would move the cursor up and down."It was far from perfect and working this way was sluggish, so Bricklin reverted to using the left and right arrow keys, with the space bar in place of the fire button for switching between horizontal and vertical movement.VisiCalc was unveiled in 1979 and described as "a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations". We owe it a debt of gratitude for the part it played in driving sales of the Apple II and anchoring Apple within the industry.Writing in Morgan Stanley's Electronics Letter, shortly before its launch, analyst Benjamin M Rosen expounded his belief that VisiCalc was "so powerful, convenient, universal, simple to use and reasonably priced that it could well become one of the largest-selling personal computer programs ever... [it] could some day become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog."How right he was, as Tim Barry revealed in a later InfoWorld piece in which he described an experience that would have been familiar to many:VisiCalc"When I first used VisiCalc on an Apple II, I wanted to get a version that could take advantage of the larger system capabilities of my CP/M computer. Alas it was not to be... We ended up buying an Apple II just to run VisiCalc (a fairly common reason for many Apple sales, I'm told)."Apple itself credited the app with being behind a fifth of all series IIs it sold.Apple II success: colour graphicsSo a piece of software worth a little more than $100 was selling a piece of hardware worth ten times as much. That was uncharted territory, but even with the right software the Apple II wouldn't have been a success if it hadn't adhered to the company's already established high standards.The February 1984 edition of PC Mag, looking back at the Apple II in the context of what it had taught IBM, put some of its success down to the fact that "its packaging did not make it look like a ham radio operator's hobby. A low heat-generating switching power supply allowed the computer to be placed in a lightweight plastic case. Its sophisticated packaging differentiated it from ... computers that had visible boards and wires connecting various components to the motherboard."More radically, though, the Apple II "was the first of its type to provide usable colo[u]r graphics... contained expansion slots for which other hardware manufacturers could design devices that could be installed into the computer to perform functions that Apple has never even considered."In short, Apple had designed a computer that embodied what we came to expect of desktop machines through the 1980s, 1990s and the first few years of this century - before Apple turned things on its head again and moved increasingly towards sealed boxes without the option for internal expansion.Almost six million series IIs were produced over 16 years, giving Apple its second big hit. Really, though, the company was still getting started, and its brightest days were still ahead.For VisiCalc, the future wasn't so bright, largely because its developers weren't quick enough to address the exploding PC market. Rival Lotus stepped in and its 1-2-3 quickly became the business standard. It bought Software Arts, VisiCalc's developer, in 1985 and remained top dog until Microsoft did to it what Lotus had done to VisiCalc - it usurped it with a rival that established a new digital order.That rival was Excel which, like VisiCalc, appeared on an Apple machine long before it was ported to the PC.Apple, Xerox and the one-button mouseApple has never been slow to innovate - except, perhaps, where product names are concerned. We're approaching the eighties in our trip through the company's history and we're at the point where it's followed up the Apple I and II with the III. Predictable, eh?The two Steves founded the company with a trend-bucking debut and had the gumption to target the industry’s biggest names with its two follow ups. That must have left industry watchers wondering where it might go next.The answer, it turned out, was Palo Alto.Xerox had established a research centre there - Xerox PARC, now simply called 'parc' - where it was free to explore new technologies a long way from the corporate base on the opposite side of the country. Its work helped drive forward the tech that we still use every day, such as optical media, Ethernet and laser printers. Of most interest to Mac users, though, is its revolutionary work on interface design.The Apple I, II and III computers were text-based machines, much like the earliest IBM PCs. But Jobs, who was working on the Lisa at the time, wanted something more intuitive. He convinced Xerox to grant three days’ access to PARC for him and a number of Apple employees. In exchange Xerox won the right to buy 100,000 Apple shares at $10 each.To say this was a bargain would be a massive understatement. Apple has split itsstock four times since then - in 1987, 2000, 2005 and 2014. Companies do this when the price of a single share starts to get too high, in an effort to stimulate further trading. So, assuming Xerox held on to those shares, it would have had 200,000 by 1987, 400,000 by 2000 and 800,000 by 2005. The split in 2014 was rated at seven to one, so Xerox's holding would leap from 800,000 to 5.6m. Selling them at today's prices would rake in $708m (£450m). Not bad for a three-day tour.Jobs was bowled over by the Xerox Alto, a machine used widely throughout the park, with a portrait display and graphical interface, which was way ahead of its time. It had been knocking around for a while by then, but Xerox, which built 2000 units, hadn’t been selling it to the public. It wasn't small - about the size of an under-counter fridge - but it was still considered a 'personal' machine, which was driven home by the user-centric manner in which it was used. It was the first computer to major on mouse use, with a three-button gadget used to point at and click on objects on the screen.Jobs decreed that every computer Apple produced from that point on should adopt a similar way of working. Speaking to Walter Isaacson some years later, he described the revelation as "like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be."The Lisa versus the MacintoshIt kicked off a race inside Apple between the teams developing the Lisa and the Macintosh.Jeff RaskinThe official line at the time was that Lisa stood for Local Integrated System Architecture, and the fact it was Jobs' daughter's name was purely coincidental. It was a high-end business machine slated to sell at close to $10,000. Convert that to today’s money and it would buy you a mid-range family car. The project was managed by John Couch, formerly of IBM.Jeff Raskin, meanwhile, was heading up development of the Macintosh, which had smaller businesses and home users firmly in its sights, and each team wanted to be the first to ship an Apple computer with a graphical interface.Whichever team got their first, Apple - as a company - wanted them to do it at a price that wasn't prohibitively expensive, and that meant finding some cheaper solutions to the ones arrived at by Xerox. The Alto’s mouse, for example, had three buttons and cost $300. Jobs wanted something simpler, and capped the price at $15. The result was the one-button clicker we still know and love to this day.Jobs was so excited by the potential of the mouse and graphical interface that he got himself more and more involved in the Lisa's development, to the extent that he started to bypass the management structure already in place. The caused upsets, and in 1982 matters came to a head.The LisaThe Apple Lisa had an advanced guiMichael Scott was Apple's president and CEO at the time, having been brought to the post by Mark Markkula (Apple employee number three, and investor to the tune of $250,000). The two men worked out a new corporate structure, which sidelined Jobs with immediate effect, and handed control of the Lisa project back to John Couch. Jobs, also stripped of responsibility for research and development within the company, was little more than a figurehead. That left him on the lookout for a new project.Perhaps inevitably, he turned to the Macintosh.Named in honour of Raskin's favourite edible apple (the McIntosh), the Macintosh had been in the works since 1979, so when Jobs joined the team it was already well advanced. That didn’t stop him making extensive changes to the program, though, including the commission of a new external design and integration the graphical operating system. Raskin left the Macintosh team when he and Jobs fell out, and Jobs assumed control for the remainder of its development.However, this enforced switching of sides meant that Jobs - technically - ended up on the losing team. The Lisa launched in 1983, with its graphical user interface in place; the Macintosh debuted the following year. The race had been won by the more expensive machine.It was a pyrrhic victory, though. The Macintosh, which we'll be covering in more detail in the next instalment of the series, was a success, and Apple's current computer line-up - iOS devices aside - descends directly from that first consumer machine.You can't say the same of the Lisa. It cost four times the price of the Macintosh, and although it had a higher resolution display and could address more memory, it wasn't nearly as successful. Apple released seven applications for it, covering all of the usual business bases, but third party support was poor.Nonetheless, Apple didn’t give up. The original Lisa was followed by the Lisa 2, which cost around half the price of its predecessor and used the same 3.5in disks as the Macintosh. Then, in 1985, it rebranded the hard drive-equipped Lisa 2 as the Macintosh XL and stimulated sales with a price cut.At this point, though, the numbers didn't add up, and the Lisa had to go. The Macintosh went on to define the company.By 1984, Apple had proved twice over that it was a force to be reckoned with. It had taken on IBM, the biggest name in business computing, and acquitted itself admirably. The Apple I and II were resounding successes, but while the Apple III and Lisa had been remarkable machines, they hadn’t captured the public imagination to the same degree as their predecessors. Apple needed another hit, both to guarantee its future and to target the lower end of the market, which to date it had largely ignored.That hit, we all now know, was the Macintosh: the machine that largely guaranteed the company's future.All change: Jef Raskin versus Steve JobsThe MacintoshWe'll always remember Steve Jobs as the man who launched the Macintosh, but he only arrived on the project in 1981 - two years after Jef Raskin had started work on the low-cost computer for home and business use. Jobs quickly stamped his mark on it, and Raskin left in 1982 - before the product shipped. We must give Raskin credit for original idea and its name (his favourite kind of apple was the McIntosh, but this was tweaked to avoid infringing copyright), but otherwise the machine that eventually launched was a fair way away from the one he’d originally envisaged.Raskin's early prototypes had text-based displays and used function keys in place of the mouse for executing common tasks. Raskin later endorsed the mouse, but with more than the single button that shipped with the Macintosh. It was Jobs and Bud Tribble, the latter of whom is still at Apple, that really pushed the team to implement the graphical user interface (GUI) for which it became famous.They saw the potential of the GUI’s desktop metaphor after seeing one in use at Xerox PARC, and they'd already laid much of the groundwork for Apple's own take on the system as part of the Lisa project. Tribble tasked the Macintosh team with doing the same for their own machine which, in hindsight, may have been the most important directive ever issued by anyone inside Apple.If the Macintosh team had continued down the text-and-keyboard path, it's unlikely their product would have sold as well as it did - and Apple, as we know it, might not exist today at all.The Macintosh project: Simpler and smarterThrough several iterations, the prototype Macintosh became both more able and less complex to build. It had fewer chips, and the Apple engineers were able to push them further and faster. By the time it was ready to launch, the Macintosh incorporated the kind of graphics hardware that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to buy in any rival machine, yet Apple was aiming to sell it at a price that would put it in reach of the better-heeled home user.The final spec was radical for its day, with a 6MHz Motorola 68000 processor ramped up to 7.8MHz, 128KB of Ram, and a 9in black and white screen with a fixed 512 x 342 pixels. To put that into perspective, it’s not even enough to display an app icon from a retina-class iOS device at its native resolution, but it could still accommodate System Software 1.0 – Apple's fully graphical operating system.The Macintosh project: good looksBut it wasn't just what went on inside the box that made it such an attractive device. The Macintosh looked just good on the outside. Sure, it was shrouded in beige plastic – but the all in one body incorporated the floppy drive and a handy carrying handle, so you could easily take it with you, wherever you needed to work. It looked friendly, too, and that made it more approachable.There were still some limitations, though. The original Macintosh didn't have a hard drive, so you had to boot from a floppy and could only temporarily eject the system disk when you needed to access applications and data. Apple partially fixed this shortcoming by offering an external add-on drive, which allowed users to keep the System disk in situ and delegate responsibility for apps and data to a second disk. It was an expensive add-on, though, and the external Hard Disk 20, which cost $1495 and gave just 20MB of storage, was still a year away from going on sale.Despite it limitations, though, many of the features established on that first Macintosh are still in use today. We've dropped the 'System' monicker in favour of 'OS', but we still use the Finder name, which debuted there, and both Command and Option appeared as modifier buttons on its keyboard (the latter has since been usurped by alt, but the name lives on for many users).The Macintosh project: pixelsThe hardware was only half of the story. Coder Bill Atkinson had implemented a radical system by which the Macintosh System software allowed for overlapping windows in a more efficient manner than the computers at PARC had done, andSusan Kare spent months developing a visual language in the form of on-screen icons that have since become classics.It’s her that we have to thank for the on-screen wrist watch (to indicate a background process hogging resources) and the smiling Mac – among others – as well as the seemingly illogical square and circles combination she chose for the command key. (This is a common symbol in Sweden, where it’s used to denote a campsite.) Her paint bucket and lasso graphics are used widely in other applications, and the fonts she designed for use on the original Macintosh, which included Chiacgo, Geneva and Monaco, are still in use today – albeit in finer forms.The Macintosh went on sale in January 1984, priced at $2,495. It wasn't cheap, but it was good value for what you got, and that was reflected in its sales. By the beginning of May that same year, Apple had hit the landmark figure of 70,000 shipped units, which was likely helped in no small part by a remarkable piece of advertising directed by Ridley Scott.Apple's '1984' advertNobody would ever deny that the original Macintosh was a work of genius. It was small, relatively inexpensive (for its day) and friendly. It brought the GUI – graphical user interface – to a mass audience and gave us all the tools we could ever need for producing graphics-rich work that would have costs many times as much on any other platform.Yet, right from the start, it was in danger of disappointing us.You see, Apple had built it up to be something quite astounding. It was going to change the computing world, we were told, and as launch day approached, the hype continued to grow. It was a gamble – a big one – that any other company would likely have shied away from.But then no other company employed Steve Jobs.Jobs understood what made the Macintosh special, and he knew that, aside from the keynote address at which he would reveal it, the diminutive machine needed a far from diminutive bit of publicity.He put in a call to Chiat\Day, Apple’s retained ad agency, and tasked them with filling sixty seconds during the third quarter break of Super Bowl XVIII.Super Bowl ads are always special, but this was in a league of its own. Directed by Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and filmed in Shepperton Studios, its production budget stood somewhere between $350,000 and $900,000, depending on who is telling the story.The premise was simple enough, but the message was a gamble, pitting Apple directly against its biggest competitor, IBM.International Business Machines dominated the workplace of the early 1980s, and the saying that ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’ was a powerful monicker working in its favour. People trusted the brand, staking their careers on the simple choice of IBM or one of the others. As a result, the others often missed out, and if Apple wasn’t going to languish among them, it had to change that perception.So the ad portrayed Apple as humanity’s only hope for the future. It dressed Anya Major, an athlete who later appeared in Elton John’s Nikita video, in a white singlet and red shorts, with a picture of the Mac on her vest. She was bright, fresh and youthful, and a stark contrast to the cold, blue, shaven-headed drones all about her. They plodded while she ran. They were brainwashed by Big Brother, who lectured them through an enormous screen, but she hurled a hammer through the screen to free them from their penury.Even without the tagline, the inference would have been clear, but Jobs, Apple CEO John Sculley and Chiat\Day turned the knife the with the memorable slogan, ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four.’It was a gutsy move, never explicitly naming IBM, and never showing the product it was promoting, but today it's considered a masterpiece, and has topped Advertising Age's list of the 50 greatest commercials ever made.Jobs and Sculley loved it, but when Jobs played it to the board, it got a frosty reception. The board disliked it and Sculley changed his mind, suggesting that they find another agency, but not before asking Chiat\Day to sell off the two ad slots they’d already booked it into.One of these was a minor booking, slated to run on just ten local stations in Idaho, purely so the ad would qualify for the 1983 advertising awards. Chiat\Day offloaded this as instructed, but hung on to the Super Bowl break and claimed that it was unsellable.As Jobs' biographer, Walter Isaacson, explains, "Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach, decided to throw the long bomb. 'I think we ought to go for it,' he told his team."Thank goodness they did.There are two ways to judge an ad. One is how well it markets your brand, and the other is how much money is makes you. The 1984 promotion was a success on both fronts. Ninety-six million people watched its debut during the Super Bowl, and countless others caught a replay as television stations right across the country re-ran it later that evening, and over the following days.Fifty local stations included a story on it in their new bulletins, which massively diluted the $800,000 cost of the original slot. Apple couldn't have booked itself a cheaper ad break if it had tried.The revenue speaks for itself. The ad, combined with Jobs’ now legendary keynote, secured the company's future, and kicked off a line of computers that's still with us today - albeit in a very different configuration.It's perhaps no surprise that following the success of the 1984 advert, Apple booked another Super Bowl slot the following year for a strikingly similar production, this time filmed by Ridley Scott’s brother, Tony.'Lemmings' once again depicted a stream of drones plodding across the screen. The colours were muted, the soundtrack was downbeat, and the drones were blindfolded, so it was only by keeping a hand on the drone ahead of them that they could tell where they were headed. Only when the penultimate drone dropped off the cliff over which they were marching did the last in line realise that a change of course was called for - and a switch to Macintosh Office.It wasn't a great success. As sterndesign's Apple Matters explains, the advert "left viewers with the feeling that they were inferior for not using the Mac. Turns out that insulting the very people you are trying to sell merchandise to is not the best idea."Wired put it succinctly: "Apple fell flat on its face… People found it offensive, and when it was shown on the big screen at Stanford Stadium during the Super Bowl, there was dead silence - something very different from the cheers that greeted '1984' a year earlier."The Macintosh and the DTP revolutionThe Macintosh got off to a good start, thanks to Jobs' spectacular unveiling, its innovative design, and the iconic '1984' advert, but it still needed a killer application, like VisiCalc had been on the Apple ][, if it was really going to thrive. It found it in the shape of PageMaker, backed up by the revolutionary Apple LaserWriter.The $6,995 LaserWriter, introduced in March 1985 - just over a year after the Macintosh - was the first mass-market laser printer. It had a fixed 1.5MB internal memory for spooling pages and a Motorola 68000 processor under the hood - the same as the brain of both the Lisa and the Macintosh - running at 12MHz to put out eight 300dpi pages a minute.It wasn't the first laser printer - just as the Macintosh wasn’t the first desktop machine and the iPod wasn't the first digital music player - but, in true Apple style, it wasdifferent, and that's what mattered. Functionally, it was very similar to the first HP Laserjet, which used the same Canon CX engine as the LaserWriter and had shipped a year earlier at half the price. However, while HP had chosen to use its own in-house control language, Apple opted for Adobe’s PostScript, which remains a cornerstone of desktop publishing to this day.It was a neat fit for Adobe, which had been founded by John Warnock when he left Xerox with the intention of building a laser printer driven by the PostScript language. Jobs convinced him to work with Apple on building the LaserWriter, and sealed the deal shortly before the Macintosh launched.As a key part of the Apple Office concept, introduced through 1985’s less popularLemmings Super Bowl ad, the LaserWriter was network-ready out of the box, courtesy of AppleTalk, so system admins could string together a whole series of Macs in a chain and share the printer between them, thus reducing the average per-seat cost of the device. This made it immediately more competitive when stood beside its rivals and, as InfoWorld reported in its issue of February 11, 1985, "Apple claims a maximum of 31 users [can be attached] to each LaserWriter but its own departments at its Cupertino, California headquarters hook up 40 users per printer."So, everything was in place on the hardware side. What was missing - so far - was the software.Paul Brainerd, who is credited with inventing the term 'Desktop Publishing', heard of Apple's intention to build a laser printer and realised that the Mac's graphical interface and the printer's high quality output were missing the one crucial part that would help both of them fly: the intermediary application. Thus, he founded Aldus and began work on PageMaker.The process took 16 months to complete, and when it shipped in July 1985, for $495, PageMaker proved to be the piece that completed the DTP jigsaw. The publishing industry was about to undergo a revolution, the like of which it wouldn't see again until we all started reading online.Although it was later available on Windows and VAX terminals, PageMaker started out on the Mac, and firmly established the platform as the first choice for digital creative work - which is perhaps why it's favoured by so many designers today. It's hard to believe, in an age where we're used to 27in or larger displays, that the Macintosh’s 9in screen, with a resolution smaller than the pixel count of an iOS app icon, was ever considered a viable environment for laying out graphically-rich documents, but it was.By March 1987, less than two years from launch, PageMaker’s annual sales had reached $18.4m - an increase of 100% over the previous year, according to Funding Universe.PageMaker versus QuarkXPressBut good things don't last forever, and eventually PageMaker lost a lot of its sales to QuarkXPress, which launched in 1987, undercut its high-end rivals and by the late 1990s had captured the professional market. In 1999 Forbes reported that at one point 87% of the 18,000 magazines published in the US were being laid out using XPress (including Forbes itself).Adobe and Aldus merged in 1994, retained the Adobe brand and transitioned products away from the Aldus moniker. It was a very logical pairing when you consider that PageMaker was conceived to take advantage of the graphics capabilities of an Apple laser printer, which in turn were served up by an Adobe-coded control language.Quark was going from strength to strength at the time of the merger, and four years later – in summer 1998 – Quark Chief Executive Fred Ebrahimi, in Forbes’ words, ‘announced his intention to buy Adobe Systems of San Jose… a public company with three times Quark’s revenues’.Quark versus InDesignOf course, the acquisition didn’t go ahead, and what followed is now a familiar story. Adobe was already working on InDesign under the codename K2, using code that had come across with the Aldus merger. InDesign shipped in 1999 and after a few years of that and PageMaker running side by side, the latter was retired.PageMaker’s last major release was version 7, which shipped in 2001 and ran on both Windows and OS 9 or OS X, although only in Classic mode on the latter. It’s no doubt still in use on some computers and lives on in the shape of the archived pages on Adobe’s site here.InDesign was out in the wild by then and Adobe was keen to push users down a more professional path. We think that’s a shame as there’s still space in the market for a tool like PageMaker to act as an entry ramp to InDesign further down the line.Business users may now turn to Pages, with its accomplished layout tools and help from dynamic guides, but a fully-fledged consumer and small business-friendly tool like PageMaker would still find a home in many an open-plan workspace.Jobs vs SculleyIt's all been good news so far in our story of Apple's founding and early development. We're still in the mid-eighties. The company is still young, but going from strength to strength, and it's offering up some serious competition for its larger, longer-established rivals. Few would have guessed that trouble was just around the corner.To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.Steve Jobs may have been Apple's most public face, but he wasn't its CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn't yet turned 30, and many on the board considered him too inexperienced for the role, so they first hired Michael Scott, and later Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 on the back of stock options he'd acquired at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple's initial investors, but he didn't want to run the company long term.When he announced his desire to head back to retirement, the company set out to find a replacement. It settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously lured to Apple from Pepsi by asking 'Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?'Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quotes one of Sculley's reminiscences: 'I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better.'That's exactly what he did, and during the honeymoon period everything seemed to be going swimmingly. As Michael Moritz writes in Return to the Little Kingdom, 'At Apple, Sculley was greeted like an archangel and, for a time, could do no wrong. He and Jobs were quoted as saying that they could finish each others' sentences.'Their management styles were wildly different, though, and it's perhaps inevitable that this led to some conflicts between the two men. Sculley didn't like the way that Jobs treated other staff members, and the two came to blows over more practical matters, including the pricing of the Macintosh.From the moment of its inception, the Macintosh was always supposed to be a computer for the rest of us, keenly priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The aim was to put out a $1000 machine, but over the years of gestation – as the project became more ambitious – this almost doubled.Shortly before its launch it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn't enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley prevailed and the Macintosh 128K hit the shelves at $2,495.That was just the start of the friction between the two men, which wasn't helped by a downturn in the company's fortunes. Sales of the Macintosh started to tail off, the Lisa was discontinued and Jobs didn't hide the fact that his initial respect for Sculley had cooled. The board urged Sculley to reign him in.That's exactly what he did, but not until March 1985 - just shy of two years after arriving at the company. Sculley visited Jobs in his office and told him that he was taking away his responsibility for running the Macintosh team.Talking to the BBC in 2012, Sculley explained what went on inside the company at the time: "When the Macintosh Office was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn't afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings - not just to cover the Mac's problems. That's what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support."But Jobs wasn't ready to go without a fight.Sculley had to leave the country on business that May, and Jobs saw this as the perfect opportunity to wrest back control of the company. He confided in the senior members of his own team, which at the time included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being lined up to take over from Jobs on the Macintosh team. Gassée told Sculley what was happening, and Sculley cancelled his trip.The following morning, Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the whole board, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs said they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between the two of them – him or Jobs. Again, they sided with Sculley, and Jobs' fate was sealed.Scully reorganised the company, installed Gassée at the head of the computer division and made Jobs Apple's chairman. That might sound like a plum job – indeed, a promotion – but in reality it was a largely ceremonial role that took the co-founder away from the day-to-day running of the company.This wasn't Jobs' style. He felt the need to move on and do something else and, a few months later, that's what he did. He resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a company that would design and build high end workstations for use in academia, taking several key Apple staff with him.If this had happened in the 2000s, when Apple was riding high on the back of the iPod and iPhone and was prepping the world for the launch of the iPad, it could have had catastrophic consequences. In the 1980s, though, the outcome was somewhat different.DeWitt Robbeloth, editor of II Computing magazine, wrote in the October 1985 issue, "Most industry savants agree the move was good for Apple, or even crucial. Why? There were serious differences between the two about what Apple products should be like, how they should be marketed, and how the company should be run."So, Sculley was in control and could run Apple as he saw fit. Now we'll see exactly where that takes the company over the following months.Jean-Louis Gassée takes over from Steve JobsThe most recent stop of our tour through the history of Apple saw Jobs leave the company after falling out with the board. It wasn't entirely unexpected - and the news wasn't greeted with the same kind of dread as the announcement of his cancer many years later. Indeed, Wall Street responded positively to Jobs' departure, and the price of Apple stock went up.Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been Apple's Director of European Operations since 1981, was appointed by CEO John Sculley to take over from Jobs and head up Macintosh development. Fewer positions could have been more prestigious in a company that owed its very existence to that single iconic product line - particularly at a time when the company's focus and ethos was about to undergo a significant change.55 or die: reinventing Apple post-JobsIn the months leading up to his departure, Jobs had been focused on consumer-friendly price points, initially wanting to sell the Macintosh for $1,000 or less into as many homes and businesses as possible. In the event, that never came to fruition, as the final spec simply couldn't be built, marketed and shipped at that price while still turning a profit.However, with now Jobs busy elsewhere, the board was free to re-think what Apple was about and the kind of machines it would produce. It was already appealing to creative business users thanks to the prevalence of Macs in design and layout offices so, logically enough, it made the decision to target the high-end market with more powerful, and thus more expensive Macs. Although the company would sell fewer units, each one should - in theory - deliver similar or higher profits.The policy had its own nickname, '55 or die', which was a nod to Gassée's dictat that the Macintosh II should deliver at least 55% profit per machine, perhaps explains why it was so expensive. A basic system with a 20MB hard drive (insufficient to hold an average Photoshop file today) started at $5500, but bumping up the spec, with a colour display, more memory and larger hard drive, could easily see the price double.When stood against their PC counterparts, then, Apple's new computers looked pretty expensive, but they had several benefits that kept their users loyal – in particular, the user interface. It's important to remember that although Windows may be ubiquitous today, that wasn't always the case.When the Macintosh II first appeared in 1987, Windows was less than two years old, still at version 1.04, and still an add-on to DOS rather than a full-blown, stand-alone operating system.Once the designers of the mid-1980s had got used to working visually, they didn't want to go back to using a text-based computer, so until Windows hit the big time, which happened with Windows 3 at the end of the 1980s, Apple had the graphical market pretty much to itself.Apple gets colourful: the Machintosh II ships with a colour displayThis would be enough to encourage complacency in some companies, but not Apple, which continued to innovate in a way that would at least partially justify the high prices. The Machintosh II, for instance, wasn't simply a spec-boost of the original Macintosh. It looked completely different, being housed in a horizontal case that the end user (or an engineer) could open themselves to upgrade the memory, drives and so on. This was a major break from Apple's established way of doing things, where all previous computers, with the exception of the build-it-yourself Apple I, had been shipped in closed boxes, largely because Jobs saw this as a way of making them more friendly and less threatening.It was also the first Macintosh to ship with a colour display, and although it's difficult to imagine what a difference that would make today, we only need to think back to early, mono iPods and compare them to the current nano to understand the impact it must have had.Aside from heading up the development of conventional computers, Gassée also oversaw a lot of Apple's behind-the-scenes development, where designers were dreaming up new products that would one day drive the company to new heights. Two of the fruits of those labours, the Newton MessagePad and the eMate, were particularly prescient, as they pointed towards Apple's later dominance of lightweight computing through the iPad and iPhone, but they didn't see the light of day before Gassée's own departure from Apple.His tenure ran from 1981 until the end of the decade, which was the point the focus on highly-priced premium products started to falter. IBM clones were getting cheaper, and with the uptake of Windows and inexpensive desktop publishing applications, even some of Apple's most loyal customers were tempted to jump ship.What Gassée did after AppleThe fourth quarter of 1989 marked the first time Apple had seen a drop in sales. The stock market got edgy, Apple's shares lost a fifth of its value, and despite having once been tipped to one day head up the company, Gassée left the following year. Like Jobs, he went on to found another radical computer company – in this case, Be Incorporated, which developed the BeOS operating system.As we'll see in a later episode, his work with BeOS would come close to bringing Gassée back to the company. For now, though, Apple was focused on trying to win back some of the less wealthy customers by introducing a range of lower-priced computers, including the Macintosh Classic (8MHz processor, integrated mono display, $999), Macintosh LC (16MHz processor, pizza box case, colour capable; the initials stood for LC, but it cost $999 without a display), and Macintosh IIsi (20MHz processor, large desktop case, $2999 without a display).Unsurprisingly, after so many years of waiting, Apple customers lapped up these new, affordable machines, and the company enjoyed a revival. Indeed, by returning to basics, almost literally, Apple was back on the up, and about to wow the world with two of its most radical products ever, as we'll discover next month.Apple's decline and IBM and Microsoft's riseSo Steve Jobs has gone, and so has Jean-Louis Gassée, his successor as head of product development. All in all, the future isn’t looking so bright for Apple at this point in his story. Despite initially being quite successful in chasing high profits with wide margins, its market is starting to shrink and, with it, so did its retained income. For the first time in the company’s history, its year-end results showed its cash balances to be rising more slowly than they had the year before.That wasn't its only problem, though. IBM had been out-earning Apple since the mid-1980s, when it established itself as the dominant force in office computing. There was little indicating that this would change any time soon and, to make matters worse, Apple’s key differentiator was about to be dealt a close-to-lethal blow: Microsoft was gearing up for Windows 3 - a direct competitor to the all-graphical OS, System.Windows had been a slow burner until this point. Versions 1 and 2 came and went without bothering Apple to much, but Windows 3 was a different story entirely. The interface was more accomplished, which for the first time supported 256 colours, and it was more stable thanks to a new protected mode. The graphical design language had been implemented from end to end, with icons in place of program names in Windows Explorer, its equivalent of the Mac’s Finder.It could also run MS DOS applications in a Windows window, so it felt more like the unified graphical OS experience we know today - and which was already a hallmark of Apple’s GUI underpinnings. In short, more people than ever before could happily spend their whole day in a Windows environment, which would have left them asking why they would buy a Mac when there were so many PCs to choose from.Apple's Quadra and PerformaApple needed to up its game, which it did by developing a whole new line of computers that we now might think of as classics of their time: chiefly the Quadra and Performa, but also the less well-known Centris (which, as its name suggested, sat at the ‘centre’ of the line-up).The Performa line was, in effect, a case of Apple rebranding its existing stock, but bundling them with consumer-friendly software like ClarisWorks and Grolier Encyclopedia so they would appeal to the home user. The idea was to make them a viable stock item for department stores and other lifestyle outlets, as to date Apple's computers had only been available through authorised dealers and mail order (there was no such thing as the Apple Store back then).It was a sound theory, and one that would have exposed the Apple brand to a whole new audience, but it didn't quite work as might have been expected. In part that was because the enormous range of slightly different models was confusing - so confusing that Apple went to the expense of producing a 30-minute infomercial showing a regular family choosing and buying a Performa. You can still find it online, in six linked parts.It's unlike the kind of short and snappy advertising we're used to these days, devoid of catchphrases, and it spends a lot of time explaining not only why a Performa is the right choice, but also why Windows is difficult to use. It's hypnotic - and it's hard to argue with its message, too, if you can devote enough time to it.Macintosh Performa 6300You can see a full list of the various Performa machines, and the original Macintosh models from which each one was derived on Wikipedia, and its clear from the minor differentiations between them that some of the simplicity on which Apple was founded - and to which it has since returned - had by now been lost.Having so many computers to market and ship also meant the company had to try and predict which machines would sell best and build enough of each one to satisfy demand. That didn't always happen, and with Windows-based computers approaching ubiquity, Apple realised it was going to have to team up with one of its long time rivals, IBM, if it was going to take a lead.The AIM Alliance: Apple teams up with IBM and MotorolaTogether, Apple, IBM and Motorola founded the AIM Alliance in October 1991 (the name is their initials), to build a brand new hardware and software combo called PReP - the PowerPC Reference Platform. This ambitious project would go head to head against the existing Windows / Intel hegemony by running a next-generation operating system (from Apple) on top of brand new RISC-based processors (from IBM and Motorola).Apple’s nascent operating system was codenamed Pink, and not without good reason. Much of the code was rolled into Copland, the aborted OS that we’ve encountered once before in our tour of the archives, and it came about following an extraordinary meeting in which all of the company’s future projects were written down on blue and pink card. Those that made it onto blue paper were comparatively easy and could be implemented in the short term.Those written on pink would require more effort, and a longer timeframe. The next generation OS, was naturally noted on one of the latter.AIM Alliance’s plans never came to fruition on the software side, and there were problems on the hardware front, too. When you bring together three notable players like Apple, IBM and Motorola, it’s to be expected that they’d each have their own ideas about the best way to do things so, perhaps it was inevitable that their differing views on the reference platform’s make-up didn’t always align.If it had worked out, PReP might indeed have changed the face of computing. It didn’t, of course, but it did result in a change of direction for Apple. PReP's legacy was the PowerPC processor, which went on to form the bedrock of its computer line-up for years to come.The PowerPC yearsIf you bought a new Apple computer any time between 1994 and 2006, you'll have taken home a PowerPC-based device, the genesis of which we explored above. The fruit of a productive collaboration between Apple, IBM and Motorola - the AIM Alliance - it was, for a while, one of the most advanced platforms on the planet. Indeed, it proved versatile enough to sit at the heart of everything from the lowly iBook, right up to the mightiest enterprise-focused Xserve.PowerPC 601 Processor PrototypeThe name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC-Performance Computing, and its core technology was based on IBM's POWER instruction set, so even though it was an innovation of the early-1990s it wasn't an entirely alien platform for developers coding for the Mac.This helped make PowerPC a viable alternative to the x86-based processors being shipped by Intel and AMD, which were then dominating the computing market. Even Microsoft shipped a version of Windows NT for PowerPC before scaling back to focus solely on x86 and, later, Freescale.The first PowerPC-based Macintosh (pre-Mac) was 1994's Power Macintosh 6100 which, as its name suggests, was based on the 601 processor, running at 60MHz and developed using code that was already familiar to engineers from both Motorola and Apple. As the Quadra's successor, it was the first machine able to run Mac OS 9, which would likely have been a big enough sales point on its own.However, perhaps hedging its bets (platform transitions are nerve-wracking projects, after all) it also released a DOS-compatible version, which instead used an Intel 486 processor and allowed Windows and Mac OS to be run simultaneously, effectively doing what VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop do today, and VirtualPC did in the PowerPC line's latter years.Power Macintosh 6100The 6100 was released in concert with the beefier Power Macintosh 7100, which had been developed under the internal codename 'Carl Sagan'. It was a convoluted choice, based on the belief that the computer was so brilliant it would make the company 'Billions and Billions', which just happened to be the name of a book written by astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to stress the letter 'B' when saying the word 'billions' so people wouldn't confuse it with millions.Although it was never used to market the 7100, Sagan claimed that customers might have considered the codename, which was revealed in a magazine, to imply that he endorsed the product. He wrote to the magazine, asking them to make it clear that he did not, at which point Apple's development team re-named the computer BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued for libel and lost, with the court ruling that "one does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'butt-head'".Carl SaganEventually the two parties settled out of court, at which point the 7100 was again renamed, this time to LAW, or Lawyers Are Wimps.The PowerPC line enjoyed a good innings, but by the middle of this century's first decade, fractures were starting to appear in the alliance and the platform wasn't evolving quickly enough to keep consumers happy. Apple's high-end notebook, the PowerBook, was starting to look a little underpowered, and in an effort to push the processor in the Power Mac G5 beyond its native rating, it produced three special editions that employed a sophisticated water cooling system that allowed it to overclock the processor without it overheating.PowerPC 970FX processor, as used in one of the last Power Mac G5sThose in the know began talking about parallel teams working inside Apple HQ on a version of OS X that would run on Intel processors. The gossip was never confirmed, but the fact it had even been mooted meant Jobs' 2005 announcement that the company would shift its entire line-up to Intel hardware was less of a shock than it might have been.Jumping ship just four years after the introduction of OS X would have been too big a move for many CEOs, who might have been afraid that they'd frighten away their customers. As Macworld wrote, 'It was a big gamble for a company that had relied on PowerPC processors since 1994, but Jobs argued that it was a move Apple had to make to keep its computers ahead of the competition. "As we look ahead... we may have great products right now, and we've got some great PowerPC product[s] still yet to come," Jobs told the audience at the 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference. "[But] we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map."'You might have expected developers to be up in arms: after decades of honing their code to run smoothly on PowerPC architecture, they'd have to throw it away and start from scratch, but Apple gave them a crutch, at least in the interim. Rather than cut off support for legacy code from day one, it built a runtime layer into OS X Tiger (10.4), called Rosetta, a name inspired by the Rosetta Stone, the multi-lingual engravings on which were the key to understanding hieroglyphics.This interim layer intercepted Power G3, G4 and AltiVec instructions and converted them, on the fly, to Intel-compatible code. There would have been a slight performance hit, naturally, but it was an impressive stopgap, and one that Apple maintained until it shipped Lion. (Although Snow Leopard, the last iteration to support it and the first for which there was no PowerPC release, didn't install it by default - you had to add it manually.)PowerPC lives on, not only in the countless legacy Macs that are still putting in good service, but in consumer devices like the Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as well as in faceless computing applications where it's a popular choice for embedded processing.Of course, during the 12 years of PowerPC's dominance, many other things were going on behind the scenes. Apple was working on the Newton MessagePad, chipping away at a revolutionary operating system that never shipped and, as a result, bought Steve Jobs' company NeXT and, with it, Jobs himself, ensuring Apple's survival.Apple and MicrosoftIf IT was a soap opera, Apple and Microsoft's on-off relationship would put EastEnders to shame. Today, you'd never guess there had ever been anything wrong, and that's probably down to the fact that their relationship has never been more symbiotic.IDC figures released in summer 2015 showed Mac sales to have climbed by 16%over the previous quarter. At the same time, though, the overall PC market for machines running Windows had dipped by 11.8%. So, with ever more of Microsoft's revenue coming from Office 365, it needs to push its subscription-based productivity service onto as many platforms as it can - including Android, iOS and, of course, the Mac.Apple, on the other hand, needs Office. It has its own productivity apps in the shape of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint remain more or less industry standards, so if it’s going to be taken seriously in the business world, Apple needs Microsoft Office onboard.So, a peace has broken out - and a long-lasting one at that, which despite some sniping from either side, stretches right back to Jobs' return to Apple after his time at NeXT. We’ll come to that later, but suffice it to say at this point that it shouldn't really surprise us: the rivalry between the two camps often seems overblown.Microsoft developed many of the Office apps for the Mac before porting them to the PC and, in the early days at least, Bill Gates had good things to say about the company. "To create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different," he said in 1984, "it takes something that's really new, and really captures people's imagination. And the Macintosh - of all the machines I've seen - is the only one that meets that standard."That's pretty flattering, but there's a saying about flattery: imitation is its sincerest form. Apple apparently didn't see it that way when Microsoft, in Apple's eyes, went on to imitate its products a little too faithfully.As we already know, Apple had been inspired by certain elements of an operating system it saw at Xerox PARC when it was developing the Macintosh and Lisa. Xerox's implementation used the desktop metaphor now familiar to OS X, Window and many Linux users, and when Microsoft was developing Windows 1.0, Apple licensed some of its fundamentals to the company that Jobs latterly took to calling "our friends up north".That was fine when Windows was just starting out, but when version 2 hit the shelves, with significant amendments, Apple was no longer so happy to share and share alike.Microsoft Windows 1.0Most significantly, Microsoft had implemented one of the features of which Apple was proudest: the ability to overlap live application windows. This is more complex as it sounds, as it requires some advanced calculations to determine which parts sit beneath others, not to mention how they should behave when repositioned.However, Apple’s primary argument was that, taken as a whole, the generic look and feel of a graphical operating system - such as its resizable, movable windows, title bars and so on - should be subject to copyright protection, rather than each of the specific parts. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that this would be akin to Ford copyrighting the idea of a car, rather than a specific engine implementation or means of heating the windscreen, but back then, the GUI was such an innovation that you can understand why Apple would have wanted to protect it.The court didn't buy into the idea of look and feel, and asked Apple to come back with a more specific complaint, highlighting the parts of its own operating system that it believed Microsoft had stolen. So, Apple made a list of 189 points, of which all but 10 were thrown out by the court as having been covered by the licensing agreement drawn up between the two parties with respect to Windows 1.0. That left Apple with just 10 points on which to build its case.Microsoft Windows 2.0However, over at PARC, Xerox could see that if Apple won it might be able to claim the rights to those elements itself, even though they'd been dreamed up following on from Jobs et al's tour of its labs. Xerox had no choice but to mount a claim itself, against Apple, stating that the operating environments on the Macintosh and Lisa infringed its own copyrights.Ultimately, Xerox's act of self-defence was unnecessary as the court ruled against Apple, deciding that while their specific implementation was important, the general idea of using office-like elements, such as folders and a desktop, was too generic to protect.Apple appealed, but to no avail. However, it did at least avoid losing to Xerox, as the Palo Alto company’s claim was thrown out.Of course, Apple and Microsoft patched things up eventually, and for that we should all be grateful. If they hadn't, it's possible there might be no Mac today. Why? Because when he came back to Apple and set about returning it to greatness, Jobs realised that he couldn't do it alone. He might have a streamlined hardware line-up waiting in the wings, headlined by the groundbreaking iMac, but he knew that without the software to back them up they’d never attain their full potential.Business users wouldn't switch to a platform that didn't support industry standard document formats, like those produced by Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and that remains true today. While home users and small teams will be happy to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, IT departments - particularly those in mixed-platform offices - often still rely on Microsoft Office formats.So, Steve Jobs put in a personal call to Bill Gates, who was then Microsoft's CEO, and convinced him to keep developing Office for Mac for at least the next five years. Gates did just that, and at the same time Microsoft bought $150m worth of non-voting Apple stock, thereby securing its future.In return, Apple unseated Netscape as the Mac's default browser and installed Internet Explorer in its place, which was actively developed right up until 2003, when in the face rumours that Apple was working on its own browser in house - Safari - Microsoft scaled back its work on IE for Mac to the point where, today, it no longer runs on OS X.Apple in the 1990sApple was a very different company in the 1990s to the one we know today. It had a lot of products and a lot of stock, but not enough customers. There's only so long a company can survive like that.Looking back on it now, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was losing its way. Alongside its computer range, it was producing digital cameras (where it was ahead of most of the big-name players that now dominate photography), video consoles, TV appliances and CD players. It had also invested heavily in the Newton platform to produce the MessagePad and eMate lines.In many respects, to use a well-worn cliche, it was running before it could walk. Almost all of these products have equivalents in Apple's current line-up where they form the basis of the iPhone camera, Apple TV, iPad and so on, but in the 1990s there was no way to link them all together. They were, to all intents and purposes, disparate and largely disconnected products; there was no overarching storyline to what Apple was producing the way there is now, where the Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and iOS devices can all share data courtesy of iCloud.To make matters worse, the decision to license a lot of its technologies was only making it harder for Apple to succeed in each marketplace, as it was enabling its rivals to produce cheaper cloned versions of its top-line products. Even the Newton platform wasn't immune, with Motorola, Siemens and Sharp, among others, using the operating system and hardware spec to build their own products.Cloning remains a contentious issue in Apple history. Aside from being bad news from Apple's in-house hardware development, many consumers would say it was actually good for the end user, as it encouraged competition and, as a result, lowered prices. That brought more people to the platform than Apple would have managed to attract on its own, which in turn ensured continued support from application developers, including key names like Adobe and Microsoft, without whom the computer line-up may well have collapsed.But something had to give - and a decision had to be made, which turned out to be one of the most momentous decisions in the company's history.Jobs returnsApple was still on the look out for a new operating system, as its in-house efforts weren't going as well as it had hoped. By 1996 it had shortlisted two possible suppliers: BeOS and NeXTSTEP, each of which had a historical connection to Apple itself.BeOS was developed by Be Inc, a company founded by former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassée. He had been appointed as Apple's director of European operations in 1981 and, four years later, was responsible for informing Apple's board of Jobs' intention to oust CEO John Sculley - the act that led to Jobs' departure from the company.NeXTSTEP, on the other hand, came from NeXT - the company that Jobs founded upon leaving Apple. Although NeXT's hardware didn't go on to sell in the quantities that Apple was shipping, it was highly thought of and is perhaps best known as the platform on which Tim Berners Lee developed the World Wide Web while working at Cern.The stakes couldn't have been higher for either man - or either company - but in the end Apple chose NeXTSTEP.If it had been a simple licensing deal that wouldn't have been so remarkable, but in truth it was far more than that. Apple purchased NeXT itself - not just its operating system - for $429m in cash, plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, effectively buying back Steve Jobs in the process.The man who had co-founded the company was returning to it after 12 years away.Making changesBuying NeXT wasn't enough to fix Apple's ongoing woes on its own. Its share price was declining, and over the next six months it fell still further, to a 12-year low.Jobs convinced the board of directors that the company's CEO, Gil Amelio, had to go and, when it agreed, it installed Jobs in his place as interim CEO. At that point, Apple began a remarkable period of restructuring that leads directly to the successful organisation it is today.Jobs recognised that if Apple was going to survive it needed to concentrate on a narrower selection of products. He slimmed down the range of computers to just four - two for consumers and two for businesses - and closed down a lot of supplementary divisions, including the one working on the Newton.At the same time, he saw that the licensing deals it had signed weren't doing it any favours, and he brought them to an end. The immediate effect wasn't good, as it saw the market share of new computers running Apple's operating system dropping from 10% to just 3% - but at least 100% of them were being built by Apple itself.The strategy paid off in the long run, though, and Apple's computers and operating system are holding their own in a world where rivals are seeing year on year stagnation or - worse - decline.Not everyone was convinced, though. When asked what he would do to fix the broken Apple Computer Inc, Michael Dell, who founded the Windows-based rival that carries his name, told a Gartner Symposium, 'What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.'Dell was riding high at the time, but over the years the two companies' relative positions have changed, and in 2006 Jobs mocked his rival in an email he sent to Apple staff."Team," the email read. "It turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today."And were things "different tomorrow"?Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the long run they were very different indeed. Apple grew to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalisation, while Dell went back to private ownership, as Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners bought out the existing shareholders.

The Independent | Latest news and features from US, UK and worldwide | The IndependentFound: Joan of Arc's suit of armourMary Dejevsky @IndyVoicesMonday 17 June 1996 00:02She was burnt at the stake in 1431. But, it is now claimed, her working wardrobe lives on. A Paris antiques dealer believes he has found the suit of armour in which Joan of Arc fought her epic battles, before the English bought her from the Burgundians and had her burnt as a witch.When Pierre de Souzy bought the suit, he thought he had merely acquired a set of old armour in unusually good condition. But the armour was also unusual in being very small. When Mr de Souzy's 14-year-old daughter was allowed to try it on, it fitted her perfectly.But Mr de Souzy says that it was only when his wife joked that their daughter looked just like Joan of Arc that the possibility occurred to him that it might have been made for the Maid of Orleans.He then embarked on months of detective work - which revealed striking coincidences which might support the claims of authenticity. According to experts cited by France's main Sunday paper, the Journal du Dimanche, the metal has been dated to the 15th century.Marks on the armour correspond to injuries Joan is known to have suffered during the siege of Orleans in 1429 and subsequently near Paris.The possibilities that the armour was made for a child or another female warrior have been rejected. Jean-Pierre Duchiron, an armour expert, said he is "practically sure" that the armour was Joan's. But the curator of France's army museum is sceptical. One opposing piece of evidence is that Joan wore a helmet with a moveable visor; Mr de Souzy's armour is visorless.He bought the suit from an elderly woman, whose ancestor bought it in Britain in 1760. Joan of Arc's armour vanished after she was taken prisoner near Compiegne on 23 May 1431. But even if the armour eventually proves to be Joan's, Mr de Souzy's problems may not be at an end. He fears that the armour would become priceless, as a French national relic - and therefore, perhaps, unsellable.The Independent | Latest news and features from US, UK and worldwide | The IndependentJoan of Arc - Jeanne d’Arc (1412 - 1431) | Jeanne-darc.infoJeanne d'Arc's Suit of ArmourCharles VII provided Jeanne with a suit of armour costing 100 écus, either 2 500 sols or 125 tournois pounds. This was not an outstanding sum and contributed towards the inventory that Jeanne established during her trial:Through the Count of Laval’s testimony, we learn that the suit of armour was in fact a “harnois blanc”, or “all-in-one” suit of armour, rather than a suit comprising of several detachable pieces. In comparison, this suit of armour cost twice as much as the cheapest equipment used, yet cost eigh time less than the most expensive.This suit of armours was offered to the town of Saint Denis in ex voto after failed attack on Paris. Fom that moment on, Jeanne wore a suit of armours taken from a Bourguignon, the value of wich remains unknown.The Saint Denis suit of armours was almost certainly not destroyed but possibly suffered the same fate of the sword that was offered to Sainte Catherine de Fierbois by a soldier, and then borrowed by Jeanne d’Arc.After the inquest at Poitiers, Charles VII commissioned a suit of armor for Jeanne at the samme time that he set up a military household for her. The registra of the city hall of Albi, who saw her, testified that “Jeanne went armed in white iron, entirely from head to foot.” Moreover, Guy and André de Laval saw her on horseback near Romorantin “armed entirely in white, exept, for the head, a little ax in her hand, seated on a great black courser.”The accounts of the treasurer Hémon Reguier refer to the purchase of that suit of armor in April 1429: “100 livres tournois were paid and delivered by the afforesaid treasure to the master armorer for a complete harness for the afforesaid Maid.” With this harness, Jeanne was equipped in the same fashion as the men-of-arms of her era.Jean Chartier reported that she was “armed as quickly as possible with a complete harness such as would have suited a knight who was part of the arma and born in the king’s court. “She was equipped, moreover, like knights of a certain rank: 100 livres tournois was a significant sum.The Maids Armour” …With this army Jeanne was sent. The King had caused armor to be made for her…”2– The Duc d’Alencon, Trial of nullification.Armor was a very important part of the 15th century soldier. It had gone from the days of the lorica segmentata through chain mail to what was in the time of the Maid to complete sets of armor which covered the entire body. However this type of armor was expensive therefore it remained in the hands of the nobility, and royalty. The basic soldier could count himself fortunate if he possessed even the most even the most rudimentary helmet and Gambeson.By the time of the Hundred Years War, armor making had developed into a highly skilled profession. The latest improvements were incorporated into armor as well as better steel. While we do not know with exactitude what the Maid’s armor actually looked like the print above is a fairly excellent representation from contemporary sources that are in existence and those which were most common.The description “White harness” means that the armor is without any embellishments. In the miniseries, “Joan of Arc” with Lee Lee Sobieski, the armor she wears is not white harness. She has a lys on her chest and lyse around the besagues3 contrary to modern belief armor of the time was about 50 lbs or so.The modern idea that has been passed down from the 19th century that knights had to be lifted up onto their horse by use of a crane is nonsense. The Constable of France, Bertrand du Guesclin, was noted for leaping onto his horse and climbing rope ladders while fully clothed in his armor. Jeannes armor was made for fighting in. She could be found in the thick of the actions urging the troops on.Her armor saved her on several occasions. While at Orleans, Jeanne wearing her armor was in fact wounded by an arrow, which penetrated her armor. She was taken from the battle, and the English perceiving an advantage in this screamed obscenities. They believed that they had won the encounter. Jeanne stayed behind the lines but returned just before dusk. This turn of events was a psychological blow to the English and to the French it appeared as a miracle.“…During the assault on Jargeau… …Jeanne made the attack; in which I followed her. As our men were invading the place, the Earl of Suffolk made proclamation that he wished to speak with me, but we did not listen, and the attack continued. Jeanne was on a ladder, her standard in her hand, when her Standard was struck and she herself was hit on the head by a stone which was partly spent, and which struck her calotte. (Head-covering without visor, “chapeline casque leger en fornie de calotte sans masque.”) She was thrown to the ground; but, raising herself, she cried: “Friends! friends! come on! come on! Our Lord has doomed the English! They are ours! keep a good heart.”The Duc d’Alencon, Trial of nullification.“…Jeanne was there wounded by an arrow which penetrated half-a-foot between the neck and the shoulder; but she continued none the less to fight, taking no remedy for her wound….”Jean, Bastard of Orleans, Count de Dunois.“…The King’s troops remained there from morning to night, and Jeanne was wounded: it was necessary to take off her armor to dress the wound; but hardly was it dressed when she armed herself afresh and went to rejoin her followers at the attack and the assault, which had gone on from morning without ceasing…”Louis De Contes, Trial of nullification.“…When she felt herself wounded, she was afraid, and wept; but she was soon comforted, as she said. Some of the soldiers seeing her severely wounded wished to “charm ” her; but she would not, saying: “I would rather die than do a thing which I know to be a sin; I know well that I must die one day, but I know not when, nor in what manner, nor on what day; if my wound may be healed without sin, I shall be glad enough to be cured.” Oil of olive and lard were applied to the wound. After the dressing, she confessed herself to me, weeping and lamenting…”Fr Jean Pasquerel, Trial of nullification.HarnessThe term “harness” designated the diverse garments of war; to be more precise, one spoke about “of the head” or “of the arm.” Every piece was independent, as attested in the accont books of the armores, from whom pieces were ordered separately: a leg harness, an arm harness, a gaunlet, and so on. Jeanne also wore a military garment of Oriental origin, made of rectangular metal plates (usually of steel)-the jaseran, which was widely used in fourteenth century. She also wore a brigandine, an armed vest made of a great number of small plates of metal joined by rivets, the heads of which formed a kind og geometric design. The right arm was protected in a lighter fashion than the left, so that a sword or lance could be wielded more freely. The armor of the left arm, by contrast, was folded back to assist in holding the horse’s reins.We know that the first suit of mail-the blanc harnoys made for her in Tours-had been left be her in the Abbey church of Saint-Denis after the failure of her attack on Paris, and its subsequent history is unknown. We are ignorant of what happen to her second suit of armour. It has been estimated that the purchase of a complete set of military equipment corresponded to two years’ wages for a man-at-arms.It took 8 weeks for the Jeanne’s armor to be made and 600 years later it still takes 8 weeks.HelmetThe helmet shown here–a bascinet of the type worn during the 14th and early 15th centuries–is one of these works fraught with historical associations. It is believed to be the helmet that Jeanne d’Arc wore at the Siege of Orléans (1430), one of the turning points of the Hundred Years’ War. It is reported to have hung above the main altar of the church of St. Pierre le Martroi in Orléans (a short length of chain is still attached to its peak): it was considered to have been given as an ex voto by the Maid after she had been wounded at the siege by a crossbow bolt. There are marks of crossbow bolts on the helmet.Jeanne made use also of a capeline, a steel hat equipped with a wide brim, frequently used when scaling fortifications. But her contemporaries remaked that she often went about with her head bare, which was hardly surprising since military commanders of high rank often wore a simple hood or a hat rather than a helmet.Information from Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the helmet is todayDate: ca. 1375–1425. Dimensions: H. 11 7/8 in. (30.2 cm); W. 7 1/4 in. (18.4 cm); D. 8 1/4 in. (21 cm); Wt. 5 lb. 1 oz. (2268 g) Marking: Marked on the right cheek: a shield charged with a six-pointed star surrounded by a circle. Provenance: Above main altar in church of St. Pierre du Martroi, Orléans, where it hung as an ex voto. Ex coll.: Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Duc de Dino, Paris.According to an attribution traceable only to the nineteenth century, this helmet was said to have been worn in battle by Jeanne d’Arc and to have been given by her to the church of Saint Pierre du Martroi at Orléans, where it hung over the main altar. Although the legend is probably untrue, the helmet does have what looks like damage from use in battle.Note on the Casque of Jeanne d'ArcNote on the Casque of Jeanne d'ArcAs a rule, ancient armor cannot be safely attributed to historical personages, and it is doubtful whether the “Casque of Jeanne d’Arc” which the Museum exhibits has more than a legendary pedigree. Nevertheless, we have received a letter from Mr. Andrew Lang, an authority on the history of Jeanne d’Arc, which bears upon this matter. The letter from St. Andrews, Scotland, is datedNovember 23d, and reads:“Mr. Bruce-Gardyne has sent me a photograph of a basinet in your Museum, from Orleans, traditionally attributed to Jeanne d’Arc. (see picture next to this text) At the siege of Jargeau, in June, 1429, her life was saved by her chapeline (a light headpiece without vizor) when a heavy stone knocked her off a scaling ladder. From Jargeau she went to Orleans for two or three days and she might naturally have dedicated the chapeline.4“The coincidence is curious: we do not on any other occasion hear of her wearing a vizorless headpiece.”In this connection we may add what Baron de Cosson has written of this basinet.5“It is a French basinet dating from the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century. It retains part of the small chain which denotes that this casque has been suspended as an ex voto in a church.A heavy dent in the region of the left cheek may well have come from a warhammer (bec-de-corbin), and two others on the right cheek appear to have been the result of lance thrusts.According to information obtained by the Due de Dino it seems that this basinet formerly hung above the main altar in the church of Saint Pierre du Martroi, at Orleans, where it passed as having belonged to Jeanne d’Arc.”As the case stands we are convinced that the casque is French, that it is of the period of Jeanne d’Arc, and that it bears marks of contemporary service. In the last regard the evidence is satisfactory: for one reason, the injuries clearly antedate the ancient rusting of the headpiece. This then makes it probable that the object was preserved because it was an ex voto – an assumption still more probable by reason of the fragment of chain which is attached to it — the ancient rivet showing clearly that its attachment to the basinet was primitive.It next remains to be proven that the casque formerly hung above the main altar in the church of Saint Pierre du Martroi, at Orleans, and it would be interesting to confirm the observation which is reported to have been made by the Due de Dino, that the links of the chain now attached to the basinet agree with those said to be still hanging in the church. But even granting this provenance of the casque, it yet remains to be demonstrated that the ex voto belonged to the maid and not to one of her officers. Unhappily, too, the casque can hardly be the “chapeline” referred to in the record which Mr. Lang cites, at least if the contemporary term was accurately chosen, for a chapeline is well known to have had a brim, while the present casque is a typical basinet which has merely lost its face guard. Moreover, its injuries were not caused by a crushing stone, but were effected by pointed weapons, one of them probably a crossbow bolt.It is unfortunate for our present purpose that there is no contemporary portrait of Jeanne d’Arc which would give us a reasonably accurate picture of her armor. The earliest portrait hitherto known6 dates sixty or seventy years from the time of her death; and its armor is of this late period, with an armet, florid epaulieres and tassets.No better evidence is forthcoming in a second miniature (also on parchment) which dates from a slightly earlier period: this was discovered in Paris a few months ago by Mr. Jacques Reubell, to whose courtesy the Bulletin is indebted for the opportunity of reproducing it for the first time. It is especially interesting that although in this picture the armor is unlike that in the first miniaure, the face is the same, strongly suggesting that the early artists were familiar with an authentic portrait of Jeanne d’Arc.Name of parts of armor in the Middle Ages and RenaissanceUnder Clothes– Linen Under-shirt and under-pants. Woollen stockings.Underclothes were important as they prevented the armor from chafing the Knights skin.Sabatons– these were the first armor to be put on. Sabatons was armor for the foot and consisted of riveted iron plates on the boots Akelon – arming doublet.Arms– Layer of chain mail over the arms of the Medieval KnightsBesagues– which were small round ‘shields’ laced to the mail at the shoulder to defend the armpitRerebrace– for the defence of the upper armVambrace– for the defence of the lower armGreaves– Plate armor which protected the calf and anklesPoleyns– Plate armor which protected the knee capCuisses– Plate armor which protected the thighChest Armor– Breast PlateBack Armor– The BackplateFaulds– were rings of armour which were attached to the breast plate and protected the hips, abdomen and lower back of the Medieval KnightsHead and Neck armor– the helmet was called the Bascinet which had a skirt of mail called an aventail to protect the neck. There was also a great helm, and a sallet.Face protection– A Visor was a detachable piece of armor which protected the face and eyesGauntlets– ringed metal plates over the fingers.Spurs– Spurs were attached to the heel by straps and used to ‘spur’ the Knights horse on in battle. The spurs became a symbol of knighthoodSurcoat– A robe, with a belt around the waist, was placed over the body armor. The surcoat was emblazoned with the cote of arms or device of the Medieval Knights in order for identification purposesWeapons– A Dagger and Sword were attached to the Knights beltShield– Carried in defence and displaying the Knights heraldic blazon, by the 15th century these were getting smaller and smaller as the armor became more incasing until they disappeared altogether.Jeanne’s suit of armour remains is unknown, and we may never know exactly what happened to the armor. Her armour may have looked like the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman’s armour worn in the Victor Fleming’s 1948 film Joan of Arc sold at auction june 2011 for $50,000Sources: Museum of French Art, French Institute. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtCredit: JSTOR Home & “Arms and Armor”: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 32, no. 4 (1973–1974)FootnotesIn the Accounts (formerly kept in the Chamber des Comtes at Paris), of Maître Hemon Raguier, Treasurer of War, there is an item relating to this suit of armor: ..."To the Master Armorer, for a complete harness for the said Pucelle, 100 livres tournois."... "Source - Olivier Bouzy,"Jeanne d'Arc, Mythes et Réalités", Atelier de l'Archer.(small round 'shields' laced to the mail at the shoulder to defend the armpit.)(Proce's: Vol. Ill, pp. 96-97.)(Le Cabinet d'Artnes de Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigovd. Paris. Rouveyre, 1901.)(it has been cited by Mr. Lang in his life of Jeanne d'Arc)© 2020 - Joan of Arc - Jeanne d’Arc (1412 - 1431) | Jeanne-darc.info | Sitemap | Created by Søren Bie | www.scriptorium.dkGo to TopJoan of Arc - Jeanne d’Arc (1412 - 1431) | Jeanne-darc.info

The patriots are out in force today. But if I were them, I’d be careful about making any predictions.Predictions are hard to make; so much is contingent on specific events, lone actors, and rogue elements. While trends are interesting, a single person can radically alter the course of history. As trends go, currently, trends for unification look really, really bad. The CPC Patriot types talk lots about economics, as if economics are the only factors ever involved. This is a modern fact of life in China, but not really elsewhere. In China, two generations have been raised to never think about politics and to only think in purely economic terms: Only money matters, especially “my” money, and screw everything else. In fact, when it comes to politics, as we’ve seen around the world, political and social factors almost always overshadow economic ones. This is why the Chinese Patriotic Warriors on computer keyboards make the mistakes they do: because the vast bulk of all humans, at the end of the day, don’t actually think in exclusively economic terms. So when people talk about China, they just see the shiny new building in Pudong and Shenzhen and think - Tada! No more thinking required! Except that’s just not how the world has ever worked, despite the financial reductionism of young Chinese netizens.To illustrate the point, for example, let’s imagine just *one* event that could very easily happen, because events exactly like it have already happened.>>>China abducts a political figure from HK to mainland China illegally, and it’s seen and reported. There could be a protest in Hong Kong in which someone gets injured, and then a million people pour out into the streets to support the protesters (note that this is extremely possible; we have evidence in the recent past that this can happen quickly). Let’s say the police are split, and either refuse to enforce order or a number of them join the protesters (which is actually also very possible). In a panic, the local Chinese garrison is called out when the protest seems to be going on for two weeks or more, and getting bigger. Some hotheads from a university throw an umbrella or a brick at a soldier. He shoots two protesters. Hundreds of millions around the world watch this playing out on live TV and the internet. Tens of thousands of more people in HK pour out into the streets, two decades of anger and bottled resentment of Beijing spilling out. Meanwhile, Taiwan is watching this in abject horror, and Taiwanese people begin to collect in public in sympathy. As the entire world is in the grip of watching this horror show, all of the other crimes of China are played out on screens to back this up: Uighur detention camps, crying refugees who secretly escaped on international TV, dissidents from China speaking out and now being listened to, sympathy protests in front of Chinese embassies around the world, etc.It’s at this moment that the Taiwanese people support a Taiwan Independence candidate who announces that Taiwan can no longer afford the fraud of the “1992 Consensus” any more, and the time has come to sever any political futures with the nightmare of modern China. Etc. etc. etc. etc. The main political party (whichever one, they might all do this if they want to keep or get power, even the KMT at that point) decided to push a referendum. While China is involved with HK and a huge crackdown is looming, the entire world looks at Taiwan and hears its cries for help next to this totalitarian dictatorship with its black-uniformed stormtroopers.You can bet every penny you own that the world will sympathize with Taiwan and many countries will endorse independence.<<<Above, I just chose one small issue. It’s so easy for this, or any other of thousands of easily imaginable series of linked events, to happen. At the moment, China is like a dry forest waiting for just…. one… spark. Now, you can assert that this or that chain of events is unlikely or impossible, or whatever, but the truth is - and everyone who isn’t in reflexive denial knows it - the scenario I outlined above is just one among millions we could imagine. All of these are all too realistic and believable and, depending on the scenario, even very likely.The truth is that China is, at this point in its history, poised on a large number of intersecting precipices. It’s a big and powerful bear, but it’s walking along a tightrope. The big powerful bear always looks strong, right up until the last moment, until it slips just a little bit. And then the entire situation unravels.It’s like a very, very dry forest floor; it’s a great campsite and it feels safe, until there’s just the smallest out of control campfire that sets off a massive forest fire. It’s like a spring coiling up winding around, without releasing. At some point, if the leaders of China slip up, or if events get out of hand, if the grip slips in just the wrong place, that spring is going to snap.Because the first instinct of the PRC is to exert ever more and more crushing social control - the only response it has to any situation - it won’t know how to release whatever social, political or historical tension is building up. All it knows how to do is close its fist ever tighter. At some point, throttling both history and the people will cease to be an effective strategy, and the PRC’s leadership instincts will bring disaster.China’s political culture is extremely brittle and, though it can flex in certain circumstances, and it can take a lot of tension, like any strong material, engineers know this: The ability to flex and bend is as important for a material’s longevity and durability as its strength.Liberal democracy seems weak, often stupid, and there’s no guarantee of good government. Most often, you get mediocrity. But, acknowledging its limits and its failings, it does have great benefits. Among other benefits small and large, it has one absolutely overpowering advantage: it allows for a far, far broader range of potential responses to crises, and it has the ability to adapt to historical contingencies and social pressures with surprising flexibility, making it both durable and, from the individual’s perspective, survivable. Liberal democracies tend not to destroy their own people.You won’t pick this up from Chinese media, but from the ground in the country, it’s possible to see just how much China’s social situation is actually extremely fragile. We all think the CPC and the PRC are eternal and powerful and stable and inevitable and Hooray for the Party!, but all over the world, far, far smaller events that have been going on have set off much larger consequences in the past, and the truth is that every single part of China and every social issue is one huge collection of consequences waiting to burst.As an example, instead of winning over hearts and minds, the PRC has decided to simply eliminate an entire ethnic group in a horrifying twist on 20th-century ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation.Over a million Uighur people are in what are, essentially, concentration camps, and some who have been let out and fled China say there’s torture going on, and an attempted cultural genocide. That’s just one thing. Shall we start itemizing and recounting all the others?Instead of lowering the temperature on a simmering ethnic conflict, the PRC’s response is to triple-down on punishment and persecution. It’s almost as if it has no other tool in its social toolbox but the Hammer. This is what I mean by “bad instincts”: the PRC’s instincts when faced with almost every problem, political or social, is to bring the crushing fist of the almighty State down as hard as it can, and grind its victims into the dust. In Xinjiang, with the Uighur, the PRC has literally been creating a terrorist nightmare by intensifying persecution and brutalizing the people for three decades.There were other possible responses: loosen state control, use the carrot to entice Uighurs to be productive and happy citizens of a PRC state that valued their difference and contributions and gave them some kind of meaningful autonomy and self-control. But autonomy is anathema to the PRC’s political culture. Instead, it decided to treat the Uighur not as citizens, even minority citizens, but instead like a conquered and colonized people. Its decided to crush their culture, to strip them of wealth, property, social status and even their freedom, and to attempt to exterminate their culture and eliminate them as an ethnic group.If Uighur terrorism breaks out, it will be exclusively because China turned what was a complex situation that could have been managed by a carefully calibrated and gentle hand, into a savage but now tragically simple situation: If the Uighur wish to survive, they now understand in their very souls, without a shadow of any possible doubt, that the Han Chinese-run PRC is their mortal enemy. The State wants to obliterate them. China has openly declared war on the Uighur, and it has created its own internal enemy, because it has left the Uighur with absolutely no other options but two: The Uighur can either accept effective extermination at the hands of the Han Chinese and the PRC, or they can somehow put together a serious resistance, underground and over time.Don’t underestimate the power of people to resist brutal oppression. Take a long and hard look at history before you credit the CPC with some kind of supernatural genius. Unless you fill open pit graves with millions of bodies, men, women and children alike, oppression far more often creates nations, where it was intended to erase them. Even when people attempt to exterminate openly, sometimes reactions create nations; the Jews looked finished, except that Germany’s attempt to physically extirpate them in the end resulted in an actual Jewish state being born.But there’s more. The judgement against the PRC’s good government is worse than it seems, because the situation in XInjiang is not merely the simple mistake of one or two bad leaders. The situations in Tibet, Xinjiang and in other parts of the PRC’s structure have been simmering for decades, with the State making the same mistakes over and over and over again like a drunken carpenter with only one tool. The Chinese-PRC response has always been based on brutality. It seems to understand nothing else but savage force; it seems to have no other way to respond to resistance.With such a crude and limited toolkit, and faced with a cascading series of incredibly complicated social problems, do you honestly think that the Chinese state can possibly absorb and effectively rule Taiwan? Taiwan is hard to govern *for Taiwanese*. No leader of Taiwan is ever popular. The people are ornery, judgmental, impatient with their leaders. The PRC’s ham-fisted political structure is utterly incapable of running a divided, dissenting, outspoken, loud and liberal democratic Taiwan. The most common, everyday actions in Taiwan are unforgiveable in the PRC. People badmouth and sneer at their leadership, laugh at their follies, mock them in public, openly protest, and the state is forced to bend to the people’s will. It adapts and changes almost weekly. Taiwanese defy their state almost as a matter of course, protest, run amok. But this apparent weakness is, in fact, a profound strength. Taiwan is a liberal state. It can respond to situations with flexibility and humility, and adapt to changing social demands and conditions.The PRC doesn’t have the political culture or the instincts to do anything but smash heads with hammers. Smashing people when they get out of line is the only thing the PRC understands. It knows nothing else. Any study of modern Chinese politics and social development shows this immediately, in all spheres: If the CPC could have learned, it would have done so already, and it wouldn’t now be trying to eradicate the Uighur people, or exercise the all-encompassing behind-the-scenes social control it’s trying to impose on everyone else.There are also wildcards. Nobody knows how regional players will respond. China has learned how to make enemies, and is comically bad at making allies. Love or hate the CPC, it’s hard to deny that this is true.The Phillipine Trump, Duterte, might be a friend of China for now, but he’s so quixotic and temperamental that you never know.Vietnam is pretty pissed at China, though this is its default state, and any Vietnamese political faction that makes dissing China its focus is likely to win a lot of support among the people. Note that Vietnam is liberalizing very quickly, far faster than China, and it’s actively seeking far closer ties to the US and the West, which makes sense - its only real historical enemy is, when you get down to it, China. Vietnam hates being the little-tributary-state, and if you give the very tough and independent-minded Vietnamese people a chance, they’ll tell you where China can puts its hegemonic ambitions in Asia. Vietnam can’t be counted by China as a friendly or allied state; give the regional situation the right push, and it’s far more likely to back a international group working with Taiwan.South Korea has a left-wing pro-NK/China government for now, but it looks like it’s burning its way out awfully fast, and South Korea’s President Moon should worry about the fate of almost all ex-presidents of SK. You know a place is a democracy when all its political chiefs end up in prison. Given the situation, SK will likely back whatever the US does, because China is not the big brother of the nice kind, but the big brother who inflicts bruises on you.Japan is just itching for any excuse to turn China from potential rival to hostile enemy. In fact, it’s not even waiting: it’s re-arming, re-focusing, and actively trying to piss China off to justify a Japanese response. If China *actually* does anything, you can bet your personal fortune that Japan will throw in its towel with any anti-Chinese force available. It’s casting about for any issue, but if that issue happens to be Taiwan, it will debate it, appear hem and haw, but ultimately it will declare Taiwan a just cause and go to the wall for it. And it’ll stick with the US against China. Japan just needs an excuse, any excuse. Everyone who isn’t dreaming or projecting their own desires, and who watches Japanese-Chinese relations, knows that this is the only real item on the menu there.So there’s a ring of countries around China that will be aligned against its interests in Taiwan.We can throw the US in, too, as the hub in the alliance with these nations. For a whole host of reasons, Trump notwithstanding, the US can’t allow China to seize control of Taiwan - it will be the end of the US’ commercial and political structures in Asia, and this will only accelerate Chinese domination of global politics. View this from the perspective of a liberal democratic state: protecting free and democratic Taiwan from invasion and occupation by a dictatorship is about as holy and justifiable a cause as it’s possible to imagine for any other democracy. You win hundreds of millions of cheers when you resist. This will mesh with US political interests, as well, so the US is absolutely going to back Taiwan.Before all this happens, Japan may decide that a more formal arrangement with Taiwan is necessary. It would take only a few nudges for Japan to be pushed to sign a treaty of mutual defence with the ROC, or with a newly independent Taiwan. My guess is that this would face only token resistance in Japan: People will love the idea of standing up for the democratic little guy against the big, bad, evil Chinese empire.Chinese patriots imagine that nobody will lift a finger for Taiwan. In this, they are aggressively mistaken. And I use the word aggressive: their “patriotic” contempt for the outside world, their chip-on-the-shoulder outsized pride in China’s profound greatness and inevitable super-power, the conviction that brute force is good, and weakness is to be crushed at all costs, the core idea that “might makes right” - this is the overriding modern ethic of the CPC and its supporters. It’s how the domestic culture has been shaped by the CPC. Within China, the law is less actual law and more a suggestion, something to use as a weapon against those less powerful than you. Control and abuse is to be expected, and as a result, you’re supposed to avoid politics. Citizens of the CPC state defer to those more powerful. The rule is that you can abuse those beneath you, you should cheat and steal when you can, and that the only crime is getting caught. Basically, the CPC has created a society which has abandoned all concept of fairness or justice. In China’s modern culture, power and might are right, and there is no justice.Given this reality in the PRC, it’s no wonder the China-patriots think that China is going to be able to just intimidate Taiwan and walk into it, unopposed, and the locals will be handed PRC flags and kneel down before the glory of the almighty PRC. Their arrogance is fueled by a belief in China’s unbeatable invincibility and a kind of Imperial belief in raw power as its own justification.This would be safe enough is it were true, and every person in the world, and in Taiwan, believed that it was impossible to successfully resist the majesty and glory of the PRC. The danger to the rest of us is that these people are dead wrong, but they have no idea just how tragically wrong they are. Their nationalist ego is puffed up to the size of mountains, and this gives them a sense of invincibility, one that can easily lead them to making grotesque mistakes.This is hard for patriotic Chinese to hear, because they have such contempt for the world outside the PRC, but here it is:The democratic world is not weak.It may appear divided and squabbling, but this is merely a feature of liberal politics and democratic rule. When you push them, the free peoples of liberal democracies prove to be utterly hard and committed. Similar voices said that the “western democracies” were weak 80 years ago; they were catastrophically wrong on a global scale. When pushed, the liberal democracies of the world will do absolutely anything - anything at all - to win. If China invades Taiwan and the US gets involved and helps defend it, the world will not back China. Instead, every dead Taiwanese baby and every burned out Taiwanese school and hospital will be front-page news. Every “freedom fleet” blockade-breaking trade run will confront Chinese ships. Sailors will die.Chinese will be expelled from countries where they live; Chinese assets abroad will be seized, used to compensate Taiwan and allies for their losses; trade with China will be shut down, goods confiscated in ports, ships boarded at sea, the very few Chinese allies surrounded and rendered mute and crippled. The world will lock China out. Do not doubt it.In the end, the raw logic of economics are failing. Taiwanese political sentiment is getting more hostile to China, not less; the more contact there is, the less Taiwanese want to be part of the PRC. Taiwanese in the PRC working are actually *more* independence-minded than Taiwanese in Taiwan - believe it or not!People fixated on economics think that economics decides all political questions. Well, I hate to break it to them, but it doesn’t even decide most political questions. Actually take a long look at politics, before you make predictions.Politics are ornery, and national sentiments and ideology are not zero components. In fact, they override economic logic a lot of the time.The Taiwanese are just never going to agree to join a non-democratic PRC. At some point, the people leading the PRC will need to deal with this utterly unavoidable fact - that their political project is to toxic in Taiwan, so unsellable, that peaceful unification will be exposed as a complete impossibility.At that point, the PRC will be left with exclusively military options.Note this, about military options:Assuming nobody will help Taiwan is a terrifying dangerous conceitNo invasion will work; with a tiny fraction of the force, Taiwan could make the invasion a bloodbath for China, one which will go down in history as one of the greatest losses of life in a single war, ever. it will mostly be on the Chinese side. Sea-borne invasions are excruciatingly difficult to play out in the best of circumstances; as it is, a few batteries and satellite-guided missiles in hardened positions in Taiwan’s mountains could kill a hundred thousand landing troops in the water just on day one, and double or triple that every day thereafter.A blockade will be contested by the world.The entire conflict will happen with Taiwan seen as the good guy and China as the evil empire out to crush democratic freedom-loving people; everyone loves the underdog, and everybody hates undemocratic evil empires. We all know this is the only narrative that will survive the opening salvo. We need to stop fooling ourselves and thinking otherwise.The entire conflict will happen on live TV and minute-by-minute on the internet. Every time anything happens, it’ll be seen by billions of people. China will be able to hide nothing.If China lands troops, Taiwan will not fold, as so many predict; passive and very active resistance will go on for months, if not years. It will be vicious. It will invite crackdowns; the crackdowns will spur more resistance, in an ever-increasing spiral of ungovernability.If China fails to win quickly, or the occupation fails (which would be extremely likely, given China’s wretched record with such things and the PRC state’s core instincts to become overbearing and oppressive), then all it will have done is guarantee Taiwanese independence day celebrations. The new narrative will be the noble resistance to Chinese aggression, and this will be the true cementing moment for a new Asian nation which will be forever cut off from China by a new social, cultural, but especially political national identity . This identity will crystallize and become rock-solid very quickly. Nothing creates and unites a nation like having a common enemy; and if your enemy is China, you will be Un-China overnight.Only a total, 100% victory, unlike every other conflict in all of human history, will give China what it wants. Note to the curious: that’s impossible. In any case, it will sunder and destroy all of China’s trade, cripple it internationally and Taiwan will become the Chinese Northern Ireland, the Chinese South African Apartheid, the bloody insurrectional nightmare that will destroy the PRC state from within.The PRC will expend so much political capital, so much wealth, and lose so much wealth through being cut off from trade, lose so many lives, that it will be lucky if Taiwan is only as costly as Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, or Vietnam for the US.Even if China invades, an occupation will ultimately be a bloodbath for China. It will face endless protests, a huge international outcry, total end of all trade with almost the whole world, concentration camps, videos of people being executed, etc. If Taiwan resists, even on a token level, China is utterly screwed.A hostile invasion of and occupation of Taiwan will either forge the ugliest Chinese empire in history, changing and blackening the nature of the then-newly-reborn PRC, or it will utterly break the back of the regime itself.Whatever emerges will be exhausted, morally shattered and isolated. It will have no friends, it will have lots of enemies, and its neighbours will be hostile. Its own society will be sharply polarized, its people suspicious of government, angry for a whole host of reasons, and questioning its legitimacy.There is no good outcome for China in this. Absolutely everything is awful.PREDICTION?So I’m going to go out on a limb, here. I could be wrong - who knows, China could reform tomorrow, Taiwan could have an island-shattering earthquake that destroys Taipei and Kaohsiung, the US could abandon Taiwan because Trump is an idiot, etc.But given these reservations, my predictions:1) Despite the attempt, Taiwan is lost to China for peaceful unification, likely permanently. Coercion, despite what CPC Patriots think, will backfire, and very badly. China will try coercion, confident in its arrogance and its dreams of its own power. This will be a tragic miscalculation.1a) As all attempts to entice Taiwan fail - economically, socially, culturally - Taiwanese will see China as a rival or draining force, and are/will grow resentful of it, not yearning for it. This is already setting in, now. Expect it to increase.1c) The PRC’s patriotic mobs will get angry when attempts to sweet-talk Taiwanese through bribes and benefits fail to generate any support for unification. This is assuredly what will happen. China’s attempts at inducement will turn the PRC’s would-be hegemons to anger and a sense of betrayal: We were so nice to you, and you still don’t want to marry us. This anger will become failure to understand, and then it will become rage. This will polarize and Taiwanese will be driven to dislike the PRC even more.2) China will not reform; the PRC state will become much more intrusive and politically repressive than it is now. It’s on a very retrograde road at the moment, and it seems to be accelerating.3) The West’s “One China” self-serving ambiguity will egg China on to have contempt for Taiwan’s feelings, and it will push. Eventually, it will get hard pushback from the West, and from other countries like Japan, which it will not expect.It will be remarkably and unexpectedly fierce.Because it faced only partial resistance prior to this, it will think this is Western aggression. It will be the result of ambiguous signals sent by the West; the outside world was, despite signals and the way the PRC interpreted them, never going to accept PRC aggression against Taiwan.4) This passive-aggressive attitude on the outside may lead China to think it can win a short war. This is the danger: Only a hard-line stance by allies of Taiwan will prevent China from making this critical miscalculation. This is the greatest danger, that China will miscalculate and think it has any freedom to act. IThe PRC does not have this freedom to act, and this error will only be obvious when people on all sides start dying en masse.5) Taiwan will, eventually, either keep the status quo (which is, more or less, independence in all but name), and if left to its own devices, will formalize this independence by the next generation, at the latest. This seems almost an inevitability, in social terms and in domestic Taiwanese terms.China will have to decide what to do.In truth, it has no good options if it wants unification.All the keyboard warriors will call this BS or delusional or just shout slogans and denounce stupid foreigners, but all it takes is stepping back and looking at all the variables simultaneously. Taken together, they look exceptionally bad for China’s goal of reunification. Only by pretending many of those variables don’t exist can you paint a picture in which China acquires political control of Taiwan.So the question is: Why are people deliberately omitting these details? What is motivating their motivated reasoning? Why are they excluding data they dislike? That’s the most interesting question. History will do what history does - our debating of it is kind of beside the point. What’s more interesting is asking the question: Why do people insist on projecting their own beliefs onto situations, on making their own priorities seem historical, instead of just taking in as much information as possible, accounting for all of the variables, and then noting the patterns that emerge, and the limitations of these patterns?If you do this, China’s cause in Taiwan seems extremely weak.So my prediction is that Taiwan will never become part of the PRC. If the PRC falls and something replaces it, perhaps then all bets are off. But as the PRC is now, without extensive political reform and opening, Taiwan is lost to it forever.China is backed into a corner, and it has no good options at all. The best option (peaceful unification) is almost certainly impossible with the PRC in its current form, or even a lot of other, imaginable forms. Taiwan is almost assuredly impossible to convince unless the PRC totally changes and the CPC steps down from power. The other option (conflict) will be a total disaster, even if China somehow “wins”.If China were really, super smart, this is what it would do:It would encourage Taiwanese independence. It would, in fact, actually sponsor Taiwan as a new member of the UN.It would welcome a new Chinese-speaking state as a voting member of the UN. It would sign reciprocal favourable trade deals with Taiwan. It would found friendship associations and mutual aid associations. It would extend foreign country but preferable visas to Taiwanese, acknowledge their foreign state citizenships as foreign, but give them benefits.The PRC would lull the Taiwanese into a sense of safe, pleasant comfort with their sovereignty and political institutions intact.Then China should just turn around and more or less buy Taiwan.There’s no reason why it can’t be an independent country, …. and still be utterly beholden to China. China then gets two votes in the UN, and it’s a hero for honouring Taiwanese opinion and aspirations. In fact, it then becomes a cherished partner and, in future, maybe even an ally.This is the smartest possible thing to do, from China’s perspective. But my guess is that its leaders aren’t that smart.While this cute plan is good for *China* as a political body, and as a nation, and would almost certainly work very well, … there’s a reason why it won’t happen.My cute plan may be good for “China”, but it’s not good for the CPC.The CPC claims that it’s the only governing force suitable for ethnically Chinese people; that the Chinese long for the welcome bosom of the Party. The CPC cannot tolerate an example of a Chinese state, both free and democratic, on its doorstep, outside the control or influence of the CPC. “China” as a state may be able to tolerate an independent, democratic Taiwan, and might even be able to peacefully unify. But the CPC cannot tolerate any rivals, especially one with a free press and political environment over which it has no leverage. In effect, the CPC is selfishly guarding its own interests and screwing “China” over to get them. It must destroy Taiwan’s society-as-it-is, or it will always face this hurdle.So I see no actual solution, except for Taiwan to cultivate its allies and for those allies to always send China strong messages: No force will ever be permitted. If we want to avoid war, that message has to be unambiguous, so China knows never to step over the line.Otherwise, the world will be at risk.THIS ASIDE IS FOR THE PRC PATRIOTS READING THIS:This is just an addendum, but it comes from me as a person - someone who is a descendant of those who should have known better, but never really learned. It’s not particularly reasonable, except in that it takes from the grim pages of history a hard lesson, partly a feeling of dread in the bottom of my soul. It’s more like noticing the sharp sunlight of the past, and knowing that it burns; having a bad sunburn on my arm that when touched, causes me to reflexively flinch. It’s something so many rivals of the USA (and the “West”) really need to hear. Like I said, it’ s half-emotional, and distracting, and this is why it’s in italics; it’s an aside, and you can skip it. But if you’re a China patriot, you might consider what I write here, and consider it seriously.The USA is an English country, founded on the basis of theoretical principles (even if they’re not always perfectly incarnated). Its people and culture are descended ultimately from the same culture that created much of the last 1500 years of world history. We should all note that the English-speaking peoples, while not winning every war they’ve fought, have proven extremely dangerous to every enemy, because they cannot ever surrender or admit final defeat. The language is half-filled with military metaphors; English language and culture seems refined and literate and scientific and intellectual and precise, but they have other, and very much darker, aspects, too. Are we speaking French here? German? Chinese? What’s the international language, …. Dutch? We’re speaking English, and no matter where you are, English has become the language of human record, and this is not an accident, despite what you may think. Against all odds, in cultural, social, and political conflicts, culturally English people have beaten back all challengers - by any means necessary, honest or not, decent or not, fair or not. They have stolen whole continents, fought what seemed like and endless series of hopeless wars against vastly superior numbers and resources, invented entire categories of technology, survived incomprehensibly deadly plagues and diseases that leveled other cultures, survived almost unimaginable social strife and internecine conflict, absorbed other cultures and learned what they did best, culturally overwhelmed, through sheer volume and quality, the cultural outputs of even the most energetic rivals in Europe and abroad, and built social systems so resilient and adaptable that they’ve transplanted themselves everywhere almost as if they were a force of nature. They have done all of this while still maintaining a kind of utterly relentless moral authority that is a contradiction, but a contradiction that gives it strength: it both questions itself constantly, learns, adapts, and is often divided, and yet that moral authority never really wavers and ultimately remains true to itself. How was this possible? It’s partly because, when it comes down to it, when this seemingly “weak” people are pushed to the wall, 2000 years of survival tells this culture that there is no price too high to pay for winning. It means that the Germans in WWII committed suicide when they attacked the British Empire, which brought in the Americans (“British Empire II”). When the Japanese Empire finally decided that to conquer China, they had to take on the US, it committed suicide by attacking Pearl Harbour. There was no other possible outcome. The Americans would have done anything to win, anything, anything at all. There was no circumstance under which they would have surrendered or given up. There was simply no price too high for the Americans, or the British.It’s irrational. It’s senseless. But when pushed hard, nobody in history has proven the willingness to do anything to win like the English nations, and especially the USA. If you punch the Americans, you goddamned better be willing to fight to your own inevitable total destruction, because even if you “win”, either you will also be destroyed ; or you will surrender. No other outcome is possible. My ethnic ancestors on 4 distinct sides, in repeated conflicts, all fought English armies and culture, and yet, here I write in English.I’m not endorsing this, nor do I think this is a good thing. I’m simply pointing it out to you. In many ways, my own not-too-distant ancestral past is painful even for me; my ancestors fought the English on every side, and always lost, whether it was in blood or gold or culture. The English stole the future from every one of my ancestral cultures, through peaceful and violent means, and the thing that makes me both fearful and angry is that it was likely inevitable.I say these things because the Patriotic Chinese!!! in the Great PRC!!! are making a mistake if they think the USA is some old lion that can be bought off with a few promises or a bag of silver, or pushed aside when threatened. The very last thing the USA will ever do, and I mean ever, is back down. By extension, you can also infer most of the English world. Australia seems like a pushover, with politicians bowing to commercial interests, … until you cross a line, at which point the reaction seems very aggressive. Canada seems the same, but it’s a clever, clever place, with schemes and reasons of its own, and contingency plans; the same for the UK and NZ. For a time, you can nudge and pull, and think you’re making progress, but in the end, if you push too hard, or cross some line you can’t see, you will fight and die, even if you “win”, … or you will surrender. For 2000 years, every single enemy who thought the English nation(s) was/were weak was ultimately beaten to extinction by Hengist and Horsa or King Edward I or William of Orange or Churchill or Hollywood or the Internet.It. Is. Relentless. The English / “West’s” sheer depth of utter dedication and commitment to winning such conflicts cannot be underestimated. Absolute, total self-annihilation is preferable to surrender. In the end, English - Western people very genuinely believe this. They will destroy themselves to if this is required to destroy their enemies and they will do this gladly, convinced death and obliteration is better than subjugation. There is no price too high to pay.This isn’t just military. English culture can adapt and absorb the best of what it finds. The language, also, is utterly pragmatic. Unlike most other cultures and languages, “Purity” is not highly valued in English culture, and adaptation is celebrated. As a result, English cultures are expert at assimilating people and cultures from every part of the world - from Jews in 15th century London to Mohawk traders and Polynesian warriors to Chinese immigrants in Vancouver - and making them some kind of “English”. If you think you can hold out, …. wait a generation. Maybe only half a generation.If China decides it needs to take on the US and conquer Taiwan in blood, you can believe with every word on every page of every history book that once begun, the US will obliterate itself and every living person in China before it even considers surrender. There will never be a moment when it backs down from a real, knock-out, drop-down, to-the-wall fight. If China throws one tactical nuke at the US 7th fleet in the Pacific, the US will obliterate 4 Chinese army divisions on mainland China and a couple of smaller military towns. If China throws a warning nuke over some Iowa farms, the USA will kill 500,000,000 million Chinese as retaliation, without hesitation, and dare China’s desperate leaders to respond. If China responds to this, the USA will kill every other last person in China without two seconds’ hesitation. Do not, even for one second, have the slightest doubt about it. If attacked, the USA will force China to surrender Taiwan and give it independence, or it will totally obliterate every living thing in China. If you give any English leader, who will be a person strong enough to rise up and lead one of these English countries, an excuse, and they feel they’re operating on the basis of firm moral principles, they will throw back at you whatever you throw at them times ten. They really are this crazy. They are utterly committed to principles. They founded whole nations on nothing more than ideas and notions. Do you think they’ll just back away from these things? Just because you think ideology is for idiots, don’t for a moment think this is true for everyone.The key operating word here that you likely don’t understand is this: Principle. Some say the Russians are non-ideological and pragmatic; they’ll fight for survival or advantage, but in the end, practical concerns overrule principles. The Chinese are also described as practical people who, history has shown, have no problems bowing to masters or conceding some issue when there’s coin, personal benefit or survival at stake, or just to help both sides save face.But English people don’t care about “face”, and they value courage. But most of all, they care about principle. People genuinely think that the rule of law is a thing - that the CEO of Huawei must face the law. The rich must face the law, unlike in China, where power and influence or favour decide the law. English people are angry at cheaters not because of who they are, but because cheating goes against principles. They DEMAND Rule of Law because the principle is what’s important to them, even if it’s not practical, and even if it’’s hard to fully implement. They hate corruption, because even if they themselves benefit, they feel dirty - because principle has been offended. No self-respecting American leader would ever even pretend to think about the possibility of surrendering in this situation. And if they do, it’s for one reason only - to get revenge later on, or to turn you to their side.English culture is a culture of martyrs to principle.English people ARE that crazy; on a matter of principle, anyone in an important position just WILL NOT SURRENDER. When it comes to winning a serious conflict over a matter of principle - like protecting a small, democratic US ally like Taiwan against Evil Chinese Empire, NO PRACTICAL CONSIDERATION will enter into a US president’s head. He / she will look back on 1500 years of history and say: I will not be The Failed Leader who backed down on Principle. Principles are 100% more important, in this sense at last, in English culture, than anything pragmatic. No leader who expects to be respected can be less committed to core principles than all these famous leaders who have gone before.It defies logic, say the Russians, or the Chinese, or even the Germans; ultimately, all that matters is what’s practical and reasonable, right? But in this, every foreigner is dead wrong, every single time. You cannot possibly understand English culture until you understand that principle overrides pragmatism on every important issue. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand your enemy, and to make a critical error. No better advice could possibly be given to any person creating strategy to use against the English West: Principle Matters, and is more important than Pragmatism.So yes: All the shiny buildings in Shanghai mean nothing.Because before every other factor, the culturally English people won’t narrowly calculate what the best outcome for them is. Look at the movies; look at the literature; look at the myths and heroes and stories. The English people truly actually really believe that it’s better to die horribly defending your principles (whatever they are) than to live in world where you surrendered or compromised. If it’s to free the slaves, then you do ANYTHING required to free the slaves; if you believe in democracy, then you will be willing to do anything at all to realize it; if it’s to protect law and order, you will do anything - anything - to impose law and order. Usually, it’s a combination of these things.Culturally English people very regularly fight hopeless, utterly stupid battles even in everyday life. They’ll go to city hall and fight some boring parking ticket just because; if they see some injustice, they’ll escalate a pubic spat until those in the “wrong” surrender or are punished. They’ll protest, and have protested for centuries, what they see as unfair or unjust, and they’ll do this even when soldiers come out to shoot them. In fact, facing resistance may make them even bolder. They will agree to fight in some pointless war when there’s a serious principle at risk. The US-Vietnam war was lost at least partly because US leaders failed to articulate to their soldiers, or the American people, a clear principle for which people were fighting. But you can believe, that had they successfully done this, the Viet Cong would have been obliterated to the very last man and woman and child and South Vietnam would still be a country today. In the old American West, the people who stood up to injustice or who fought back were heroes. In the past, whoever stuck to principles was a hero, regardless of any other factor: Criminals, leaders, kings, slaves, prophets, soldiers, servants, anyone who lives by and for principles is a model of righteous living. Anyone who surrenders their principles is contemptible.Compare and contrast the history of NATO intervention, say in Kosovo, versus EU or continental European intervention. In Europe, principles are less firm and more notional. But when a genocide was threatened in Kosovo, the EU dithered, debated, bent, wondered if it was worth it. NATO, effectively led by English countries, hesitated for about 3 seconds, and then bombed the Serbs and saved the Albanian Kosovars from extinction. Not only did it never apologize for this and the damage caused, but it’s still unhesitatingly seen as a costly venture that was valuable…. because it maintained the vitality of a principle. Even if it damaged NATO interests, it was worth it - on principle. When the British Empire fought slavery, it actually did a great deal of damage to its commercial and political interests, but once it had decided that slavery had to be abolished, it spent treasure and lives and political capital to make that reality - on principle.Once “principle” is activated, no cost is too high. If it becomes a fight over democracy or tyranny, the West will absolutely not hesitate to fight China until either both sides are totally destroyed or China has been forced to back off, and Taiwan is totally independent. China is making a mistake if it thinks it can browbeat or push the West away from Taiwan. Arrogance and cultural ignorance let it think that the West will act like China has traditionally acted, calculating based purely on self-interest, but it’s wrong. If China pushes the west, especially when it seems to be weak (because this is the default state for liberal cultures), it will find whatever principle it needs to motivate itself, and it will do anything required to defend that principle.Anything at all. I cannot emphasize this enough.The “West” will never, ever surrender that principle until it is totally annihilated, and if somehow forced to back down, it will never, ever forget and never stop trying to get very serious vengeance. Take a look at history to see what form that vengeance takes. If you wish to see a test of this observation, I give you the graveyard of history - of those who have not understood this one, single vital fact about the English, the culture they carry, and the “Western” world they effectively created.If China attempts to take Taiwan by force, and the USA and the West think a serious principle is at stake, it is extremely likely that total war will result. China will be 1) humiliated or 2) obliterated, and much of the rest of the world likely along with it. If the West sees a principle at stake, I tell you this now, that no other outcome is possible. War will escalate, and on principle, the West will never, ever, ever back down, because it cannot imagine backing down on a principle. If China refuses to back down, and fights, then ultimately, China and the world will be radioactive wastelands.There was a moment in the cold war when the Soviets realized that the West was entirely willing to really go to war. I mean, real war, for real purposes, with real results. There was no real debate, and the USA, the supposedly capitalist, commercial USA, was very clearly willing to obliterate the planet to protect little more than a few ideological principles. This terrified the Soviets, because for them, war preparation had been as much about bluster and showmanship as it was anything else. Ideology in the Soviet Union was a less strictly adhered-to thing, ironically, as the Americans imagined the Soviets were more dedicated Communists than they really were. When the Soviets realized that the Americans and British and everyone else was actually, really and truly preparing to fight for something that the Russians thought was cheap - for principles - the Soviets realized they were up against something so irrational and terrifying that they needed to back down. Capitalists should only care about money and be easy to buy off, right? Um, …. well, maybe. But they didn’t bank on the people behind these liberal democracies. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy really, really would have gone to total war with / over Cuba. No joke: He would have sunk every Russian ship in the Caribbean. he would have had bombers in the air ready to obliterate every city in the Soviet Union.When the current joke of a US president sends ships into the South China Sea, I know it seems ridiculous, but he is not joking. He really means it. As unprincipled a monster as Trump is, he knows how he’s going to be judged by others. Those ships are armed, and they are absolutely prepared to do something about it. If China tests this, it will be blood and fire and death. Do not doubt this for one second. Cheer on your soldiers only if you desperately seek mass death.The next time someone says that nobody will defend Taiwan because commercial or political interests are more important and Taiwan is boring, you just stop and think, and look at the historical record. You’re inviting real war, possibly real total war. Don’t make that miscalculation.