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Jobs, as the story goes, was immediately convinced that this was the future of the PC and took control of the company's efforts to produce a GUI-driven machine, the Lisa. Xerox gave Apple's engineers three days' access to the PARC facilities in return for $18mn worth of Apple stock.

While Jobs worked on Lisa, Jef Raskin set up a separate project to build a low-cost computer based around a GUI. Raskin had joined Apple after Jobs hired him to write a programming manual for the Apple II. Raskin thought the Apple II too complex to become a mass market machine and began lobbying within Apple for a new kind of computer.

Jobs's personality soon proved to much for the 'corporate shirts' on the Lisa project and he was kicked out. So he turned to Raskin's 'pirates'. Both teams raced to be the first to market, and in 1983 the Lisa won. However the high, $9,995 price tag and lack of software meant the machine was a commercial failure.

A year later Raskin and Jobs unveiled the first Macintosh, although Raskin's contribution to the final product is often overstated. It was Burrell Smith who designed the motherboard and integrated the powerful Motorola 68000 chip, and the likes of Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Susan Kare and Jobs himself who built the interface and software.

The machine was launched with a single TV advertisement

The advertisement, which shows a person smashing the face of Big Brother with a sledgehammer, closed with the line: 'On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984".'

The ad was shown just once during that year's Super Bowl and is widely considered to be one of the finest ever made. Apple revived it in 2004, with the sledgehammer-wielding heroine wearing an iPod.

Initially sales of the Mac, as it soon became known, were not particularly strong, despite costing $2,495 and boasting computer 'firsts' that included the single-button mouse (the PARC Alto's mouse had three buttons), a 3.5in 400K floppy disk drive and an 8MHz processor that was noticeably faster than anything else on the market.

What made the Macintosh successful were two small software companies. In the mid 1980s Adobe developed a language, PostScript, for describing page layouts so that they could be printed on the new breed of low-cost laser printers (pioneered by Apple). At the same time Aldus had developed PageMaker, which took advantage of the advanced graphics capabilities of the Mac's GUI to allow pages to be designed and put-together on a computer screen - what became known as desktop publishing.

Together Apple, Adobe and Aldus created an entirely new industry, one which continues to provide Apple's core market, although Aldus has long gone, PageMaker having been eclipsed by QuarkXpress and ultimately absorbed by Adobe.

By 1985, however, Jobs was losing a power struggle with the very man he had brought in to run Apple two years previously, former Pepsi boss John Sculley. Jobs was stripped of his powers and given an office - known as Siberia - on a remote corner of the Apple campus. He left soon after.

Apple's 30th Birthday [part 1] - Riding the whirlwind