Andy Hertzfeld, a member of the original Macintosh development team, is using Google+ to show off a photo of a young Steve Jobs flipping off the IBM logo on a street in Manhattan, NYC.
Hertzfeld
writes on his Google+ account, “In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here's one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit.”
The photo was taken in December 1983, a few weeks before the festivious Macintosh launch. As the story goes, Jobs and Hertzfeld had embarked on a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek to talk about a cover story on their computers.
According to Hertzfeld, the photo was taken spontaneously as the duo walked around Manhattan with Jean Pigozzi at their side. Pigozzi is described as “a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time.”
Further weighing in on the photo featuring a rebellious Steve Jobs flipping off the IBM logo, Hertzfeld added: “Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.”
On the early rivalry between Macintosh and "IBM-compatible" computers based on Microsoft's DOS, the Apple co-founder is quoted in a book (
Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward by Jeffrey S. Young, 1987, p. 235) as saying:
“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”
The famous 1984 advertising masterpiece was also in direct correlation with IBM or, the Big Blue, as the company was referred to in those days.
In an interview about the release of the Macintosh (24 January 1984), Jobs said: “We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me too’ products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.”
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