This month, Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, having survived five decades of ups and downs. Whether you love or hate the company, its products have had a massive influence on the consumer technology market and the world.

Among the obvious successes, such as the iPhone and the MacBook, there are numerous dead-end failures, such as the butterfly keyboard and the G4 Cube. But its history is also littered with forgotten legacies—some successes, some failures—that still influence computing to this day.

IEEE Spectrum spoke with John Buck, author of Inventing the Future: Bit by Bit, to learn more about some of those forgotten legacies pioneered by Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG) in the 1980s and 1990s.

LaserWriter and desktop publishing

In the mid 1980s, as Buck says, Apple needed a commercial success:

While Steve Jobs had recognized the potential of linking a printer product with Adobe’s popular PostScript even before the release of the Mac, the LaserWriter ended up one of the first post–Steve Jobs products, where the company learned to understand what the market wanted instead of just what Jobs wanted. And even though the first model was expensive, it was cheaper than the alternatives.

Jim Gable, who was the product manager on LaserWriter, had no background in printing. The ATG was full of smart generalists who got dragged in on these projects.

Apple discontinued the LaserWriter line when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, but it set the groundwork for desktop publishing. To cope with the processing demands of running Adobe’s PostScript for font rendering, the LaserWriter had its own Motorola 68000-series processor.

While the PostScript partnership was initially lucrative, licensing fees eventually became a burden for Apple. From Buck:

With the advent of more affordable printing came the need for legible fonts at different sizes, from small screens to giant billboards. Initially, for the LaserWriter, Apple licensed PostScript, which Adobe created in 1982.

Even though Adobe helped Apple create the desktop publishing revolution and bring them much-needed business, they thought, we’re paying them too much money for fonts, let’s build our own thing, which was a very ATG thing to do. They brought in all the experts and said, “Right, we’re just going to do it better.”

And they built it, then went behind everyone’s back and spoke to Bill Gates and said, “Right, you don’t like them [Adobe] either. It’s costing you money.”

The result was the TrueType fonts in 1989, which are now widely used on macOS and Windows, while high-end printers still use PostScript. Its last release was in 1997, and Adobe’s alternative Type 1 fonts are largely forgotten.

Apple’s Newton personal digital assistants (PDAs) ultimately failed but led to a successful partnership with Arm that culminated in the iPhone decades later.Geoff Parsons

Newton, Arm chips, and the iPhone

While Acorn computers won’t mean much to people outside the United Kingdom, the company spun off part of their business to create the much more famous Arm, thanks to a joint venture with VLSI Technology and Apple in 1990.

Buck explains how this relationship began:

When Apple built the first Newton, they commissioned AT&T to create these Hobbit chips, and they were too slow, too hot, and couldn’t deliver the power. And they discovered Arm. A little two-man team with the project name ‘Möbius’ went to the UK to try their chips and found them ideal. Even though Newton was a disaster because of too many egos who wanted to add this and that, the fact that they’ve found Arm to put in the Newton becomes the success story of the iPhone. It’s a research arc that takes forever to come to market. And some of the mistakes that they stumble over to get there.

QuickTime and digital video formats

One name from the ATG era you’ll still find on a modern Mac is QuickTime. While it’s not the essential powerhouse it once was, in Buck’s opinion, it’s one of Apple’s biggest legacies:

To me, the legacy of QuickTime and the team behind it are one of the most enduring of the ATG. At the time of its release, playing video on a computer was incredible, and in the 90s and early 00s, QuickTime defined many video format standards, most notably MPEG-4.

QuickTime team member and ATG compression algorithm expert Gavin Miller, who’s now Head of Research at Adobe, said to me: “I think the QuickTime team invented the modern media-rich world, and the larger ATG imagined and prototyped experiences that parallel modern movies, video games, and interactive map-based technologies. It was something of a golden age when great ideas were often in the future, perfect if only computers could be fast enough. Idealism, matched with ingenious engineering, made those things happen 10 years earlier than they might have otherwise.”

Others, such as former Apple product manager Andrew Soderberg, thought their importance had been understated and told me: “Other than Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, these were the most important engineers in Apple’s history until the advent of the iPhone.”

Operating systems and browsers started to build in many of the features that QuickTime helped define. QuickTime is still present on macOS (Apple discontinued the Windows version in 2016) but serves mostly as a playback app, with most of the codec work now handled by other software.

Early Macintosh models did not sell as well as people might think. According to Buck, Hypermedia helped Apple with lagging Macintosh sales:

People had been experimenting with the ideas that form what became “the World Wide Web” long before its creation at CERN. And HyperCard was one of the more successful experiments, causing a rush of enthusiasm and sales for the Macintosh.

Apple tied HyperCard’s launch to Apple’s first CD-ROM in 1986, a digital version of the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC). It was launched as a stack of 4,000 linked HyperCard cards, doubling the sales of the Macintosh 1, causing Apple production challenges in meeting demand.

This, in turn, led to a revolutionary overhaul of production techniques, with engineer Steve Young tasked with introducing robots and automation to factories in the USA, Singapore, and Ireland. All two years after he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University.

HyperCard received updates until 1998, and Apple finally withdrew it from sale in 2004. The original pointed-finger cursor for early web links was inspired by HyperCard, as was the Wiki concept. Apple continues to be a leader in production and logistics techniques.

Apple’s first foray into portable computing, the Macintosh Portable, had display and battery issues.Jim Abeles

Macintosh Portable and PowerBook laptops

Apple’s first foray into personal computing was a disaster, but, as Buck recounts, they quickly redefined the form factor:

Portable devices are now how most people interact with computing. Apple was late to creating a portable version of the Mac despite the increasing demand, even allowing others to fill the gap while they worked on their model.

Dynamic Computers began advertising a “portable” Mac that was actually a disassembled Mac Plus integrated into a new enclosure. Apple was so desperate for sales, it sold the Mac Pluses at a discount to Dynamic.

In the end, weighing 16 pounds, the resulting device was fraught with display and battery issues. Much of this was due to a few people on the “Harpo” development team having no experience with portable computers, as Jon Krakower recalled to me: “The mechanical design engineers assigned to our team had no experience with designing small, lightweight portable products. Apple itself had never shipped a portable product and had no experience with the special size and weight requirements. They brought in people who only had experience designing desktop computers, CRT displays, or printers.”

Apple discontinued the Portable less than two years later. However, quickly afterwards, they began a redesign, as industrial designer Gavin Ivester told me: “I was called to a meeting with John Sculley, where he told us that by next year, the personal computer market was projected to be 30 percent laptops. There was no Apple laptop (or notebook) yet, and creating one would easily take more than a year with normal resources and processes. Sculley calculated how many millions of dollars per day 30 percent of Apple’s business was worth—it was a big number.”

Taking inspiration from the Compaq LTE, the team moved surprisingly quickly, attempting to use as many existing parts as possible. The resulting PowerBook was a huge success over its 15-year lifespan, setting the template for what laptops would look like even now. Ironically, the team that created it ended up leaving to work for Compaq.

When Jobs returned in 1997, he shut ATG down to save on costs and product distractions. The only ATG project he kept around was QuickTime, ironically, because the team had just developed a version for Windows, but the people themselves went on to many other places, and Apple entered a new chapter.