Blast from the Past: 1986 Apple Ad

The line seems perfectly reasonable and coherent to me, Andrew. It is a valid way of saying, "This ad suggests that if your business is out of control, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems ... "

"That sentence defies all english logic"

Nonsense, Andrew. It makes perfect sense; understanding it does require an attention span of more than three milliseconds though.

April 1993 UNIXWorld magazine cover:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/29870210/

"Does Steve Jobs have a future in software?" 8-)

"Blast from the Past: 1986 Apple Ad"

Ah, yes. But for OS X users the interesting thing is not what Apple was doing at the time but what Steve Jobs was.

" After several months of being sidelined at Apple, he resigned on Friday, September 13, 1985 ...

" ... By mid-1986, it was clear that no existing operating system (OS) would be able to meet their tentative specification for an object-oriented programming environment and user interface. This forced a major change in the business plan: not only would NeXT create an object-oriented programming environment, they would need to build hardware and a Unix-like Mach-based OS for the toolkit to run on. ..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1987.E2.80.931993:_NeXT_Computer.2C_Inc.

It retrospect he made the right decisions, and it's not his (reborn) company Paul Graham is laughing at:

"All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's anyway."

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

"If your business is out of control, suggests this ad, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems, with its shiny, shiny spreadsheets, word processing, and other business features that allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to become a computer expert."

That sentence defies all english logic

It's amazing Apple's still in business. :-)