There's been a bit of a backlash in recent years for various reasons, but for the most part it's now unimaginable that Apple could be anything but successful. They're the dominant force in technology and culture as a whole, it seems, which each new product greeted with open arms and something approaching hysteria. It wasn't always so, however. The early days for the company were frequently rocky, beginning literally as a bunch of pals operating out of a garage (and their first computer being made by hand, for example). The burgeoning computer market was mainly being controlled by existing big companies like IBM. The first truly big failure Apple had, however, was in 1983 and it looked like curtains for them company for good. Their Lisa computers, which pioneered the use of a mouse, documents, folders and also things like copy protection was a colossal failure, with 2700 units reportedly buried in a landfill in Utah after it failed to take off at launch. For comparison, that's basically what sealed the fate of Atari back in the day.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
