‘40 Years Ago, Drexel Made Computer — and Apple — History’

Alissa Falcone, in a good piece looking back at (my alma mater) Drexel University’s groundbreaking deal with Apple 40 years ago to provide deeply discounted Macintoshes to all students, and integrate them throughout the campus and curriculums:

Drexel was prepared to buy IBM computers — and had equipped its computer centers with IBMs for decades — but the cost came to more than $1,000 per unit. IBM’s young competitor Apple, on the other hand, was willing to give discounts, provided the University agreed to secret negotiations and discreet showings of its newest, unreleased personal computer.

Bruce Eisenstein, PhD, Arthur J. Rowland Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering, was the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the time, and had been the founding faculty adviser for the Drexel Computer Society started in 1972. He was Drexel’s choice to meet with an Apple representative to see the future Macintosh, which had never-before-seen properties like a mouse, icons on a screen and different fonts. This new Apple product was more powerful and easier to use than earlier personal computers; novices could supposedly master it in 30 minutes (without the need to memorize and type coded commands). And Apple agreed on the $1,000 price tag for a model that sold to the public for $2,495.

“I went back to the selection committee and I said, ‘Listen, you have to forget the IBM. This new computer from Apple is the one you have to get. They are going to make it available to us for a thousand dollars — that’s all inclusive.’ And the first question was ‘Is it compatible with the IBM computer?’ Well, no. Was there software for it? No. Were there any programs for it, like a word processor? Not yet. So the committee justifiably kept saying, well, what’s the name of this? What’s it like? I couldn’t tell them. I had to say you just gotta trust me on this. So they took a vote and unanimously voted to adopt the unknown computer that turned out to be the Macintosh,” Eisenstein recalled in Building Drexel: The University and Its City, 1891-2016.

Drexel chose the untested Macintosh even knowing that Apple wouldn’t announce it to the public until January 1984 and that the computers wouldn’t be ready until March, almost halfway through that momentous academic year.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Eisenstein, but I’d sure like to thank him for his prescience. By the time I got to Drexel in 1991 the Mac was infused throughout campus.

★ Monday, 17 March 2025