It could be said that without Burrell Smith, the Macintosh might never have made it to the Flint Center stage on January 24, 1984. He was to the Macintosh what Steve Wozniak was to the first Apple computers, a hardware wizard who came up with ingenious ways to coax more performance out of a computer with fewer chips.
Smith joined Apple in February 1979, starting out in the service department repairing Apple II machines. It was the equivalent of the mail room in a non-tech company. He was 24 years old, the same age as Steve Jobs and many others at Apple who grew up obsessed with electronics and passionate about the potential of personal computers. Bill Atkinson, the software wizard behind much of the core system code for the Lisa and Macintosh and who wrote MacPaint, thought the cherubic-looking hardware hacker could help with a new project led by Apple employee No. 31, Jef Raskin.