Stefan Mileschin

It seems that when Steve Jobs was signing off on the iMac his marketing genius might have been out to lunch.

In an excerpt from his upcoming book published by the Sydney Morning Herald, Kevin Segall, the bloke behind the "Think Different" campaign said that he had a devil of a job telling Jobs that his suggested name for a new Apple computer was rubbish.

Jobs insisted that the name should be MacMan, you know like PacMan only with an M.

Jobs invited everyone to a meeting to see the computer, then whipped a gray sheet off the device to reveal the computer that would put Apple back on the map.

Segall claimed that the group apparently let out a collective "holy cow" because it shattered every idea of what computers were supposed to look like and no-one appeared to have any sense of perspective.

It was a colourful one-piece computer that showed off its inner circuitry through a semitransparent shell. Hooray.

But the problem was what name to call this revolution in computing and Segall recounts Steve Jobs saying to the group, "We already have a name we like a lot, but I want you guys to see if you can beat it. The name is 'MacMan'".

Segall suggested iMac but that was not a hit with Jobs. It took a few attempts and a Chinese burn before he woould stray from his treasured MacMan name.

Apparently he refused to accept it until he had seen the new name silk-screened onto the model of the computer to see how it looked.

After that he stuck I in front of everything.

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/job...the-apple-imac