Brian Howard

Brian Douglas Howard (March 23, 1944 – February 1, 2010) was one of the original members of the Macintosh development team at Apple Computer.

Career
Brian Howard and Jef Raskin first collaborated through Bannister and Crun, a two-person technical consulting firm, where they were contracted to produce a manual for Steve Wozniak's Integer BASIC at Apple Computer.

Apple Computer
Apple was pleased with the results of Raskin and Howard's work and hired them in January 1978 as employees #31 and #32, respectively, to form the company's new publications department. In 1979, Raskin submitted a proposal for an information appliance computer. Upon approval, Howard was the first staff member to join Raskin's new Macintosh team. By 1981, Howard and Dan Kottke hand assembled the first clear Macintosh prototype with an Apple II floppy drive.



Though Raskin and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs both left the Macintosh division and the company, Howard remained at Apple Computer and later joined the portable computing division. Andy Hertzfeld credited Howard and Bob Bailey with engineering the best of the Macintosh models. By the time Howard passed away from cancer in February 2010, he had been one of the longest continuously-serving employees of Apple, surpassed only by Chris Espinosa.

Articles

 * Friends gather to remember a member of the original Macintosh team by Mike Cassidy, San Jose Mercury News. 2010-02-18.
 * Macintosh’s Other Designers by John Markoff and Ezra Shapiro, Byte p.347-356. 1984-08.