She insisted the Mac should have keys that used universal symbols instead or just English letters or words. Joanna helped make the first keyboard layout for the Mac. At the time, American products rarely bothered to do localization for foreign markets. She wanted to make the Mac a tool that felt natural for international users, by making it speak their language. Joanna was also key in making the Macintosh an international product from the start. She defined the early markets, including higher education, which carried the Mac in its early days. Joanna ran the Macintosh marketing team by herself for the first year and a half. He assigned her the task of making the first business plan, and figuring out who the customer of the Macintosh would be. Steve didn't have a typical marketing job in mind for her. Shortly after taking over the project, Steve told Joanna that she could still research and test user interfaces, but she was going to be responsible for marketing, which she had never done. Steve decided the Mac should be more like what Xerox was doing, which Joanna was very familiar with. Steve Jobs took over the Mac project in December 1980, merging it with the ongoing (and troubled) Lisa project. In November 1980, a month after Joanna joined, Apple went public. At the time, the Mac research team consisted of Burrell Smith (hardware), Bud Tribble (software), Brian Howard (documentation/hardware/jack-of-all-trades), Jeff Raskin, and Joanna Hoffman. She was originally hired to do user interface research and testing. She became employee #327, joining in October 1980. Raskin was so impressed with Hoffman that he asked her to interview for a position at Apple. Joanna and Jef's discussion at Xerox PARC focused on what computers should look like, and how they could improve people's lives. He was the one who named it Macintosh, because it was his favorite kind of apple. Jef wrote the original BASIC programming manual in 1977, and went on to start the Macintosh research project in 1979. She also had a heated discussion with Jef Raskin, Apple employee #31. While at a lecture at Xerox PARC in 1980, Joanna asked a lot of pointed questions. Employee #327: One of the Wizards Behind the Macintosh Joanna was right there, watching history, and helping to shape it. The work done by Alan Kay and his team at Xerox PARC would go on to form the basis of what became the Macintosh, and was the genesis of the modern graphical interface. She ended up volunteering at Xerox PARC, interacting with all the things they were working on: the first graphical user interface, the first computer mouse, on-screen controls, object-oriented programming, and other truly revolutionary computing concepts and ideas. Hoffman was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California. After using her computer skills in the field of archaeology for a while, she grew tired of looking at the past. She studied archaeology at the University of Chicago, where she started her pursuit of a PhD. She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics, and earned a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science from MIT. Joanna Karine Hoffman Nazarian was born in Poland and grew up in the Soviet Union, immigrating to America in 1968 at the age of 15.
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