Apple turns 50: the history of the big apple in Peru

In Mariátegui’s house, in Miraflores, a small office was set up with a laser printer and scanner, and both friends began to become part of the community of Apple users in our country. “At that time, people thought that the Mac was mainly for graphic design, but the truth was that it had many other possibilities,” says Mariátegui, “and since there were few users, a community of fans and passionate about this technology was formed.”

“There is an obsession with perfection and aesthetics, that is what defines Apple products and makes them so loved,” says Ossio. “Steve Jobs said ‘I want the interfaces to be pretty, to look like candy’. And you fall in love with them, because they are made to bring out the best version of you.”

“My taste for art and technology,” Mariátegui concludes, “comes from this stage, from having later had access to a CD player and having seen all those interactive programs that were only available for Mac.” Currently, Mariátegui is a renowned curator and researcher of art and new media, and Ossio is an expert administrator in advanced programming. “I’m a tech towel grabber,” he jokes, “that is, when someone throws in the towel and says ‘this can’t be done,’ that’s when my job begins.” Among his anecdotes are having saved a novel for Mario Vargas Llosa and some work for Hernando de Soto, or having joined together several Macintoshes to create a supercomputer and solve an ‘impossible case’.

César Zevallos Heudebert was a boy fascinated by computers in the early 80s. In 1981 he had his Carmelitas school acquire 25 Apple II computers for its laboratory and he began teaching Logo, Basic and Pascal to high school students. Three years later, already in college, he was able to buy his first Apple IIc computer and immediately afterward a Macintosh 512k. “It was a completely new and powerful machine for the time,” he remembers, “because it had a mouse and the whole Windows thing. It was a total change.” It was half the price of a car, but it was worth the effort.

In 1986, with Roberto Michelena and Alberto Brigneti, Zevallos founded Eos, a company dedicated to the sale of computers that in a visionary way introduced digital pre-press systems to advertising agencies and newspapers of the time. In this period of discovery of the Apple world, he made a trip to MacWorld, in the United States, which could have ended in tragedy. One of the engines of the plane that was taking it from Miami to San Francisco exploded a few minutes after takeoff and the ship had to return to the airport in an emergency landing.

That mishap allowed him to meet Ed Fiol, CIO of the “Miami Herald,” who was also on the accident plane and was waiting for a new flight with a MacWorld magazine in his hands. Zevallos approached him, started talking to him, and thus found out about the digital transformation that said newspaper had undertaken and asked him to visit their offices, upon returning from the Apple event.

“Indeed,” he says, “I was able to see how they used the first four-color imagers with Mac in Aldus PageMaker (what would later become Adobe InDesign).” Thanks to this discovery, already in Lima, Zevallos managed to convince the directors of the newspaper ‘Expreso’ to make this conversion in our country. “We made the biggest Apple sale of the 1980s, in Peru, for a figure of 400 thousand dollars, and we made the entire pre-press industry change,” he says proudly.

The first company representing the Apple brand in Peru was Systel and its creators were Lola Luks and David Sztudent, two pioneers in the sale of computers in Lima. In 1985, they opened a store in Miguel Dasso, in San Isidro, under the name Unimicros, where they distributed the Commodore, the Apple II, Lisa and the first Macintosh.

This first stage ended when Apple commissioned the transnational Xerox to distribute and sell the Macintosh, leaving aside local distributors. But the change was not as successful as expected. Two years later, they contacted the Peruvian representatives again, and Luks and Sztudent then formed the company Amicro to market the apple brand among authorized national distributors. Antonio Calogero came to work there in 1987 as product manager, a year after graduating from Cibertec. “I was able to see the evolution of Apple over ten years,” he says, “and soak up the different products and versions of the operating system that were adopted by creatives, photographers, independent designers, advertising companies, magazines and media outlets.” After the dissolution of Amicro, around 1999, representation passed to international wholesale companies.

Currently, Calogero is one of Apple’s authorized distributors in the corporate and educational field, through Infotek Peru. “For me,” he says, “it has been a passion to be able to use and sell these products for almost 40 years.”

With the new century, the community of Apple users expanded exponentially with the new revolutions that meant the appearance of MacBooks, iPods, iPhones and Apple Watches, “with integrated and efficient systems,” as Jacquelin Asto, systems engineer and professor at the Autonomous University of Peru, says. She defines with one word the key to this brand in its half century of existence: simplicity. “Its interface,” he explains, “is not at all complex, from its icons to its devices they are easy to use, which allows us to interact with an entire digital ecosystem that makes our daily lives easier.” Due to advances in neuroscience applied to technology, Asto predicts that in the near future these devices will become more multisensory, and we will even be able to communicate telepathically with them. “Just by thinking something,” he predicts, “Siri will execute what I need or want. It won’t be long before that happens.”