Joanna
Hoffman

BIO:

Joanna Hoffman is a marketing executive who was an original member of the Apple Macintosh team, starting there while it was still a research project. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1955 to filmmaker parents but spent the first ten years of her life in Soviet Armenia. She eventually immigrated to the United States and arrived in Buffalo, New York, in 1968.

Though she arrived in the United States not knowing any English, she learned it very quickly and excelled in school, developing an interest in science at a very young age. She went on to attend MIT, earning a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science. While there, she became interested in ancient materials and their composition, so she applied for graduate school in the archaeology program at the University of Chicago. However, she postponed going to school to go on an archaeology dig in Soviet Armenia. After this, she found herself in Silicon Valley, where she had her first exposure to Xerox PARC, and fell in love with it. She attended the University of Chicago for one year before dropping out and returning to Silicon Valley. Xerox held a series of seminars where they invited their scientists, engineers, and other guests to lecture. While attending one of these, she ran into Jef Raskin, a former classmate at MIT, who invited her to work with him on a new research project at Apple.

Hoffman joined the Macintosh project in October of 1980, and Steve Jobs took over the project two months later. He selected Hoffman to do marketing for the project, even though she has no prior experience in the field. Amongst her team, she became known as one of the only people that could stand up to Jobs. When she pushed the Mac in both the international and academic markets, where it performed well, she defined the computer’s future market.  Hoffman also wrote the first draft of the User Interface Guidelines for the Mac. Eventually, she also became the Macintosh’s international product marketing manager. After this, she followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, and in the 1990s became vice president of marketing at General Magic until she retired in 1995.

To learn more about Joanna Hoffman, read her oral history recorded by the Computer History Museum in 2017.  

Womanhood is a public art and digital media project that promotes the historical contributions of women to Santa Clara County. https://womanhoodproject.org/ 

Womanhood is supported by the County of Santa Clara Office of Women’s Policy.