Date of Birth:

1955

Date of Death:

Present

SECTORS:

Technology

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 University of Chicago. However, she postponed going to go on an archaeology dig in Soviet Armenia. After this, she ended up in Silicon Valley, where she had her first exposure to Xerox PARC, and fell in love with it. After going to Chicago for a year, she dropped out and came back 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, an old classmate at MIT, who invited her to work with him on a new research project at Apple.  

 

Hoffman joined the Mac project in October of 1980, and Steve Jobs took over the project two months later. He selected her to do marketing for the project, even though it was something she had no prior experience in. Amongst her team, she became known as one of the only people that could stand up to Jobs. She defined the market that Mac was intended for when she pushed the Mac to both international and academic markets, and it sold quite well in both markets. She also wrote the first draft of the User Interface Guidelines for the Mac. Eventually, she also became their 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. 

Augmented Reality Coming Soon!

 

Project Artist: Kiana Honarmand

AR Image Source: Daz

Profile Image Source: Courtesy of Norman Seeff

 

TRIBUTE ARTIST:

Kiana Honarmand