Marinaccio: Let's start with when you worked for Apple, and what you did there.
Cunningham: I worked for Regis McKenna, which was the company that handled Apple's publicity. I started there in July of 1983.
Marinaccio: Had you worked with Apple before the Mac intro?
Cunningham: No. It was my first project. I left in August of 1985, and started Cunningham Communication. So I was with McKenna just over two years.
Marinaccio: What was high tech marketing like in 1983 and 1984? Were there other companies that had done what Apple did with the Macintosh?
Cunningham: Well, I think that Regis McKenna is pretty much The Man: he is credited with inventing the whole high-tech marketing thing. There were a number of companies that did stuff prior to the Macintosh, and even Apple did some things prior to 1983: the launch of the Lisa computer was very similar, it just wasn't as successful of a product because it was too expensive for the market, and there were a lot of other issues.
Basically what Regis believed was that you could orchestrate the coverage of a new technology product. You did that by enabling journalists to see the stuff you were creating while it was being developed, and you put them under NDA. That was a practice that Regis had started before I got there. He did it with Intel, and had done it certainly with Apple before. I'm sure there were other companies, but I didn't have much involvement with them.