John Couch

One of the primary software architecture designers of the HP AMIGO/300 software environment — a precursor to the Xerox Alto and the Macintosh — Couch also served as Apple's first Vice President of Software and Vice President/General Manager for the Lisa division, Apple's first GUI computer.

He began his professional career in 1972 as a software engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where he held various software management positions. In 1978 he joined Apple as Director of New Products reporting to Steve Jobs. Couch has also served as VP of Education at Apple.

In an interview with Andrew Harrison, he revealed that he was recruited personally by Steve Jobs and took a pay cut by half because Steve's vision was that Apple should be full of people who believed in what they were trying to achieve, not people who saw it as a way of making a fast buck. Ironically, many people have been made rich by Apple, mainly because they stuck to that vision: "To create tools for the mind that advance mankind." He is quoted as saying, "This reminds all of us that success comes when we focus on what we are trying to achieve, in our case, better learning outcomes, not just the introduction of technology for technology's sake." Couch said Jobs described computers to him as a "bicycle for the mind," exercising and opening up opportunities that people could never before perceive.

He retired from Apple once, but Jobs brought him back when he too returned to renew his education vision. Apple's global education sales stood at a staggering $9 billion. Couch views Jobs's legacy alongside the greats of American society such as Rockefeller, Edison, and Carnegie as people who changed things, and in education he believes history has been made in the shape of the iPad, iBooks Author, and iTunes U.

He has been very clear, however, that this is not just about the technology; it is the combination of technology, content, and pedagogy — a combination that completely changed how we view education, where children learn through devices in new and inspiring ways. One great example he cited was a school showing slowed-down images of a basketball trajectory to teach physics, or a larger-scale study that challenged children only to answer questions that had not been answered, given that all the ones that had been were just a search away. "iPads, iTunes, and iBooks Author provide the tools for teaching but how we use them is perhaps the greatest significance."

Per Chuck House, Couch did the HP Amigo software and then led Apple's software efforts on the early Apple III and Lisa, heading up Apple Education until Jobs died. Directly prior to his position at Apple, he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DoubleTwist Inc., a leading provider of genomic information and bioinformatics analysis technologies, which made headlines as the first company to provide a comprehensive annotation of the human genome. The year before joining DoubleTwist, Couch served as Executive in Residence for Mayfield Fund, where he provided strategic planning, management, and technology advice to high technology companies.

In 1985, he turned his focus to education at the Santa Fe Christian School, where he initiated a program that turned this debt-laden private school into one of the first examples of how the creative use of technology can revolutionize learning in the classroom. Under his leadership as Chairman of the Board of Santa Fe Christian School, the school's annual losses were annulled as the student body grew from 150 to 1,000, while the school's modest facilities were expanded to a new 17-acre site offering a range of world-class resources, including a fiber optic network of Macintosh computers.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was honored in 2000 as a Distinguished Alumnus. Couch is also the author of the Science Research Associates textbook, "Compiler Construction: Theory and Practice." He has taught at both the University of California, Berkeley and at Cal State San Jose.