Apple's cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had departed the company in 1985. This vacuum of entrepreneurial leadership created a tendency to promote low-level engineers up to management and allowed increasingly redundant groups of engineers to compete and co-lead by consensus, and to manifest their own bottom-up corporate culture. In 1988, Apple released System 6, a major release of the flagship Macintosh operating system, to a lackluster reception. The system's architectural limitations, set forth by the tight hardware constraints of its original 1984 release, now demanded increasingly ingenious workarounds for incremental gains such as MultiFinder's cooperative multitasking, while still lacking memory protection and virtual memory. Having committed these engineering triumphs which were often blunted within such a notoriously fragile operating system, a restless group of accomplished senior engineers were nicknamed the Gang of Five: Erich Ringewald, David Goldsmith, Bayles Holt, Gene Pope, and Gerard Schutten. The Gang gave an ultimatum that they should either be allowed to break from their disliked management and take the entrepreneurial and engineering risks needed to develop the next generation of the Macintosh operating system, or else leave the company.