Apple History At folklore.org

oaklybonn writes "Andy Hertzfeld seems to be the primary author on this fascinating site, which details many of his experiences in the Macintosh (Bicycle??) development efforts. It includes such choice commentary as: "we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.", on a page describing a game bundled with the original IBM PC." Reader themexican adds "As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

Mac Anniversary

So, what happened with the rumors of a special announcement on Monday in commemorate the Mac's anniversary?

Bicycle

What, no elaboration on why it was called the Bicycle? Fine, I'll enlighten you.

Apparently there was a story in Scientific American, or Popular Science, or some such magazine where the scientists were trying to determine what was the most efficient of animals in terms of locomotion. Which creature moved with the least amount of calories burned? Well, humans were waay down the list, pathetic in terms of other creatures. The top animal with the most efficient means of movement was an eagle or something. Then, one guy had this idea to measure how efficient a human being is on a bicycle. It was awesome, he was drastically more efficient, able to go further and without burning as many calories. It knocked the bird out of first place.

So, early on, Apple was planning on calling it the "Bicycle for the Mind." I don't know if it makes as much an impact if you don't know the story behind it.

I got this anecdote from one of the Apple behind-the-scenes books (I forget which), like Apple Confidential [amazon.com].

Re:Bicycle

You also have to understand the energy crisis culture at the time the fact that more scientific research went into bicycles in the previous ten years than probably all of thier history previous.

It was right about at that time that the number of bicycles in America once again outnumbered cars.

In 1980 in think there like 10,000 people in America who had ever heard of the Tour de France. In 1984 it was nearly as commonly known as the World Series.

Bicycle was actually a buzzword.

There is a species of albatros that lives entirely at sea for months at a time, generally soaring at little more than wave hight. It is so adapted to this enviroment and so efficeint in flight that it can sleep while so soaring.

Even though water is a dense medium animals that are adapted to it do not have to expend energy supporting their own weight. I've got the chart from MIT around here somewhere, but can't lay hands on it immediately, as I recall the dolphin and tuna and salmon topped the list for animal motion by its own power (a soaring bird may use little energy, but that's because it's not doing much of anything. Air and gravity are.) A Portugese Man-o-War simply floats with the tide, as a man in an innertube might. Torpor is very energy efficient.

So what animal is the most efficeint will change with your definition of "motion."

It is interesting to note, however, that not only is a man on a bicycle more energy efficient than a swimming dolphin, but he is more energy efficient than the same man riding a horse.

This is why the invention of the bicycle was such a stunning technological step that transformed society even before the advent of the motor car. The first smooth paved roads were made for the bicycle. The cars uspurped them.

KFG

Re:Bicycle

Still haven't been able to dig that one up. I've got some graphs here comparing human power output to that of a horse, but that's a horse of a different color.

On the other hand if you've done any riding of both it's surprising at first, but reflection bears it out.

If you try to sit on a horse like you do on a chair you'll get pounded to death. Your butt will turn to hamburger, your spine will get crunched (forensic examination of Custer's troops showed spinal degredation even among teenagers as I recall). You have to lift yourself up and down in stirrups in rythmn with the horse. Saves your butt and spine, but until you've done a fair amount of riding you'l come home with your legs aching. Riding a horse is a lot of work. This is why the genteel class prefered the surrey. Even if, for some reason, you choose to sit like a sack and take the pounding you'll burn a fair number of extra calories in the process. Riding a horse works all the muscles of the body, each burning calories, no matter how slightly.

On a bicycle you can simply sit; only the legs are really using extra calories; and fairly gentle pressure on the pedals will give you 8 mph or so on the level. Grandma can do this and keep it up all day. 12 mph is the speed a man with virtually depleted sugar stores can ride all day (although he won't enjoy it very much). An expert can ride at 15 mph until he falls asleep if he eats normally(the record average speed for crossing the US coast to coast is 15.3 mph, that average includes all downtime such as for sleeping. The clock started in California and stopped in Atlantic City NJ).

I have to note that all of this is highly speed dependant. For instance, it takes a world class athlete (horse or man) to hit 40 mph, but the jockey of a horse galloping at 40 mph is probably working at about the rate of a bicyclist going 20 mph; about .2 hp ( watch a horse race on the tube, the jockey ain't just sitting there), whereas it's obvious that a man on a bicycle going 40 mph is pushing the very limits of human capability. (I'll note though that American professional cyclist Jackie Simes III beat a trotter in a race at Saratoga Springs. I've ridden a bicycle race on the same track. Trust me, the horse was at the advantage here. I never, ever want to race a bicycle on a horse track again)

The bicycle is at the disadvantage going uphill or into the wind. On the other hand riding a bicycle downhill requires very little energy while riding a horse downhill requires more human energy.

None of it is very straight forward and thus the claim that a man on a horse uses more energy than a man on a bicycle is provisional based on the conditions.

As I recall the figure I have is for a horse at a trot of about 8 mph (which is why I chose that figure above) and a man bicycling at the same speed on the level in still air.

The man on the bicycle will be expending about .03 horsepower, barely more than walking to the fridge.

Yeah, in the mid 70s I was a bicycle researcher, which is why I have that chart, and why it is "somewhere," although I concentrated more on dynamics.

KFG

Re:Bicycle

Apple had a higher-ed program for equipping labs with Macs in the late 1980s and early 1990s called "Wheels for the MInd".

The Susan Kare-style logo at the top of the WotM letterhead was the same featured in the Folklore site. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Still cool, even if you don't.

Apple history

A model by model Apple history can be found here [apple-history.com].

Nostalgic

Just looked at that site, and saw the 1998 iMac [apple-history.com]. I shuddered when I saw those awful hockey puck mice that Apple chose to include with iMacs. Worst episode ever....

At my university, they replaced them pretty quick with *REAL* mice. (Yes, I risk of sounding like a troll... but you know what I mean if you've ever used one of those mice)

But the Macintosh Classic brought back some fond memories of elementary school. I remember sitting in computer class, and the teacher would say, now double click on clarisworks, and then she'd lecture for about 5 minutes then let us use the program.... because clarisworks took that long to load.

Folklore

"As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

Cool. This looks like a neat software setup for a website. I'll be interested in trying it out after it gets released.

Love Andy Hertzfeld

Met him at the West Coast Computer show in Vancouver demoing Thunderscan around '86 or so, and he had the exact same green shirt on that I was wearing.

The man is a Geek God. Turning a printer into a scanner? Sheer genius.

A little more history...

Andy Hertzfeld is one of the guys who helped design the original Mac, and also one of the people behind Eazel [slashdot.org], the GNOME UI polishing group. Eazel was the group that contributed Nautilus [gnome.org] file manager to GNOME. Strangely, Eazel's webpage [eazel.com] now displays jibberish...

Hertzfeldt?

For a moment, I confused Andy with Don Hertzfeldt.

I'm such a consumer whore.

Interpreted code and high volume traffic

"As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

Shows if you want to run a site written with an interpreted language and expect Slashdot level interest, you'd better be running it on one hell of a monster machine.

Sheesh!

Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

I think it boils down to the core concept that "users do not want to use a computer". From this leads designers to think of ways of alleviating redundancies and mundanity and in its place add comfort and features. The Mac UI really was a significant milestone for computers when it was first introduced. The GUI concept was a long time in coming and the Mac was so far ahead of the rest that it is only the lack of business acumen of the folks at Apple that hampered such a revolutionary product.

Even today the interface is still significantly different and better than the alternatives. The concept of only a single window frame with a single menu bar at the top of the screen is easy for new users to grok. The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... nono the button on the right... no, don't double click it, only click it once... no, press Control-Z to undo that... no, just stop touching the computer until I can come over, mom" a thing of the past. Who would have thought that a seemingly backwards step as the single mouse button would be such a revolutionary step forward for computing?

It's almost like Apple has sucked all the brainpower out of Silicon Valley and packed it all into their Macintosh line. I have never owned a Mac, but I have many friends who do and who constantly rave about how much they love it. And I believe deep down that the reason they love it so much is because fundamentally they hate computers, but their Mac behaves unlike any other computer out there. It does its job and gets out of the way, unlike other operating systems which force you to spend half your time fiddling with screen refresh rates and Config menus just to get down to your real business.

Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... nono the button on the right... no, don't double click it, only click it once... no, press Control-Z to undo that... no, just stop touching the computer until I can come over, mom" a thing of the past.

First of all, Apple invented the double click, which totally breaks the motif that Apple intended to create with the introduction of the mouse.

Secondly, by getting rid of the right mouse button, Apple introduced things such as "control click.. no, control, not option.. no, not alt.. control.. yeah" You will never convince me that control clicking, or click-and-hold (which doesn't even work outside of the finder) is an adequate replacement for a second mouse button.

Of course you can plug in a multibutton mouse into the mac and it works, this doesn't help people with laptops.

The lack of a right mouse button and a scrollwheel on mac laptops makes things very frustrating.. and we have to resort to installing things like SideTrack to do things with the touchpad that PC touchpads do by default.

In fact, Apple should just integrate SideTrack into the OS, or add a damn scrollwheel.

Don't forget other UI disasters Apple is responsible for like Home and End keys that never seem to do what you expect.

For example, in Safari, I expect that when I'm editing a text field, if I hit home, the cursor should move to the beginning of the field, not scroll to the top of the page. If I'm selecting emails in mail.app, hitting up and down selects the next and previous emails, but hitting home doesn't take me to the top of the email list, it scrolls the currently selected email.

Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

Don't forget other UI disasters Apple is responsible for like Home and End keys that never seem to do what you expect. For example, in Safari, I expect that when I'm editing a text field, if I hit home, the cursor should move to the beginning of the field, not scroll to the top of the page. If I'm selecting emails in mail.app, hitting up and down selects the next and previous emails, but hitting home doesn't take me to the top of the email list, it scrolls the currently selected email.

Use Command+Left to go to the beginning of a line or Command+Right to go to the end of a line. Alt+Left and Alt+Right skip words. It's not a bad system necessarily, just one you aren't used to.

Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design.

IMHO, there's more to that design decision that you think. The fact that the Mac's menu bar is placed at the top of the screen makes it a lot easier to point at with the mouse, because you simply cannot move the mouse pointer too far. This makes it far superior in terms of usability that Windows-style menus at the top of each window.

For more details, I recommend reading "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. UIs should be based on scientific usability studies, not developers' tastes - that's what Gnome and KDE suffer from.

Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

"Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design. It's a relic of single-tasking from the original Mac OS. The problem is that it's not just a single window frame. In the original Mac with single-tasking, the desktop was monopolized by a single app, even though that app might have multiple windows. But with multitasking, all the windows from different programs are on the desktop, yet there is no visual mapping from the menubar to its associated windows in the foreground program."

There is good reason for the way the Mac OS handles itself the way it does. While it would seem like a good idea to contain all parts of a program within a single window, there are several problems with this... many of which become very confusing to the end user.

• Too many menus!
• 
  As the user begins opening more and more applications, it takes longer for the user to find the correct menu among several windows. Going by the Human Interface Guidelines, a single menu on the screen reduces the time needed to locate the correct item. The menu also identifies the currently active application by displaying the application name/icon within itself.
  
  
• Where did my menu go?
• 
  By making the menu part of the window, the menu is forced to travel around the screen with the window, unless the window is maximized to full screen. By locking the menu into a single, isolated place on the screen, it causes the interface to become much more predictable for the user. Predictability equals efficiency.
  
  
• How do I create a new document after closing the last one, without having to relaunch the entire application?
• 
  With a menu stored entirely within a window, you can't... unless your application displays windows within other windows. Under the Human Interface Guidelines, this isn't an issue. The app continues running until the user decides to kill it himself. As applications get bigger over time, so does their load time. The time wasted per year by creating a new instance of an app each time the user mistaken closes the previous document when he meant to create a new document, could add up to hours or even days worth of time.

There are other issues, but these are the major ones that tend to cause the most trouble. This is not to say there aren't problems with the Mac OS in it's current form though. For whatever reason, Apple apparently did away with most of the Human Interface Guidelines somewhere between Mac OS 8 and Mac OS X. As a result, things are now much more complicated than they need to be. So, if there is a problem with something in Mac OS 9/Mac OS X, blame Apple... not the Human Interface Guidelines they should have been following.

Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest?

Interesting. I use KDE, which can either do a Mac style menu across the top or menus-in-apps. Here's an interesting point:

On my desktop, I use xinerama, either two or three monitors (I have gone as high as five in the past). I use menus-in-apps (aka Windows style). I load many many apps and have them spread out all over the place. I also tend to open new URLs in new windows.

On my laptop, I use a single 1024x768 monitor. I use menu-at-top (aka MacOS style). I load only a few apps, and have them all maximized (in general). I tend to use tabbed browsing significantly more.

In both I use Konsole (the KDE terminal app) in a uniform manner... lots of tabs, a primary shell, a root shell, and then several task shells. I use the second desktop in both as a place to kick windows that either are running "in the background" (conceptually, a la xmms) or interesting tangents that I ran across while working on a task (web pages found while googling for something else, half finished documents I was working on, etc).

I also used to be an emacs kinda guy, and now I use vi. I use Kate often as well (the file sidebar is very handy for making small changes to many files).

It's interesting, because the menubar difference is very natural, and I move back and forth with no difficulty. I can't recall the last time I hunted for the menu with a false start. For the single screen, MacOS style is the best, especially with a eraserhead mouse. For many screens, Windows style is better because I don't have to move across several monitors to hit a menu.

--
Evan

User testing

The difference is that Apple actually tested out their user-interface features on users, rather relying up some designer's theoretical notions. This led to crucial insights like, "it's much faster to access a menu bar that's always at the top of the screen, rather than one that's at the top of a window." Like many aspects of human engineering, this is the sort of thing that seems counter-intuitive, because at first thought it seems more logical to associate the menu with the thing that it affects.

iPods predicted in 1984?

I was watching CNN the other day and they were doing a small segment about the Mac anniversary and showed the 1984 commercial. It was the first time I noticed this, but the running girl seems to be wearing an iPod on her hip.

Re:iPods predicted in 1984?

The 1984 ad [apple.com]has been sorta re-released by Apple, with the iPod added in. Looks like a pretty good post-addition, doesn't look very obvious of an edit.

Well designed and easy to navigate..

When it's not /.'d...

*sigh*

Where do I go to pay for a subscription? (rhetorical)

I'll play devil's advocate

Okay I'll bite. Was Donkey.bas the greatest thing in the world? Heck no. But it isn't as bad as this article makes it out to be. Donkey was never meant to be a true game. It was friggin' demo. I remember running and thinking, okay that's nice. What else is there?

There was plenty. The PC when it was first introduced ran all the Infocom games at the time. It ran Wizardry and all the Epyx games. Sure it wasn't as homey as the Apple II my friend had, but all the business were buying it.

I'm opening myself up for -1 Trolls and Overrated, but the PC wasn't *that* bad. It's easy to take a swipe at Gates for something thrown together at the last minute. It's not like he was making Choplifter or anything. In the end, the PC's open architecture that led it to be the computer platform of choice. The C64, Amiga, Atari ST were all great gaming platforms but just couldn't keep up with the ever upgrading of the PC. The roots of today's Half-Life 2, Doom 3's and Counter-Strikes all have roots with that first PC so long ago.

Re:I'll play devil's advocate

Actually the PC was not "open" at all, IBM was not too happy when the clones started appearing.

It was copied, that is for sure, but it was far from "open." A plagiarized design doesn't make it "open" in the same fashion that a blown up safe lock box is also an "open" box.

And most of the games you mention have more in common with the machines you dissed than the actual original PC. I.e. most of the Doom engine was actually developed in NextStep, a lot of the 3DS software that game designers adopted in the 90s come from an Atari ST design program, most of the multi channel audio we know assume as standard was inspired by the Amiga (.mod's were the .mp3's of the 80s! :)), and on and on.... the PC ended up becoming more like the mac, the amiga, and the ST, not the other way around... to the point where current PCs have far more in common with those platforms in "spirit" than the original PC.

Oh, that's why it's so slow....

I started surfing folklore.org earlier this evening and I was nearly finished reading everything when...

Slashdot hit.

I had an idea, so checked here withi 20 minutes, and sure enough, it was the banner story. Shit. I was almost done reading the whole story of Macintosh as interpreted by Andy H.

Offtopic: python

that the python code running the

Site is terribly slow, it is running python all right.

Mirror?

Anyone got a mirror?

Inside the Apple Studio with... Andy Hertzfeld

An interview with Andy Hertzfeld [crazyapplerumors.com]

For those interested in Apple history...

Here are several other great Apple history resources.

Sites:

• www.apple-history.com [apple-history.com] is one of the best Internet sources, with information on every computer Apple ever produced
• apple.computerhistory.org [computerhistory.org] has year-by-year info on Apple with some cool, hard-to-find pictures

Books:

• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs [amazon.com] by Alan Deutschman
• Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company [amazon.com] by Owen W. Linzmayer
• Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything [amazon.com] by Steven Levy

Other:

• Pirates of Silicon Valley [amazon.com] is a largely inaccurate but quite enjoyable movie about Apple's beginnings =)

Liked DONKEY.BAS?

If you liked DONKEY.BAS [archive.org], try the all new Donkey .NET [microsoft.com]!

Speaking of Apple History...

They are responsible for what I am sure must have been the longest line-up in history [mac.com]!

Mac information

http://everymac.com/ [everymac.com] has some good Macintosh information, specs, and history.

So What Ever Happened To Burrell Smith?

Anybody have any idea what happened to this wizard of the Macintosh?

Site software

"As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

Great. Maybe Slashdot could consider using it...

Apple History

1984 - Apple is Dying

1988 - Apple is Dying

1992 - Apple is Dying

1996 - Apple is Dying

2000 - Apple is Dying

2004 - Err, Ipod might save 'em

well-designed website?!?

"As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."

I don't know about well-designed and easy to navigate, this page is taking forever to render for me!

Donkey wasn't supposed to be PLAYED

Article is /.'ed, so I assume the game is Donkey. It was merely a technology and programming demo, it was obviously not intended to be played as a game. It was the first non-trivial program I ever saw - IIRC, a couple thousand lines of interpreted BASIC. I learned how to write simple graphics programs by studying the source. (320x200, 4 color CGA left a lot to the imagination)

Almost everyone my age learned to code the Apple II, but I had the original 8088 PC and had to make do with what I had. Took me all summer of cutting grass to save $300 to buy that friggin' CGA card.

farkdotcom

I remember playing this game when I was about 7, on my grandma's brand-new 286. I thought the object of the game was to hit the donkeys...

Moore's Law and the Mac

Serendipity... Just yesterday I came across folklore.org via John Gruber [daringfireball.net] by way of Rainer Brockerhoff [brockerhoff.net] who added this observation of Chris Hanson [livejournal.com]: in 20 years, from the Macintosh 128 to the dual G5, the specs increased thus:

CPU frequency: 512-fold

RAM: 4096-fold
Removable storage: 1792-fold
VRAM: 3066-fold
Network speed: 4551-fold
Mouse buttons: 1-fold
Price: 1.015-fold

i.e., they kept the price point.

As it happens, while advising a friend on how much memory to buy in 2004, I had just looked at how Apple's nominal RAM stacks up against Moore's Law. Pretty much confirmed, if you ask me:

1976: $ 666, 8 kB (

Apple I [wikipedia.org])
1980: $1200, 32 kB (Apple II+ [apple2history.org])
1984: $2500, 128 kB (Macintosh [everymac.com])
1987: $2000, 512 kB (Macintosh 512k [everymac.com])
1990: $1500, 2 MB (Macintosh Classic [everymac.com])
1993: $1440, 8 MB (Macintosh Quadra [everymac.com])
1998: $1300, 32 MB (iMac G3 [everymac.com])
2001: $1500, 128 MB (iBook G3 [everymac.com])
2004: ?

Slow like Python

As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future

What a great site. An important historical record. Perhaps the Python would explain why the site is so slow. Python is a scourge.

The real bicycle chart

The chart in question showed energy consumed per unit distance traveled. At bottom a cluster of various creatures and vehicles including man, with birds at the top. A big gap then half way up was a human on bicycle. Another big gap and then at the top, jet passenger aircraft. In Scientific American a long time ago. It was a sidebar and might be hard to search for.

Shoelaces

we were amazed

I think it's fairly certain Konzen wrote that program. From an engineering standpoint, Gates has never been able to tie his shoelaces.

But denigrating the IBM machine because it wasn't the Mac is missing the point: backward compatibility. IBM spent a lot of $$$ and effort getting CP/M ISVs to make the leap. To quote Steve Jobs: 'When developers no longer write applications for your computer, that's when it really starts to fall apart.'

Re:MS co-founder?

Well, the site is /.'d, but is he talking about Bill Gates?

I can get to it, it took a little bit to load but I got it now. At least the article that talks about the game.

The game they are talking about is Donkey.
(Somehow I doubt that's related to Donkey Kong.)

It says the authors were Bill Gates and Neil Konzen, it was written in BASIC, poorly animated, and called Donkey because at certain points in the game a "donkey" appeared in the middle of the road and you would then have to quickly hit the space bar, or the game would end. (I'm guessing the space bar was for stopping?)

That article also mentions that MSDOS was a clone of an earlier version of CP/M.

Re:... and its Slashdotted already

the power of python!

Re:Cheapest Mac

go to lowendmac.com and look into getting a blue and white G3. it can be upgraded if you like, but it it'll run OSX and Darwin...

Re:MS co-founder?

LOL! Nice try at Troll dom. Actually it was Allen who wrote most of the code, and it was not DOS but BASIC. One is an operating system, the other one is a language. Actually Bill Gates did not graduate from Hardvar, and it got there due to family conections not sheer brilliantness (scion). Oh, and he claims he dropped out, officially he got in trouble with the administration because the machine him and Allen used to develope the basic code, a PDP, did not belong to them.. but rather the school. They actually moved the computer that was not their property to their dorm room, they used university property to develop a commercial language. Actually BASIC was not even their own invention, so they basically made a port of the language.

DOS was not an MS product, they bought the code from a Seattle based company. As far as I know MS were in the compiler business before 1981, and I doubt Gates wrote a single line of DOS code, he definitively was not in any shape way or form the main architect/coder of DOS. And if you even had any remote idea about what you are saying, you'd know that the DOS that gates and CO. bought was a quick and dirty copy of CP/M-86.

Gates may be a good marketer and commercial thug, he is by no means a decent coder. And BTW next time try harder, pulling a never existing article from Byte out of your arse is just too boring.

Uh, check the history books

I'm soooooo tired of people claiming Gates (or MS for that matter) created BASIC. The language [byte.com] and compiler were invented in Dartmouth while nine-year old Bill Gates was hundreds of miles away in his nice cushy private school in WA. Hell, even the original C reference pre-dates the formation of MS.

As was mentioned by another poster, MS is a marketing marvel, but this myth about it's founders being technnical geniuses has just got to go. It scares the kids...

Very early MS history.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a ROM BASIC they sold to Altair/MITS, an S-100 CP/M computer with real neat switches and lights. Ironically it was written on a PDP-11 running what would ultimatly become SCO UNIX. The Altair was a neat machine, but no it didn't run Linux and no you wouldn't like to see a Beowolf cluster of them.

Microsft DOS came from Seattle Computer Products QDOS; MS licensed QDOS-86, told IBM they had an exclusive (a lie) and the rest was history.

QDOS was a bad clone of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, which was sold to Novell which was sold to Caldera, now SCO. Gary originally worked at Shugart and, lucky devil that he was, ended up with a very expensive 8" floppy drive. He decided to write a disk loader for it, hence "Disk Operating System" or "DOS". The rest of us loaded software from casette tapes using the BIOS; disk drives were very evry expensive.

Back in the day, Digital Reaserch sold Operating Systems and Microsoft sold languages. When DR decided to sell a langauge around '83 the rumor was MS retaliated by selling an OS. The motivation may be a myth, but it was a popular one back then.

Gates pubilshed some undocumented Z-80 instructions in, I think, Dr. Dobbs. It was the last usefull thing he ever did.

Re:Cheapest Mac

I'm looking to get the cheapest Mac that runs Darwin.

There is a difference between the cheapest Mac that runs OS X, and that runs Darwin. Darwin (the core) will run on a lot older hardware than OS X itself. For instance, you can run Darwin on the PowerMac 8NNN series, but dont try to take a retail OS X and install.

Have a lookt at Low End Mac [lowendmac.com] and Accelerate your Mac [xlr8yourmac.com]. Perhaps they can give you some kind of hint. Now finally, i'd just like to point out that if you indeed want to run OS X, keep in mind that the "minimum requirements", like 128MB ram, is NOT sufficient imho. My G5 even choked on 512MB :)