Macintosh's 1984 Debut 613
Stephen E. Jobs writes "SiliconValley.com is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Mac by republishing some of its coverage of the machine's 1984 launch. 'After two years of secrecy, brainstorming and sometimes zany company maneuvering, Apple Computer Inc. will unveil a new personal computer Jan. 24 that is the size of a stack of paper and, for about the same price, contains more power than the basic IBM PC.' That's how one writer described the Apple Macintosh in 1984. There's more at SiliconValley.com."
A stack of paper? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A stack of paper? (Score:5, Informative)
It was a neat little package, but the Apple II platform's best days were behind it by then, and most people have probably never seen a
Re:A stack of paper? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Help Me Decide! (Score:5, Insightful)
What I found really strange was that I didn't expect it to happen to me. All of the Mac nuts I know (with a small handfull of exceptions) all just got a wild hair up their ass and oneday just went and bought a Mac. That's the first step and it seems like all of them suddenly began to hold all other platforms in deep contempt.
Then comes the inevitable collecting of old Apples, Macs, and Next computers. Before you know it you have a room in your house dedicated to a bunch of old computers you didn't even care about 6 months before. You're watching keynote speeches you didn't care about 6 months before.
BSD and Linux would be I think more relevant so maybe you want to be one of those guys. With those you've got cool operating systems and there's nothing wrong with that. With Macs though you've got old hardware AND old software that's unique to your new hobby. You've also got all kinds of collectible junk to spend cash on.
I'd go Mac but then I'm biased
Exchange rate (Score:3, Informative)
For reference, it is ~105 Yen. This means in 1984 Japanese products would cost half in US dollar terms tham they do now. [Yeah simplistic, but this is the numerical terms]. Kinda puts pleas by the present administration about the exchange rate into perspective.
Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Why throw out rare, antique, collector item computers to the bin? A twentysomething twitty fool of a girl at my mother's workplace threw out some early model Acorn Archimedes in the bin without asking anyone. This is how these old computers become rare in the first place.
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:3, Funny)
maybe because they're worthless and nobody wants them?
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
I can easily get lithographics of a Renoir for a few bucks, but an original will cost big bucks.
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO the big advance on the Mac at the time was having a high-quality (for the time) bit-mapped display on a consumer priced PC - even then it seemed an amazing waste of memory
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
We're finally tossing the last of our original Macs. Some are Mac Plus, or a little newer, but it's remarkable how much use one could get out of those things.
A friend of mine last night said he was finally retiring his Mac LC. The hard drive had died, and figured it was time to let it go. I'm not a huge Mac fan, but I have to admit the longevity of these Macs is impressive.
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm willing to concede that Apple and Steve have plenty of faults. Unfortunately, the alternatives have far worse ones.
I'd rather be around a bunch of fanatics than The Resigned.
D
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like Bank Of America talking!
Their branches here in the NW have been running SE's as terminals since the SE was introduced, and I still see them sat on manager desks and in reception areas.
If I was responsible for deciding what hardware replaces those machines I'd be hard pressed to switch to a different manufacturer after using the same Apple hardware for such a long time.
Re:Durability of the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
Put them on ebay. People still want those things. They are still great for MIDI sequencing, and you can turn them into a Macquarium if you want...
http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/macquarium.sht
My Dad still uses his Mac Plus! (Score:5, Interesting)
The machine has an 8MHz 68000, 1MB RAM, a 20MB hard drive (external under-mac that I spent three years convincing him to use), and an ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer that screams to high-heaven, but prints beautiful three-part forms.
I don't think the machine has ever been opened for even a cleaning. They don't build 'em like they used to.
Re:Market Share (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple has certainly not kept their solution proprietary--they have acceded to "market demands". Any tower Mac has AGP, PCI, USB, ATA... all technologies which were created on the PC side of the fence. Rather than battle with proprietary designs (even Firewire, Apple-innovated, has been accepted as the de facto new A/V transmission standard, cross-platform), Apple has certainly chosen more compatibility, not less. Furthermore, every Mac since System 7.1 Pro has had the ability to read and write PC media. And now, OS X is, with its core: BSD!
This is a long ways from the time when PC and Mac hardware/software was absolutely separate, with completely different interfaces on each platform. When it comes to compatibility, Macs are a far cry from a "proprietary" design, relative to what it once was, these days.
I remember all of this (Score:5, Funny)
"This is the end of apple. They're dead"
heh. Apple. Going out of business since 1977
Re:I remember all of this (Score:5, Interesting)
Some things don't change
Re:I remember all of this (Score:5, Funny)
For more info, you might try to dig up a copy of the article (well, ok, the Mercury is not one of your major national newspapers, but I am too lazy to and most would not appreciate my entering the text of the article).
For just a second, I was like, how rude not to post a link!
Re:I remember all of this (Score:4, Interesting)
i love all the rampant speculation and comparison between the McIntosh (sic) and the PCjr, and the 1984 ad compared to the "tramp" chaplin ads from IBM.
1. When will UNIX (XENIX, UniPlus, UNITY, or (dare I hope?) 4.2BSD)
be available for the Mac?
2. Which hapless software house gets to do the port?
actually, it was less than ten years before apple brought out a BSD-based unix for the 68k mac in the form of A/UX, but it was killed in '94 and never made it to powerpcs
Classcal (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Le roi est mort, vive le roi! (Score:3, Funny)
Morons! May the metamoderators get you!
Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
But remember that when Microsoft came up with Windows, it was actually a very innovative thing too - a Mac-like interface for you DOS machines! And while MS was improving Windows (added multitasking, threading, nicer GUI), Apple was stagnating - little new was being introduced in their MacOS, Jobs quit.
These days Apple is innovating (OS X, iTunes, iPod, etc), and MS is stagnating.
Give it another few years, and the tables will turn again....
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Informative)
Of course Windows 1.0 was not the first attempt to do this. Don't forget such wonders as IBM's TopView [langreiter.com], Quarterdeck's Desq [fortunecity.com], Digital Research's GEM [geocities.com] and a number of others. For a while in the early/mid 1980's there was a swirl of innovation and copying (not to mention a lawsuit [wikipedia.org] or two) as people tried to bring the Xerox-invented GUI to desktop computers.
Mod parent down- He doesn't know (Score:3, Informative)
1. Jobs did not quit- he was voted out of his own company, many saying he was too hard on his employees until 1997 when he returned to Apple as CEO
2. It is doubtful the tables will turn to Apple again. Ever heard of Linux?
3. Apple made lots of mistakes early on. They did not almost go out of business because Microsoft had a superior product.
Check out this article [historyhouse.com] for further information.
Re:Mod parent down- He doesn't know (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of people (not just you) seem to be doing a bit of history revision here - the original battle in 1984 was not between Apple and MS, it was between Apple and IBM. Read the article if you don't believe it, but I also recall this clearly and it was even the subject of Apple's famous 1984 SuperBowl ad ("Big Brother" was represented by IBM, not Microsoft).
In 1984, IBM still had a stranglehold on the corporate market. This was, in all honesty, the market the Mac was originally intended for. It was designed as an easier computer for non-technical company drones to use - rather than spending weeks training on how to use an IBM PC, they just sit down and start clicking around with their mouse. The Apple II line was expected (initially) to continue as Apple's home machine. Design work (which would become Apple's main niche later on) was not even a consideration back then - no desktop computer was powerful enough to handle it. There was no "Think Different" campaign back then - the idea of the Mac was not to enable creativity, it was about letting accountants work with spreadsheets more easily.
In the end, Apple never did gain the corporate foothold that they wanted, and both Apple and IBM were eventually overwhelmed in the desktop market by MS. Apple didn't see this coming at all when they released the Mac, and neither, obviously, did IBM. MS turned PC's into commodities - it didn't matter anymore whether you had an IBM PC or a clone, because the clones would run IBM-compatible operating systems just as well. (Don't forget that IBM had their own competing OS - PC DOS - that MS-DOS was a clone of, and this was what was generally installed on clone machines.)
Both Apple and IBM continuously lost market share through the 1980s and 1990s to cheaper IBM-compatible clone machines running MS software. Apple quickly discontinued the Apple II line and put all their egges in one basket with the Mac (Jobs considered the Apple II to be largely Steve Wozniak's machine, and I still believe the discontinuation of the line was partly a personal decision - at that point in time the Apple II line was actually more powerful and more expandable than the Mac, with more software and hardware add-ons available). If they had not hit on the strategy of pitching Macs for creative work (which didn't happen until at least the late 80's or early 90's), there is no question Apple would have been out of business. They had no other market, and had failed in all of their efforts at retaining market share both at home and in the workplace (not to mention schools, for that matter). The major slide started, btw, when Jobs was still leading the company. I always smirk when I read Mac fans acting as if Jobs is the savior of Apple; in fact, he pretty well drove the company into the ground with his early strategies, but to his credit he seems to have learned a lot over the years about how to run a company.
Anyway, so the initial enemy was IBM, who were thought of back then in much the same way many people think of MS now. It's one of the biggest ironies in the history of the computing industry that at this moment, the only major internal part that separates Apple architecture from (IBM-compatible) PC architecture is a CPU that's co-produced and designed by IBM.
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
How was it innovative when Digital's GEM did the same thing before Windows even existed?
Seems Microsoft can just say "innovate" enough times and people start to believe it.
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see...
Media Center PC -- What's that? I've yet to see anyone who has one.
Tablet PC -- A fantastic step backwards in design. If you're already lugging two pounds and something the size of a notebook around, why not just use a notebook PC? It does everything a tablet PC does and more, and has a much easier input interface.
Pocket PC -- Oh, huge innovation there. Apple beat them. Palm beat them. Handspring beat them. That's just another ripoff.
XBox -- Everyone's got a PS2. Sorry. Putting a P3-700 in a box with a harddrive and a TV-out running a stripped down windows kernel and DirectX doesn't count as "innovation". That's called "building a computer that plugs into the TV". And Sony's done it better.
Media Player 9 -- The player sucks. Sure, there are some good new codecs, but the best interface they ever had was in 6.4. Ever since spacebar-to-pause-and-play was removed, they've gone downhill. Whoever thought that was a good idea seriously needs a smack with the cluestick.
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Interesting)
If you think that's what an Xbox is, you haven't used one. While true it is based on PC components, the Xbox is a console. You put a game DVD in and it just works... It is far from a "PC with TV-Out".
As for Sony doing it better, if you really se
Re:Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
I also believe Tablet PC makers have been saying that the sales are not agreeing with the hype.
The problem seems to be that they are trying to sell them as notebook replacements instead of a computer that's a tablet. They're too thick, too heavy, don't have enough battery power, or are overpriced.
I'd like a Tablet PC to
Re:Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Progress? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Progress? (Score:4, Funny)
Macintosh - An Opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember seeing the first Mac in school around 1990, it was bought in 1985 with the UK introduction and people asked where it all sat, what did it do etc...
http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=tam&
A great page for somemore Apple history, especially technical details and those legendary Code Names!
1984 Commercial (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1984 Commercial (Score:3, Funny)
Or am I just drinking too much?
Alex
Re:1984 Commercial (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1984 Commercial (Score:5, Informative)
Mac Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mac Opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Comparitavely, Macs are (or at least were) rarely used in scientific research (like I said, this is changing--I know of a few labs now that use G5s and the like as a replacement for more expe
Stephen E. Jobs writes... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stephen E. Jobs writes... (Score:3, Informative)
Mac's Popularity (Score:4, Interesting)
1) why hasn't the Mac done better?
2) why hasn't the Mac died?
I know the standard answer to why Mac is still around is "Small but loyal group of devotees", but I have trouble with that idea.
If it is good enough to inspire fanatical loyalty in some, why hasn't it been good enough to win over the rest of the world? And, having failed in winning over the world, how can apple still afford to be in the business?
Dunno. I always did like Macs, myself. Always met my needs.
Re:Mac's Popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, some people see it and don't care, and some people see it but can't afford to go buy one (expense argument aside, entry level mac
Re:Mac's Popularity (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm going to a network party, and I show up with a Mac, I'm going to be left out unless we're playing Unreal or something.
Are you trolling, or do you not know much about macs? How about:
C&C Generals
Quake III
Starcraft
Diablo II
Halo
SimCity
Age of Empires II
Civilization III
Age Of Mythology
Alien Vs. Predator II
Baldur's Gate II
Harry Potter Games
Max Payne
Medal Of Honor games
Neverwinter Nights
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
Return To Castle Wolfenstein
Jedi Knight II
Tony Hawk Games
Warcraft III
Lineage
Everquest
True, PCs get more games, and sometimes the Mac releases come later, but quite a lot of the games I buy ship with Mac and PC versions on the same disk.
Why the Mac did not do better (Score:4, Interesting)
If Apple had made the Mac expandable using some kind of external bus (something the Apple II and Commodore 64 and CP/M systems and PCs all did), there would have been a supply of external disks that would have allowed it to compete with the PC.
If they had made a business version that had a larger case which could be opened and expanded with more memory, they might have cornered the market.
If they had licensed the hardware and software to other manufacturers, they would have been able to compete with the price drops that kept the (IBM) PC the most popular choice.
As it was, IBM clones were simply cheaper, more expandable, more widely available, and eventually, more capable.
Apple captured a small number of markets with its graphic capability and has basically been serving the same markets ever since.
Re:Mac's Popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
> Ever looked at the price of a mac?
Have you?
G4 eMac with 17" monitor: $799
G4 iBook: $1099
And you can even buy the fastest personal computer in the world for $2999.
For what you get, Macs are not expensive.
Re:Mac's Popularity (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahh, so you did not buy a IBM PC for more at that time? Yeah, that pricing sure kept those out of the business/office world.
POINT AND CLICK???? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember being completely skeptical of that new "point and click with a mouse" thing, in the macintosh. It looked like a cool idea, but in my keyboard-oriented mind, I just couldn't imagine how, lord, HOW you could tell the computer what to do by entirely relying on clicks on graphics. Steve Jobs was a great envisioner (or xerox copycat, depending of your point of view).
Re:POINT AND CLICK???? (Score:4, Informative)
Forshadowing of Apple's 20 year problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This statement really tells a lot about the problems that Apple had throughout the mid 80's to late 90's. They were so innovative, that they often fell "off of the curve". In 1984, Joe Consumer wasn't about to spend $2500 on a computer; an appliance that was, at the time, a luxery, and not a necessity. And certainly, it had no where near the ubiquitiy that it enjoys today. Microsoft knew that the timing for a "computer for the masses" was around the mid 90's, ten years after the Mac debuted. So they *ahem* borrow the Mac's look and feel, and release Win 95. IIRC, '95 was around the time that Apple decided that the next revolution in computing was in handhelds and palmtops that could respond to a user "writing" rather than keying in data. The Newton exploded onto the market, and promptly gathered dust on the shelves as users passed it by. A scant four years later, 3Com capitalizes on Apple's brilliant but horribly timed innovation with the Palm series.
It looks like after 20 years, Apple is finally getting it right. The IMac was the first "sexy" computer. Only a year later, I see that I can buy neon ground effects for my transparent PC. ITunes was released at exactly the perfect time. And should be, and rightly so, a cornerstone of Apple's brand identity for the first decade of the 21'st century. So, Happy Birthday to the Mac, and congrats to the great engineers at Apple that have finally learned that innovation and market timing are inseperable.
Re:Forshadowing of Apple's 20 year problem (Score:3, Insightful)
It's pretty clear to me that corporate gr
Well, it took 20 years... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, back in the day, I had an Apple IIgs, and used Apple II computers at school - but when I got out on my own, I built a PC (for games of course).
Now that my gaming has been replaced by other things, I find that my last objection to going to Mac is moot. Of course, this is even more moot (can that happen?), because there is a fine selection of games available for the Mac.
I still would like to see GTA for the mac, as that is one you can play for 10 min, or ten days...
My last PC will be my last.
I look forward to see what else Apple will improve - I still think that I should never have to wait for anything on a computer, that I should be able to comunicate with it in plain language, and that it remains a tool for me, rather than a 'content delivery and licensing kiosk' like many of our Windows friends are ending up with.
Shut up, you had me at hello. *tear*
heh.
Re:Well, it took 20 years... (Score:3, Interesting)
Haven't looked back since. N
Re:Well, it took 20 years... (Score:4, Informative)
Windows: Product activation. Uninstallable browser and email client. File associations stolen. Kludgy interface, that doesn't follow it's own rules. Crappy audio management. (I have a rather specialized sound card and breakout box. The driver is great, the 'Control Panel' handling of it is not.)
I won't count Trusted Computing and DRM as there isn't really an implementation of it currently (ignoring WMP), but why wait for it to come?
No way to efficiently back up, standards that have been 'extended', and refusal to work with other OSes.
With the Mac, I don't have to worry about any of that. OS X is rather seamless and easy to use. The install takes no time at all, you don't have to activate it, and most everything is out in the open - let's not forget that it keeps getting faster every time I update!.
Yes, there are mistakes, such as the 'improved' network browser, and the now crippled iTunes that doesn't let me listen to my music at work. The Mac doesn't like legacy hardware much (but then again, neither do I) and there are other issues (say with laptop build quality, and initial price) that make a Mac less attractive. It is closed source (based on open source) and built by one company (don't die, Apple!), so that may be a concern - however, the benefits to having a singular vision of how the OS works and how the GUI looks far outweigh the negatives for me.
Linux intrigues me, but I have yet to find it simple enough for me to choose to use. I don't want to have to deal with the issues that my Linux-running friends have. I want to sit down and DO.
On a side note, I think that OpenBeOS will make a solid competitor to Linux 'on the desktop' - I really think it's all about consistency in the GUI. Gnome seems to be on the right track, but there are still too many things for the average person to configure. I know I might come off as a Mac/BeOS zealot, but I don't think I am. I am a realist when it comes to my computing experience - I can configure Apache, but I really don't want to. I don't want to spend my time getting things to work, I want them to work, now. I see the value in Macs being the ease of use, yet no lack of command line power *if you want it*, the consistency of the GUI, the apps that run on it, and the workflow that it fosters.
I see the potential in OpenBeOS as a consistent GUI coupled with an emphasis on the user - add open source to that, and I think we have a winner.
Whew. Long rambly post. Hope I answered your one line question. :)
Remake of the classic "1984" ad (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/1984/
There's just one subtle difference...
Re:Remake of the classic "1984" ad (Score:5, Informative)
The obvious one is of course the woman is wearing an iPod.
The second is that the date on the "big screen" is changed. The date is in the lower left portion of the talking head screen, and in the original commercial, it read "1-24-84" in now reads "1-24-04"
What is this Microsoft you speak of? (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, the REAL story. (Score:4, Insightful)
According to several sources, Microsoft has been working on Mac software for more than a year. Early on, Mac project leader Steve Jobs took the Mac plans to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, sources said. Gates reportedly agreed not to produce similar mouse-based software for a year, but with Mac behind schedule, Microsoft was able to jump into the market in 1983 with its own mouse programs for the IBM PC.
I wondered if I would ever find out exactly how Microsoft was ever able to take the Mac GUI, complete with Mac icons. There have been many conflicting stories over the years. Since this is from 1984, I tend to think we might have finally found something accurate.
How Microsoft got away with "copying" Mac UI (Score:5, Interesting)
I wondered if I would ever find out exactly how Microsoft was ever able to take the Mac GUI, complete with Mac icons.
Windows 1.x was a toy which I'm guessing Apple just ignored. Windows 2.x was licensed. Windows 3.x was found to have been covered by the Windows 2.x agreement. Windows 4.x (Windows 95 and Windows NT 4) was first published after Lotus v. Borland, which held that UI is a process, not a copyrightable expression. None of them copied anything from the Mac pixel-for-pixel.
My Last PC... (Score:3, Interesting)
I really don't mind using Windows XP; it's stable enough for me -- but I'm looking towards the future...
I think Longhorn is really going to be a prison for it's users.
Don't get me wrong, I think light-use-DRM is fair (e.g. iTunes Music Store) but Microsoft is just plain evil. They want to control your BIOS, your computer and your life.
Hell, after 2006 when this Trusted Computing platform comes out, don't be surprised to see that you can't install Linux or any other UNIX variant on your machine because the BIOS won't let you. That box won't be yours, it'll be Microsoft's. Ever wondered why that little icon on your desktop was called My Computer? Maybe you should read the EULA better!
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Apple had double digit marketshare by 2010.
Hah - Macs will have DRM too! (Score:4, Insightful)
I honestly wouldn't surprised if Apple hardware had the same DRM as PC hardware by 2010. They've already nailed their users with the iTunes DRM, and I can see no reason why they won't continue down that road.
If nothing else, companies like Adobe, who are getting positively [slashdot.org] nuts [slashdot.org] about fighting "pirates" will force them into it.
An Amazing Read (Score:5, Interesting)
Seeing the introduction of some things from the past can be facinating in how much our world has changed. But in this case, it's especially interesting in how FAST it's changed. I'm sitting here typing on a laptop that is a year or two old. That said my laptop (for about that price, ignoring inflation) has a hard drive that's half a million times larger than the machine's RAM, has more power than a building full of old Macs running together weighs 1/3 (or less) what that mac did, can do TONS of other things that the Mac could never dream of, and my laptop is OLD AND OUT OF DATE. Of course, I owe a HUGE amount of this stuff to that little Mac (which I have 4 of im my basement ;). Go Apple!
Stack of Paper (Score:3, Informative)
Peace!
other magazines (Score:4, Interesting)
Dupe! (Score:3, Funny)
I Switched... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, we shot a low budget indie short film two years ago. After shooting, we went to my PC and tried to edit it. We ended up giving up due to frustration. A year later, I bought an eMac and edited with no problem using iMovie and then distrubuted it w/ iDVD.
I've been recording music in my home studio for quite a while now, and while I had an ok setup with my PC, it got sooo much easier when I got the Mac. Especially now, with Garage Band, I've been able to scratch out songs with half of the effort I had to put into my Windows box.
Keep in mind that I'm a network engineer, and I maintain over 500 Windows servers - so I'm not really biased. For the enterprise, Windows is your choice (for now), but for the home user, I'd encourage everyone to consider the Mac.
A little revisionist history... (Score:3, Interesting)
And let's not forget the Apple Lisa which started the mouse/icon/desktop thing for Apple. That puppy was way ahead of its time. The Mac simply brought it down (relatively speaking. a Lisa was $10K) to where mere wealthy mortals could afford it.
Re:A little revisionist history... (Score:5, Informative)
The Mac was a lot more than something that "simply brought" the Lisa price down.
Jef (I was there
Not a Mac user, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Might have to 'swap' diskettes..." (Score:5, Interesting)
It's strange that Steve Jobs, generally a fan of new technology, had such a blind spot about internal hard drives. I tend to think it was that, more than anything else, that got the Mac off to a dangerously slow start.
I remember paying, I believe it was $400, for a second, external floppy drive, without which the machine wasn't very usable. Even then, it was (after the novelty wore off) quite annoying listening to those drives play that "MacDirge" (they had a very audible, musically pitched whine that jumped between several pitches as the disk format went to different numbers of sectors per track. I never thought to take it down in musical notation, but the drive played three or four notes of a minor chord).
Re:"Might have to 'swap' diskettes..." (Score:3, Interesting)
Jobs hated hard drives because they were loud and power hungry. A Macintosh with internal hard drive would require a cooling fan, and that was agains Jobs will. He was always a fan of silent computing (and still is - the hard drive in my iBook is incredibly silent, and the machine is almost entirely mute, until the fan kicks in, but that's not very often). Oddly enough, many people in early
1984 advertisement history (Score:5, Informative)
Here [isd.net] is a good writeup on how the advertisement came about and what the initial internal reaction to the ad was in late 1983.
Wired (Score:5, Informative)
The Macintosh's Twisted Truth [wired.com], which talks about how Jef Raskin was the real inventor of the Mac (and how Jobs wanted to kill the Macintosh project at the time), and Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel [wired.com], which details how Microsoft support the Mac from day one.
Re:Wired (Score:5, Informative)
Before you respond, consider taking a look at the "Holes in the Histories" article on www.jefraskin.com. If you want dates and want to see original documents dating back to 1979, read "The Book of Macintosh" much of which is in the Stanford University History of Technology collection.
If you want proof that I wanted computers to be graphics-based and human-centered (and that I had invented and built my own graphic input device in 1965 or 66) see "The Quick Draw Graphics System", my thesis, which was published (Penn State) in 1967 -- 5 years before PARC was established. This puts the lie to the often-stated claim that the Mac stole its basic orientation from Xerox PARC. Not that we didn't learn a lot from PARC's brilliant work later.
So, diamondsw, even if the original Mac didn't have a GUI as most people now know it, but it did have a graphics-based interface that was (IMHO) even easier to learn and use. As for sound, it had it from the first -- I've been doing computer music for years before the Mac and there's no way I'd design a product without built-in sound.
Also see the Appendices to my book, "The Humane Interface" which has a detailed, button-press-by-button-press, account of some of the differences between PARCs interface and the one I designed.
Jef (I was there
Amazing computer. (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone remember the lovely tutorial disk that came with the Mac? I can't remember what it was called (i.e. what was on the label), but there was a disk that you booted from that just taught you how to use the machine. It walked you through a lovely animated tutorial with sound that went through use of the mouse, windows, menus, icons, files, etc. using little games -- a maze, an on-screen piano... and it provided feedback in how skilled you were with all of these things. It only took about 10 minutes to get through it, and then you could use the Mac like a pro! But it had graphics and sound! People take these things for granted today, but I had a steady stream of friends over who just wanted to go through that amazing tutorial over and over again and couldn't believe their eyes and ears.
I still remember seeing MacWrite/MacPaint for the first time, just after having set the machine up and gone through the tutorial. Without ever reading a single manual, I knew how to use this incredibly powerful (for its time) WYSIWYG text editor (unheard of on the PC) and paint program. I must have spent hours just doodling in MacPaint, and friends who owned PCs would come over to do the same and then to print out their doodles on the ImageWriter, which, as a graphics-oriented printer that printed fonts as they appeared on-screen, was about as wild an idea as the Mac itself was. To the friends, who had single-font dot-matrix or daisy wheel printers, even the idea of dot-matrix graphics from a printer seemed like a visit from the kool aid fairy.
The disks were a pain, it's true, but they stored more than the PC floppies and were much more compact and durable, and nobody else but mid-sized and large businesses at the time had any way to afford a hard drive. The 5MB (yes, 5 megabyte) full-height hard drives for PCs were prohibitively expensive, thousands of dollars... Not to mention 10MB (there were no 20MB PC drives yet, IIRC).
Even just the black-on-white display was stunning. Everyone was so accustomed to the notion that computer displays were by necessity some sort of harsh green... Even though Tandy had had a white-on-black display for their TRS-80 Model I some time earlier. I remember one of my friends commenting that if there was no technical reason for making green displays, he'd be happy never to have to see one again after seeing my Mac's display.
Even when Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 came out years later, the computing environment that they created was nowhere near as integrated or as usable as the original Finder 1.0 had been for the Mac. The Mac is quite a testament to the vision of Apple computers, the influence of Xerox notwithstanding... I mean, how often is the devil really in the details (look at Windows, for example), and yet Apple in a remarkable number of cases over the years seems to have gotten 95% of the details in their products right... more often than not when Steve Jobs has been around.
Re:Amazing computer. (Score:3, Interesting)
I do recall that there was a little maze applet that was meant to introduce you to mousing. I might still have t
Re:Amazing computer. (Score:3, Informative)
Not only would you add the cost of a hard drive, but add cooling fan, an extra i/o chip in the motherboard, firmwire/bois modifications, and fit it in a tiny tiny ( by 84 standards) space, would make the apple as expensive as the $7,000 lisa!
This is 1983 we are talking about here.
These are not commidity items back then.
A simple analog to digital converter was hundreds of dollars! Today they cost about a nickel and are used in cell phones.
If you have ever s
i have one. still amazes me. (Score:5, Interesting)
anyhoo, it's still a marvel. at some point, it has been upgraded from the original 128k to a 512k-e motherboard so it's actually pretty usable. i wish i had the original 128k mobo. i'd frame it - "look kids, soldered on memory and no expansion slot!".
the keyboard and mouse still work after 20 years, which is remarkable in itself, but by the feel of them in the hand and the action of the keys, they could have been sold a year ago.
i had to track down an operating system (and 400k floppies) to get it and its brethren to work. the folks at sun remarketing [sunrem.com] used to sell software for it - i can't find it on their site now - system version 5.x and finder 4.x, i think, but i was able to track down a couple years ago disk images all the way back to system 1.
it's tricky to get a working 400k system disk from a G3 with no floppy to a 512k with no network connection, but suffice it to say it involves another power mac and a mac plus with two floppy drives.
but anyway... the finder and few apps i have are not only remarkably fast (no multitasking, though), but beautifully designed - every pixel placed with care, and use of the very limited screen real estate well thought out.
it's no wonder, comparing this machine to some of the other '80s vintage PCs in my collection, why the press of the time was gushing over the first mac. regardless of its lack of hard drive and cooling fan (steve likes his computers quiet - and when not reading from the floppy, the mac is eerily quiet) and nonexistant expansion opportunities, it was way ahead of everything else out there.
well, maybe with the exception of the Lisa.
Bought my first mac ... (Score:4, Interesting)
-Sean
Re:Bought my first mac ... (Score:3, Interesting)
print ads from 1984 (Score:5, Interesting)
i have a little collection of old BYTE magazines that i picked up from used book stores specifically for their apple ads. it's always amusing to me what kinds of claims they made back then...
what is a mouse? (Score:3, Funny)
Now that is a step back in history. It's funny to see that they had to fully describe what a mouse was. But I do remember those days, and the mouse was definitely something rather new to consumers, especially to "the rest of us".
What was the Mac for? (Score:5, Interesting)
The poster correctly identifies one of the original marketing directions. But the original major application I proposed was the Net (which didn't exist yet). If you want to read the original document about what I expected people to do with it, see the Appendix (written in 1979, when I started the Mac project) to my article "Holes in the Histories" on www.jefraskin.com.
Jef (I was there
The most important attribute of early macs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Link to the famous ad? (Score:5, Informative)
The Ad (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, a neato article on it here: http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm [duke.edu]
Re:Still works (Score:3, Interesting)
If its taken care of... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now if you discuss fans, HD's, floppies, then yes, they do have a much redcued life span.
But even then, taken care of they should still be running.
Re:If its taken care of... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amiga forever! (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the amiga, to this day, is the ONLY computer that can run Mac software on a 68060, the FASTEST 680x0 CPU ever made
That is a lie. 68060 adaptors work just fine in a Quadra 630 and will boot and use the macOS without problem. Making a big deal about the FASTEST 680x0 CPU is irrelevant when, by the time a 68060 was released, the rest of the world was using 200MHz+ Pentiums and PowerPCs. Behind the times yet again.
If you wish to use that argument, then you may as well use it against yourself. The PC is, to this day, the only computer that can run Amiga software on a *insert favorite x86 CPU name here*, the FASTEST x86 CPU ever made. What's the point?
Re:Amiga forever! (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that's an Amiga attitude! If you were living in 1993 what you say might be relevant, but none of us exist in the past. It's 2004.
Normally I'd agree, but this is an article reminiscing about 20 years ago, so I'd say looking to the past is relevant.
The fastest Amiga that can run a real, released AmigaOS is what, a PPC604? yes. It's a PPC604. Don't go counting the AmigaOne and it's generic G3 or G4 motherboard because then you're falling into the typical Amiga trap of living for vaporware. Perhaps w
Re:Amiga forever! (Score:3, Interesting)
The Amiga was a really nice piece of hardware. But the multitasking OS had a really poor user interface and was constantly crashing and throwing up guru meditation numbers. It just had an overall "unfinished" feel. I'm not surprised that it never really challenged the Mac. Great games for its time, though.