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Apple Businesses

A Review of the 128KB Macintosh 476

Posted by Zonk from the retro-love dept.
bfwebster writes "The physicist John Wheeler famously quipped that 'Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once.' The web flattens time by making more of the past accessible. Here, then, is a reprint of BYTE's official review of the original 128KB Macintosh from the August 1984 issue. The article highlights the radical break with other PCs that the Mac represented, while at the same time giving the first real warning of Steve Jobs's least-productive tendency: pre-emptive and often arbitrary constraint of end-user options (e.g., no memory expansion on the 128KB or announced 512KB Macs, even though the 68000 processor had a lovely, flat 16MB address space, as opposed to Intel's 808x segmented hell)."
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A Review of the 128KB Macintosh More

A Review of the 128KB Macintosh

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  • Ha! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:50AM (#12949709) Homepage Journal
    1984 called, it wants it article back. ... no, wait, that doesn't work.

  • Upper limit was actually 4 megs, not 16 (Score:5, Informative)

    by weave ( 48069 ) * on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:50AM (#12949710) Journal
    Actually the upper limit on early models was 4 megs, not 16 megs. Bits 30 and 31 were mapped into ROM and hardware addresses (respectively, if i recall correctly).

    Still, a great machine. I bought one in April 1984 and was a Mac freak until System 7, at which point I switch to Windows. Back then the OS was just stagnating. Once boxes with OS X came out, I went out and got an iMac and fell back in love with Macs.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:59AM (#12949768)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Thanks for the correction. (Insert standard Homer d'oh sound here).

    • Re:Upper limit was actually 4 megs, not 16 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Megane ( 129182 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:26AM (#12949985)
      I got my first mac in 1985, 128K+external floppy. I later got a Levco MonsterMac upgrade installed. Two frickin' megabytes. For over a year I would boot from a floppy that set up a 1.5M ramdisk. That thing was FAST (relatively) running off a ramdisk. I had to give that up with System 7, because it was no longer possible to system-switch to another disk.

  • Flattened time? (Score:5, Funny)

    by warkda rrior ( 23694 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:51AM (#12949714) Homepage
    The web flattens time? What was the shape of time before? Was it fluffy? Did it have spikes or bumps?

  • Um.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:51AM (#12949716)
    Any news happen *today*?

  • Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jdp816 ( 895616 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:51AM (#12949719)
    My Amiga 1000 laughs in superiority.

    • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Informative)

      by grahamlee ( 522375 ) <graham.iamleeg@com> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:58AM (#12949762) Homepage Journal
      ...but not until 1985. While I also used Amigas for years (earliest was an A500, latest an A1200, gave up using that in about 2001) as far as 68k-based fun goes the NeXT blew everything else out of the water. Of course, it cost more than anything that wasn't a Sun3 too...
      • as far as 68k-based fun goes the NeXT blew everything else out of the water.

        The NeXT had it's share of problems. Objective C has never caught on. The original version's magneto-optical drive was a total disaster (completely unreliable and dog slow), as was the lack of floppy disk (which was important way back in 1990 when it was released, at least in the University segment, where I encountered NeXTs).

        Perhaps the biggest problem was the price. At $9,999 it was just too expensive for the consumer. G

    • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:04AM (#12949804) Journal
      Sorry, not in 1984.

      I posted earlier (and therefore, below. Yeah that makes sense) about my lust for a Mac in 1984. The sequel is that when I could afford what I wanted (early 1986), I chose an Amiga 1000 and never looked back.

      You're right, even if you're laughing (or trolling). But in 1984, you needed about $20,000 to do anything like a 128K Mac.

      • But in 1984, you needed about $20,000 to do anything like a 128K Mac.

        Um. Sorry. You could buy the far, far superior Lisa for a lot less than $20,000. And, if you planned on writing any software for either one, you had to.

    • My Amiga 1000 laughs in superiority.


      pity the amiga didn't make it..

      they were quite impressive machines, dunno why they didn't make it though.

      But those were the days... Amiga vs. Atari vs. Mac dang...
      • The Amiga failed because of a horrible, wretched marketing department. It became synonymous with "video games", and then became Amiga vs. Atari. Nobody seemed to take it seriously as a business machine.

      • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:24AM (#12949958) Homepage Journal
        "pity the Amiga didn't make it..
        they were quite impressive machines, dunno why they didn't make it though."
        The Amiga had a good life. By many standards it was a success. A lot of the old Amiga people are now in the OSS community.
        Why did it not become the "standard"?
        1. The BIG computer magazines where already running into the great PC wasteland. Why? that is where the ads where. I mean think about the Mac compared to a PC of the day. WHY would you buy a PC in 1984? They where not cheaper than a Mac. At no time did any magazine or pundit ever come put and say. Graphics, color, multitasking, and a GUI are the future of Computers! PC can not compete with the Amiga. Frankly PCs did not catch up with the Amiga or the Mac until 95 or 98! I remember articles discussing if there was any "real" value to multitasking?

        2. Commodore could not market it's way out of a wet paper sack. If Commodore bought KFC they would have changed the name to "Warn dead birds in a paper bucket".

        If you think about it current PCs are more like the Amiga than the PCs of 1985. Multitasking, Mouse, GUI, flat address space, stereo sound, 32 bit pointers and hardware acceleration for graphics operations.

        • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Funny)

          by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:26AM (#12949994) Journal
          2. Commodore could not market it's way out of a wet paper sack. If Commodore bought KFC they would have changed the name to "Warn dead birds in a paper bucket".

          I heard another version: "Commodore Sushi: Cold, dead, raw fish."

          • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
            I really blame the trade magazines more than anyone.
            None of the Computer magazines of the time ever said. The Amiga is better than the PC.
            Everyone that ever used an Amiga knew it. But it was like an ugly secret.
            Part of the problem is Commodore went from a "serious" computer company with the Pet line. To a Home computer company with the Vic and 64. Then they went all over the place with the Amiga, the 128, the Plus/4... Why the spent a dime on the Plus/4 I will never know
            I just do not think they knew what th

            • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Informative)

              by rho ( 6063 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:02AM (#12950858) Journal
              This is why I didn't go Amiga in 199-mumble, even though I was interested in video. I would read magazines--Amiga magazines--and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the hell the computer was all about. Chip RAM? Fast RAM? Frobnizes and gribblefrunks, and if you got an A500, you had to use left-handed Torx drivers to spaz your bortz, but an A1200 was totally different.

              It was totally indecipherable. And in order to make it Really Work, you had to take a soldering gun to it. That's fine I guess, but contrary to a lot of Slashdotters' beliefs, it's not that much fun to go after your $2000 toy with heavy machinery and end up with a paperweight because you're all thumbs.

              The ads in Amiga mags were hilarious, too. Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install.

        • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:54AM (#12950238)
          WHY would you buy a PC in 1984?

          The PC's success was driven largely by business usage. In 1984, you would have bought a PC because it had one of the best keyboards that has ever been made, and it had an outstanding monochrome text display (with a crisp font and specialized long-persistence phosphor).

          Basically, the PC was a standalone version of IBM's high-quality mainframe terminals. It was designed for people who needed comfortably to run business apps all day long. This is not something that you would want to do on the primitive color monitors of the day, and the Macintosh was a brand new architecture with a radically different UI and zero business software available at its introduction. The PC also had IBM's support and brand name; as they say, you'd never be fired for choosing an IBM.

          When the clones came along and offered PCs to the public at low prices, people bought a computer just like the ones at work that they were already familiar with. The rest is history.

        • There is a third reason and that's commodore's business ethics. Commodore was notorious in the industry for paying their bills late. Very late.

          Standard practice at Commodore was to place large orders with small companies who would have to expand to meet the order. Commodore then withheld payments on the order which basically shut of the company's cash flow and they went belly up. Commodore then came in and bought the company for a song and a dance and forgave its own debt.

          This was Commodore founder Jac

    • Speaking of Amiga...

      Did anyone else realize that the author of the Byte article worked for FTL games? They made the awesome dungeon-crawler "Dungeon Master", which I played religiously on my Amiga 2000 HD back in the day.

      It was the first game that truly scared the crap outta me. I had the Amiga hooked up to the stereo (yeah for RCA outs), with my speakers on either side of the monitor for full stereo effect. Had the volume cranked up, and a mummy jumped out from around the corner and hissed at me. I

    • Re:Color, multitasking? (Score:4, Funny)

      by El Cabri ( 13930 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:09PM (#12952016) Journal
      I can indeed hear that laugh, albeit muffled by six feet of earth.
  • No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

    (sorry, couldn't resist.)
  • and I wanted a Mac SOOOO BAD. I test-drove one at a computer store in Oklahoma City in the evening of one of my days on a temporary assignment at Tinker Air Force Base, where I was doing system design documentation on a Xerox Alto [digibarn.com]. It was so karmic and wonderful, getting my first exposure to really cool UI stuff for desktop publishing during the day, and then playing in the evening with a machine which was obviously the wave of that particular future.

    I couldn't afford a Mac, of course. I just jonesed for it

  • AC Presents: Article Text (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:54AM (#12949733)
    Reprinted from Byte, issue 8/1984, pp. 238-251.

    The many facets of a slightly flawed gem

    The Macintosh

    Photo 1: The Apple Macintosh computer
    Few computers - indeed, few consumer items of any kind - have generated such a wide range of opinions as the Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it lives up to that potential remains to be seen.

    Personally, I think the Macintosh is a wonderful machine. I use one daily at work, and then at night I play with the one I have at home. Or, at least, I try to play with it. You see, my wife - who for years resisted all my attempts to introduce her to computers - has fallen in love with the Mac (her words, not mine). She uses it to type up medical reports, notes on her clients, and personal letters. In fact, she's suggested that we get a second Macintosh so that we won't have to fight over the one we have.

    The Macintosh is not without its problems. Resources are tight - it needs more memory and disk space - and software has been slow in coming to market. Many have criticized its price ($2495). In fact, there are indications that Apple considered a lower price ($1995) and then rejected it. It doesn't seem to have hurt the Mac's market - people are still buying them faster than Apple can make them - but there's the potential for backlash if the machine doesn't deliver on all its promises.

    Whatever its problems and limitations, the Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting computers to work with people instead of vice versa. Time and again, I've seen individuals with little or no computer experience sit down in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they use the same words to describe it: "amazing" and "fun." The question is whether "powerful" can be added to that list.

    Photo 2: The Macintosh dot-matrix printer
    In an industry rapidly filling up with IBM PC clones, the Macintosh represents a radical departure from the norm. It is a small, lightweight computer with a high-resolution screen, a detached keyboard, and a mouse (see photo 1). It comes with 128K bytes of RAM (random-access read/write memory), 64K bytes of ROM (read-only memory), and a 400K-byte 3½-inch disk drive. If you throw in an Imagewriter printer (see photo 2 and figure 1) the system costs $2990. The processor is a Motorola 68000, running a name-less operating system (see the text box, "A Second Opinion" on page 248 for a fit description). It has absolutely no IBM PC/MS-DOS compatibility, and it would appear Apple plans none.

    The Display

    The display is small (9-inch diagonal), but it has very high resolution (512 by 342 pixels). Every pixel is crisp. Several things make the display unusual. First, the Macintosh has no "text mode." Instead, the display is always bit-mapped graphics. Second, the display is black-on-white rather than amber-, green- or color-on-black, giving it an ink-on-paper effect. Third, the pixels are equally dense both horizontally and vertically, eliminating the "aspect ratio" problem that plagues other graphic systems. (In other words, a box 20 pixels wide and 20 pixels high will be a square.)

    Figure 1: A sample printout from the Macintosh using its printer and the MacWrite word-processing program. The printout was obtained using MacWrite's high-quality output mode, as opposed to the draft and ordinary quality modes. The output here is shown at 100 percent of actual size
    The effect is excellent. The display is clear, crisp, easy to read, and easy on the eyes. Because all text is graphically generated, the "what you see is what you get" word processing is available (with multiple fonts, sizes, and styles). Embedded drawings and proportional spacing are also possible. Some criticism has been made about the lack of a color-graphics capability. Frankly, I am unconvinced of its necessity. Most applications I have seen use color graphics as a substitute for detail, and the Mac

  • Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)

    by taskforce ( 866056 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:56AM (#12949749) Homepage
    (An interesting footnote: the QuickDraw graphics routines in the Mac's ROM do provide for color, although Apple has not announced any intentions for supporting such.)

    It's eriee how similar this statement is to the statements which we get every time Apple launches a new product even today... "a .wma icon was included with the iTunes app in Mac OS X Tiger" or a while back it was possible to unlock the "secret colour screen" on your iPod 3rd gen. (it made the screen turn blue.)

    Also similarly, the author says he actually wouldn't like colour, and he's glad Apple left this feature out. (Remind anyone of Steve Job's current stance on the video iPod?)

    • Re:Fascinating (Score:2, Informative)

      by cosmic_0x526179 ( 209008 )
      IRC, and thinking wayyy back... the original color implementation on the earliest Macs (128k/512k and likely the Plus) was 8 colors only. It was put in there to support color printing on the Imagewriter. The original Macs were black and white (no gray scale). The first Mac with Color QD was the Mac II.

  • Wow flashback (Score:2, Interesting)

    by d'oh89 ( 859382 ) *
    This is a prety cool article. It's amazing the costs of Macs back then. I wonder what $2500 in 1984 invested marginally would be worth nowadays? The really interesting piece of the article is the author's complaints about memory. While it's true that 128K was insufficient for a GUI based computer, it was more than sufficient for a Dos 3.x pc. It's also funny that the same complaint 20 years ago holds true today... computers always run better with more memory. I remember using this computer back in sch
    • Keep in mind that the original Macs were single tasking. Other than Desk Accessories, you ran one application at time (and the Finder was one of those one at a time applications). To go from MacPaint to MacWrite, you first had to quit MacPaint. The operating system could carry something on the clipboard from one app to another (assuming it wasn't too large) but you could only run one at a time. This has a downward effect on memory requirements. 128K was really squeezing things tho. The 512k was the first Ma

    • Re:Wow flashback (Score:4, Informative)

      by Megane ( 129182 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:49AM (#12950190)
      If you think that's expensive, how about the costs of Macs later than that? I have a Mac Week from September '91 with a list of prices for the new lineup of Macs. And you wouldn't even be able to buy the 400M HD models for another three or four months.

      PB 100 2/20 no floppy. . . $2299
      PB 100 2/20 ext floppy . . $2499
      PB 140 2/40. . . . . . . . $3199
      PB 140 4/40. . . . . . . . $3499
      PB 170 4/40 2400 fax modem $4599
      ClasII 2/40. . . . . . . . $1899
      ClasII 4/80. . . . . . . . $2399
      Qdr700 4/floppy. . . . . . $5699 (with no HD!)
      Qdr700 4/80. . . . . . . . $6399
      Qdr700 4/160 . . . . . . . $6999
      Qdr700 4/400 . . . . . . . $7699 (these were the days of $1000+ HDs)
      Qdr900 4/floppy. . . . . . $7199 (with no HD!)
      Qdr900 4/160 . . . . . . . $8499
      Qdr900 4/400 . . . . . . . $9199

  • Nostalgia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:59AM (#12949767)
    I actually have the Mac 128K that my dad got at Dillard's department store in Dallas, TX on January 24, 1984. I was 9, and I'd been wanting a computer and was angling for an Apple //e. But my dad - who wasn't the computer type - thankfully said that he'd heard some rumblings about this new computer that he thought he should wait for.

    It was the Macintosh.

    I just snapped a couple pictures with my Treo 650:

    Here it is, alongside a NeXT cube and ann actual Motorola Viper CHRP box (capable, at the time, of running Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX, and the at-that-time-already-defunct Solaris and NetWare implementations for PowerPC):

    http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/CHRP_128K_Cube. jpg [wisc.edu]

    And the model tag from the 128K, barely visible, "M0001":

    http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/M0001.jpg [wisc.edu]

    A couple other things; a 20th Anniversary Macintosh and a PowerBook Duo 2300c, with DuoDock II+:

    http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/20th_Duo.jpg [wisc.edu]

    And now, over 21 years later...

    http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/Desk.jpg [wisc.edu]

    How time flies.

  • compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yardbird ( 165009 ) * on Thursday June 30, 2005 @08:59AM (#12949769) Homepage

    It has absolutely no IBM PC/MS-DOS compatibility, and it would appear Apple plans none.

    And 21 short years later, it turns out they planned it all along!

  • Mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by SrmL ( 18247 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:00AM (#12949775) Homepage Journal
    Mirrordot [mirrordot.org] mirror of TFA.

  • The coolest part (Score:5, Interesting)

    by marshac ( 580242 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:01AM (#12949789) Homepage
    The coolest part of the Mac 128k isn't the computer itself, but rather what's on the inside of the case. [digibarn.com]

  • This is great (Score:5, Funny)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:03AM (#12949799)
    But what I really need from this issue of Byte is that article that had 5000 lines of BASIC you could type in verbatim to your computer and play a clone of Pitfall.

  • Quotation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skewray ( 896393 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:04AM (#12949806)
    The quotation isn't John Wheeler. It is a Cambridge don whose name I forget. It went something like, "Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once, and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at Cambridge." I've got it written down somewhere...
  • Since then, Apple has dropped the Moterola processors, has improved the amount of RAM greatly, has gone to bigger screens, technically gone from not being IBM compatible to partially made by IBM, and a great many other things.

    However, it still has the same one button mouse as always. Some things never change.

    • It's also still the machine with the best UI around. You're right, some things never change.

      (re: the mouse troll, more-button mice have been supported on the Mac for ages. You don't piss and moan about the standard crappy mouse&keyboard that come with your PC either.)

  • Mac 128k vs. Spring Break (Score:5, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:06AM (#12949819)
    I'd been using computers for about 8 years when I saw my first Macintosh in 1985. I'd always hated command lines because I a) can't type worth a darn and b) can't remember arcane commands either.

    When I saw a 128k at my university's computer store in March 1985 I immediately fell in love with its GUI - all the commands were right their in plain english and organized in convenient menus. I dragged my wife to see the thing and she fell in love with it too. We took our limited savings that we had intended for a spring-break vacation and bought a 128k, external floppy, and ImageWriter I for $1700 (an educational discount gave us about 40% off the list price of $2800). We even paid $34 for a box of ten 400k Apple floppies.

    That machine was our main computer until the Mac II came out in 1987 and our 128k remained in use until about 1995. I still boot the machine occasionally just for the nostalgic sounds of the start-up bong and the whirr of the floppy drive.

  • One question about that 128K machine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Foolomon ( 855512 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:07AM (#12949822) Homepage
    One question about that 128K machine: can you boot Linux on it?

  • ponderous (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ChristTrekker ( 91442 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:08AM (#12949832)

    Sometimes I wonder what the MacOS would have looked like if those engineers would have known where it was going to go in the future, and knew all the modern techniques of programming? Alternatively you could ask, how would we design the Mac today if we limited ourselves to hardware available in 1984?

    Would the filesystem have been designed differently? Would there have been more emphasis on preemptive multitasking? Would certain conventions from other systems have been adopted to ease interoperability when networking came on the scene? How would certain missteps admitted by Apple engineers been avoided?

    • No way to answer those questions, of course. But if you look at the Apple Lisa, you'll see what Apple was capable of when it wasn't limiting itself to designing a low-cost machine.

    • Apple was relatively forward looking (Score:4, Insightful)

      by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:51AM (#12950209)
      Although the 128k had many a kludge with respect to memory management, multitasking, etc. I'd argue that Apple had the right approach when it came to telling developers what to expect. Direct interactions with hardware were frowned on. Apple's early design guidelines were very explicit about NOT assuming anything about the hardware, file system, display, etc. Developers that took this advice to heart could create applications that were future compatible.

      The result is that I still use some applications on a near daily basis that were introduced in 1987/1988. These apps could run on a Mac Plus (System 6, 8 MHz 68000, 2 MB RAM, 800k floppies) and now run on a dual-G5 (OS 10.3, 1.8 GHz G5, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB SATA HD).

      Apple may not have designed pre-emptive multitasking into their early systems, but they did create a development ethos that meant that early applications were not incompatible with the major changes in both hardware and OS that occured later.

    • Re:ponderous (Score:3, Interesting)

      by WinterSolstice ( 223271 )
      Well, here's what I would do, though I will expand your scope a bit.

      First, hardware:
      1) Memory access hatch (like the battery one it had) and the ability to upgrade memory...
      2) Non-proprietary battery. Have you ever tried getting a replacement one? It's not easy. Wouldn't a 9 volt or something have sufficed?
      3) Attach the mouse to the keyboard.
      4) Sell a "ROM upgrade" service... Allow older machines to become "newer" machines for a reasonable fee.

      Second, software:
      1) FREE dev kits. Those Apple kits were reall

      • Re:ponderous (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
        First, hardware:
        1) Memory access hatch (like the battery one it had) and the ability to upgrade memory...
        2) Non-proprietary battery. Have you ever tried getting a replacement one? It's not easy. Wouldn't a 9 volt or something have sufficed?
        3) Attach the mouse to the keyboard.
        4) Sell a "ROM upgrade" service... Allow older machines to become "newer" machines for a reasonable fee.

        You're OK so far.

        Second, software:
        1) FREE dev kits. Those Apple kits were really expensive if I recall correctly.
        2) I think the

  • Ironic (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:09AM (#12949837) Journal
    The Macintosh has a standard, one-button, mechanical-tracking, optical-shaft-encoding mouse (again a departure from industry norms).

    21 years later...
  • I still have my Apple ][ manual boasting about how with their new enormous 16K chips you can boost your machine up to a whopping 48K of ram.

    Always got a chuckle from me. (And mine had 62K because of an extra add-on card. Let you do disk I/O (? - some apple ][ geek can tell me what it was that overwrote highres page 2)without clobbering your high resolution graphics buffer)

  • It was all about MacWrite/MacPaint. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:14AM (#12949873) Homepage
    I had a Mac 128 w/2 drives. The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface, though the user interface was indeed revolutionary.

    The thing that made the Mac immortal was the fact that anyone could "publish" documents from their desktop without needing complex typesetting systems or knowledge of traditional "publishing" and commercial printing processes.

    At the time, most people with home computers didn't even have printers, which were expensive, error-prone, often massive, and didn't produce pretty output. All non-industrial printers at the time were either dot matrix or daisy wheel (using letter blocks like a typewriter to pound letters through a ribbon) impact printers and had only one typeface at one size. On dot matrix printers the quality of these letters was horrible (think NINE dots of vertical resolution per letter for consumer-grade printers or FIFTEEN dots of vertical resolution for business class printers). Very expensive printers might have a second "high quality" typeface that you could select by pressing a button on the printer, but this typically wasn't much better.

    Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics, certainly (even the dot matrix printers generally didn't have any graphics capability whatsoever--it just wasn't included; only the ability to accept a stream of ASCII and dump it out to the page was in the ROM). What little formatting could be performed (left/right justification, line spacing, etc.) was often set in a word processor as a document property globally, and wouldn't be displayed on the screen as you typed.

    The Macintosh and relatively cheap ImageWriter printer changed all this radically; you could format text using multiple typefaces, set them to a range of sizes, boldface, italicize, even full justify (!), and not only would these things appear on the screen as you did them (beyond magical in an era in which most PCs also only had the ability to display ASCII on their screens, lacking graphics capability unless you had expensive hardware like a so-called Hercules card, IIRC, still mono), but they could be output to the printer and would appear on the page just as they did on the screen. And you could even mix text and graphics .

    This kind of capability was unheard of because it had never before been available to the consumer at any price, and certainly not in a system that required no specialized knowledge to use.

    You knew the Mac was an important computer historically from the moment it was released, because within a month or two, in any city or neighborhood, every newsletter, advertisement, flyer, poster, city council report, whatever that hadn't been commercially printed had obviously been done on a Mac. Everyone knew what a Mac was and knew that it was the computer that could be used to publish readable, visually pleasing, professional documents straight from your office or bedroom, for just a few thousand dollars.

    • Re:It was all about MacWrite/MacPaint. (Score:4, Informative)

      by a1englishman ( 209505 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @10:36AM (#12950622) Journal
      Yes, printer of yore were 9 or 15 pin. A lot of them did print truely horrible fonts, but a number were capabile of some nice output -- if you were willing to wait. The Apple Image Writer was no champion of high resolution output. It used the some 15 pin technology of those other printers, but the Mac used bitmap mode instead of text mode. The result was pretty equivilent. No unless you got the Laser Writer could you really start calling it desktop publishing.

      You are right thought: The Mac was the first personal computer to enable the avaerage Joe to produce documents with multiple fonts, and embedded graphics. But by saying the other computers had nothing more than Notepad is a falacy. There were a great number of word processors, from Scripsit, to WordStar. You couldn't embed graphics, and everything was displayed in text mode; however, you could choose fixed pitch, variable pitch, italics, bold, superscripts and subscripts. Everything you need to actually write a document.

      Apple Macintosh's two great advancements for the home computer were the GUI and desktop publishing.

    • Re:It was all about MacWrite/MacPaint. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CaptDeuce ( 84529 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:56AM (#12951366) Journal

      The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface ... The thing that made the Mac immortal was the fact that anyone could "publish" documents from their desktop without needing complex typesetting systems or knowledge of traditional "publishing" and commercial printing processes.

      And what made publishing documents so easy? Yes, the user interface.

      Reading various comments on this thread alone, never mind the word that is called slashdot, I'm forced to conclude that many people here don't understand what a user interface really is.

      Virtually everything involving computers back then required complex knowledge to perform anything but the simplest tasks. Macintosh brought its capabilities to a level understandable by a four year old. Ask three or four year olds how old they are and they'll hold up fingers and say "this many!"; take them to a buffet table and ask what they want to eat and they'll point at what they want -- even without saying a single word. Macintosh captured this simplicity with point and click ; the most notable difference is that users need to use a mouse instead of just pointing a finger, of course.

      Making complex knowledge of computers available to a user is fairly trivial. Adding text menus and function keys, the most common MS-DOS interface at the time, is also trivial; likewise adding a mouse. For many years publishers of DOS and Windows proclaimed their programs were "user friendly" presumably on the basis of their menu based interface in that it simply had one. Whether or not users can make the program do what they want had little or bearing on slapping the "user friendly" label on it. Indeed, the situation hasn't changed all that much.

      Until developers (and pundits) realize that not mouses and menus a user friendly interface make, the sooner computers won't be more difficult to use than they need be.

      Making a false distinction between interface and the power and functionality underneath is as misleading as making a distinction between the human brain and the mind: the mind is essentially a manifestation of the brain's function; mental illness is a manifestation of a sick or damaged brain. Likewise, the power and usefulness of a computer system (OS, application, etc.) from a user's perspective is inextricably tied to the interface.

      This explains a large part of why Windows sucks (again, from a user's perspective) and why Linux is so slow in displacing Windows. One can argue that even though the Mac platform represents the most refined user interface in computing to date, it is Windows' superficial resemblance to the Mac's interface that lulls the typical Windows user into complacency. The oversight -- or downright dismissal -- of the importance of user interfaces by many hardcore Linux geeks (though certainly not all!) is another topic in its own right but ultimately is caused by the perception that interfaces are a distinct entity that cannot possibly be the source of real power of an OS -- or application.

      Make glib dismissals of the importance of user interfaces at your own peril.

      It's the interface stupid.

  • Mac 128k vs. a brick (Score:4, Funny)

    by garignak ( 611737 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:15AM (#12949879)
    For those that haven't seen it, there is a "review" comparing a Mac 128k vs. a brick. It's available here [totse.com] (Google cache). [72.14.207.104]
  • as opposed to Intel's 808x segmented hell

    Hey! I owned an 8088 and besides having to use a hammer to add your expanded 640k of RAM it was a great little piece of shit!

  • Eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:24AM (#12949969) Homepage
    The web flattens time by making more of the past accessible.

    What is this, pretentious posting day? You could say the same about a library, but you wouldn't score as many "whoa, he's a deep geek thinker" points on Slashdot.

  • Some principles still hold true... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@[ ]ata.net.eg ['ted' in gap]> on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:27AM (#12949996) Journal
    I also have heard that the upgrade to 512K bytes will eliminate all such problems because there will be more than enough RAM for any application. Again, I disagree. You can never have enough RAM.

    Glad to see that some needs just never go away.

  • 640K is more than anyone will ever need (Score:3, Funny)

    by computational super ( 740265 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:33AM (#12950055)

    From TFA linked to by TFA: When 256K-bit memory chips become available the Macintosh will be upgraded to a 512K-byte machine, enough space for the most ambitious application programs.. Wow... obviously they weren't thinking about screen-savers back then...

  • Clear writing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Cyburbia ( 695748 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @09:45AM (#12950159) Homepage
    It's nice to see a clearly written, jargon-free review that can be easily understood.

    In today's magazines, even though they're read by folks that are as a whole far less tech-savvy than the Byte readers of old, reviews are filled with acronyms and buzzwords. I wonder what that review would look like if it was in PC World ...

    As with the rest of the hardware solution, the input device solution is significantly different from those found on other hardware solutions (see photo 3). It's smaller than most and has only 58 depressable character, line break and control function entry solutions.

  • The lasso tool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:33AM (#12951176) Homepage
    My wife and I (both computer scientists, which was a relatively new degree at the time), went to a computer store to check out the Macintosh in 1984. We were really impressed by MacPaint - being able to draw on screen at that time (as opposed to using something like a plotter) was a big deal. After filling the screen with various filled shapes and textures, I noticed the lasso selection tool, and wondered what it did. I selected an arbitrary region with it (even the concept of selection was new) and then noticed the little "dancing ants". I clicked in the middle of the selection and dragged... and the arbitary graphic region moved ! We bought one right then. The things we take for granted today were so astonishing when the Mac was introduced, that it's impossible for folks that have grown up with the technology to appreciate. In the intervening 21 years, few things have been as impressive as the Macintosh.

  • My family still uses this mac... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phallstrom ( 69697 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:45AM (#12951280)
    My dad bought this mac when they first came out. I used it as a kid to write all my papers and play games (load runner in particular). Several years ago lightning hit near our house and took out our new computer (connected via a surge strip). The mac (plugged into the wall) survived just fine.

    I've had it in my garage for several years, just sitting, not being able to toss it.

    Good thing too, because now I have a 1.5 year old and he *loves* it. Wrote a little program to draw XOR'd circles on the screen any time he hits a key.

    He's figured out how to turn it on, turn it off, and occasionally when the screen goes blank, knows where to tap it on the side to bring it back.

    Good little machine!

  • Old School Mac Upgrades - Soldering Required (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Embedded Geek ( 532893 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @11:59AM (#12951397) Homepage
    least-productive tendency: pre-emptive and often arbitrary constraint of end-user options

    While that plan was folly for Apple, it worked out pretty well for third market folks. Back in 1986, I was working at an independent Mac repair shop in La Mirada called "Computer Quick" that could upgrade a 128K to 512K or even (gasp!) 2 Megabytes.

    I absolutely hated the 512K jobs. First, you would take a pair of cutters and cut the 16 64K x 1 bit RAM chips off the board, leaving the pins in place and usually making a mess of the thing. Next, you'd use a desoldering iron (we had an industrial grade one with a pump, thankfully. None of this squeeze bulb garbage, thank heavens) to remove the pins and clean out the holes. Inevitably, you'd wind up pulling up a trace or shorting something out here, so you had to inspect it very carefully. Finally, you'd solder the new chips (128K x 1 bit) in and solder in a thumb sized daughter board that would handle all the address line magic. Then power it up and keep your fingers crossed for "Happy Mac" to show his face.

    In comparison, the 2 Meg upgrades were a piece of cake. We used daughter boards called "Monster Macs" [mactech.com] from a San Diego company named Levco. Since there was no expansion slot, you'd cut the 68000 out and add a socket. Then the daughter board (which had its own 68000) clipped right on top, neat as can be. Levco also had a controller board that could clip on top of that for SCSI hard drives - a "grandaughter" board.

    When we had accumlated a stack of clipped 68000 chips, we'd file off the edges and drill a couple of holes to make keychains. Very cool. I had mine for a decade before it got stolen. Only worked on the plastic cased chips, though. The ceramics would crack.

    Levco was known for a pretty cool sense of humor. When you powered the thing up, "Happy Mac" had fangs (since they'd had to hack the Mac ROMS to make it work anyways). Also, there were four PALs on the board labeled Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. My boss told me some of the Levco engineers had wanted to name "Zeppo" "Karl" but he'd warned their management about the fallout this might've caused. Remember, the Berlin Wall was still up and Reagan was in office.

    I know that these days a megabyte seems absolutely trivial, but back then it was an absolute phenomenon. You simply never heard the term "Megabyte" except with hard drives and even that was a pretty new thing. Kind of like gigabyte drives a few years back. And its utility was beyond question - Levco let slip that Apple's finance department in Cuppertino used Monster Macs for their accounting.

    Alas, all good things come to an end. Computer Quick's was surface mount technology in the Mac Plus. I was ecstatic the first time I saw SIM memory - no more soldering! Our chief tech tried to fix a trace on the logic board and it took him twelve hours once he got done repairing the damage he'd caused. He handed it over to our boss and told him, "That's it. We're out of business."

    I enrolled in a four year school and decided to go into software instead of continuing as a tech as I'd originally planned. Computer Quick was out of business by my sophmore year. The era of garage based computer businesses was over.

  • C64 vs. 128k Mac: You can guess who won (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 5n3ak3rp1mp ( 305814 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:05PM (#12951997) Homepage
    I was actually looking to get a Commodore 64 like everyone else in the neighborhood when my family and I walked into a random computer store in December of '84. It turned out to be an Apple store (thank God). I was 12, our family didn't have a computer yet (although I had taken some computer classes and shown strong interest), I hadn't heard too much about Macs at the time. So the young sales guy does the "completely blew me away" Mac demo, I was smitten. When we wondered what time it was and he pulled out the Alarm Clock desk accessory, I went from "smitten" to "sheer desperate hardware-lust mania". I have never before, or since (sadly), had an experience like that for a man-made object, and I feel bad for people who were not a part of that, it was so amazing. It was way more expensive than a C64, but my parents luckily didn't know any better (and luckily had the money) because when I said "Mom! Dad! WE HAVE TO GET THIS MACHINE", they bought the whole shebang, mac, imagewriter, even a 300 baud modem (the latter for $300!). I proceeded to kill most of the next summer (such a nerd...) learning Microsoft BASIC and playing various early Mac games, and dialing up various BBS'es. This is a kid who used to spend his summers on the beach...

    I think it's why I stuck with Apple through the dark years of the mid-90's, and use OS X to this day (although, alas, my job currently is coding on Windows, and has been for some time). I just had a high opinion of Apple's whole point, and I figured they'd eventually pull through. I suppose it must be some crazy sort of love, why else would you stick around "through thick and thin"? Why else would I wait for the Mac version of a game instead of just caving and buying a PC? Stubborn loyalty with lots of feeling behind it... which all started with that initial rush. Sounds strangely like a good relationship.

    The irony is, I am currently getting multiple emails from Microsoft requesting an interview for their AppDev group. I guess I've been doing development using Microsoft tools for long enough now that it's worth something to the Borg ;) Thing is, my heart is not in it (literally) and I'm at a point where I'd like to work with some non-Microsoft tech for a change, even at reduced pay. I frequent non-Microsoft sites (like this one) all the time, I'm always a closeted Apple (and to a slightly lesser extent, *nix) fanboy. I'd love an Apple dev job (or at least any job where I could use Macs for work) but the only opportunity I had so far (besides striking out on my own- thank you for your inspiring presentation PDF, Wil Shipley [arstechnica.com]!) was working in the dungeon of some office building for Nikon, having no design input whatsoever. No thanks...

    Idealism is costly ;) Not to mention, I'm only achieving mediocre "performance" in my jobs, and I wonder if my "Apple affair" has anything to do with it!

  • Harken to the days of old! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @01:38PM (#12952235) Homepage Journal
    "the Macintosh design team crammed an unbelievable amount of power into the 64K bytes of ROM in the form of tightly written, highly optimized machine code. In doing so, the team provided standard user interfaces, so that most application programs on the Mac will be used in similar forms."
    While certainly not just applying to the Mac's of yore. What happened to those days where the true art of bare metal programming was the pinnacle of geekdom? Just think how much faster and efficient todays software would be if we applied this philosophy to programming.
    Of course things are more complex and hardware considerably more variable in these days of Open Source , cross - platform development etc. Wouldnt it be nice if we at least tried a little harder to avoid the bloat - just because machines get more powerful it doesnt mean you should let your code slip ... does it ?

  • Unix PC review (1986) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @02:43PM (#12952884) Homepage
    If anyone cares, the 1986 Byte review of the AT&T Unix PC is also available [ajwm.net].

    Not quite the historic impact of the Mac, but interesting in its own right. It was certainly the first and may still be the only "Unix PC" ever offered (discounting various Linux offerings and the current MacOS X as "not really UNIX®").

  • A column, not a review (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hudsucker ( 676767 ) on Thursday June 30, 2005 @05:40PM (#12954961)
    This is a reprint of a column, with commentary about the mac. It isn't the official review.

    The introduction and review was in the February 1984 issue, with the Mac on the cover. This is the article for the geek; it includes block diagrams of the architecture and pictures of the motherboard.

    The Feb 1984 issue also included an interview with the designers.

    I was hoping TFA would be the February article, because it actually is very interesting. In it, they make a big deal about the justifcation for certain design decisions, most notably the lack of expansion slots. Instead, they included "virtual slots", in the form of "high speed" serial ports (RS-422).

    Remember that they were trying to solve the problems of the Apple ][, one of was how the expansion boards fitted into the memory map. By eliminating expansion slots, they hoped that it would improve stability, by ensuring that the developers would have a fixed machine environment to work with. They thought that by including all the ports a user would ever need, there would be no need for expansion slots.

    Then a couple of years later, Apple decided that expansion slots were good (with the Macintosh II).

    It is kind of funny that with the iMac, Apple came all the way around back to the same port-expansion ideas that were discussed in the Febuary 1984 article and interview.

    If anyone can find the Feb 1984 article and interview online, it is a good read.

    • This is a reprint of a column, with commentary about the mac. It isn't the official review.

      No, actually, this is the official review. The February 1984 issue of BYTE (I have the issue in my files) contained the Macintosh product introduction and first look articles. Phil Lemmons, editor-in-chief of BYTE, knowing that I had purchased my own Macintosh, asked if I would like to do the official review, and I did; it was the first article I ever wrote for BYTE.

      I did later have a column in BYTE, but that didn'

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