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Molasses let your mid-1980s vintage Macs run at 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, or 1.0 x normal speed.

At 0.25 speed you could actually see the windows redraw.

It was a great April Fools joke.

Some people still use Mac Pluses and such as web servers. So if a Mac Plus can do it, a recent laptop computer can do it, even if it's not the most powerful solution.

Of course, the Outbound, a Mac clone that used semi-legal SE ROM chips, was the first true Mac laptop...or something to that effect. I LOVED mine, and their customer support was the absolute BEST...which may explain why they're now kaput.

http://www.jagshouse.com/outbound.html

and

http://www.lowendmac.com/clones/outbound.html

Gee, I wonder who that is making easy use of the Lisa in photo 7 ...

I think it's kind of cool how in the Lisa ad below:

http://www.jagshouse.com/images/lisa4.jpg

The real world images above the icons look like the photorealic icons used in OS X (no shit, yes they're real, but i.e. the lighting, camera angle, etc.)

I kid, I kid.

Anyway, here's a picture of the orgional ad: http://www.jagshouse.com/lisabrochure.html

He gives no examples of proper interfaces

"Radical" barely describes them. If memory serves, there was no file system. One floppy was one document. All file operations were done with a single key, called Disk. If you had just inserted a floppy it loaded a document. Otherwise it saved the current one.

A document was a text stream. If you wanted database-like functionality you used the incremental search, which you triggered with keys close to your thumbs because that was good ergonomics.

If you wanted to do anything remotely elaborate, the Swyftcard had escapes to Applesoft Basic, creating a huge chasm between routine and advanced functionality.

Debatable as hell, but explains why he sees OS X and XP as more similar than different.

From what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.

Perhaps, but the Canon Cat was the closest product to his vision -- it was his baby.

Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical

Well, if by GUI you mean bit-mapped graphics, then the Canon Cat had a GUI. But I think most people would look askance at calling it a GUI when only one quarter of the WIMP set was used. And character-based menus for applications had been around for a while by then.

Here's how a Cat evangelist describes the interface Raskin thought was optimal:

"The Cat's user interface made this computer unique when compared to other computers. The user interface was based on a simple text editor in which all data was seen as a long stream of text broken into pages. Special keyboard keys allowed the user to invoke various functions. An extra key titled "Use Front" acted as a control key...."

"When you powered on the Cat you were presented with a display that looked like a typewriter with a sheet of paper. Black characters appeared on a white background. A ruler bar appeared at the bottom of the screen...."

"The Leap keys also controlled text selection (indicated by hilighting), deletion, copying, and moving. If the selected text was a mathematical formula one keystroke with a special key calculated the mathematical result and the answer appeared on the screen with a dotted underline overlaying the original formula. If the selected text was a computer program written in either FORTH or 68000 assembly language, then a special key let you execute the program (I don't think many Cat users did any Cat programming). You performed mail merges by selecting columnar text data and pressing another special key. Repetitive command sequences could be automated by assigning commands and text strings to the Cat's numeric keys. One special key let you dial a selected telephone number either for voice or modem communications. Data received from the built-in modem flowed into your text as if you had typed it...."

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Raskin's idea of the ideal user interface boiled down to a souped-up typewriter. Calling it a GUI seems overly charitable.

And don't get me started on the lunacy -- still popular with some Forth programmers -- that you don't really need a file system or file format compatiblity with other computers. Arghh!

Tyler

While you're probably right with the "widely-marketed" proviso, the computer that was probably the purest expression of his approach is the Canon Cat.

Jef Raskin, who is often mis-labelled as "The Father of the Macintosh" (despite the fact that he left the Mac team three years before the Mac's unveiling) has been a notorious critic of Apple. He bashes the leadership, the GUI, and the hardware. The more he does this, the harder it gets to construe it as anything other than sour grapes. Especially since his only real attempt at designing "his" computer interface was the complete flop of the Canon Cat

Note to Jef: if your design is so awesome, make it happen! If it's that much better, I'm sure you'll get more than enough sales to rake in the bucks! I know that I, for one, would love to see what it is you consider to be the ideal interface!

MacQuarium, baby!!!

Honestly, other than using hard drive platters as chimes in my Computer Store, this has been it.

MacMinix already exists. Unfortunately it only runs as an application on top of a Classic MacOS system (I assume it runs on MacOS 9, I haven't run it since MacOS 6 or 7).

OT, but this /. obsession with case modification -- a practice which i can't relate to -- makes me think of the classic story of Andy Ihnakto's 'anti-case-mod':

He did the reverse -- he kept the case intact, but substituted something else more interesting for the innards. Specifically, he made an aquarium out of his old Mac 512. (no pics, but if you hunt around on google there's lots of 'em people have done)

Who needs a fish screensaver when you can have real ones swimming around...

Raskin had a completely different model for a user interface. He didn't want a mouse or a GUI. His concept was the ultimate keyboard-driven word processor. The result was not the Mac, but the Canon Cat, which lasted six months on the market before being discontinued.

Exactly--I think emulation has become so big precisely because of the nostalgia associated with those quirky old games we all used to play, or just the quirky old OSes we made do with. After all, some of the first emulators were for things like the Atari 2600, ancient technology with horrid graphics and pitiful resolution by today's standards--but we remember fondly those old games.

No one has mentioned this one yet, so I thought I'd post it right toward the top since I LOVE it so much. It is bar none my favorite piece of software--I use it every day. It's Basilisk II, the open-source project that emulates a 68k-based Macintosh.

And it emulates a 68k Mac perfectly, only faster than the originals on my old K6-2 400. I can't wait to see it speed along when I finally upgrade--AMD, VIA, please hurry up and get dual Athlon solutions out the door, okay? The proggie is even optimized for dual processor machines; you can run it on one particular CPU, and use the other for other tasks.

This brings me to the one drawback: it tries to eat 100% of CPU time, from what I understand even on fast machines--but not a problem if you stay inside the emulated Mac while it's running, like I do, or have a dual-processor machine.

But Basilisk II is superior in most respects to the closed-source, commercial Mac emulators, SoftMac 2000 and Fusion--it's much more stable, crashing less frequently than a real 68k Mac, whereas Fusion and SoftMac crash more often.

I highly recommend that anyone who's ever used an old Mac and liked it or some of its software, check out Basilisk II at its homepage. If you run it under a Windoze platform, the homepage for the Windows port is here.

The great part is that Mac OS versions through 7.5.3 and its update to 7.5.5 are free for download from Apple's own website, so that you can run a real MacOS unlike with the runtime environment Executor some here may have tried. Links to Apple's FTP to get the OS are on each Basilisk II homepage, but the directions for installing MacOS on a HFS partition image file seem a bit more detailed at the Windoze version's homepage.

The only thing you need is a Mac 68k ROM, which you can download from a real Mac you own (instructions are given for how to copy this to a file), or you could pirate it from the Net. A ROM from a Quadra works best, since it's a 32-bit clean ROM unlike some of the older 16-bit "dirty" ROMs. Not that I condone piracy, but...you can easily find quadra.rom with some creative guesswork at Google.

It's been great to have that old Mac I used to use at the college computer lab in '95 back, and better than ever. I've been playing Barrack, one of my favorite games of all time. I've been playing that quaint old classic Risk, simple but addictive as it was in the early 90s. And Basilisk II even allows your virtual Mac to use your PC's internet connection, so grab Netscape 3.04 from the Netscape archives and have deja vu all over again (I still think the rounded look of the old versions of Netscape for the Mac are better than most of today's browsers look).

Sorry for running on so long, but I love it. The only problem has been tracking down older versions of Mac apps and games--I decided I wanted to make my virtual Mac an authentic 1995 beast, not only was it my first year of college, it's the year the Net really exploded into the mainstream. I've been collecting these old apps that were common back then, and eventually, even though it's a copyright violation, I'm going to release a 150MB HFS partition file on the Net containing a snapshot of 1995, with all the common software that's now difficult to find. Much of it I had to find by poring through old FTP mirrors, like this and from here. The olf NCSA Telnet and NCSA Mosaic ftp archives are still there, and have period versions of common utilities.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share something about my favourite emulator. Ciao.

The link should be: http://www.jagshouse.com/OSX.html. Notice the addition of the "s".

Run an emulator. Most of the time, you can even find an emulator for your own system that you can run on your own system, like vMac, a Mac Plus emulator, which runs on Macs as well as Windows95/98/NT.