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Making The Macintosh 1.0
beekman1 writes: "Stanford has up their first edition of Making the Macintosh. Where many articles deal with the political aspects of this period (Steve Jobs taking over, etc.) this one has the technical details like the evolution of the mouse from lab testing to production device. Link aquired from ArsTechnica"
Cute. Actually, very funny. But seriously, let me tell you a little story. Back about 6 or 7 years ago, I had a client that sold a minicomputer-based software package, and was developing a microcomputer- based package to complement it. I was working on the larger system at the time. One day, I was working away, when I happened to notice a conversation going on over on the microweenie side of the office. The programmers were talking about a problem they had encountered in testing wherein if one person read a record, then another person read the same record, changed it and wrote it back to the database, and then the first person made their changes and wrote their version of the record out, the second person's changes would be lost. They seemed to think that this was something new and unusual, and needed some kind of new solution to overcome it. I called it record locking, and took it for granted.
Here's a quote I was going to use in submitting a story about the Vintage Computer Festival (until someone beat me to it):
The point is, you need to know your past, or you will needlessly make the same mistakes your predecessors made.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
The early Apple designers were aware of the wide area systems that were in place, such as the ARPANet, the question was how to develop applications on top of it. They even had the concept of POPs and ISPs down (calling them "A Nodes").
... This was a terrible strategy, of course, because it did not seamlessly link Macintoshes with IBM-compatibles. "We looked at Gassée and said, 'Who is this guy?'"
Where the disconnect happened was later on, when Apple's managers chose to build a proprietary network system and actively discourage connections to other systems. Wired 5.11 had a big expose of how Apple basically told corporate MIS to go to hell when people were requesting hetrogenius networking for the Mac:
Just as he had dismissed the importance of licensing, Gassée never saw the need for Apple's computers to communicate with anything except other Apple computers.
...
Jean-Louis Gassée had won nearly every fight. He was the undisputed master of engineering, the person who had almost always gotten his way. Now he would put another indelible stamp on Apple, one that would have repercussions as grave as the decision not to license.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Wow, $400 for a clunky looking box-mouse thing! How far we've come in 25 years! I mean now I've got a sexy looking curvy-with-scroll-wheel-and-red-light-mouse thing. It enhances my computer experience so much.
Oh, and the of course the marketing has improved.
(Normally I am quite critical of Apple, the Mac and Steve Jobs himself. This is one situation where I feel I need to make an exception....)
Steve Jobs may have a reputation as a control freak, but even he didn't always get his way , especially when it came to the Mac.
Many of us know about his demand for 3 mouse buttons, but few know about his instistance that the first Mac be priced at $1,299. For what they were selling at the time, it would have truly been a computer for the rest of us, and would have lived up to all the hype.
However Scully decided he wanted to make a lot of money. His idea was "forget about things like userbase, and pay attention to stock prices!"
The introductory price of $2,499 was an insult to everything the Mac was supposed to be about.
Jobs complained to Scully, who along with Jean Louis Gasse (yep, THAT one) raved about how wonderful it would be when Apple was charging $10,000 for Macs . Which they did.
It only went downhill from there.....
The marketshare rose slowly, then fell dramatically. Gasse fought licensing of the Mac for years, then bitched endlessly when Apple refused to give Be their specs.
Then, 2 years ago, Jobs finally got his chance to ship a $1,299 All-In-One Mac. Finally laying to rest the demons from when he first started to lose control.....
actually, if you ever use the mac, you'll know that it has heaps of useful error messages.
/* inside a comment makes me nervous.'
"Sorry, A system error occured." is the one that appears in a modal dialog with a bomb. No other Macintosh error messages do this. (IIRC, the bomb is actually in ROM on older systems).
The sad mac is useful: it tells of a ROM failure, and there is a technote (don't know the number) that explains exactly what all the sad mac error messages mean. Most of them are to do with hardware faliures, and are usually accompanied by the 'chimes of doom' (basically a short sample played instead of the chord, older Macs had a slice of Beethoven, my Centris plays a drum solo and G1 and G2 powermacs have the sound of a car crashing!).
The best error messages come from an old version of MPW, and includes this classic: 'call me paranoid, but seeing
life is a canvas/and the paint is hope and promise/the world is ours/no one can ever take it from us.
Consider this: ...
Communications Network Impact
" A real-time conversation involves two (or more) people with terminals carrying on an exchange. Such a conversation could easily last for hours. Or two computers could be co-operating on a problem, with the same duration of contact. Such usage could, in the face of a million users, tie up large portions of phone company equipment all out of proportion to the numbers using the system. "
Wouldn't it have been amazing if apple was at the leading edge of networking in the 1980s and included BITNET with their little mac instead of pouring all those resources into their own networking thing? Imagine where we'de be today with the world "discovering" the net 15 years earlier?
The main question is this: what will millions of people do with them?
What a silly question... look at pr0n, steal songs from the RIAA, and download code to rip DVD's of course! Oh, and read /. too :)