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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.
(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.....