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Macintosh's 1984 Debut
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."
Well, that's a mighty tall stack. Maybe if you'd purchased the original Macintosh with 1 Yen notes, we'd have some equivalency here. (No, I can't be bothered to look up historical exchange rates and do the math. So sue me.)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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. Can't quite say the same about PC's as we're chucking crates of those that are only 3-5 years old.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've never seen the famous Superbowl Mac ad. Can anyone provide a link to it online?
I remember all of this, and one of the things quite a few people said at the time
"This is the end of apple. They're dead"
heh. Apple. Going out of business since 1977
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....
My Mac is still about the size of a stack of paper, and still has a little more power than the basic IBM PC. You'd think in 20 years we'd have seen some progress!
Well, my mid tower fits that description. At a glance, I'd say it's about the size of a 4000 sheet stack.
And the great thing is, most of those old Macs still function. I'd like to see you bring out a working PC from 1984.
'that is the size of a stack of paper and, for about the same price'
Stacks of paper can come in all different sizes and shapes. The recycling plant near my house has a stack of newsprint big enough to bury a bus. That's like saying, "I have a jar big enough to hold the volume of air inside it."
Unknown host pong.
The Macintosh appealed to everyone who had the cash really, remember, 1984 still had the ring of niche markets and professional roles in computing, games demoted to the Commodore 64 amongst others
p ag e=personal&subpage=mac
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!
I like Apple's remake of their famous 1984 ad. This time the woman wears an iPod.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
http://www.peoplesdaily.com
...to stay on their toes. It's the original un-Microsoft, long before Linux rolled round. And the non-Intel trend keeps them innovating too.
As this article made clear, there was an
infectious and inspirational spirit behind the
birth of the Macintosh, which has lasted to
this day, as does the continuing chorus of
industry doubters predicting trouble for
Apple. At least some things in the computer
industry never seem to change.
Steve Jobs is betting the new M
acintosh will help win the holy war against
IBM.
To know there were people who actually bought sex for $2,495 in the 80s!
When one takes the Mac home, said one market watcher, ``It's not a one-night stand. You fall in love with it.''
This is just my opinion, but I think that Mac has always been geared towards the artist, while IBM has always been aimed at engineers. Using either of these machines one could see the begining of this trend, and now in the year 2004 it is still true. I do not believe that either machine is better than the other, and they never were. The difference between the two is more right-brain left brain.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/home.shtml
Funny, I never thought Steve was the type to whore about his achievements on Slashdot.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
'and is directed by a mouse - a handheld device that, when slid across a table top, moves the cursor on the Mac's screen'
Interesting...
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
http://www.apple-history.com/movies/1984.mov
Plus, a neato article on it here: http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm
The Welkin: Online Music Reviews
I know it's corny, but there really has never been a system that has rolled with the punches as well as the Mac. I hope for twenty more years and beyond.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
After all these years, I still wonder two things:
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.
I created this account just so I could comment on this story
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).
What a fucking original sentiment!
+5 Informasightful!
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.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
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.
Except for the moving parts, most any PC ( of any type ) will last for a hundred years...
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/1984/
There's just one subtle difference...
Goo goo g'joob.
From the article: "Within the next few months, Microsoft Inc., a Bellvue, Wash. software publisher closely allied with IBM, is scheduled to introduce a spreadsheet package for making financial projections, a graphing package and the Basic programming language."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
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 for further information.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
It's all about gameplay, not just pretty graphics!
Peace
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.
Flamebait my ass. The Amiga was more powerfull, and CHEAPER too! That's fact! Oh, and it had 4096 colors at a time when the Mac had *2* and the Pc had *4*.
Not to mention the ability to process RAW NTSC signals making it the supreme video editing computer TO THIS DAY.
In fact, the amiga computer actually won the top prize at Macworld one year!!! Oh the embarassment! It's not even a MAC!
But I digress, do to the Amiga what you can only do with mod points, rather than facts.
My next computer will be an Apple *Mac or *Book.
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.
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!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
If Macs appeal to the feminine side of the world and homosexual males does that mean that lesbians like PC's???
For other perspectives, see Creative Computing magazine: Apple Mac review and Compute magazine: Apple's Macintosh Unveiled
I disagree with your opinion, well atleast with macs in 2004. I think now days they are geared twords both engineers *and* artists. What more could an engineer want than a portable unix machine that is purdy to look at to boot?
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Around 233.80 Yen/US Dollar in 1984. I would give a link but I looked it up on Reuters. If you have a Reuters terminal just use RIC JPY=.
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.
Oh wait... /. wasn't around in 1984; heck most /. readers weren't around in 1984.
"in protest he surrender his controlling hares in the company."
Damn those controlling hares...
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. 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 when AmigaOS4 is actually released and not a "Beta that will be here next month!!" you can only be 5 years behind the times.
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?
Morons! May the metamoderators get you!
...for about the same price, contains more power than the basic IBM PC.
An Apple product for a competitive price? Well well, how about them apples?
Apple's real start in 1984 in front of the public came in the form of the now famous Super Bowl ad. Now, 20 years removed, will there be another big ad during the game?
This link was provided to us in one of the iPod rumour threads.
Peace!
a year ago and haven't looked back. Unix functionality with a nice GUI. I use the Mac for development (perl and C utilities), music and video production, and plain old web surfing and email. I have never really had a computer in the past that could handle all of my different interests w/ this much ease.
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.
I don't think they got the Mac right until the Mac SE came out in '86 or so. The original 128K Mac was too slow and small for its ambitions. The other funky thing about them was their power supply. It was cooled by convection, which made sure the power supplies died easily and often. I think the other forgotten aspect of the Mac was the LaserWriter which made the WYSIWYG metaphor work.
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.
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.
I've never owned an Apple/Mac, and don't particularly want to, but this is an important anniversary. Apple has innovated more over the years than just about any other computer company. Apple has had it's ups and downs, but it could be argued that they've been more loyal to their customers than anyone could have expected. The fact that so many of their customers are loyal to them - well, that should tell you something about what kind of company this is. Hats off to Apple for 20 years of the Mac!
A good question, since the Mac was launched when there was a real window of opportunity. My first PC at work cost something like $6,000 and this was a "cheap clone" at the time. But it had a 20 Mb hard disk and that meant we could do real work on it. The Mac, with its 128Kb RAM and single floppy, was just too slow for serious work.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
My favorite quotation from the article: "Because the machine now has one drive and 128K of RAM, several sources said users might have to 'swap' diskettes..." Oh, brother. Did we ever.
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).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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 when AmigaOS4 is actually released and not a "Beta that will be here next month!!" you can only be 5 years behind the times.
Well, you could run Amiga software on a G4 with MorphOS on a Pegasos (yes, it's not the original AmigaOS, but then OS X isn't the same as the original MacOS either - that was ditched a few years ago).
Here is a good writeup on how the advertisement came about and what the initial internal reaction to the ad was in late 1983.
Well, with any CMOS based part made in the last 15 years or so, do not be surprised if it starts failing after much less than your 100 years. At least if it was turned on for that time.
There is this problem of aluminum migration that happens when current runs through the gates of the semiconductor. This will eventually either cause shorts (most of the time) or opens (rare, but getting less rare as the design sizes get smaller and temps get larger) In fact, one of the other great things about copper is that it migrates much more slowly.
Many 24x7 certified CMOS parts are assumed to fail in the 10 to 15 year time frame. You can increase the time frame by making larger features in the part but only to a certain extent as you also need to up the voltage with the size of the gate features and, well, that just helps increase the migration issues.
Some of the newer low-K (SOI) stuff can significantly improve life span, especially when coupled with lower voltages and copper rather than aluminum.
Win95=Mac '84
In terms of interface- perhaps. I used some Macs in the early 90s and (IIRC) they had next to no multitasking (when did this change?).
No, Win95 gave us 'proper' multitasking, which Amiga owners had to wait until *1985* for.
Uh... hang on... Win95 = AmigaOS '85.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
can it run Linux? (it had to be said!) :)
The Macintosh's Twisted Truth, 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, which details how Microsoft support the Mac from day one.
I remember drolling over those things at the local Mac store... incredibly expensive. Still are relatively.
Yeah, I mean really, screw games. Buy a console. But why the one-button mouse? Is there an ideology behind that? Is their reasoning simply "ease of use?"
Such a language did exist, but it was eventually called Object Pascal and was released in 1985 by Apple
Don't get me wrong, I think light-use-DRM is fair (e.g. iTunes Music Store) ... I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Apple had double digit marketshare by 2010.
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 nuts about fighting "pirates" will force them into it.
Three Squirrels
I still have two Mac 128k machines in the garage and they still run. They were amazing machines in their day. Compared to the green-screen PC's running cumbersome software with manuals inches thick, the Mac was a beautiful machine to use. The sense of control and interaction was so immediate!
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.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
i have a circa 1984 macintosh i picked up at a garage sale or surplus at some point. i can't remember when. i have so many now - 9 compact "toaster" models of various descriptions.
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 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.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Here's the more interesting question: What is Apple doing for the 20 year celebration ?
Do they have any special product launches or other activities organised ? Can we expect a surprise on January 24 ?
But he wasnt looking at the past, the artical was a little retrospective, but no ones gonna walk in and say a Mac 128 is the be all and the end all the way the amiga user in timewarp will.
however my MacSE just rocks.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
EOM
Boy I just love Slashdot's lameness filter. Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Flamebait my ass. The Amiga was more powerfull, and CHEAPER too! That's fact! Oh, and it had 4096 colors at a time when the Mac had *2* and the Pc had *4*.
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.
I'm not sure the whole legal status behind it, but I have been told that there was some sort of trademark or contractual agreement that prevents Apple from making a multi button mouse. I personally have been using a mutli button trackball for 10 years now. Would I like to see Apple make one? Yes, but it doesn't bother me too much. But it irks me not to have it on a PowerBook. Ack!
I'm almost ready to become a zealot but I don't know whether to become a Mac, Linux, or BSD zealot.
Each operating has its advantages but surely one has be more rounded then the rest. I have been told that, like sports, I can't be a zealot of all the operating systems because you can't classify yourself as a zealot if that was the case. I mean it would be like saying I'm a Redskins and a Cowboys fan.
BSD I have been told is a dying operating system but it still seems alive to me. Linux is, I've been told by IBM commercials, a fast growing operating system that will one day transcend the heavens, whatever that means. We all know about the Macs and the Switch commercials.
Help me decide fellas.
It's the same reason why McDonalds is the most popular restaurant in the world. Most people do not buy "the best", they go with whatever is "cheap enough" and "good enough," and suck up the inherent inferiority to save a few pennies.
Apple will not -- and probably cannot-- compete in that territory. At least not without severely compromising the essence of the company and the brand.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
And 20 years later, Apple still has the same percentage of market share........not much. They have (in my opinion) a superior product for the most part, but by keeping it proprietary, they pretty much killed it off. Such as Sony did with the betamax.
Ack!!!
Macs have always been used for science. Apple has always been prominent in education; for decades, they were the dominant PC in academia. To name just one pivotal example, NCSA@UIUC build Mosaic so Macs could present networked visualizations of their supercomputer simulations, kicking off the Web we know and (some of us) love.
--
make install -not war
I've been looking for a link to video of Jobs' unveiling of the Macintosh at the 1984 annual company meeting. Any one know where to find it?
... two weeks ago. A 15" G4 AL laptop w/ a superdrive. It is god's machine. This is by far the coolest computer I've ever owned. The ease and utility of a mac and the versatility and power of unix. It is like NeXT reincarnated and better. In the last twenty years, no offense bill, but M$ has gone from bad to worse. Linux is still cool, however.
-Sean
Where can I buy one? Sorry, couldn't resist.
But some of your arguments are bad.
Media Center PC -- What's that? I've yet to see anyone who has one.
I remember talking about Linux in 1994, the the PC (Mostly DOS) Guys were going yea I don't know anyone but you who is using it so I guess it isn't that great.
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.
This reminds me back in 1994 again when explaining the wonders of E-Mail and the internet. Then people are going, gee that sounds really backward why not just give them a telephone call it is a lot easier and you get a response back plus you can transmit your feeling a lot better.
Pocket PC -- Oh, huge innovation there. Apple beat them. Palm beat them. Handspring beat them. That's just another ripoff.
Now in 1995 or so. I was showing the X-Windows interface then they said (although sightly incorrectly) Well that is just a copy of Windows and Mac it is just an other ripoff.
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.
Well I am sorry they got rid of that feature for you but they put others in. It reminds me of the old debates on which was better GUI or Command lines. For DOS and Windows. They kept on going well DOS does this and this better then Windows while completely ignoring all the other advancement that windows had to offer.
You are just trying to prove to yourself that Linux or Mac or whatever products you use are better then the competition. I am not a fan of MS and I don't like the direction their innovation is going. But they are innovating. With competion from Apple and Linux MS is starting to get hammered and begging to improve their products more and innovate them more and more now and both Linux and Apple is doing the same. It is called competion and it is good. So stop Panicking when ever Microsoft does something better then its comptitiors because they will do something else to make their product better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ohhh but...
Quite a few early Macs died quickly suffering from a sereous defect. A poor powersuply I believe.
Early PCs had the same problem however for sligtly diffrent reasons.
The Mac power supply didn't supply enough power for the computer so it slowly burnt out suffering the same problems of the Channel F and Commodore 64.
However the C64 power supply would last a very long time and most units are still working today. They are also easly to replace making it easy to just buy a new one. It was a tolerable nusence for a cheap computer.
The Mac powersuply like the Channel F PS gave out quickly and was not easly replaced.
In all three examples (and the PC) the power supply death could take out other parts killing the computer.
The PC power supply issue was diffrent. It was actually over rated for the PC BUT the PC was expandable the original Mac was not. For power supplys this meant a PCs power requirements could increase over time as each upgrade requires more power. The user who is fussy and not wanting to open the case won't be upgrading it eather.
If the power supply needs to be replaced it's not much more complex than adding any other hardware.
Something that long bothered me about the PCs is that they use uveprom or at least they did in the past. Most people just call them eproms I know but the fullly qualified name is nessisary to seperate it from eeproms.
Most manufacured computers use proms or roms. ROMs are manufactured with the data installed proms are manufactured blank but burn once and stay that way. eproms are erasable. uveproms are erasable by ultra violet light.
A small amount of sunlight is UV and that silver (or worse white) tab over the window dosen't reflect all the UV light. After a few years enough light leaks through to cause some of the bits on the uveprom to erase.
PC motherboard manufactuers prefered to use uveproms so they could recycle BIOS roms with old code instead of tossing them.
(This also was due to the nature of PCs at the time forever having the BIOS tweeked)
Apple however used ROMs. So did IBM so I think you'll find the original IBM brand name PCs still work. However you'll find those PCs have a bunch of upgrade rom chips inserted. IBMs method did not require tossing the old roms but just adding new ones.
Recovering old PCs is simply a matter of reburnning the BIOS and it wouldn't hurt if you got the latest upgrades while your at it many old bios required you used a dos application to set up the system settings while newer PC bios roms have that in the software. And a few PC upgrades are entirely BIOS upgrades. Wouldn't kill to have ISA plug and play support added to an old 386 now would it?
I think the "PC Clone" makers really didn't care if your PC lasted 5 years. In fact they'd be thrilled if it didn't. If you didn't eventually upgrade they'd be out of business.
Yes you personally.. Nobody else.. Not me or her but YOU. Just kidding. It dosen't matter if you personally upgrade so long as most users upgrade and little things like this make sure the majority of the market dosen't sit back and say "Welp this is all I need thanks"... That sort of thing nearly killed Atari.
I don't actually exist.
This is just my opinion, but I think that Mac has always been geared towards the artist, ...
Back in the 80s, Apple did have a toe-hold in business computing. It was not uncommon to see Macs on top manager's desks. CEOs don't like looking incompetent at anything. People who worried about acronyms like DSS and EIS were well into Macs.
It certainly appealed to people with an artistic bent, although it was not until the days of the Mac II and postscript printers that graphic artists could really start to do serious work on the Mac. But what it really appealed to was people with the clout to have one bought for them.
Apple might have conquered the world. Instead it only changed it.
The problem was that this was the era of exponential growth in the rate of computer use - an unsustainable phenomenon which was bound to leave somebody with world domination in desktop operating systems. I had a friend who had a computer dealership back then and typical orders came by the dozen. One off orders were the exception. Now that we are in steady state for computer usage rates, the idea of paying a premium for usability seems good. In any case these days Mac prices are pretty much on par with comparable quality PCs (if such a thing can be said to exist). But back then if I had 30K$ in my budget to equip people with computer, I could equip 20 people with PCs for the price of equipping a dozen with Macs. No matter how much money I had to spend on computers, back then you'd always have peole waiting in line for more. The lure of equipping a few more people, especially if their opinions didn't matter tha much, was irresistable. So it wasn't uncommon for companies to buy both: a few Macs for the people with status, and DOS PCS "for the rest of us".
Which means that while times were good at Apple, they were very good at Microsoft, and Apple's days as a business machine vendor were numbered. As soon as there was a Windows version that was good enough (3.0), Macs started to disappear from the executive suite (although no doubt they hang on in some places).
Apple had two strategic advantages: its position in the upper echelon of management, and its attraction to the most innovative developers. It proceeded to squander both by arrogance and disinterest in its business relationships. However, the company did continue to innovate which was fortunate. It's hard to imagine this, but the idea of the Mac as a machine geared to artists was a reinvention of the product. It was made possible by the LaserWriter, an inspred combination of a laser priting engine (the same as was in the original HP LaserJets), PostScript and built-in (if primitive) networking. It was this product that made the Mac the artist's machine.
Were it not for the LaserWriter, the dire predictions of Apple's demise would almost certainly have come true, since its market would have been restricted to a few well heeled user interface afficianados.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My Dad has been using his Mac Plus problem-free for about 17 years. He has a G4 that he uses for his graphic design work, but when he needs to do billing or add/search contacts he turns to the Mac Plus running his do-everything Hypercard stack running under System 6.0.8.
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.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Where in the world did you get the idea that Macs were "rarely used in scientific research". You're obviously not a scientist. As the former software ediitor of Science magazine, I can assumer you that Macs are far more prevalent in scientific labs than they are in the rest of the world. What an idiot!
I disagree, I live down the street from Brown University and they've had a TON of macs there since the mid 1980s. Several of my neighbors were professors or researchers and they all used Macs, because back then getting a PC with similar horsepower, networking, color display, and WYSIWYG printing was a pipe dream. Remember that the Mac has had 32-bit processing long before Intel caught on, and that mattered a lot to the scientific community. The macs also had superior SCSI drives, built-in 250Kb/sec networking, no-fuss hi-resolution displays, and the CPU architecture was more friendly to developers, not to mention the Macintosh Toolkit (the core API of the Macintosh that allowed all programs to look/feel the same).
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
You would think that after 20 years they would get the typos fixed! I counted two, and I am not very good at proofreading.
this page on macobserver.com is an old article, but timely. it has links to a lot of old apple ads and brochures from the days when you had to explain to people what a mouse was.
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...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Christ, not that tired old analogy again.
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.
"Star was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc.
Star's designers assumed that the target users are interested in getting their work done and not at all interested in computers. Therefore, an important design goal was to make the "computer" as invisible to users as possible. The applications included in the system were those that office professionals would supposedly need: documents, business graphics, tables, personal data-base, and electronic mail. The set was fixed, always loaded, and automatically associated with data files, eliminating the need for users to worry about obtaining, installing, and starting the right application for a given task or data file. Users could focus on their work, oblivious of concepts like software, operating systems, applications, and programs.
Another important assumption was that Star's users would be casual, occasional users, rather than people who spent most of their time at the machine. This assumption led to the goal of having Star be easy to learn and remember."
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".
from it's inception, the mac has ALWAYS been more of an artists/designers tool--postscript, pagemaker, photoshop, illustrator, quark, color management, director, flash, plus much, much better audio and video hooks, software and hardware...
so, to recap: graphic design, audio and video are all Mac strongholds, and it's no focus group accident in Redmond... while it's true that the right-brain friendly Mac has always appealed to artist and designer types, the difference is more than skin deep--occasionally, i am forced to use a windoze machine, and it's like playing a guitar with mittens on...
let me add by saying that hearing slashdotters talk about art is like hearing artists talk about slashdot..;>
The amigas had better color , better OS, better sound, better graphics.
Apple wanted to buy em , but C= did instead
Poor apple took YEARS to actually copy the amiga anywhere near it....
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Your argument is sound, but the Pentium wasn't at 200 Mhz when the 060 came out. They were in the 60-90 MHz range still.
I'll give the Amiga credit for being years ahead of its time, but then again so was SGI. Neither company maintained that lead. They just sat there and let everyone else surpass them. My R10K w/1 MB L2 used to be a speed demon but today it's competitive only with the K6-2 500. The best MIPS offerings are still based on the R10K design and only running 3-4x faster.
Apple was in that same position when they let the G4 stagnate on and on without scaling well. The G5 came just in time. And they better crank that sucker up over time to stay competitive as well.
BECAUSE DEBIAN FUCKING SUCKS
I, for one, am waiting for the 3 GHz G5 CPUs...
It would be nice if Steve and company simply skipped the 3 GHz and went from 2 GHz to 4 GHz...
Imagine a cluster of those!
even Firewire, Apple-innovated, has been accepted as the de facto new A/V transmission standard, cross-platform
:P
just thought you'd want to know...
FireWire is a du jour standard. it's USB that is de facto
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
I had my first computer course in sixth grade on Apple ][c's...
We learned the basics of OS, floppy use, and even some BASIC... But all I remember was playing Karateka... : (
I was so hooked I asked my parents for one... But I guess that was very expensive, because instead of that I got a Radioshack TRS-80 with a tape drive.
However, I learned loads with that one.
No sig for the moment.
for the clients, anyway. Many of the servers were old novell systems. One in my office -- running our air LAN -- was a 286 running I think novell 2... worked fine til we added one more person to staff and then the extra load was more than it could handle, it kept crapping out, so we replaced it with a small shell script.
err, a little tiny cisco airlan box.
That's "de jure," not "du jour." You were neither correct nor funny.
What computer like device didnt have more power than the IBM PC in the mid 80's :P
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
It raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was a cold rainy day in So. Illinois. My wife and kids had gone to bed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
A little remembered fact about the commercial is that "Big Brother" is IBM. They were the Microsoft of the 70s and 80s. Lets hope they don't revert to their old ways.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why are you spreading FUD about old Macs? Macs don't even have a BIOS. They do have firmware for booting up, but this isn't upgradeable. You've already said you don't know what the finder is or how it works, but you've posted four times already. You don't have to prove to us how stupid you are.
Nobody cares about your XT. There's really no point telling us
DVD burning software was released for free. If you know someone at MS, you should be able to get a copy for free. I don't beleive MS even has a company store.
This is not the place to ask that question. Why are you trolling?
Stop abusing punctuation, fucking idiot.
is a hell of a lot easier than keeping up with bsd/linux and all the associated packages (in my experience).
Mac: Run Software Update, click Accept. It doesn't get much easier.
Its hard to beleive you can read at all. No versions of OS X is retired. Why are you defending M$? Read some articles on Slashdot you ass, and maybe you'll figure it out
Trolling, I don't see that one.. And I'm not the one posting as AC. The guy said Finder was a nice aspect of it, and I asked what it is. It's an honest question.
-]Phreak Out[-
Or, maybe a boyfriend? ;-)
GENERAL PUBLIC SIGNATURE (GPS) Any replies (derivatives) of this post must also use the GPS
MS does indeed have a store. It's next to the MS Museum now. Software there is roughly 10% of retail cost. IE Windows XP Pro OEM is $35, as opposed to $400. They also carry XBox stuff and MS games. Lots of companies have company stores, MS, Nintendo, Sierra.
-]Phreak Out[-
Bah, that's all that needs to be said. It's easy to see why this is an AC poster.
-]Phreak Out[-
This troll is everywhere..
-]Phreak Out[-
blame my OS's spealing checker. i wasn't trying to be funny.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
If Windows hadn't taken off, Microsoft still had OS/2, to be accurate.
---
I have managed to network or serial link PC's, Mac's, Commodores, TI calculators, etc. I have used Dos, Windows, MacOS, Basic, Linux and "god knows what some of them had for an os". I've learned a few things since the days of BBS's and slow modems.
Mac OS X is like linux on qualudes, but it is a step in the right direction. At least it will network properly. Dont hand me that garbage about Linux desktops not working. Thats just propoganda to entice the computer illiterate into parting with thier money. I've been using Linux as my main desktop system since 1999.
The older Mac systems are real good for making you pull your hair out. All that fancy networking stuff they built into them for talking to other macs gets in the way when you try to talk to other systems. Sometimes, the only thing that will work with them, because of some hardware issue nobody else has ever heard of, is a null modem adapter cable.
ALWAYS be close to a copy of Kermit that works on whatever system you are playing with. When all else fails...Kermit will pull through. I can seamlessly move files from an OS 7.5.5 Mac, serial linked to a linux box, into any machine on my LAN using the Kermit protocol. Yep, it's slow, but it always works.
I have two macs on my LAN. I have a Performa 578 running OS 7.5.5 and a PowerMac 6100 running Debian (thank you Takashi Oe, I couldn't have done it without you). Both were a nightmare to get working properly on the network. One because of the nubus hardware and the other because of the apple software.
I built (and maintain) my inlaws LAN. It has a New IMac running OSX. It was ridiculously easy to add to the network, but damn that thing is slow. I liked it when I first saw it, but I am really beginning to loathe OS X. It seems as slow as my old Commodore 64. (yeech!) OS X is just a crippled version of BSD in my opinion.
The rate of adoption of OS X in the physical sciences astounds me. Our own department made a transition from Dec to SGI to Linux over the last 10 years. I thought Linux was going to be the end-all-be-all. But now here come the Macs, rolling in and starting to make a dent in the Linux mindshare. And that's even without me evangelizing at all :)
You first... Go ahead, try....
-]Phreak Out[-
As a former Newton user that switched to a Palm Zire 71, I can atest that Graffiti sucks. Newton's hand writing recognition, even cursive, was much better.
I do so miss the Newton...if only Apple would bring it back. My Zire, though great in physical size is lacking.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=84290&ci d=7366023
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/31/ 1820226&tid=172
-]Phreak Out[-
It looks like not much has changed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
One of the posts states: "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. "
:-) Raskin
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
Is there some kind of term or condition when posting to Slashdot that gives special privileges to ignorant, obnoxious Apple users ? Slashdot has gone downhill directly in proportion to the number of Apple zealots.
I`ve used the Lisa, Macintosh, and Amiga etc., etc., and the only computer that was literally jaw dropping for the time was the Amiga. Seeing an affordable multi-tasking, windowing graphics/multimedia workstation, running graphical PC applications on the same screen (Sidecar) as native 68000 applications in the mid eighties was stunning.
The only impressive thing about Apple is the moronic fan-boy reality distortion field that surrounds them.
Yeah, its the size of a stack of papers just like my iPod weighs less than two CDs.
SPAM
Well, I for one found the article intriguing, I remember the first time I went from my NEC 8080 to a mac and was like 'what is this weird square thing with the button?'. I actually giggled out loud (my roomate probably thinks I am insane) when I read the description of the mouse. hee hee hee. boy how times have changed, nowadays if someone doesn't know what a mouse is, you think their insane! This article gives a little history
Don't forget inflation...$2495 in 1984 could almost buy you a new entry-level car (Makes the $10k Lisa seem really expensive by comparision!)
My pre-Mac machine was an Amiga 500 that served me well from 1989 to 1996, until Compuserve discontinued it's text only service access to the graphic interface (An Amiga-excluded) client, I then went cold turkey computer-less for a couple of years.
Future shock was going from that 8mhz A500 to a 333mhz iMac!
Happy Brithday Mac!
If you crack open an old Mac (you need a long torx screwdriver to do this properly) you will find the signatures of the original Mac team cut into the plastic. Steve Jobs said that artists sign their works and the Mac team created art. The members signed the case mold used for Macs up until 1986. I've purchased two Mac Pluses. One for $2500 in the heydey. I put it to much good use. It came with a 40 Meg HD. I much later purchased another at a garage sale, I couldn't resist for $25, it came with a 60 Meg HD all the standard Mac software and a number of decent games.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
No-one will notice this post by now, but may I chime in and say : that was hilarious!
anything else you'd like to assumer us of?
Seriously, I'd like to know too. I would consider myself an advanced windows user, i've been using it since 3.1 and constantly amaze coworkers as I whizz through menus and windows with keyboard shortcuts. But through all my windows experience I still cant for the life of me figure out a mac. I mean, I've only tried them for a minute or 2 at compusa, and it seems that i can max, min, close programs, and the icon bar at the bottom is nice (hope you can scale back those 120x120px icons) but i know hitting the red? button on a window doesnt close the proggie, just hides it somewhere, theres a menu for that, i think, hell maybe im asking too much agreeing with this guy. if its an easy answer do so, or linky to a page.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
We're starting to post the 20 or 10 year anniversaries to all sorts of computer history. At the rate computers advanced, these anniversaries are going to come up pretty quick. I hope we have enough time to be nostalgic for one before the next one comes along. :)
I just read part of the blurb... and I was going to say "that is SO 1980'ish". Alright, the joke's on you.
1) America loves conformity
2) "Fanatical loyalty" is an in-group thing
Let me explain.
That famous Ridley Scott ad for the "1984" debut of the Macintosh? Terrible ad. Oh, it's a marketing milestone, and aesthetically very clever. But even 20 years ago, the number of Americans who cared about or even recognized the symbolism of George Orwell's dystopian novel was small. The majority were out voting overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan -- the candidate of stasis, conformity, and militarism, who answered the longing for the era of Eisenhower and The Blob. And along came Apple saying, You don't want to be a part of the blob. Wrong. People loved the blob. They did and they do.
So Scott and Apple bucked the zeitgeist, and Apple solidified its position forever as the refusenik's machine. But America has long been the land of the mass mind, of mass taste and mass obedience, and after the little spurt of difference represented by the 60s and the sexual revolution, cultural time had resumed its usual course: flowing backwards. Ronald Reagan announced a world that would be dominated by Britney Spears and Dubya, a world that emphatically doesn't celebrate the sexy athletic female version of Winston Smith jiggling her way past the helmets and truncheons to smash Big Brother's video monitor. Hell, in 2004, we have another measure of how far we've traveled: soon enough we may see those video monitors sprouting up, courtesy of our very own Fatherland Security.
The cult that has formed around Apple celebrates much that isn't intrinsic to the machine: all the value-added love that comes from the community of arty geekdom gathered on message boards, in cafes, at Macworld, on Slashdot. It's a nice enough subculture, or so I've found as a new Mac owner these past 18 months.
But having seen and interacted with it now, I can well understand why 97% of Americans aren't clamoring to join it. Fanatical loyalty is something Americans are happily familiar with in other contexts, such as churchgoing and warmaking. They commoditize it all the time, too, whether in Beanie Babies or SUVs or blue jeans. But you will see in most instances that such fanaticism is an expression of conformity. The blue jeans ad that promises you'll be hot sh1t with the chicks isn't saying you'll stand out as much as you'll blend in acceptably. Those jeans will keep you from being a pariah; once in them, you'll do. This is the opposite of the individualist ethos that Appple pushes.
Quite apart from stellar technology, Apple is in the business of selling separatism. It targets the off-kilter and aloof and sensitive as well as the rarefied and fussy and elite. (It most directly romanticized them in its Think Different campaign, where every geekette was invited to see herself as Amelia Earhart and every geek as Einstein. My computer makes me a hero? Cool beans!) Despite our fond myths about the old west and individualism, there aren't many such people in our society; if there were, we wouldn't need to reassure ourselves with the myth. Most Americans revel in their essential sameness, which is why our cars all look the same and our radio stations all play the same songs and our newspapers all mouth the same pieties and and our politicians all say the same things and our movies are generally about blowing the hell out of people who aren't like us. For such a culture, the Mac is a bit of a...tough sell. ;-)
Finder = equivalent to Windows Explorer... the file management app that puts the icons on the desktop, shows the drives and files, etc.
You come off as uninformed; but he's not a zealot. That's actually the truth he speaks.
/Library and /System/Library, depending on root level.
/Applications, you *will* have everything you ever need to mirror your environment on any Mac.
/Library, and /Applications. If you screw up, reinstall the OS and then reapply ~/, /Library, and /Applications, and you have an identical system. On Windows 2000, if you screw up and reinstall the OS, there is zero method to regain your prior OS. The only thing you can do is boot off a Linux CD and then reverse dd across the network and restore your image.
Windows Product Activation: You can't use Windows without activating it, period
Mac OS X functions, period. If you buy future releases, you get more features, but basic product functionality isn't restricted or denied because you never registered.
The email client for Mac is much more easily uninstallable. Just drag the program to the trash. Don't say the Windows method is easy when compared to that. The best you can say is it's possible.
Backup in Windows is impossible.
Try backing up all your user preferences and restore it
Try backing up all your user preferences, then applying it to a new account, new machine, or a reinstalled machine.
Try backing up all your documents; then apply them to a new account, new machine, or a reinstalled machine.
Try *finding* all your preferences first, before you can back them up
Try *finding* all your documents first, before you can back them up
Try backing up your OS, install a new OS version, decide you don't like it, and then restore the previous OS. Impossible with Windows, not impossible with OS X
The only reason all of these things are possible in OS X?
Preferences exist in ~/Library/Preferences
General settings exist in ~/Library
Documents exist in ~/Documents
System specific settings exist in
This makes it trivial to back up and restore. In Windows you need to go into Program Files, into the registry, and into the Windows directory to grab them all, and you cannot separate the data from the programs, the documents from the configuration.
Even worse, it's nearly impossible to selectively back up parts of your registry, applications, and profiles; you need to back it all up and restore them all at once (cloning) else nothing will work. Under OS X, you can back up your Applications; without preferences, they assume stock defaults. You can back up your preferences; without the Applications, nothing happens, but as soon as you install the Application (again) it will automatically pick up the old preferences. You can also back up your documents, and without the Applications they won't open, or will open in an alternative program.
You can, and quite easily, back up each as needed; you often only need to back up ~/Library and ~/Documents and have a fully functional 'image' of your system on any Mac you want; if you back up ~/Library, ~/Documents, and
OS X, unlike Windows, cleanly separates applications from the OS, data from the executable, user from system, and preferences from documents. You can simply manage, backup, restore, and amend any of those without impacting anything else, quite unlike Windows. The parent poster was not being zealous at all, because it's true.
My friend with a Gateway (and even me, on my Win2k machine) cannot backup and restore his system without resorting to a Linux CD! Boot Knoppix or Debian, or whatever, run dd on the drive and copy it on a network drive, and reverse the process to restore it!
Windows doesn't have any ability to backup your system!
On a Mac, you only need to back up ~/,
GPL Deconstructed
http://tinyurl.com/3eyx6
So celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Mac with an interesting peek into the past!
Shoulda put in B-B-Bill's head up on the screen too. Also another geeky thing, anyone remember the planet express ad in futurestock(the one with the unfrozen 80's wall street type)?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
It is that with a very "primitive" configuration, compared to what we have today, one could do 90% of the every day tasks that we can do today with a PC. The Mac toolbox was in ROM and it took 128 KB of memory. It had networking, print support and a GUI that was economical in resources and easy to use. The Mac was a "quantum leap" for computers in that era.
I think you're thinking of the original AmigaOS release. The guru meditation error message was chopped, and the stability problems subsided. I can't remember my Amiga Workbench ever having crashed. It is true that the Amiga1000 was released prematurely. It should've had a finished OS, GUI, and more ram. But Commodore wasn't very bright.
Where can I buy one?
Amazingly enough: here, here, or here
seems some things just never die
(and no I'm not still using one myself as my main machine, but you did ask...)
I bought my Amiga at least a couple of years after the initial release, and it still had that "unfinished" feel to it. By that time, I was using my Mac for serious work on a daily basis. I never seriously contemplated using the Amiga as anything more than a toy (although it was the video tool of choice for a few years). Perhaps the Amiga eventually got its act together, but by that time it was far too late to challenge the Mac, much less the Intel machines. It is amusing to imagine what Apple might have done if they'd had the Amiga hardware to work with, instead of the limited original Mac design. Clearly, the Amiga OS was technically more ambitious. But the Mac had that "It just works" thing going for it from the very outset, while the Amiga did not.
In many ways the Mac started the decline of Apple and the rise of the PC and M$, at least from a hackers POV.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
I always thought Amiga-heads were the most zealous, simply because for the most part they were right :) It was a hell of a machine that could do more than the Mac when both first launched.
Me, I'm a Mac guy because I like to dole out my geekiness in small doses.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
No versions of OS X is retired.
I think you'r wrong. 10.0.x is definitely "over", and 10.1.x - though still useable and used by many - doesn't seem to be getting any serious updates now.
When I went to college in 1988, I had a Macintosh Plus with an attached hard disk. Actually, I had two attached hard disks via SCSI chain. I had all my programs and school work on one hard drive, and my games and personal projects on the other.
Also, I personally opened my Macintosh Plus and added memory to it on two separate ocassions. The last time was to upgrade to System 7 (what a memory hog! ;-) )
First, you state the IBM-clone you had was $6,000, then you state "IBM clones were simply cheaper". Which one is it?
The other piece of FUD is this declaration of "serious" work. I took my term papers pretty damned seriously. Perhaps you are trying to say they couldn't do complicated work? I don't know, but this "serious" crap was the original FUD spread about Macintosh, and I can't believe there are still people keeping that one alive.
CT
You can get a great price for Office for OS X then! ;~>
You're right 10.2 and 10.3 are not service packs, but Actually WinXP is pretty close to being exactly that. W2k is Windows NT 5 and XP is WinNT 5.1 Your reliable information unfortunately follows a highly unreliable troll.
I'm a schizophrenic one-eyed man. I'll be seeing you in court!
Those 'Apple Fanatics" must be real strong folks...
Just imagine the size of the messenger bag...
But your right...anyone bringing a desktop computer to a coffee shop is definitely only looking for attention...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
They *must* use a 'proprietary' architecture...oh, they *do* use HyperTransport?
Nevermind...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I'll be seeing you in court!
Relax dude. What makes you think I'm out to get you?
KFG
And it seems just a tad narrow-minded of you to assume all Slashdot readers have no artistic talent. I study digital design. Computer science and--who woulda thought?--fine arts. Personally, I feel a bit more at home with charcoal and paper than a mouse and screen, but I'm not wholly ignorant of 2d and 3d digital art, either. I feel equally at home talking about artistic expression as C coding or Linux. But maybe that's just me.
Just to nitpick, OS'es since 7.1Pro are able to mount FAT floppies as long as you have a HD floppy drive.
Before 7.1Pro, you had to use the Apple File Exchange application or some third party utility.
How can an honest report of what we experienced 20 years ago be called "FUD"?
The Macs our company bought were not expandible and the price of PCs went down very rapidly from the $6000 the first one cost. This is my point: Apple had a window of opportunity which they lost.
We used the Macs for serious work, yes, mainly documentation since it was the only box that could run software like PageMaker. But a box that does one thing does not succeed. The PCs could run terminal emulators, we could attach modems, install compilers, build software, and so on.
The Mac Plus - which you had - was already late in the game, which started in 1984 IIRC. By the time the Mac Plus came around, the bulk of potential customers had chosen IBM compatible PCs as their "personal computer of choice", and it was hard to change that.
And there was no conspiracy against Apple, despite the somewhat defensive attitude you take. Apple made a great product but it took them too long to understand what the market wanted, which was more power for less money. When you sell something - even wonderful - that people do not want, you cannot succeed. That is why the Mac failed.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I don't mean to flame you, Jeff, but after I became aware that you existed while reading The Humane Interface (^v^^vv etc), not because I had read all the lying histroies about the Macintosh, but rather because, like most people, I simply wasn't interested, I pretty soon realised that you are one of those people who a)Is always right(TM), and b) always is upset because he doesn't get enough attention. Reading your article, "Holes in the histories" -full to the brim with self pity and righteous anger- on your site only confirmed that for me.
Taking The Humane Interface as an example. You have some very interesting insights and ideas about human computer interaction (The ^v notation for example) but then spend a good deal of the book whining away about how the Canon Cat, whose design you influenced and/or liked, was so much superior to modern GUI systems. You talk about a word processor from before the age of GUI everything. You neglect to notice that many programmes would be especially hard to use without a GUI, most notably those for which the Mac became famous: Layout, design and image editing.
A tip, Jeff. Your ideas would be better appreciated if you kept your wounded ego out of them for a change.
It's not your integrity that people object to, Jeff. It's your massive ego that forces you, even in a place like slashdot where nobody really cares, to promote yourself and reference the same article on your homepage, detailing all the people and events in mordern history that wronged you by miscrediting your achievements, as you did in your other post further up.
Your wounded ego trip has been carrying on for how many years exactly now, Jeff? Don't you ever get the feeling that perhaps it's time to move on, because I for one know with certainty that any article or posts by Jeff Raskin that I read is going to have a tidbit of interesting information and tons of ego trip and wounded soul? To be honest, Jeff, people will accredit you for your achievements without your bleating about it, which only makes people irritated.
Not only that, wise and wounded man, but if you were such a genious, why didn't you stay at Apple and convince them of your ideas or continue to contribute?
Once you go Mac, you never go back.
There are two kinds of people in the world-- Mac Zeolots and those who have never used a Mac.
Of course the second group doesn't understand-- they are mired in the compromises and pain of using whatever OS they are using. They are so used to it, they don't even realize that it doesn't have to be this way.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
In the book "1984", the main character's job is to go through news archives and change them to match the current political climate. To me, it looks like Apple has just made 2004 a little bit more like "1984". Doubleplusungood, IMO...
--Nate