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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."
http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/1984.html and new version: notice the ipod?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I really wish people wouldn't do this. Firstly, you shouldn't throw computers out; they're toxic, they need to be disposed of safely.
Why throw out rare, antique, collector item computers to the bin? A twentysomething twitty fool of a girl at my mother's workplace threw out some early model Acorn Archimedes in the bin without asking anyone. This is how these old computers become rare in the first place.
http://www.apple-history.com/movies/1984.mov
Plus, a neato article on it here: http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm
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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!
Of course Windows 1.0 was not the first attempt to do this. Don't forget such wonders as IBM's TopView, Quarterdeck's Desq, Digital Research's GEM and a number of others. For a while in the early/mid 1980's there was a swirl of innovation and copying (not to mention a lawsuit or two) as people tried to bring the Xerox-invented GUI to desktop computers.
Sailing over the event horizon
It sounds like the journalist at the time was confusing the Mac with the Apple //c, which was released around the same time as the first Mac. Not counting its attached monitor, the //c was about the size of a 500-sheet stack of paper.
//c.
It was a neat little package, but the Apple II platform's best days were behind it by then, and most people have probably never seen a
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
What Jobs did was realize that Xerox had something special on their hands. Xerox had no plans to actually do anything with the idea.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Here is a good writeup on how the advertisement came about and what the initial internal reaction to the ad was in late 1983.
Two subtle differences. One much more suble than the other.
The obvious one is of course the woman is wearing an iPod.
The second is that the date on the "big screen" is changed. The date is in the lower left portion of the talking head screen, and in the original commercial, it read "1-24-84" in now reads "1-24-04"
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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 wouldn't toss them.
m l
Put them on ebay. People still want those things. They are still great for MIDI sequencing, and you can turn them into a Macquarium if you want...
http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/macquarium.sht
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
3. Apple made lots of mistakes early on. They did not almost go out of business because Microsoft had a superior product.
Lots of people (not just you) seem to be doing a bit of history revision here - the original battle in 1984 was not between Apple and MS, it was between Apple and IBM. Read the article if you don't believe it, but I also recall this clearly and it was even the subject of Apple's famous 1984 SuperBowl ad ("Big Brother" was represented by IBM, not Microsoft).
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. The Apple II line was expected (initially) to continue as Apple's home machine. Design work (which would become Apple's main niche later on) was not even a consideration back then - no desktop computer was powerful enough to handle it. There was no "Think Different" campaign back then - the idea of the Mac was not to enable creativity, it was about letting accountants work with spreadsheets more easily.
In the end, Apple never did gain the corporate foothold that they wanted, and both Apple and IBM were eventually overwhelmed in the desktop market by MS. Apple didn't see this coming at all when they released the Mac, and neither, obviously, did IBM. MS turned PC's into commodities - it didn't matter anymore whether you had an IBM PC or a clone, because the clones would run IBM-compatible operating systems just as well. (Don't forget that IBM had their own competing OS - PC DOS - that MS-DOS was a clone of, and this was what was generally installed on clone machines.)
Both Apple and IBM continuously lost market share through the 1980s and 1990s to cheaper IBM-compatible clone machines running MS software. Apple quickly discontinued the Apple II line and put all their egges in one basket with the Mac (Jobs considered the Apple II to be largely Steve Wozniak's machine, and I still believe the discontinuation of the line was partly a personal decision - at that point in time the Apple II line was actually more powerful and more expandable than the Mac, with more software and hardware add-ons available). If they had not hit on the strategy of pitching Macs for creative work (which didn't happen until at least the late 80's or early 90's), there is no question Apple would have been out of business. They had no other market, and had failed in all of their efforts at retaining market share both at home and in the workplace (not to mention schools, for that matter). The major slide started, btw, when Jobs was still leading the company. I always smirk when I read Mac fans acting as if Jobs is the savior of Apple; in fact, he pretty well drove the company into the ground with his early strategies, but to his credit he seems to have learned a lot over the years about how to run a company.
Anyway, so the initial enemy was IBM, who were thought of back then in much the same way many people think of MS now. It's one of the biggest ironies in the history of the computing industry that at this moment, the only major internal part that separates Apple architecture from (IBM-compatible) PC architecture is a CPU that's co-produced and designed by IBM.
Even cooler is that you can strap an 18GB hard drive into those old machines and it freakin' works! Try strapping a drive that big into a PC from that era, it looks at you silly when you try to teach it that there's more than 2GB in the world.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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I think the stack the reporter is referring to is a stack (box) of 8.5 x 11 tractor feed paper, which is indeed about the size of the mac in question.
BookRead has some facts sort of sideways. The Lisa certainly did not start "the mouse thing" for Apple. What most people don't know is that the Mac and the Lisa were started within a few months of each other and were parallel products. When I started the Mac project, the Lisa was still a character-generator, green-on-black, machine. I sold the Lisa team on going graphic.
:-) Raskin
The Mac was a lot more than something that "simply brought" the Lisa price down.
Jef (I was there