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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."
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
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....
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.
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
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.
Here's a link to a google newsgroups search for all the mentions of Macintosh up until January 24 1984. It's all the same rumormongering that goes on before Apple's releases today, just shifted a fifth of a century back.
:)
Some things don't change
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.
For other perspectives, see Creative Computing magazine: Apple Mac review and Compute magazine: Apple's Macintosh Unveiled
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.
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!
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
... 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
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
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
excellent reading. thanks for the link.
...and about 17 years later, this guy got his answer:
i love all the rampant speculation and comparison between the McIntosh (sic) and the PCjr, and the 1984 ad compared to the "tramp" chaplin ads from IBM.
1. When will UNIX (XENIX, UniPlus, UNITY, or (dare I hope?) 4.2BSD)
be available for the Mac?
2. Which hapless software house gets to do the port?
actually, it was less than ten years before apple brought out a BSD-based unix for the 68k mac in the form of A/UX, but it was killed in '94 and never made it to powerpcs
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
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
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.