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."

Comments

Durability of the Mac

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Durability of the Mac

[Oz Factor]

Yeah, I agree. The small office that I used to work in still has a Mac SE tucked under a desk that acts as a Fax server and does some NAT routing. Not bad for a 15+ year old computer.

Re:Durability of the Mac

[Basehart]

"We're finally tossing the last of our original Macs"

Sounds like Bank Of America talking!

Their branches here in the NW have been running SE's as terminals since the SE was introduced, and I still see them sat on manager desks and in reception areas.

If I was responsible for deciding what hardware replaces those machines I'd be hard pressed to switch to a different manufacturer after using the same Apple hardware for such a long time.

Macintosh - An Opinion

[ten000hzlegend]

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

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&p ag e=personal&subpage=mac

A great page for somemore Apple history, especially technical details and those legendary Code Names!

Well, it took 20 years...

[teamhasnoi]

but I am now and forever more going to use Macs. When OS X came with a mac we got for work, I gave it a shot, and have never looked back. I bought a 15" AL Powerbook last year and it has been the best computing experience ever.

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.

An Amazing Read

[MBCook]

I've got to say that was a VERY interesting read. I'm just under 21 so I didn't pay much attention to the Macintosh's launch at the the time. But reading the article, it's amazing how much the (computer) world has changed. They have to describe what things like icons are, and what a mouse is. Today it's almost unfathomable that someone wouldn't know what a mouse it. Some of the technical specs are interesting too. It seems so weird that things were specified in BYTES then. I realize it made sense but can you imagine what it would be like to go to a computer store and ask for a 40,000,000,000 disk drive? I also have to say the description of being "the size of a stack of paper" seems very odd to me, as when I think of a stack of paper I think of something the size of a book at max, but still. Weirdest of all is describing Microsoft and where they are located (Seattle). These days people don't write about a Seattle software company named Microsoft, they write about MS because we ALL know who MS is.

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!

I Switched...

[voodoo_bluesman]

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.

How Microsoft got away with "copying" Mac UI

[tepples]

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.

Amazing computer.

[aussersterne]

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.

My Dad still uses his Mac Plus!

[MarcQuadra]

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.

What was the Mac for?

[jefraskin]

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. "

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 :-) Raskin