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A Review of the 128KB Macintosh
bfwebster writes "The physicist John Wheeler famously quipped that 'Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once.' The web flattens time by making more of the past accessible. Here, then, is a reprint of BYTE's official review of the original 128KB Macintosh from the August 1984 issue. The article highlights the radical break with other PCs that the Mac represented, while at the same time giving the first real warning of Steve Jobs's least-productive tendency: pre-emptive and often arbitrary constraint of end-user options (e.g., no memory expansion on the 128KB or announced 512KB Macs, even though the 68000 processor had a lovely, flat 16MB address space, as opposed to Intel's 808x segmented hell)."
1984 called, it wants it article back. ... no, wait, that doesn't work.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Still, a great machine. I bought one in April 1984 and was a Mac freak until System 7, at which point I switch to Windows. Back then the OS was just stagnating. Once boxes with OS X came out, I went out and got an iMac and fell back in love with Macs.
The web flattens time? What was the shape of time before? Was it fluffy? Did it have spikes or bumps?
You need to install an RTFM interface.
Any news happen *today*?
My Amiga 1000 laughs in superiority.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
(sorry, couldn't resist.)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I couldn't afford a Mac, of course. I just jonesed for it. A lot.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
as opposed to Intel's 808x segmented hell
How hard is it to write a submission about a product without taking a cheap potshot at the competition? Was this really necessary?
If you own a Ford, does your car drive better if you talk shit about imports whenever you're not driving your car?
Reprinted from Byte, issue 8/1984, pp. 238-251.
The many facets of a slightly flawed gem
The Macintosh
Photo 1: The Apple Macintosh computer
Few computers - indeed, few consumer items of any kind - have generated such a wide range of opinions as the Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it lives up to that potential remains to be seen.
Personally, I think the Macintosh is a wonderful machine. I use one daily at work, and then at night I play with the one I have at home. Or, at least, I try to play with it. You see, my wife - who for years resisted all my attempts to introduce her to computers - has fallen in love with the Mac (her words, not mine). She uses it to type up medical reports, notes on her clients, and personal letters. In fact, she's suggested that we get a second Macintosh so that we won't have to fight over the one we have.
The Macintosh is not without its problems. Resources are tight - it needs more memory and disk space - and software has been slow in coming to market. Many have criticized its price ($2495). In fact, there are indications that Apple considered a lower price ($1995) and then rejected it. It doesn't seem to have hurt the Mac's market - people are still buying them faster than Apple can make them - but there's the potential for backlash if the machine doesn't deliver on all its promises.
Whatever its problems and limitations, the Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting computers to work with people instead of vice versa. Time and again, I've seen individuals with little or no computer experience sit down in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they use the same words to describe it: "amazing" and "fun." The question is whether "powerful" can be added to that list.
Photo 2: The Macintosh dot-matrix printer
In an industry rapidly filling up with IBM PC clones, the Macintosh represents a radical departure from the norm. It is a small, lightweight computer with a high-resolution screen, a detached keyboard, and a mouse (see photo 1). It comes with 128K bytes of RAM (random-access read/write memory), 64K bytes of ROM (read-only memory), and a 400K-byte 3½-inch disk drive. If you throw in an Imagewriter printer (see photo 2 and figure 1) the system costs $2990. The processor is a Motorola 68000, running a name-less operating system (see the text box, "A Second Opinion" on page 248 for a fit description). It has absolutely no IBM PC/MS-DOS compatibility, and it would appear Apple plans none.
The Display
The display is small (9-inch diagonal), but it has very high resolution (512 by 342 pixels). Every pixel is crisp. Several things make the display unusual. First, the Macintosh has no "text mode." Instead, the display is always bit-mapped graphics. Second, the display is black-on-white rather than amber-, green- or color-on-black, giving it an ink-on-paper effect. Third, the pixels are equally dense both horizontally and vertically, eliminating the "aspect ratio" problem that plagues other graphic systems. (In other words, a box 20 pixels wide and 20 pixels high will be a square.)
Figure 1: A sample printout from the Macintosh using its printer and the MacWrite word-processing program. The printout was obtained using MacWrite's high-quality output mode, as opposed to the draft and ordinary quality modes. The output here is shown at 100 percent of actual size
The effect is excellent. The display is clear, crisp, easy to read, and easy on the eyes. Because all text is graphically generated, the "what you see is what you get" word processing is available (with multiple fonts, sizes, and styles). Embedded drawings and proportional spacing are also possible. Some criticism has been made about the lack of a color-graphics capability. Frankly, I am unconvinced of its necessity. Most applications I have seen use color graphics as a substitute for detail, and the Mac
Page added on 20th January 2004.
Slow news year?
continuewithdecoding:
move.l $0200(a0),d3
move.l (a0)+,d2
and.l d4,d2
and.l d4,d3
asl.l #1,d2
or.l d3,d2
move.l d2,(a2)+
dbf d1,continuewithdecoding
lea $01f8(a0),a0
dbf d0,searchforsync
rts
Hehehe...Check out the ergonomic mouse!
Well, at least in 1984, they didn't have to worry about being /.ed. Coral anyone?
It's eriee how similar this statement is to the statements which we get every time Apple launches a new product even today... "a .wma icon was included with the iTunes app in Mac OS X Tiger" or a while back it was possible to unlock the "secret colour screen" on your iPod 3rd gen. (it made the screen turn blue.)
Also similarly, the author says he actually wouldn't like colour, and he's glad Apple left this feature out. (Remind anyone of Steve Job's current stance on the video iPod?)
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Their web server would seem to be running on this same 128K Mac...
Slashdot is going to have an article about that WOPR computer from WarGames. "Would you like to play a game?"
"I drank WHAT?!"--Socrates
### 30 ###
Byte was such a great magazine. It tried to cover a wide range of computer and technology related subjects. I really miss it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
This is a prety cool article. It's amazing the costs of Macs back then. I wonder what $2500 in 1984 invested marginally would be worth nowadays? The really interesting piece of the article is the author's complaints about memory. While it's true that 128K was insufficient for a GUI based computer, it was more than sufficient for a Dos 3.x pc. It's also funny that the same complaint 20 years ago holds true today... computers always run better with more memory. I remember using this computer back in school in '86. At the time, apple just released a 20 meg HD that was almost the size of the computer itself. What a technological feat it was back then. I just wish I could have afforded one. Of course being a 10 year old with a paper route that wasn't going to happen.
I actually have the Mac 128K that my dad got at Dillard's department store in Dallas, TX on January 24, 1984. I was 9, and I'd been wanting a computer and was angling for an Apple //e. But my dad - who wasn't the computer type - thankfully said that he'd heard some rumblings about this new computer that he thought he should wait for.
. jpg
It was the Macintosh.
I just snapped a couple pictures with my Treo 650:
Here it is, alongside a NeXT cube and ann actual Motorola Viper CHRP box (capable, at the time, of running Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX, and the at-that-time-already-defunct Solaris and NetWare implementations for PowerPC):
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/CHRP_128K_Cube
And the model tag from the 128K, barely visible, "M0001":
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/M0001.jpg
A couple other things; a 20th Anniversary Macintosh and a PowerBook Duo 2300c, with DuoDock II+:
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/20th_Duo.jpg
And now, over 21 years later...
http://das.doit.wisc.edu/nostalgia/Desk.jpg
How time flies.
It has absolutely no IBM PC/MS-DOS compatibility, and it would appear Apple plans none.
And 21 short years later, it turns out they planned it all along!
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
Mirrordot mirror of TFA.
Site seems dead.
Mirrordot link Peace out.
The coolest part of the Mac 128k isn't the computer itself, but rather what's on the inside of the case.
But what I really need from this issue of Byte is that article that had 5000 lines of BASIC you could type in verbatim to your computer and play a clone of Pitfall.
The quotation isn't John Wheeler. It is a Cambridge don whose name I forget. It went something like, "Time is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once, and space is nature's way of preventing everything from happening at Cambridge." I've got it written down somewhere...
However, it still has the same one button mouse as always. Some things never change.
I'd been using computers for about 8 years when I saw my first Macintosh in 1985. I'd always hated command lines because I a) can't type worth a darn and b) can't remember arcane commands either.
When I saw a 128k at my university's computer store in March 1985 I immediately fell in love with its GUI - all the commands were right their in plain english and organized in convenient menus. I dragged my wife to see the thing and she fell in love with it too. We took our limited savings that we had intended for a spring-break vacation and bought a 128k, external floppy, and ImageWriter I for $1700 (an educational discount gave us about 40% off the list price of $2800). We even paid $34 for a box of ten 400k Apple floppies.
That machine was our main computer until the Mac II came out in 1987 and our 128k remained in use until about 1995. I still boot the machine occasionally just for the nostalgic sounds of the start-up bong and the whirr of the floppy drive.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
One question about that 128K machine: can you boot Linux on it?
Sometimes I wonder what the MacOS would have looked like if those engineers would have known where it was going to go in the future, and knew all the modern techniques of programming? Alternatively you could ask, how would we design the Mac today if we limited ourselves to hardware available in 1984?
Would the filesystem have been designed differently? Would there have been more emphasis on preemptive multitasking? Would certain conventions from other systems have been adopted to ease interoperability when networking came on the scene? How would certain missteps admitted by Apple engineers been avoided?
Constitutionally Correct
The Macintosh has a standard, one-button, mechanical-tracking, optical-shaft-encoding mouse (again a departure from industry norms).
21 years later...
Ha, I had you all beat years before with my Alto
Slow news day it may be, but the introduction of the Mac *was* a historic event. The Byte article is a nice reminder of that.
Always got a chuckle from me. (And mine had 62K because of an extra add-on card. Let you do disk I/O (? - some apple ][ geek can tell me what it was that overwrote highres page 2)without clobbering your high resolution graphics buffer)
I am trolling
I had a Mac 128 w/2 drives. The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface, though the user interface was indeed revolutionary.
.
The thing that made the Mac immortal was the fact that anyone could "publish" documents from their desktop without needing complex typesetting systems or knowledge of traditional "publishing" and commercial printing processes.
At the time, most people with home computers didn't even have printers, which were expensive, error-prone, often massive, and didn't produce pretty output. All non-industrial printers at the time were either dot matrix or daisy wheel (using letter blocks like a typewriter to pound letters through a ribbon) impact printers and had only one typeface at one size. On dot matrix printers the quality of these letters was horrible (think NINE dots of vertical resolution per letter for consumer-grade printers or FIFTEEN dots of vertical resolution for business class printers). Very expensive printers might have a second "high quality" typeface that you could select by pressing a button on the printer, but this typically wasn't much better.
Basically, the process of creating a printed document with a computer had, until the Mac, been one of simply typing ASCII into a very basic editor program (Linux users: think pico or similar; Windows users, think Notepad), then sending it to the printer directly as a stream of characters, which it would output using its single available ugly, low-res typeface and size. No formatting, no fonts, no graphics, certainly (even the dot matrix printers generally didn't have any graphics capability whatsoever--it just wasn't included; only the ability to accept a stream of ASCII and dump it out to the page was in the ROM). What little formatting could be performed (left/right justification, line spacing, etc.) was often set in a word processor as a document property globally, and wouldn't be displayed on the screen as you typed.
The Macintosh and relatively cheap ImageWriter printer changed all this radically; you could format text using multiple typefaces, set them to a range of sizes, boldface, italicize, even full justify (!), and not only would these things appear on the screen as you did them (beyond magical in an era in which most PCs also only had the ability to display ASCII on their screens, lacking graphics capability unless you had expensive hardware like a so-called Hercules card, IIRC, still mono), but they could be output to the printer and would appear on the page just as they did on the screen. And you could even mix text and graphics
This kind of capability was unheard of because it had never before been available to the consumer at any price, and certainly not in a system that required no specialized knowledge to use.
You knew the Mac was an important computer historically from the moment it was released, because within a month or two, in any city or neighborhood, every newsletter, advertisement, flyer, poster, city council report, whatever that hadn't been commercially printed had obviously been done on a Mac. Everyone knew what a Mac was and knew that it was the computer that could be used to publish readable, visually pleasing, professional documents straight from your office or bedroom, for just a few thousand dollars.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
For those that haven't seen it, there is a "review" comparing a Mac 128k vs. a brick. It's available here (Google cache).
"Sometimes a man's gotta do what a woman wouldn't consider." - Red Green
as opposed to Intel's 808x segmented hell
Hey! I owned an 8088 and besides having to use a hammer to add your expanded 640k of RAM it was a great little piece of shit!
Oh, yes, the S100 bus computers that came with sixteen slots and enough signal power to reliably drive about three of them were far superior.
To say nothing of the innumerable PCs with insufficient DC power to allow all slots to be filled, cards that did not say how much power they drew, and absolutely no way to tell that the system was overloaded other than intermittently unreliable operation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Considering they were selling the things faster than they could make them is a good indicator that perhaps the pricing was not all that out of line.
But it does make one wonder.
Would the macs have dominated the market if they had been priced at say $1500 or even 1900 instead of nearly $2500 US?
ACK
Linux can only boot on Macs with a paged memory management unit. This includes all the Macs with a 68030 or 68040, and the Mac II (one of the two Macs built with a 68020). The original 68000-based Macs cannot run Linux. The requirements are basically the same for running *BSD on old Macs. Until recently NetBSD required a FPU also (now there is a build with software support for those math functions); I don't know if 68k Linux has a similar requirement (NetBSD and A/UX are the only Unices I run on my 68k boxes because of the small install footprint).
Constitutionally Correct
Does it run Linux?
What is this, pretentious posting day? You could say the same about a library, but you wouldn't score as many "whoa, he's a deep geek thinker" points on Slashdot.
Advice: on VPS providers
I found it interesting that the author noticed that Apple wants its users "out of the machine". I've recently (within the last year) bought a PowerMac G5 and, although it really doesn't resemble the original Macs much at all since Mac OS X, there still is this "keep the user out of the machine" attitude.
Unfortunately, I had a bad fan on my Power Supply that was driving me nuts. I wanted to replace it myself, but Rev 3 of the G5 is specially designed to make that impossible for me (the earlier revs actually had instructions on how to replace it -- this rev didn't any more and I couldn't figure out how to take it apart). Naturally, because I live in Wisconsin, I got nasty customer service. Two places refused to admit there was even a problem. The third place I TOLD to replace the PSU and they did -- and the problem went away. I bought an iBook from them for their trouble. It isn't easy owning a Mac in Wisconsin, since so few engineers even know it exists. Living in an M$ dominated area, it is good I stay so far away from razor blades and Tylenol.
Back in the day, Apple had the LC III, which was a flip-top pizza-box like affair that made it extremely easy to get in to and make changes. Then, they immediately went to the Quadra's, which were directly responsible for many cuts and bruises trying to take that beast apart (but it was still possible). What is up with Apple having a good idea and then dropping it? Just like the cloning idea. At least they drop their bad ideas, too, like the hockey-puck mouse (WTF was up with that, I'll never know).
As an aside, I think the idea of going to Intel is a really bad one. The PowerPC architecture is far superior to Intel. Another bad decision by Apple. I miss the beige-box days before the Jobs takeover.
I also have heard that the upgrade to 512K bytes will eliminate all such problems because there will be more than enough RAM for any application. Again, I disagree. You can never have enough RAM.
Glad to see that some needs just never go away.
Unfortunately for Apple, that trait is not Jobs' least-productive tendency. The worst trait of Jobs is that he does not understand technology trends.
His forte is that he understands fashion trends. The multi-colored iMacs were a smashing success. So, too are the stylish iPods. Peak inside of a Mac store, and you will see excellent styling.
As for technology trends, Jobs just stumbles. His single biggest mistake is not porting the MacOS to x86 back in 1984 so that IBM PC users could run the operating system.
More than 20 years later, he admitted that he was wrong. Jobs recently announced that the Mac would use the x86 and would become little more than a glorified IBM PC clone. Of course, he will put some tweaks into the Mac so that x86-MacOS can run only on the Mac. However, clever hackers will figure out a way to run x86-MacOS on the IBM PC clones as well; "it" is merely a question of time.
If Jobs had selected the 80286 for the Mac and loaded it with x86-MacOS back in 1984 and if he had sold an alternate version of x86-MacOS for the IBM PC clones, then Apple would have become what Microsoft actually became -- an immensely profitable company that is the object of scorn by Slashdotters. MacOS would have 90% of the OS market and would earn monopoly profits year after year. Better yet, Bill Gates would have become some dweeb hacker working at Seattle Computer Products since his startup, Microsoft, went bankrupt due to relentless competition from Apple.
Totally agree. The Mac (IMHO) changed the world and how we interact with it. I mean look at us now, we're sitting here talking about it... on a computer. Very interesting.
From TFA linked to by TFA: When 256K-bit memory chips become available the Macintosh will be upgraded to a 512K-byte machine, enough space for the most ambitious application programs.. Wow... obviously they weren't thinking about screen-savers back then...
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
(Of course, the original Mac had serious power supply problems of its own, too. And even less excuse for them).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Didn't Byte magazine used to have a 'centerfold' that was like a 20 page basic program you could type in to your pc LINE BY LINE?
I tried it once, and gave up after entering way too many typos!
M
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From TFA:
The full printable ASCII American National Standard Code for Information Interchange) set is available
It may be an old article (I remember the Mac debuting so it's not as old as me), but theres no excuse for mixing up ASCII and ANSI, two associated but different standards.
Last time I checked there wasn't a standard called 'ANSCII'
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
a beowulf cluster of these things!
I do remember those flame wars. Yikes.
I still use the original monitor from my Amiga 1000 for TV. SOB is still working, it's like 17 yrs old now. If I can ever find the freakin' HD cable I might get the A1000 back together. Only time I ever really enjoyed games on the computer.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
In today's magazines, even though they're read by folks that are as a whole far less tech-savvy than the Byte readers of old, reviews are filled with acronyms and buzzwords. I wonder what that review would look like if it was in PC World ...
As with the rest of the hardware solution, the input device solution is significantly different from those found on other hardware solutions (see photo 3). It's smaller than most and has only 58 depressable character, line break and control function entry solutions.
Although the 128k had many a kludge with respect to memory management, multitasking, etc. I'd argue that Apple had the right approach when it came to telling developers what to expect. Direct interactions with hardware were frowned on. Apple's early design guidelines were very explicit about NOT assuming anything about the hardware, file system, display, etc. Developers that took this advice to heart could create applications that were future compatible.
The result is that I still use some applications on a near daily basis that were introduced in 1987/1988. These apps could run on a Mac Plus (System 6, 8 MHz 68000, 2 MB RAM, 800k floppies) and now run on a dual-G5 (OS 10.3, 1.8 GHz G5, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB SATA HD).
Apple may not have designed pre-emptive multitasking into their early systems, but they did create a development ethos that meant that early applications were not incompatible with the major changes in both hardware and OS that occured later.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
obviously all this gui garbage reduces the power and flexibility of the system, dumbs down america, and drags humanity back into the dark ages. i bet you even use graphics mode on your linux box. STICK TO TEXT. thats all you need.
Most hedge funds will not talk to you unless you have $1 million minimum to invest. The laws regarding hedge funds are lax because congress assumes if you have the money to invest in such risky and often fraudulent ventures, you have the money to hire competent advisers.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
My parents didn't even know each other back then...
Pay no attention to what the critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic! - Jean Sibelius
I wasn't interested in buying a box that I couldn't write softwar for, so I purchased an IBM-PC instead of a Macintosh, even though I was an Apple ][ user previously.
Also, at the company I worked for back then (Grumman Aerospace in Bethpage), we looked at the Macintoshes and rejected them because the screens weren't wide enough for 80-column terminal emulation (at 512 pixels across). The IBM-PCs, however, had 80-columns, and 3270 terminal emulator software available.
This made the IBM-PC a clearly superior choice, as the public as confirmed over time.
Best Buy can have you arrested
No, no, no, it's like the Earth... banana-shaped!
Just remembering this article in original hardcopy, and what might have been.
In 1984, the PC-AT was the big thing for my company (physically and figuratively). No PC was being purchased with less than 640KB of memory, and most had 640K on the mother/system/etc. board + an AST Advantage card with another 512 to 1024KB.
So when the MAC ships with (a) 128KB of RAM (and quite a lot of that used by the OS, so that only 70K or so was available to programs), and (b) NO FLIPPIN' MEMORY SLOTS FOR EXPANSION TO AT LEAST 256KB, I realized someone had not been thinking (or perhaps they were thinking - "differently").
To you original MAC designers out there - WOULD IT HAVE KILLED YOU to have built in one (just one) memory slot in the bottom or back of both the "thin" and "fat" MACs to accomodate an additional memory module? Hey, the AT came with a base 256K,
Why would this have made a difference? Well, in 1984-85, this would have allowed program designers to write something larger than a ~64K program to run in the 128KB MAC. By that time, most PC programs were 128-to-256MB in size. While "hand coding" in assembler is nice, and the MAC had all those OS routines you no longer had to write or compile into your program, just think about what having 128MB of space free for programming would have meant.
By the time the MAC Plus shipped, it was too late - at least for large business users; too many PC's (from IBM and clone makers) existed - and everyone was waiting for Windows v2 / OS2 / etc. to free us from the real mode barrier.
Likely to be some that will dissagree, but as someone supporting both platforms at the time (1985), it just plain me that Apple would go so far, and then deliberately cripple the concept in the name of somone's "vision" of a computer appliance - meaning no case opening.
The laptop I have now came with only 512MB, and my company didn't see the value (until after I received my replacement) to change the XP standard configuration to 1GB. So like anyone who wants their own situation improved, I ordered the additional memory module off the web site, and installed it myself. Like most laptops, there is a small hatch on the underside of the laptop that provides access to just this kind of capability.
I am not saying Apple needed to fully open the MAC then; and I remember Byte (and other) magazine articles on how to install hard disks by voiding the warranty and putting in after-market drives inside the case - something I thought was a bit much for most users. But having a small access hatch on the bottom or the back of the original MAC for that extra bit of memory just might have permitted Apple to gain a year on Microsoft during a critical time, especially since that was also when C and 4GLs were gaining popularity for programming.
In the past 20 or so years, there have been many points where things could have gone differently - crippling the original MAC (and orphaning all the Lisa developers with a new version of the same concept that was incompatible) always leaves me wondering - what if?
Y.A.C.C.
This read makes me a bit sad. Soon the days of articles like this will be gone. That it, with the change to Intel I think the market has lost something. There was a cultural richness before with Macs, Amiga, IBMs, Kangaroos(Australia only) all bringing something different to the table. I think everyone agrees that it was not the best design that won, but the most competative. I guess one of the lessons that the recent change, as has all the changes in Mac history, is that if Mac survives, it will surely be able to switch to a better architecture when the need arises with a minimum amount of fuss. Until then, I guess the discussion is dead, from memory to history.
It was good when it had the painted covers.
The Macintosh has a standard, one-button, mechanical-tracking, optical-shaft-encoding mouse (again a departure from industry norms). Huh? How is using a standard mouse a departure from industry norms?
I still have my old mac. I got my hands on the MS Basic for Mac in March of 84 and had to wait a month [and pay $3000] for delivery of the Mac and and imagewriter I. When the power supply fried, I upgraded to the 1 meg that had become available. It STILL runs and I STILL haven't filled up the 80meg outboard hard drive I added to it [perhaps as much an indication of how many apps DID NOT materialize for Mac users as of my overzealous housekeeping]. I eventually junked Basic for lightspeed C.
OMG, thats 20 years old!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Well I am not a native speaker, so I don't know what a potshot is, but I am experienced with the problems in segmented-model software. Segments are really an effective way, to slow down the development of modern software. It's even difficult to do hi-res gfx with those babies.
Not only that but the 128's internal clock starts counting from January 1st, 1904 and extends out 136 years. Proof enough for Slashdotters?
: D
Would that program be Klondike?
Actually, it would be Fullwrite Professional (great word processor with outliner), Trapeze (an unbelievable awesome spreadsheet-like program - but it requires a bit of a hack to work on PPC machines), and Superpaint (a very nice bit-map & vector painting program).
OK, I admit to playing the occasional game of Daleks.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Umberto Eco wrote an enlighting essay on PC's being Protestant while Macs are Catholic. While neither Gates nor jobs produced their respective operating systems or GUIs - at least Gates partially paid for his (although it was peanuts). Jobs is "smart" in terms of having figured out - that "coolness" can be marketed and sold (read The Tipping Point) - due to the fact that "lemmings" follow easily. But when it comes to Usability - Jobs has not interest - futher monopolizing the "lemmings" is his only concern - iPods that only play Apple codecs - Imacs that can't be expanded with 3 year old technology inside etc. The fact is that G5s can't even come close to Intels or AMDs that are $1500 cheaper - when it comes to producing media of all kinds. Check out http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436 and http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.js p?id=32620
I think he meant an investment in Apple (well, that's what I assumed anyway).
I can't tell for certain, but it looks like AAPL was at around $4/share in 1984. Now it's close to 40, that would be $25000, but that doesn't seem right. There were 3 2:1 splits, so would that make it $200k instead?
creation science book
It's hard to imagine nowadays what an impact this made when it first came out, because of the GUI. The first shipment of Macs were shipped to three schools if I remember correctly - MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford. There was a huge line on delivery day. The serial numbers from CMU went all the way into the low 3 digits - the one I got was really low; 79 or 179 or something like that. It blew up as soon as I plugged it in. I brought it back and got one that was 600 and something.
This was the first time many of us had seen a GUI, as unlike the guys at Stanford we didn't have a PARC nearby. It is hard to imagine in 2005 what it was like to see a GUI for the first time. I was invited to a pre-release showing a few weeks before, and the small group I was with was stunned. I sold my Apple II the next day to get the money to put in an order for the Mac.
The only magazine after Byte, that I felt was in the same league of broad IT coverage, is the german Heise C't magazine. http://www.heise.de/
does slashdot get paid for having a freaking apple topic everyday? We've had an apple topic every day for quite a while.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
You just had to show your ugly face, didn't you? Oh yeah, you forgot to use "crapple" to complete that "I live under a bridge with my thumb up my ass" image we have of you.
Lisa was such a better machine technically (and bigger failure because of the price). Lisa actually came out 2 years before the Mac.
- 1MB RAM expandable to 2MB
- 3 Slots
- 5Mhz 68000
- True Multitasking OS
- Virtual Memory (slow though)
- Could run Lisa Xenix
- Single button mouse
- Fully integrated Application Suite
(Lisa 7/7 with spreadsheet, word processing, graphing, terminal etc.) and allow cut and pasting from different docs (in 1982!)
- Intermixing of text and graphics on the page
- LisaNet local area networking
I got 3 Lisa 2/10's sitting in my basement. A Lisa-1 recently sold for $15,000
interesting parallel to modern Macs:
"The [...] Macintosh [...] is not a powerful machine [...] But for the same price or less you could [...] buy [...] a Compaq [...] And I could get lots of software for it"
sounds like the modern stereotype of to expensive Macs...
(and just for the record: i'm typing this on my iBook and wouldnt change it to a WinTel Notebook)
The point was, at the time, that HP products (a) sold to engineers and (b) were world beaters, and so simply telling the truth was all the marketing that was needed. A pity that doesn't work nowadays (when, sadly, HP hardly actually makes anything any more)
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
...it was the last Macintosh review that didn't complain about the number of buttons on the mouse.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Don't you dare mod me down unless you've owned one of these three yourself, and tried to do something productive on it. Don't get me wrong, the Mac was revolutionary, and it deserves a place of honor in the history of personal computing, but let's not make it something it wasn't: Namely something utilitarian (and therefore useful), like an Apple II, C64 or IBM compatible. The first Macs were curios, not useful computers. The Mac II marks the start of the Mac's Age of Usefulness.
Here is an anecdote about the Mac Plus: System 6 was fairly unstable. I used to attempt to write school reports on it, since it seemed like an advantage to be able to edit it without rewriting the thing on paper, and I could create and include diagrams. I can't remember what I used, but it was probably MacWrite and MacDraw, or some rip-off of those. The programs would crash every ten minutes or so, and corrupt the files on disk. And don't get me started on the Imagewriter printer. Yeah, it was fast, but it had problems keeping the paper aligned during feeding, so you spent as much time clearing jams as printing. Or, you could sit there and jockey the paper as it went in.
System 7.5 was a tremendous improvement over previous versions, but without proper memory management, applications would step all over eachother's space, and you wouldn't know anything was up until the machine crashed hard. Thank goodness for OS 10!
Countries with 50 cycle mains have actually had square pixels since anyone thought to use a TV screen as a computer monitor. The TV screen has to refresh in sync with the power, since the electron gun beam is getting weaker and stronger due to the CRT heater getting warmer and cooler as the voltage rises and falls; but as long as the peaks and troughs are in the same part of the screen each time, you won't notice. The studio lights are also similarly affected. So in the UK, Europe and Australia, TV has 25 pictures of 625 lines a second. The greater number of lines allows for more-nearly-square pixels.
..... there was some obscure glitch which could force them go to 200 lines, and I confidently predict that someone will respond with an explanation.
This, incidentally, is why PAL Amigas have 256 or 512 line displays as opposed to 200 or 400. At least they do on most boots
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
My 128 had 4MB of RAM, some of which was a bootable RAM-disk. A full reboot and launch took between 1 and 2 seconds. The best development machine I've ever had.
Get the nearly overwhelming desire to throw the original Mac out of the nearest window when it asked you to swap disks for the 100th time?
"The web flattens time by making more of the past accessible."
Wow, not on my version of Firefox it doesn't. I gotta upgrade!
-----
It's Pournelle, kid. Do you understand how absurd your comment sounds?
Loaded with limitations, yes. But the Mac 128k was so unlike anything else out there (remember, the competitive PCs had 80-character green screens), that it was truly a revolution.
So, yes, it was crippled, and it didn't really become particularly useful until the 512ke, with four times the RAM and a SCSI port, came out. It still deserves the adjective 'great,' probably more than any other computer in history. It showed the entire industry which way to go.
I painstankingly upgraded my 128 to 512 by unsoldering the 128Mb chips and wiring in 512Mb ones. Either the mobo would not accept 4MB without a PROM upgrade, or larger chips were too expensive at the time. Later, I upgraded to a "Mac Minus" by installing a set of bootleg PROMS in the upgraded mobo. I think that mobo died and I ended up installing a Mac Plus mobo I had dumster dived. The video died twice, but the case is original, and the contraption still works. I run the warping clock on it as a night light every once in a while.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Or . . . .
Mindless Amateur Crap
Monolithic Android Cartoons
Megalomaniacal Anthropomorphic Cacophony
Missives About Che (Guevara)
Managing Acrid Cheloids . .
: D
My wife and I (both computer scientists, which was a relatively new degree at the time), went to a computer store to check out the Macintosh in 1984. We were really impressed by MacPaint - being able to draw on screen at that time (as opposed to using something like a plotter) was a big deal. After filling the screen with various filled shapes and textures, I noticed the lasso selection tool, and wondered what it did. I selected an arbitrary region with it (even the concept of selection was new) and then noticed the little "dancing ants". I clicked in the middle of the selection and dragged... and the arbitary graphic region moved ! We bought one right then. The things we take for granted today were so astonishing when the Mac was introduced, that it's impossible for folks that have grown up with the technology to appreciate. In the intervening 21 years, few things have been as impressive as the Macintosh.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
My dad bought this mac when they first came out. I used it as a kid to write all my papers and play games (load runner in particular). Several years ago lightning hit near our house and took out our new computer (connected via a surge strip). The mac (plugged into the wall) survived just fine.
I've had it in my garage for several years, just sitting, not being able to toss it.
Good thing too, because now I have a 1.5 year old and he *loves* it. Wrote a little program to draw XOR'd circles on the screen any time he hits a key.
He's figured out how to turn it on, turn it off, and occasionally when the screen goes blank, knows where to tap it on the side to bring it back.
Good little machine!
I liked the fact you could get all the documentation for the amiga - the hardware reference was my favorite. The one co-processor had only three commands in its instruction set - WAIT (for video beam position), SKIP instructions and MOVE data. Did you know you could chain the two dma channels together so that one fetched amplitude values via dma and output them at changing frequency supplied by the other dma stream - you could create fully modulated carrier waves at up to 1.2 Mhz!
FWIW, I run Linux (Slackware 10) on a Compaq laptop and it works just fine. It came with Windows XP. Shudder. I fixed it quickly.
Mac stuff: I first encountered Macintosh in the guise of a Mac Plus we had at work. It was cool, and quite unlike anything I had seen up until then. Then, as now, Macs and their applications had a quality of integration (for lack of a better term). Things fit together and work together in ways that Windows is still trying to get right. acs were designed that way, so they work.
Last Saturday I was at Fry's and played with the Power Mac G5-something-or-other they had set up with a midi keyboard. I had heard of GarageBand, but never used it. Nevertheless, on my first try I had no difficulty laying down a couple of tracks (they sounded awful, but that's my fault, not GarageBand's!). They very notion that you could sit down with a program you had never used before and actually do something with it in a few minutes is very much due to the way Apple developed Macintosh, from the very beginning.
Macs are nice computers. I've never owned one, but that will probably change this year.
...laura
Reading this article... wow.
Reading all about these wonderful "new" Mac features makes me a lot more excited about computers than reading about how many Ghz the next Intel chip will have, or anything at all concerning those blasted Cell thingies. Back then, mass-market computer mags sounded like tech sites, and it was swell.
Well, for me at least.
Would have been a reprint of the SlashDot feedback at the time. I keep searching for them on Google/News but come up empty each time.
...and used Macs religiously -- and that is the correct word to describe it -- until 2001. After the fiasco of the zero-point release of OS X, I slapped a copy of Yellow Dog Linux on my beige G3, and never looked back.
The beige G3 is still chugging away in my server closet, and still running YDL. It's the last Mac I ever owned.
While that plan was folly for Apple, it worked out pretty well for third market folks. Back in 1986, I was working at an independent Mac repair shop in La Mirada called "Computer Quick" that could upgrade a 128K to 512K or even (gasp!) 2 Megabytes.
I absolutely hated the 512K jobs. First, you would take a pair of cutters and cut the 16 64K x 1 bit RAM chips off the board, leaving the pins in place and usually making a mess of the thing. Next, you'd use a desoldering iron (we had an industrial grade one with a pump, thankfully. None of this squeeze bulb garbage, thank heavens) to remove the pins and clean out the holes. Inevitably, you'd wind up pulling up a trace or shorting something out here, so you had to inspect it very carefully. Finally, you'd solder the new chips (128K x 1 bit) in and solder in a thumb sized daughter board that would handle all the address line magic. Then power it up and keep your fingers crossed for "Happy Mac" to show his face.
In comparison, the 2 Meg upgrades were a piece of cake. We used daughter boards called "Monster Macs" from a San Diego company named Levco. Since there was no expansion slot, you'd cut the 68000 out and add a socket. Then the daughter board (which had its own 68000) clipped right on top, neat as can be. Levco also had a controller board that could clip on top of that for SCSI hard drives - a "grandaughter" board.
When we had accumlated a stack of clipped 68000 chips, we'd file off the edges and drill a couple of holes to make keychains. Very cool. I had mine for a decade before it got stolen. Only worked on the plastic cased chips, though. The ceramics would crack.
Levco was known for a pretty cool sense of humor. When you powered the thing up, "Happy Mac" had fangs (since they'd had to hack the Mac ROMS to make it work anyways). Also, there were four PALs on the board labeled Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. My boss told me some of the Levco engineers had wanted to name "Zeppo" "Karl" but he'd warned their management about the fallout this might've caused. Remember, the Berlin Wall was still up and Reagan was in office.
I know that these days a megabyte seems absolutely trivial, but back then it was an absolute phenomenon. You simply never heard the term "Megabyte" except with hard drives and even that was a pretty new thing. Kind of like gigabyte drives a few years back. And its utility was beyond question - Levco let slip that Apple's finance department in Cuppertino used Monster Macs for their accounting.
Alas, all good things come to an end. Computer Quick's was surface mount technology in the Mac Plus. I was ecstatic the first time I saw SIM memory - no more soldering! Our chief tech tried to fix a trace on the logic board and it took him twelve hours once he got done repairing the damage he'd caused. He handed it over to our boss and told him, "That's it. We're out of business."
I enrolled in a four year school and decided to go into software instead of continuing as a tech as I'd originally planned. Computer Quick was out of business by my sophmore year. The era of garage based computer businesses was over.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Hello,
I remember reading about this procedure in BYTE when the Mac came out. I was in tech school then and couldn't afford anything more than a Commodore 64. If I recall correctly, the article recommended cleaning out the circuit board holes with a toothpick. A Mac user could save several hundred dollars by buying the memory chips mail-order and doing the upgrade themselves.
Then, there were several bugs found in the original ROM and they issued a recall. Mac buyers would bring the machines to the local Apple computer store and get the ROM swapped. Steven Jobs decided that any Mac mobo with a non-Apple memory upgrade would not be allowed to have the debugged ROM installed.
I was stunned (easy to do to a student new to the personal computer industry). I realized then that Apple was a company that hid a fundamental sleazy and predatory nature under a blizard of 'New Age' advertizements. It's corporate image of being a working partner with the information age pioneers was a purchased sham.
To this day, I've never trusted them or believed their image. I have marvelled at the design of some of their products. But at its heart, the personal computer industry is about ever-increasing performance vs. price issues, not design.
It's amazing how some nasty little business decision can turn off potential customers for very long periods of time. When a former employer was doing the same thing, I expressed my reservations about the practice, citing the above example. I was then promptly fired. I've learned to just shut up, now at work, and express opinions on the web.
Will it run on x86?
The Lisa review in Byte is even better - I have the original magazine (have not scanned it) but let me fill you in on some choice quotes:
"Although the Lisa design has several very important elements, four stand out: the machines graphic-mouse orientation, the "desktop" and "data-as-concrete-object" metaphors, and the integrated design of the hardware and software."
"The "mouse" pointing device is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and has one button on top."
"...the Lisa is the most important development in computers in the last five years, easily outpacing IBM's introduction of the Personal Computer in August 1981."
Oddly enough I have the IBM PC issue as well. If anyone is interested in taking these (and a few others) off my hands hit me up.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
In System 3.x, released with the Apple HD 20 in I think Jan 1986, you could format a 400KB floppy as HFS by holding down the option key.
On a Mac Plus and 512KE, 800K floppies were HFS, but you could format them MFS by booting with a System 2.0 boot floppy.
Some pre-1986 3rd-party hard disks, including Iomega 5MB Bernoulli Box, used MFS. Almost all post-Mac+ hard disks used HFS for obvious reasons.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Turbo Color, ooo I think I'm jealous.
I got a bunch of older Macs as freebies from doctors (and some nurses) when I worked at a hospital - personal machines they were getting rid of. (I cleaned them up for donation, so they were happy to let me have them.) I saw one NeXT (and several other Macs that weren't quite as old) that the hospital itself was having recycled. That's a shame, but I understand that it's cheaper to pay to have the thing hauled away and disposed of "properly" than paying a tech to wipe the drive thoroughly and strip whatever parts may be useful. I'd've happily signed an agreement to dispose of any possibly confidential data on the drive if I could have taken the machine.
Constitutionally Correct
If this is the case, can anyone explain why the middle-of-the-road product seems to always be more successful than the best-of-breed product? Is it a timing issue? Is it a "personality characteristics of the founders are more salesman than engineer" phenomenon? (Or vice-versa?)
Is my impression false?
What I like about about the Mac is that it has a modern CISC micprocessor compared to Intel's lame 8086 - Pentium IV family.
Also, it supports modern SCSI and Postscript standards as opposed to IDE and TrueType.
The downside is that you have to 'use' a mouse instead of a modern command prompt.
P.S. I *am* a shell script, you insensitive clod!
Ahh, those were the days!
Rnd
Some 68030 and even some 68020 machines with PMMUs can use Linux.
If you want to help make Linux work on a 68000 Mac, talk to this guy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Yup, I click on "Apple" when I see articles that don't make it to the main page. More ad revenue from /. because of it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The Macintosh was not intended to be Apple's high end system. The Macintosh was a "low cost" system designed to compliment the Lisa, which was Apple's business workstation.
The Apple Lisa had basic multitasking (The original Mac had none) and a full megabyte of memory. It predated the Mac by a year, cost $10,000, and flopped spectacularly in the marketplace.
The Internet is a fine tool for those with obsessive nostalgia. What made the Mac different wasn't it's architecture, it was that it was built to be the computer for people who didn't care for computers. One of the rumored design goals was to make a computer that was similar in flavor to say, a Krups food processor -- sleek, intuitive and pretty. Yeah, the original 128k had plenty of tech limitations but what it did do better than the PC was open the minds of an entire generation of new computer users. Besides, all the cool kids had one back in 84.
I was actually looking to get a Commodore 64 like everyone else in the neighborhood when my family and I walked into a random computer store in December of '84. It turned out to be an Apple store (thank God). I was 12, our family didn't have a computer yet (although I had taken some computer classes and shown strong interest), I hadn't heard too much about Macs at the time. So the young sales guy does the "completely blew me away" Mac demo, I was smitten. When we wondered what time it was and he pulled out the Alarm Clock desk accessory, I went from "smitten" to "sheer desperate hardware-lust mania". I have never before, or since (sadly), had an experience like that for a man-made object, and I feel bad for people who were not a part of that, it was so amazing. It was way more expensive than a C64, but my parents luckily didn't know any better (and luckily had the money) because when I said "Mom! Dad! WE HAVE TO GET THIS MACHINE", they bought the whole shebang, mac, imagewriter, even a 300 baud modem (the latter for $300!). I proceeded to kill most of the next summer (such a nerd...) learning Microsoft BASIC and playing various early Mac games, and dialing up various BBS'es. This is a kid who used to spend his summers on the beach...
;) Thing is, my heart is not in it (literally) and I'm at a point where I'd like to work with some non-Microsoft tech for a change, even at reduced pay. I frequent non-Microsoft sites (like this one) all the time, I'm always a closeted Apple (and to a slightly lesser extent, *nix) fanboy. I'd love an Apple dev job (or at least any job where I could use Macs for work) but the only opportunity I had so far (besides striking out on my own- thank you for your inspiring presentation PDF, Wil Shipley!) was working in the dungeon of some office building for Nikon, having no design input whatsoever. No thanks...
;) Not to mention, I'm only achieving mediocre "performance" in my jobs, and I wonder if my "Apple affair" has anything to do with it!
I think it's why I stuck with Apple through the dark years of the mid-90's, and use OS X to this day (although, alas, my job currently is coding on Windows, and has been for some time). I just had a high opinion of Apple's whole point, and I figured they'd eventually pull through. I suppose it must be some crazy sort of love, why else would you stick around "through thick and thin"? Why else would I wait for the Mac version of a game instead of just caving and buying a PC? Stubborn loyalty with lots of feeling behind it... which all started with that initial rush. Sounds strangely like a good relationship.
The irony is, I am currently getting multiple emails from Microsoft requesting an interview for their AppDev group. I guess I've been doing development using Microsoft tools for long enough now that it's worth something to the Borg
Idealism is costly
I bestow upon myself the "Doctorate of
Cubicism", for educators are ignorant of
Nature's Harmonic Time Cube Principle
and cannot bestow the prestigious honor
of wisdom upon the wisest human ever.
Dr. Gene Ray
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Alright I'm sold. Where can I pick one up?
Let's assume the Mac HW, ROM, and OS architecture was mostly frozen by mid-1983. Let's also assume they paid attention to HW and SW for IBM machines, a possibly false assumption.
:)
RAM:
Use socketed chips, and plan for growth to 16MB with only new chips. No funny stuff with address lines 22 and 23. Make 256KB an option.
Color:
8-bit Color should've been architected into the graphics system, but "not implimented" in early machines. 2- or even 4-bit color or greyscale would've been nice in 512KB machines. As it was, we were stuck with "3-bit"-color for printing, which hardly anyone used.
Sound: no change, see "expansion slots" below.
Floppy: 800KB floppy optional for those who could afford it.
Hard disk:
If Apple didn't want to ship a HD right out of the gate, it should've architected a standard way of making a Mac-compatible HD and a standard filesystem to go with the 512KB Mac.
Expansion slots for video, networking, and whatever else:
Not necessarily in the first release, but by 1985 we should've seen them. A Mac in a PC-like case with ISA-like slots would've been nice by 1985. We had to wait until the Mac II to see this.
Multitasking:
Preemptive is a lot to ask without a PMMU and a good timer chip, but Switcher-like cooperative should've been there as soon as machines with enough RAM shipped. In 1985, Apple did have a Multi-finder-like multitasking environment for the 512KB Mac running System 2.0. It crashed more often than Microsoft Windows 3.0 beta, but you could use a modem, print, and type in MacWrite all at the same time for about an hour at a stretch.
Filesystem:
Have a non-flat FS ready to ship as soon as machines with enough memory are available, recommend HD vendors use it.
Networking:
In 1983 PC networking was in its infancy, ARCNET was used for hardware and I don't know if TCP/IP existed on PCs. TCP/IP itself underwent a major revision in the early '80s. All Apple and most other PC vendors cared about was sharing printers and files on a LAN, something they did with the 512KB Mac with Lisa-file-server and the LaserWriter on a AppleTalk-on-LocalTalk network. I would've gone with RJ11 connecters rather than the more expensive Apple connectors though.
Macintalk:
Apple should've bought more rights to it and promoted it better. As it was, it was a toy.
Desk Accessories:
The Desk Accessory Mover should've come out a lot earlier. It would've been nice to strip out DAs to create a smaller System disk.
RAMDisks, caches, etc.
Third parties came out with caches and Ram Disks for the "Fat Mac." Apple should've done these or at least contracted them out and included them in the 512KB Mac box.
Linux:
Apple should've invented a time machine and put the 0.01 kernel on the Mac when it was released.
And finally...
Politics:
Refuse to allow Apple trademarks in ads for products that violate Apple's rules without getting Apple's blessing first, e.g. using the high-8-bits of memory in ways that will break in the future.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Since the Mac was not a PC, the sentence should read "from PCs".
Nice story.
I bought an SE after playing with one at a Micro Center. It was a lot of money for me at the time but I knew it would do the job. It paid for itself pretty quickly with the freelance design jobs I was getting.
Hard to believe it had an 8 mhz clock! Griping about a few hundred megahertz difference in system seems petty by comparison.
P.S. I've always called them "marching ants." But "dancing ants is nice too.
I had the "privilege" of using Sun 3/50's in our computer lab in school. We probably even had those damn laser mice. The Sun 3/50 was dog slow, even in black and white. Those early laser mice tracked poorly, and the special metal mousepads you had to use weren't very comfortable. The Sparcstations really blew the earlier Sun machines out of the water.
I don't have fond memories of the Sparcstation 2 either, mainly because by the time I was using one the Ultra 1 had already been released. Now that was workstation.
I don't know why, but I just gotta have Lotus 1-2-3 in ROM on my new laptop. If a laptop in the late 80's early 90's that didn't have all the business apps bundled with the machine was an issue... ...and I was 13.
I and probably others have written MFS-file-extraction tools. Mine's in Java so it should work "anywhere." It's not online but ask and ye shall receive.
Motivation?
I had some disk-image files from an old Mac system CD I wanted to look at, and System 10.x barfed on them.
If email addresses were in Apple HFS format, I would be yahoo.com:davidwr.geo. Or is that com:yahoo:davidwr.geo? Egad, shades of VMS.
By the way, the machines weren't "hardwired to boot MacOS" but they were hardwired to load the first two sectors of the boot floppy, then load the data fork of the file designated "System" by the boot sectors, then go from there. Granted, on pre-OF machines, it made it all but impossible to boot Linux without first booting a MacOS stub.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thankfully, the sticker on the back of my Saab that shows Calvin peeing on Clippy has one more hair spike than the real Calvin, and the fine print labels it "Calven".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"the Macintosh design team crammed an unbelievable amount of power into the 64K bytes of ROM in the form of tightly written, highly optimized machine code. In doing so, the team provided standard user interfaces, so that most application programs on the Mac will be used in similar forms." ... does it ?
While certainly not just applying to the Mac's of yore. What happened to those days where the true art of bare metal programming was the pinnacle of geekdom? Just think how much faster and efficient todays software would be if we applied this philosophy to programming.
Of course things are more complex and hardware considerably more variable in these days of Open Source , cross - platform development etc. Wouldnt it be nice if we at least tried a little harder to avoid the bloat - just because machines get more powerful it doesnt mean you should let your code slip
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
In 6th grade (1986) I wrote a paper about Haley's comet and printed it out on my mom's mac 512K and imagewriter I printer. I ended up getting a low grade because the teacher thought I had just cut out articles from a newspaper. It wasn't until after I proved to her that I did it on my mom's computer that it got changed to an "A". (printed on only one side, graphics hand drawn in macpaint, so they weren't professional quality)
As a side note: A couple years back, my dad found me an original Mac 128K in it's original shipping box with the shipping label dated 1985. He didn't think it was worth anything, but thought I might like playing with it. Mint condition, original styrofoam packing, hardly any screen burn-in. I'm holding onto this for a while.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
yeah they got bought by Ziff Davis just like PC Shopper, remember when thy were like an inch thick (Shopper)! Once that happened, they were toast. I never understood why those morons changed every mag they bought to look like PC Week and Target the 'Middle Manager'... Then bitch about declining sales.. Those (byte and shopper) were for enthusiasts, not middle managers, so by destroying them you in turn alienate the audience you intended to 'buy'... Besides it's well known most Middle managers are illiterates and there are only so many 'shiny' magazines with pretty pictures they can look at in one trip to toilet.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
http://www.blakespot.com/macplus
But, it's good to have an original 128k unit around as well...
http://www.blakespot.com/list/images/mac128.jpg
Hit my retro site for like items:
http://www.bytecellar.com/
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
If anyone cares, the 1986 Byte review of the AT&T Unix PC is also available.
Not quite the historic impact of the Mac, but interesting in its own right. It was certainly the first and may still be the only "Unix PC" ever offered (discounting various Linux offerings and the current MacOS X as "not really UNIX®").
-- Alastair
I remember those glory days before Ziff Davis bought up everything, and also when that decline happened.
As I sit back and look at things now though, it seems that for the enthusiast market, the internet has filled in the holes left from all the good magazines of yesteryear.
Ultimately, I think we may be better off now with instant access through the internet to a greater number of resources than we were with the old magazines....
Lawbreaker! Around here we obey c!
c = 299792458 m/s
1609.344 meters per mile
c = 186282.39 miles per second
You're breaking the Universal Speed Limit, citizen. Could I please see your license, registration, and proof of insurance for relativistic travel?
"My attempt to run the Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark on the Mac provides one indication of its RAM limitations"
For some reason this cracks me up. Although I heard the original Mac also sucked at the Garlicpress of Rhadamanthus test suite. Oh well, I guess benchmarks aren't everything.
I have an SE and an SE/30 running debian (takes a hell of a long time to check the 128M on startup). The SE didn't seem to be that bad of a little machine...no real problems with System 6. Maybe I didn't push it hard enough.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
But the thing that sticks with me is the very first MacPaint document I made - when I was three and a half years old. Leafing through old stuff in my folks' attic, I found the ancient computer (sadly, it no longer works - we lent it to an uncle who promptly broke the floppy drive. Still, anything that lasts 16 years these days...)
On one of the floppy disks was a MacPaint document that had my name, (old) address, and some shapes. (Circle (circle drawing), Triangle (Triangle drawing)...) My dad assured me when I showed it to him that I had indeed made that myself the day that he bought the Mac (summer '84). I think it's Apple's greatest triumph that a little kid that still had trouble with Grover's "The Monster at the End of the Book" could not only use a computer, but do so well!
Heh
/end experiment/
"Someone should study this from a safe distance..."
"Honey, anything exciting happen at the lab today"?
"We're studying the effects of WAF on.."
"Whats 'WAF'"?
"Oh, thats when..."
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
The introduction and review was in the February 1984 issue, with the Mac on the cover. This is the article for the geek; it includes block diagrams of the architecture and pictures of the motherboard.
The Feb 1984 issue also included an interview with the designers.
I was hoping TFA would be the February article, because it actually is very interesting. In it, they make a big deal about the justifcation for certain design decisions, most notably the lack of expansion slots. Instead, they included "virtual slots", in the form of "high speed" serial ports (RS-422).
Remember that they were trying to solve the problems of the Apple ][, one of was how the expansion boards fitted into the memory map. By eliminating expansion slots, they hoped that it would improve stability, by ensuring that the developers would have a fixed machine environment to work with. They thought that by including all the ports a user would ever need, there would be no need for expansion slots.
Then a couple of years later, Apple decided that expansion slots were good (with the Macintosh II).
It is kind of funny that with the iMac, Apple came all the way around back to the same port-expansion ideas that were discussed in the Febuary 1984 article and interview.
If anyone can find the Feb 1984 article and interview online, it is a good read.
I'm sure if you printed out the computer section of eBay, it would be far thicker than 2 inches.
I don't think there's any question that Internet destroyed the market for these enthusist magazines (PC Magazine, PC Shopper, Byte, etc) and they only reoriented themselves to the idiot market after their sales and advertising markets moved on.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Read up on some of Dick Gabriel's "Worse is Better" philosophy. (Not just the original paper, and especially his later arguments with himself over whether it's true or not.)
Best-of-breed products require more design and R&D, and that costs money. It always costs more to go make something new and great. And since people know that the good stuff will eventually make it into the kind of products they're already using -- for cheaper -- it's always going to be a lot harder to sell the good stuff.
For example, take the typical PC user in 1984. The PC is hard to use, but it's a known quantity. Getting an Apple costs a lot of money, and it won't run his software, and it's new and weird and plenty of new-and-weird things have turned out to be complete duds. So he'll wait. If it's really the bees knees, then PCs will have menus and mice and stuff in the next version.
Of course, for people like Steve Jobs who are great at both recognizing the good stuff, and selling it, they couldn't do it any other way.
to run real accounting software, which didn't exist on the Mac.
to run lotus spreadsheets with more than 128K of memory which you could not do on a mac.
to run insurance comapny risk-analysis software.
to run stock market tracking and modeling programs
to run video store rental software.
to attach them to a file server and run shared databases.
and so on and so on and so on. To do the things that let you PAY for buying the computer. The things we spent thousands and thousands of dollars for CP/M Z80 computers for, and now, we could do the same thing, faster and with more ram, and cheaper hard disks.
We were networking Z-80 systems with Zenith and Hazeltine terminals in '79 and '80. Once we got Corvus Omninet cards or Arcnet (!) cards and could network PC's at 1 Mhz and then at 2.5 Mhz, all bets were off. The money flowed like water for a while....
Meanwhile, there were a few long-haird weirdos in the back playing with macs and mice, and making pretty pictures. Which was fun and all, but it didn't pay the bills. Of course, Tim Jensen kept playing with the Radio Shack color computer, and having a darned lot of fun, and he and a couple of other guys were sleeping in the back of their shop working on the early video toaster.... but meanwhile, we were making actual money networking PC's with early versions of Novell when we gave up MP/M and TurboDos and went to all '86 processors.
And Tim _did_ hit it big, but in the meantime, those of us wearing suits and ties and selling pc's to lawyers to replace Wang dedicated word processors and to run conflict-of-interest databases (Many of those available for Macs yet?) or law-office-case-management software (another big mac vertical, right?) or large free-text indexing systems, with at the time (1984 remember?) huge 40 and 80 and _90_ meg hard disk drives managed to make decent money.
The macs, and the Amiga had a problem. All that bit-mapped screen stuff was fun and all, but no court in the country would take dot-matrix printouts seriously. No Daisy wheel support in the mac. C. Itoh and Xerox and NEC were were the $$$ where. Now, _later_ after the lasers showed up, even then, remember that the people PAYING to have the contracts wanted COURIER not some weird Times Roman font they'ed never seen before. And mac lasers were expensive compared to early HP and Canon and Oki lasers.....
You bought a PC in 1984 to do things that EARNED MONEY. You bought a mac to play with pictures.
Even as late as 1997, we still were installing monochrome monitors and text-screens. Why? 'Cause if _all_ you do all day is word-processing, multi-tasking DOESN'T make you any money. Even now, the fancy graphics and fonts and colors do little to enchance the operations of accounts receivable software. The biggest advantage of windows for accounting software is that the big screens allow you to see more of the accounting information at once. It _is_ nice to have AR and AP and GL all open at once.... but uh, the mac had little to do with _that_.
No color, no RAM expanision, no slots of even liftable lid.
The Mac didn't have these for the simple reason that these were the things that Woz built into the Apple II and II Plus against Jobs' suggestions. The basis of the separatism of the "pirates" at Apple, and much of their design philosophy, was Jobs' petulance over lost arguments. This is where the "Who would ever need more than X RAM?" question comes from, and what it resulted in.
I ended up getting a fully tricked out Apple IIgs because it didn't have any designed in limitations.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Much as the machines have improved, the "insanely great" sound and feel of those original Macs just can't be beat. Just thinking of the original startup noise actually gives me a little thrill, which is pretty ridiculously good design for something that shouldn't matter at all (and pretty ridiculously pathetic of me).
The backlight on an iPod gives a lot of people the same feeling, I think.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
This reminds me of the first computer that was personally mine, a Mac Classic II. Of course, I got this computer when Win98 was out, but I wanted a computer I wouldn't have to share for typing up school papers. I never got around to using the thing, except for playing around with it a bit, installing System 7.2, and trying to run Linux. Never did get Linux running on that thing though. Still, I've always wanted to find a use for this thing. I hate having crap lying around that doesn't have a purpose (even if it is just for aesthetic purposes, like art). I've repurposed many a things, including an XBox. Anyone know of anything useful a Mac Classic II can be applied to these days? And no stupid answers like "paper weight" or "macquarium." I mean for the challenge of it all! Wasn't that the spirit of the time? Let's challenge things, push the envelope, take a risk, and see just what this thing can do!
Rawr
Dungeon Master was great. I had it on my Apple IIgs.
Much, much later I had Dungeon Master II on Mac OS, but for some reason I never liked it quite as much as the original.
-- Tim Buchheim
... and then they built the supercollider.
That should have read "the only magazine after Byte, that I felt was in the same league of broad IT coverage, was the german Heise C't magazine". Sadly, c't is no longer as nice a magazine as it used to be.
I was in the same dilemma as the parent poster: I was mightily interested in the Amiga, but the lackluster sales drones in the local computer store and the confusing (for newbies) articles in the Amiga magazines suggested that you needed a mainboard. Terms were thrown around that suggested that it was a closed club with a secret handshake.
Add to this a bunch of clueless advertisers who try to fit their entire catalog into the smallest possible ad block in the magazine, and the confusion was complete. I threw up my hands in despair and bought a Mac Plus instead.
The Amiga was a great machine, but it was hampered by bad marketing (and, I suspect, a little FUD from the IBM-compatible crowd).
No formatting, no fonts, no graphics, certainly (even the dot matrix printers generally didn't have any graphics capability whatsoever--it just wasn't included; only the ability to accept a stream of ASCII and dump it out to the page was in the ROM).
The ImageWriter was hardly the first dot-matrix printer with graphics support. I remember when I was in middle school (1981-1983), the school had an Epson dot-matrix printer with full graphics capabilities -- I remember poring over the manual figuring out how to control the output pixel by pixel.
I think the printer in question was a successor to the MX-80, maybe an FX-80? From a Google search, I found that the MX-80 was released in 1980, evidently with some simple graphics characters in the character set, and a later graphic chip upgrade allowed for full bitmapped graphics capability. I believe the FX-80 had this full graphics capability out of the box, and it was released in 1982.
Granted, the Mac was the first to really take advantage of this graphics capability to generate more readable fonts for everyday documents, but the hardware capability already existed for years before the Mac was released in 1984. And as I recall, PrintShop generated high-quality fonts using printer graphics before the Mac was around, but that was used more for signs...
Back in the mid-80's when I was in high school, my computer was an Atari 800. Eventually, I scraped together enough pennies to buy a crappy little CAL-ABCO Legend 808 Printer, a printer so obscure that a Google image search turns up empty, but a web search turned up someone selling one now for $5! It was a poor 9-pin Epson clone with a wax ribbon and bad print quality, but it did have graphics capability.
Years later, when I owned an Amiga but could not afford a new printer, I decided to see just how far I could push this crappy little printer. I actually wrote my own Amiga printer driver for it, based on an example driver and the codes from the manual. Once that was working, I was able to print anything from my Amiga to my Legend 808 in graphics mode. I then used Ghostscript to render PostScript and output it to the printer.
I daresay that my Legend 808 was probably the only one in the world that ever rendered outline fonts using PostScript!
(These days, I still have the Legend 808 sitting in a box for nostalgia reasons, but I have 3 laser printers on my desk: a LaserJet 4050, a LaserJet 8000 (both with built-in PostScript support), and a cheap Brother multifunction fax machine that just happened to be a laser model...)
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Sorry, this is just like the people who say "I use Windows XP at work and it crashes every 5 minutes."
If it's doing that then you're doing something wrong, have done something wrong, have had something wrong done to you, or have a hardware problem.
I used every Mac since the original 128K, did some pretty substantial medium-to-low-level development stuff under system 6, pushed the machine to its limits, and never experienced what you describe.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
His ads for his latest book. The book he is writing with Larry Niven, the latest Phonetics software package that his wife, the school-marm-turned-entrepreneur, the attack on Democrats, the attack on government and THEN, the current book and game...
He was a pill on Byte Information eXchange (BIX)
qqqq JP - love GRO