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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)."
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.
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
...but not until 1985. While I also used Amigas for years (earliest was an A500, latest an A1200, gave up using that in about 2001) as far as 68k-based fun goes the NeXT blew everything else out of the water. Of course, it cost more than anything that wasn't a Sun3 too...
Mirrordot mirror of TFA.
IRC, and thinking wayyy back... the original color implementation on the earliest Macs (128k/512k and likely the Plus) was 8 colors only. It was put in there to support color printing on the Imagewriter. The original Macs were black and white (no gray scale). The first Mac with Color QD was the Mac II.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
Actually, there were DOS compatibility options from early in the Mac product life. I remember MacCharlie, a full coprocessor system that ran MSDOS, I think it might have worked even with the original Mac128 but I don't recall. I do recall selling a few units of MacCharlie at my dealership.
Last I checked -- no. The SE/30 is the earliest supported model.
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
Um. Sorry. You could buy the far, far superior Lisa for a lot less than $20,000. And, if you planned on writing any software for either one, you had to.
Cool. And since I'm an Atari ST fanboy (still have a working Falcon), I'll point out that Dungeon Master was first deveolped for the ST, and then ported to all those other, "lesser" platforms...
PB 100 2/20 no floppy. . . $2299
PB 100 2/20 ext floppy . . $2499
PB 140 2/40. . . . . . . . $3199
PB 140 4/40. . . . . . . . $3499
PB 170 4/40 2400 fax modem $4599
ClasII 2/40. . . . . . . . $1899
ClasII 4/80. . . . . . . . $2399
Qdr700 4/floppy. . . . . . $5699 (with no HD!)
Qdr700 4/80. . . . . . . . $6399
Qdr700 4/160 . . . . . . . $6999
Qdr700 4/400 . . . . . . . $7699 (these were the days of $1000+ HDs)
Qdr900 4/floppy. . . . . . $7199 (with no HD!)
Qdr900 4/160 . . . . . . . $8499
Qdr900 4/400 . . . . . . . $9199
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I mean think about the Mac compared to a PC of the day. WHY would you buy a PC in 1984?
PCs had color, Macs didn't until '87. PCs had hard drives, Macs didn't. From Wikipedia:
"The limitations of the first Mac soon became clear. It had very little memory, even compared to other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; it lacked a hard drive or any means to attach one easily. Although by 1985 the Mac's base memory had increased to 512 kb, and it was possible, albeit inconvenient, to expand the memory of a 128 kb Mac, Apple realized that the Mac needed to be improved."
I was certainly using PCs with hard drives in the summer of '85, and remember doing the floppy shuffle on a Mac the summer afterwards.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
as far as 68k-based fun goes the NeXT blew everything else out of the water.
The NeXT had it's share of problems. Objective C has never caught on. The original version's magneto-optical drive was a total disaster (completely unreliable and dog slow), as was the lack of floppy disk (which was important way back in 1990 when it was released, at least in the University segment, where I encountered NeXTs).
Perhaps the biggest problem was the price. At $9,999 it was just too expensive for the consumer. Give the cost, it really isn't comparible to the Mac or the Amiga.
A standard 68000 {in fact anything before an 030; and even then not the LC models, which actually had the MMU integrated but disabled by blowing a fuse} lacks a hardware Memory Management Unit. You probably could run Clinux on it, which manages to manage its memory in software without a dedicated hardware MMU.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Yes, printer of yore were 9 or 15 pin. A lot of them did print truely horrible fonts, but a number were capabile of some nice output -- if you were willing to wait. The Apple Image Writer was no champion of high resolution output. It used the some 15 pin technology of those other printers, but the Mac used bitmap mode instead of text mode. The result was pretty equivilent. No unless you got the Laser Writer could you really start calling it desktop publishing.
You are right thought: The Mac was the first personal computer to enable the avaerage Joe to produce documents with multiple fonts, and embedded graphics. But by saying the other computers had nothing more than Notepad is a falacy. There were a great number of word processors, from Scripsit, to WordStar. You couldn't embed graphics, and everything was displayed in text mode; however, you could choose fixed pitch, variable pitch, italics, bold, superscripts and subscripts. Everything you need to actually write a document.
Apple Macintosh's two great advancements for the home computer were the GUI and desktop publishing.
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!
It was totally indecipherable. And in order to make it Really Work, you had to take a soldering gun to it. That's fine I guess, but contrary to a lot of Slashdotters' beliefs, it's not that much fun to go after your $2000 toy with heavy machinery and end up with a paperweight because you're all thumbs.
The ads in Amiga mags were hilarious, too. Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
...No.
Here's an excellent summary of why an Apple computer based on an IBM PC clone design wouldn't have been a Mac.You can get Tee shirts with them at the artist's web site:
http://www.tinney.net/>
My all time favorite cover, Software Piracy, is there.
No, actually, this is the official review. The February 1984 issue of BYTE (I have the issue in my files) contained the Macintosh product introduction and first look articles. Phil Lemmons, editor-in-chief of BYTE, knowing that I had purchased my own Macintosh, asked if I would like to do the official review, and I did; it was the first article I ever wrote for BYTE.
I did later have a column in BYTE, but that didn't start for nearly a year (June 1985).
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)