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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)."
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.
The coolest part of the Mac 128k isn't the computer itself, but rather what's on the inside of the case.
I posted earlier (and therefore, below. Yeah that makes sense) about my lust for a Mac in 1984. The sequel is that when I could afford what I wanted (early 1986), I chose an Amiga 1000 and never looked back.
You're right, even if you're laughing (or trolling). But in 1984, you needed about $20,000 to do anything like a 128K Mac.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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...
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 Amiga failed because of a horrible, wretched marketing department. It became synonymous with "video games", and then became Amiga vs. Atari. Nobody seemed to take it seriously as a business machine.
-Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat-
"pity the Amiga didn't make it..
they were quite impressive machines, dunno why they didn't make it though."
The Amiga had a good life. By many standards it was a success. A lot of the old Amiga people are now in the OSS community.
Why did it not become the "standard"?
1. The BIG computer magazines where already running into the great PC wasteland. Why? that is where the ads where. I mean think about the Mac compared to a PC of the day. WHY would you buy a PC in 1984? They where not cheaper than a Mac. At no time did any magazine or pundit ever come put and say. Graphics, color, multitasking, and a GUI are the future of Computers! PC can not compete with the Amiga. Frankly PCs did not catch up with the Amiga or the Mac until 95 or 98! I remember articles discussing if there was any "real" value to multitasking?
2. Commodore could not market it's way out of a wet paper sack. If Commodore bought KFC they would have changed the name to "Warn dead birds in a paper bucket".
If you think about it current PCs are more like the Amiga than the PCs of 1985. Multitasking, Mouse, GUI, flat address space, stereo sound, 32 bit pointers and hardware acceleration for graphics operations.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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 got my first mac in 1985, 128K+external floppy. I later got a Levco MonsterMac upgrade installed. Two frickin' megabytes. For over a year I would boot from a floppy that set up a 1.5M ramdisk. That thing was FAST (relatively) running off a ramdisk. I had to give that up with System 7, because it was no longer possible to system-switch to another disk.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
You can.. its called Ebay. I bought a sparcstation 2 for 30 dollars including shipping last year. (keyboard and mouse included) It has one of those early sun laser mice that required the special mouse pad. :)
Now a next system on ebay runs at least 99 dollars and shipping is expensive. I did find a site (forgot uri) that sells refurb next machines.
I've also got a chance to play with one at my university. Seems the bought a lab full and one of the professors had been saving one in the electrical engineering department. They wouldn't let him use it on the network anymore so he donated it to the visualization group. My wife is a member and I got a chance to play with it and actually i hacked into it. Seems he had forgotten the password. We didn't have the install media anymomre.
A NeXT machine is amazing. Even though OS X is based on it, i'd rather have a next any day of the week. Now if only i could get the 99 dollars for ebay...
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
How hard is it to write a submission about a product without taking a cheap potshot at the competition? Was this really necessary?
..bruce..
I think so. I did a lot of assembly language programming back in 1974-85, including Z80, 8080, 8086, 6502, and 680x0 (and some more bizarre ones, like the F8, Perkin Elmer 8/32, DG Nova, and some mainframes as well). I loved the 6502 for its compact simplicity (let's hear it for Page 0!). I loved the 680x0 for its orthogonality and clean address space. I swore at Intel on a regular basis.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Standard practice at Commodore was to place large orders with small companies who would have to expand to meet the order. Commodore then withheld payments on the order which basically shut of the company's cash flow and they went belly up. Commodore then came in and bought the company for a song and a dance and forgave its own debt.
This was Commodore founder Jack Tramiel's business strategy, he called it the religion. This guy makes all the a'holes in todays computer industry look like saints.
There was also a big fraud scandal involving inside trading at commodore and numerous other reasons.
Altough these things happend early on in Commodore's history these things have a tendency to come around and bite you in the butt when you least expect it.
Wow! I had forgotten the name of that upgrade. A total hack that worked flawlessly. The Monster board hooked up by clamping on some of the RAM decode logic chips. This was in the days before surface mount.
I had 2 MB of RAM and a 8 MHz 68k in 1987 or so. Better than most $10,000 workstations at the time.
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.
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
The thing that made the Mac immortal wasn't necessarily the user interface ...
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.
And what made publishing documents so easy? Yes, the user interface.
Reading various comments on this thread alone, never mind the word that is called slashdot, I'm forced to conclude that many people here don't understand what a user interface really is.
Virtually everything involving computers back then required complex knowledge to perform anything but the simplest tasks. Macintosh brought its capabilities to a level understandable by a four year old. Ask three or four year olds how old they are and they'll hold up fingers and say "this many!"; take them to a buffet table and ask what they want to eat and they'll point at what they want -- even without saying a single word. Macintosh captured this simplicity with point and click ; the most notable difference is that users need to use a mouse instead of just pointing a finger, of course.
Making complex knowledge of computers available to a user is fairly trivial. Adding text menus and function keys, the most common MS-DOS interface at the time, is also trivial; likewise adding a mouse. For many years publishers of DOS and Windows proclaimed their programs were "user friendly" presumably on the basis of their menu based interface in that it simply had one. Whether or not users can make the program do what they want had little or bearing on slapping the "user friendly" label on it. Indeed, the situation hasn't changed all that much.
Until developers (and pundits) realize that not mouses and menus a user friendly interface make, the sooner computers won't be more difficult to use than they need be.
Making a false distinction between interface and the power and functionality underneath is as misleading as making a distinction between the human brain and the mind: the mind is essentially a manifestation of the brain's function; mental illness is a manifestation of a sick or damaged brain. Likewise, the power and usefulness of a computer system (OS, application, etc.) from a user's perspective is inextricably tied to the interface.
This explains a large part of why Windows sucks (again, from a user's perspective) and why Linux is so slow in displacing Windows. One can argue that even though the Mac platform represents the most refined user interface in computing to date, it is Windows' superficial resemblance to the Mac's interface that lulls the typical Windows user into complacency. The oversight -- or downright dismissal -- of the importance of user interfaces by many hardcore Linux geeks (though certainly not all!) is another topic in its own right but ultimately is caused by the perception that interfaces are a distinct entity that cannot possibly be the source of real power of an OS -- or application.
Make glib dismissals of the importance of user interfaces at your own peril.
It's the interface stupid.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
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.
You talk like its long since gone > http://www.byte.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