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)."

Comments

Nostalgia

[daveschroeder]

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.

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. jpg

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.

compatibility

[yardbird]

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!

The coolest part

[marshac]

The coolest part of the Mac 128k isn't the computer itself, but rather what's on the inside of the case.

Mac 128k vs. Spring Break

[G4from128k]

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.

One question about that 128K machine...

[Foolomon]

One question about that 128K machine: can you boot Linux on it?

Re:Color, multitasking?

[LWATCDR]

"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.

The lasso tool

[macemoneta]

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.