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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?
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
Only if you get the Calvin-peeing-on-Chevy sticker.
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)
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.
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...
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...
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.
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!
I couldn't afford a Mac, of course.
Haha. Macs used to be so pricey, funny how things cha.. er, never mind.
"It's like my pool is TEARIN' ASS 'round my backyard!" --Carl, From Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
Nah, they're probably using an SE/30 like me.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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)
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!
I think you're missing something.
Apple was selling them at $2500 and couldn't keep up with demand. What makes you think they'd be able to keep up with the *increased* demand if they lowered the price? Not only would they have more unhappy customers who couldn't buy their computer, but they'd be making less money on each computer they sold.
Comment of the year
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!
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
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.
As for my problem with the guy, the entire premise of his column is that he is an ignorant prat. Once he came on board, Byte started degenerating into yet another PC rag.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
Alright I'm sold. Where can I pick one up?
"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
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.
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.
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
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.
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_.
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).