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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.
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
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.
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...
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
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
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.
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.
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.