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Happy 25th, Macintosh!
bradgoodman writes to tell us that tomorrow will mark the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh, debuting just 2 days after the famous Super Bowl XVIII commercial. "'The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind 'Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley,' an online historical exhibit. 'The gold standard now for personal electronics is, "Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?" People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way.'"
'The gold standard now for personal electronics is, "Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?" People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way.'"
And those slogan stealing bastards are Sears. Always trying to piggyback on Apple innovation...
Yeah but, is it easy enough for Windows users to use it?
And where's Steve Jobs when you need him, dammit!
I'm a PC. I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity. Curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most. I used two of the great unutterable blasphemies--something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
fanbois-of-the-world-unite
'nuff said
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It was the last day I showered or left the basement.
Will this include a commemorative model Macintosh like the 20th Anniversary did? (I own two, one dead by lightning strike.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
That you mention "Apples Superbowl Commercial" and people know it. My dad knows, and is a real estate manager! That commercial really sticks in peoples mind. I would love to see apple come out with another commercial of that caliber. The Hal9000 commercial wasn't nearly as cool...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I have two Macs at home, but I don't think my Grandmother could handle it. How do you explain the difference between quitting an application and simply closing the window? My wife has the same issue...
May you continue to be the true innovators in the industry and give the rest of us good stuff to copy from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But get real people, the Mac had nothing to do with it.
I love my iMac! My first computer was an Apple IIe.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
No, apparently you're busy using it to spew your shit on our site. I'll wait until you've finished (just to be polite, of course).
25 years and computers still don't boot any faster. A 8MHz 128k Mac would boot in about 20 seconds. Now computers are clocked about 500 times faster and it takes 10 times longer. What's a factor of 5000 among friends?
Many of the original processing concepts of the Macintosh 68000 CPU came from Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-10 which celebrated its 40th birthday last year. The data/address separation as well as the instruction set sequencing via a two-step clock. The PDP-10 "DDT" debugging tool also had an equivalent that could be invoked by using the "programmers switch" (which was a cheap little plastic doohicky which slid into place on the side of the original Macs and, when pressed, would directly activate a switch on the motherboard and drop you into a debugger)
I got one of the first Macs. It wasn't my first computer with a mouse; we had those at work for chip design. But those cost over $100K each. My fellow engineers couldn't believe that I got a computer at home with a mouse and windows/menus for only $2500!
It even made it into our family Christmas card photo that year:
http://arneberg.com/family/xmas/xmas1984.jpg
(This is my first-ever slashdot post...how do I get a web link to work?)
This month, I prefer to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the Compaq Portable, the machine that kicked off the process of market competition that resulted in the affordable and open-standards-based systems that the majority of users enjoy today.
Xerox wanted to send a present, but they decided the GUI they sent for the baby shower is the gift that keeps on giving.
And "think tank"?
I want nothing to do with that.
It amazes me now, how we computed with so little RAM and no Hard Disk. I don't know how much ram Cell phones have but its probably more..
Those old macs 8 mhz processor 128 Kbytes (512 soon after.)
full specs
http://lowendmac.com/compact/original-macintosh-128k.html
Of course there were times when those old macs would spit out the disk you were using and ask you to put in the system disks... The Mac SE with harddrive couldn't come soon enough.
Dying a long, slow death. Oh god, when will it ever end?
"... People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way."
Bullshit, I bet that distinction goes to the makers of false teeth or a similar product with geriatric fangirls.
Nullius in verba
Thanks, Doug!
Slashdot Tue Dec 09, 2008: The Mouse Turns 40
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/09/163205
Wikipedia: Douglas Engelbart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
Wikipedia: The Mother of All Demos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
and of course,
Folklore.org: 118 stories about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.
http://www.folklore.org/index.py
Instructions for auto-linking are at the bottom of the "Post Comment" page under "URLs".
cheers.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I have a Mac 128 with an Apple Imagewriter, one of the first ones where they used a regular DB25 cable instead of the Appletalk cable. I can't believe its 25 years old. I bought it in 1990 for the printer. I think the lady said she paid $4500 for it. At the time I told her that could buy her a very nice '386
That was probably the decendent of AppleWorks for the Apple II. That suite of programs was a spreadsheet, database manager, AND word processor and ran on a computer with a whopping 64k of RAM.
512K Fat Mac in Grad School - our lab bought a couple of these when they came out
Mac LC - my first Mac. Cashed in my 401k and bought it, a color monitor, and printer for about $6,000
Mac Centris 660 AV - Two processors, and speech recognition! Sort of.
iBook G4 - needed something to sync with my iTunes, and my PC just wasn't cutting it.
And now....Shiny new iMac used mostly to run World of Warcraft
Have you tried a Mac? It powers on and boots in less time than it takes to post on /.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Obviously, you didn't have a Mac Plus with a (25-pin) SCSI port.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Interesting opinions from the ArsTechnica editors: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/25-years-of-macintosh.ars
My old TI-99/4A had a 16-bit 3 Mhz processor and 16K. yeah baby. It's amazing how clean your code gets when you only have 16k to play with....
Ummm.... the Mac plus had SCSI and the 512 supported a hard drive they made for the floppy port. I think that drive worked with the 128 as well. The floppy port HDD's were pretty slow but they worked.
When the Plus was a new machine, I had an Atari ST at home though. The ST was cheaper, just as fast, had built-in MIDI, an awesome audio chipset, color graphics, an ugly GUI and much cooler games. I got a Mac Plus later.
My dad bought one when it came out... passed it onto me, and it's now sitting in my kids room where they either pretend to work or play some basic games on it. Only problem I've had is the video went out and had to reinforce the connection a bit, but that did give me a chance to look at the engraved signatures on the inside.
Not a bad investment all things considered... wish other computers would last that long...
My grandmother's dead, you insensitive clod!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
[ My car's odometer reads in pentaparsecs. My speedometer in parsecs/hour. ]
Does your car appear blue from the front, and red from behind?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I have a Mac Plus. I got it specifically to run a particular version of AppleShare that allowed you to boot an Apple IIgs over an AppleTalk connection. And I never got around to actually doing it. Hmm, now there's something I can look into doing once I get that desk rebuilt. I know I've got an old 40 MB SCSI drive lying around somewhere....
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people"
Wasn't that already well demonstrated by the phone?
I only had 64k of RAM in 1984, you insensitive clod!
... and then they built the supercollider.
My last three consumer electronics purchases (DVR, car audio, component HD radio) all fail that test handily. Not even close.
So 25 years later, there's a lot of room for improvement toward meeting that standard.
Congrats Apple on meeting it earlier and more often than most.
Flash-forward a few years later and I go to university and leave my beloved dot-matrix printer behind. I joined the newspaper and became very well acquainted by this application humorously called "Quark Xpress" and the Mac SE/80. Now this little thing seemed perfect - full WYSIWYG printing, networking, and fun version of Risk to while away the hours. After a little practice, I started to do things I never thought I could do ...
That continued a few years later when I started investigating using my Mac at home for simple movie editing with this new piece of software called "QuickTime". Unfortunately for me, Dad had bought a Performa 450, so no movie editing for me!
After Windows 95 was released, I dated a Windows-using girl and drifted away from the Mac.
Then everything changed in 1997 and 1998. I finally began receiving a decent pay packet, moved in with the girl and splurged on a beige Mac G3 minitower (that I sold the next year to buy the Blue and White minitower).
I started doing things that I always wanted to do, but never thought possible - programming screen savers, scanning negatives and working on my photography, using a beta of this funny app from Macromedia called "FinalCut" to edit some commercials, then getting hired at a large publishing company because I was a paid-up member of the Apple club.
More than anything else (aesthetics, politics, etc), my Macintosh PC's have always enabled me to fully express my creativity with a minimum of fuss. Windows computers just give me headaches and have for years - and always seem to be working against me.
I hope the next 25 years (and pretty much the next third of my life if I'm fortunate) will be filled with Apple-creative things that similarly enrich and enable my creativity and make life all the sweeter.
What I remember Macintosh for:
1: Sealing up the original Mac while Apple II and IBM PC were open architectures.
2: Comparably higher prices for equivalent performance and peripherals.
3: Absolute hostility to clone makers, which allowed Apple to pass on their inefficiency to their customers.
4: Floppy disc incompatibility with other more prevalent systems for far too long.
5: Threats to discontinue warranty coverage from anybody who dared crack the sealed-box open.
6: Taking forever to provide an internal hard drive long after their PC competition and 3rd party suppliers (anyone remember HyperDrive) had shown them how to do it.
7: Needing to dump Steve Jobs before an Open Mac arrived.
8: The most expensive (by far) laser printer on the market when the excellent HP LaserJet met many user's needs with the same print engine for far less money.
9: 50% profit margins and proud of it!
Yes there's more, but this was a good enough start for now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have a Mac SE (dual drive) and Apple II+ sitting in my garage.
I think it's time to celebrate, and turn the Mac SE into a Fishbowl with silver sparkles for the anniversary, and the Apple II+ into the pump cover.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A truly stupid (among many truly stupid) reasons to cash on ones 401k. Unless it's provided you 10X the income since, and you've stashed that income away for retirement, a very bad move indeed.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Slightly OT, but if I wanted to read such insightful commentary as 'fuckthefuckingfuckers' posted conveniently right under the article summary, I'd go to digg. Slashdot tags are, in their current incarnation, are a troll's wet dream, and I'm frankly sick of it. Yes, I know you can turn them off, but it saddens me to see such Slashdot sink to such levels.
I remember borrowing one from work so I could show my family how a gui would work.
My mom had an interesting misunderstanding of the mouse: she kept moving it as though it moved the screen, while the pointer would stay still, ie she moved it backwards from how you would. This seemed quite logical to her and she did it repeatly.
I think that is interesting that a lot of things are not as intuitive as you think.
Though not at all stupid if it opened up a new career in Mac software development, for example. Every investment will be cashed in at some point.
I am not to sure why they are using quotes such as:
"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people"
Especially when you had people like Jack Tramiel since the 70's using sayings such as:
"We need to make computers for the masses, not the classes!"
Commodore and Radio Shack both produced and pushed the home computer into peoples homes back in the 70's by making them affordable. Not to mention I think the Commodore 64 celebrated it's 25th birthday a year ago.
Don't get me wrong, there is a recently purchased iMac in my place and I am the first to admit that Apple in its recent offerings of the last few years have done a fantastic job but real credit where credit is due.
I still remember when my dad bought the Mac 128k. At the time I was blown away by the technology that was in that machine, which had an HD the size of my last paper for school...
Heh but it still isn't cheap enought for a grandmother to use it.
This well may be the first time in a long time another Apple ads airs during the Super Bowl. However, it may not appear on the telecast. Look elsewhere. ;)
The Mac was nice for 1984 but had that *tiny* screen and was a stunningly boring monochrome. Only a short year later the Amiga beamed in like a super-advanced visitor from the future, demonstrating what a technicolour, multimedia, multitasking world we'd end up living in. Next to the Amiga, the Macs of the 1980s behaved like overfed, pedigreed, retarded puppies. Early on, ironically, the only PC that could give the Amiga a run for the money was the Apple II GS, which Apple seemed to have hated with a passion.
I guess the thing that really tickled me about the Amiga was also its chameleon-like ability to perfectly emulate a Macintosh in a pinch. I recall in the late-80s/early90s actually buying an Amiga desktop publishing rig *and* a Mac hardware emulator dongle because together it was still cheaper than the equivalent Apple rig by around 50%. We met the design requirements, and got to play Populous as well...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the 1985-07-24 anniversary, and remembering how one of the great tech advancement opportunities of recent history was so comprehensively fucked up.
Da Blog
It always annoys me when I read the myth that the Mac is a computer for newbies. It isn't. It's priced WAY out of their range, and my experience is that the only people who buy Macs are knowledgeable users -- even power users.
I'd love to get a Mac for my elderly parents, because I really do think they'd find them easier to use. But I can't because they're about a third more expensive than a standard computer.
Another issue with modern Macs is their freakin' annoying focus on multimedia. A modern Mac is really turning into an iPod docking station, and is becoming less and less of a serious computer. Microsoft Office, you say? I challenge you to use Office 2008 for anything more complex than writing a letter, and NOT have it not crash. The damn thing falls over more than a drunken toddler.
"The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,'"
No it did not.
http://www.jeremyreimer.com/total_share.html
You mean the CD caddies? Those weren't exclusive to Apple -- pretty much all the first-generation CD-ROM drives used them. The PSP still uses a smaller variant.
Yeah, I have some fond memories of my first Mac ...a Mac SE. What a great computer but it does bring a smile when I think about my iPhone having more memory than my desktop from those days. Nine inch monochrome screen and 20 meg hard drive ...now that was living, baby ...woohoo! It sure was sweet at the time, that's for sure =)
mac os x tips and imac history
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.
My original compact Mac from that era didn't have a video out. Did yours? With no video out, you were stuck with that 23 cm porthole/screen and you were screwed if the video flyback transformer crapped out. Which was pretty much almost always, eventually.
By comparison, the Amiga shipped with both composite and analog RGB outputs, so you could pick any screen size available.
Da Blog
Wow. And I think that the Hypercard that ran on the IIgs was the only version that had native color support...
I wasn't aware you were playing a game?
Let's face it, the original Macintosh, like the G1 iPhone, succeeded despite its many and manifest hardware limitations. If you ever tried to copy a floppy disc on the original Mac, you'll know what I mean. And if you tried to anything visually or sonically artistic then, well, the Mac was not the machine for you for a long, long time.
Da Blog
As a tribute to the Mac's birthday, I just powered up my old Mac Plus, which I grew up with, and made a birthday card for it in HyperCard. I wish I hadn't lended out my digital camera, as this is totally a Kodak moment that I wish I could save for posterity. Plus, without photographic evidence, nobody is gonna believe I'm enough of a nerd to actually have a working Mac Plus lying around.
Here's a shot of my Mac Plus wishing the Macintosh a happy birthday. Sorry for the grainy shot, this is a really crappy web cam I had in my rubbish pile!
Mac Plus Birthday Card
This is a Mac Plus which I grew up with and restored to working order about a year ago (by replacing a busted electrolytic cap). I also upgraded it to 4MB of RAM, added an external SCSI hard disk, an Iomega Zip drive, and loaded up System 7 on it. I slapped together the birthday greeting in HyperCard 1.2.5 :)
Am I the only one who believes that GUIs are a dead end and only CLI gives you real power and flexibility?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
No kidding. But everyone is entitled to be young and stupid once.
Why should your grandmother care? If she wants to surf the web, she clicks on Safari in the dock. ......
How on earth would anyone know that "Safari" was a web browser?
Everyone who visits my flat, and uses my computer (a Mac) asks me how to get a browser up. It's not obvious.
Contrast that with Windows, where you click on "Start" and there is "Internet Explorer".