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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.'"
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...
EFI OpenBoot firmware has more code than the original Mac OS boot floppy, wich cheated by having 4 megs already in ROM.
So, what's your point, really?
My Apple //c and multitude of other antique hardware (including a Lisa 2) might boot faster, but they sure dont do as much.
Quit complaining and head back to your compiler!
Honestly, I think the evolution of suspend states has more than made up for it. Granted, you're still drawing a bit of power while in sleep, but modern Macs use next to nothing in that state and wake near-instantaneously.
Coupled with an OS that can run for weeks without a reboot, I've no complaints.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Yep, I was one of those who bought one during the first 100 days. All I remember was how painful it was swapping 3.5" floppies in and out of that computer. It was easy but painful. The Apple Lisa was much better and had a hard disk (that amazing 5mb Apple Profile). Sadly it was 3-4 times the price.
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The data/address separation
Are you referring to the memory buses here? The only data/address separation in the 68K instruction set was the separation between data and address registers, which the PDP-10 didn't have (it just had 16 GPRs).
The "PDP" that the 68K more closely resembles from a programming point of view is the PDP-11, with more complex addressing modes and an operand/operand orientation rather than the register/memory orientation of the PDP-10.
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.
Xerox made computers with a GUI and mouse before Apple, but they cost a fortune, and were pieces of feces. The disk drive on the Interlisp D machine I used was powered by a rubber belt (like a vacuum cleaner). And just like a vacuum cleaner, it occasionally popped off or broke. Also, the entire file system was stored in Lisp nodes, so when you deleted a large directory, it stopped doing anything for over a minute while it garbage collected all the deleted files.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Licensing fees so that games weren't 'welcome'. (Or so I was told, might be an urban myth).
Constant disappointment when I would realize that I would need an IBM compatible computer to run [INSERT New Application].
Later when CDs came out those stupid absurd CD Cassettes.
When they moved the power button to the keyboard so that books being moved around on your desk would turn off your computer... oh wait it's STILL like that. Grrrrrr.
Yeah, I can be a dumbass... surely not the first.