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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.'"
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?
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?
Keeping track of which applications are currently running is something for techies who are concerned with memory usage and such because they actually know how their computer works. Your grandmother doesn't so neither does she needs to know the difference between closing a window and closing an application.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land, is the operating phrase of most major technology companies. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they most definitely settled it. They did not invent postscript, but they definitely established it. And they did not invent the GUI but they settled it.
But taken as a whole, the mac was really a pioneering achievement, When you consider what was available at the time. Sure Xerox had their star systems, people used floppies and so on. But to put it all together in (relatively) cheap system that did not have a command line at all and sell it to consumers was a huge risk. And one that took a lot of innovations to make all work together. It had an original OS. It used software driven instruments to do everything (apple desktop bus. disk timing, character generators, etc...)
a huge leap and worthy of the boldness of that ad.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
She'll care when it's "Why does my computer keep running slow?" or even that she doesn't have enough memory to open applications. Especially 25 years ago, when OSs didn't swap out RAM, and RAM was very limited.
Are you actually saying that users never closing applications was intended behaviour?
Sir,
You are so awesome and I'm so glad the mother of your child was willing to go along with the picture.
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
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.