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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.'"
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?)
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.
Interesting opinions from the ArsTechnica editors: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/25-years-of-macintosh.ars
On top of that, a good OS will page out the unused application after a while, so it's taking up neither RAM nor CPU cycles.
It doesn't matter if the app is left open, it doesn't have any noticeable impact on the system for users.
Yeah, but I can still hope for some kind of a Mac Mini-level revision with a bump in speed and a built-in iPod dock to come out tomorrow at a price point of $666.66 (between the prices of the two current configurations), perhaps merging in features of the Apple TV platform.
Or even better, how about a pocket-sized Mac Micro? That would be a shocker!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.