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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?)
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.