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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.'"
Talking about a "good OS" is all very well, but did classic MacOS on the Macintosh 128k do these things?
(And indeed, although I know that modern OSs do do this, I'd be curious to see them tested in practice - how well does OS X, or any other OS come to that, run if you never ever close anything down?)
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.
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