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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'm a PC. I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity. Curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most. I used two of the great unutterable blasphemies--something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
It was the last day I showered or left the basement.
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?
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...
May you continue to be the true innovators in the industry and give the rest of us good stuff to copy from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Are you kidding? 1984 was exactly like 1984, the personal computer was just a ploy by the government to gain access to our very thoughts. What you don't know is that MAC OS and WINDOWS and even LINUX are all running rootkits that grant access to the NWO. Everything you type is monitored. Why do you think new computers come with video cameras standard??? So they can monitor you...
</TinFoil>
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?
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?)
Xerox wanted to send a present, but they decided the GUI they sent for the baby shower is the gift that keeps on giving.
That's simply not true. I'm sending the Thought Police over to your house to explain to you how mistaken you are.
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.
There was no 1984. We have always lived in 2009.
I have a Mac 128 with an Apple Imagewriter, one of the first ones where they used a regular DB25 cable instead of the Appletalk cable. I can't believe its 25 years old. I bought it in 1990 for the printer. I think the lady said she paid $4500 for it. At the time I told her that could buy her a very nice '386
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.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
Interesting opinions from the ArsTechnica editors: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/25-years-of-macintosh.ars
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.
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?
Heh. They've been dying since 1977 according to most industry analysts.
My grandmother's dead, you insensitive clod!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
[ My car's odometer reads in pentaparsecs. My speedometer in parsecs/hour. ]
Does your car appear blue from the front, and red from behind?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I have a Mac Plus. I got it specifically to run a particular version of AppleShare that allowed you to boot an Apple IIgs over an AppleTalk connection. And I never got around to actually doing it. Hmm, now there's something I can look into doing once I get that desk rebuilt. I know I've got an old 40 MB SCSI drive lying around somewhere....
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Clearly you never had to wait for your dad to shell out $400 for a 5.25" floppy drive upgrade on your Commodore 64 because your cassette drive would just take FOREVER to load Temple of Apshai (which, until this very post some 25 years later -- Christ... -- I thought was spelled Aphsai).
Isn't it funny... the more powerful computers get, the things we do with them get lamer and more trivial. 1984 - testing and developing scientific theories on a machine with 128K RAM; 2009 - posting on slashdot with 4GB RAM.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
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.
What I remember Macintosh for:
1: Sealing up the original Mac while Apple II and IBM PC were open architectures.
2: Comparably higher prices for equivalent performance and peripherals.
3: Absolute hostility to clone makers, which allowed Apple to pass on their inefficiency to their customers.
4: Floppy disc incompatibility with other more prevalent systems for far too long.
5: Threats to discontinue warranty coverage from anybody who dared crack the sealed-box open.
6: Taking forever to provide an internal hard drive long after their PC competition and 3rd party suppliers (anyone remember HyperDrive) had shown them how to do it.
7: Needing to dump Steve Jobs before an Open Mac arrived.
8: The most expensive (by far) laser printer on the market when the excellent HP LaserJet met many user's needs with the same print engine for far less money.
9: 50% profit margins and proud of it!
Yes there's more, but this was a good enough start for now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I have a Mac SE (dual drive) and Apple II+ sitting in my garage.
I think it's time to celebrate, and turn the Mac SE into a Fishbowl with silver sparkles for the anniversary, and the Apple II+ into the pump cover.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A truly stupid (among many truly stupid) reasons to cash on ones 401k. Unless it's provided you 10X the income since, and you've stashed that income away for retirement, a very bad move indeed.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I know that at this point, "RTFA" has become a running joke ... but you're the first person I've seen who hasn't even bothered to read the comment which he's replying to! Way to set a new bar for other slashdotters to meet ...
I know that at this point, "RTFA" has become a running joke ... but you're the first person I've seen who hasn't even bothered to read the comment which he's replying to! Way to set a new bar for other slashdotters to meet ...
The really funny part is that he didn't even read the comment which he was replying to!
Yeah, I can be a dumbass... surely not the first.