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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.'"
It was the last day I showered or left the basement.
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
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?)
There was no 1984. We have always lived in 2009.
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.
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.
Heh. They've been dying since 1977 according to most industry analysts.
[ 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!
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.
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!