Slashdot Mirror
Apple Macintosh Turns 30
snydeq writes "30 years ago today, Apple debuted the Macintosh. Here are some reviews of the early Mac models, including the Macintosh ('will be compared to other machines not only in terms of its features but also in the light of the lavish claims and promises made by Apple co-founder Steven Jobs'), the Mac SE ('contains some radical changes, including room for a second internal drive and even a fan'), the Mac IIx ('a chorus of yawns'), and the Mac Portable ('you may develop a bad case of the wannas for this lovable [16-lb.] luggable'). Plus insights on the Macintosh II's prospects from Bill Gates: 'If you look at a product like Mac Word III on that full-page display, it's pretty awesome. ... But the corporate buyer is never going to be a strong point for Apple.'"
iFixit got their hands on a Mac 128K and did a teardown, evaluating the old hardware for repairability. What will the Mac look like in another 30 years?
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
They used lead solder back in those days, assuming the floppy drive isn't too dusty and your boot disk is intact.
When Steve Jobs died I booted a mid-80s Mac and it came up fine. MacPaint (source code here) was an amazing feat given that it had to run in 128KB (really 192KB - like most Mac applications of its time, it made extensive use of the code that was in the 64KB of ROM).
So was the "disk copy" program that could copy a 400KB (400,000 byte) disk in only 4 passes. It stole a large chunk of the 22KB RAM normally allocated to video to do it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
MS Word on the original Mac was an incredible change. (This was before MS went all gung ho on Windows: they were still doing MS DOS and Windows was this DOS addon). I remember doing my physics papers on it and being able to put in math symbols and format and a bunch of other font and formatting things - all with a click of the mouse! And the WYSIWYG interface that printed what you saw on the screen!
That was mind blowing back then. Because before that it was a text editor and trial and error in getting it to print well - or just an old fashioned IBM Selectric and a bottle of White-Out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had to write papers in the snow, uphill, both ways,.... AND LIKED IT!
You could hit the debugger switch, which was an add-on or semi-hidden piece, and get to a debug prompt. A very limited CLI.
The main thing, though, was that NOT having a CLI on the classic MacOS was a 'burning the ships behind' moment. By removing that as a fallback, applications had to be graphical and work without CLI install/diagnostic processes, Even minor utilities had to have some effort put into a proper user interface.
This worked, mostly. Some apps reimplemented command lines, and a lot of apps went to the super-limited interface, of course... but most stepped into the relatively new paradigms of the GUI (Apple not being the first, but popularizing it)
I don't like the movement of Apple towards a Microsoft-like business model where they care about their own corporate agenda more than their users
I was unaware that there was a time when that WASN'T the case.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
That's how they pitched the Mac... that is to say, a computer that's not just for computer nerds.
"I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer."
- Douglas Adams
...and *still* stuck in their parent's basement, unable to make it in the business world.
Not having a CLI and forcing developers to either limit their applications to what could be pointed at and clicked, or implementing their own application-specific CLI is one of the reasons why the Macintosh ended up being a niche platform, derided by some as having its manual 'printed on drool-proof paper'. If there is one thing Apple did right when they introduced OSX it is their decision to 'allow' command line access.
--frank[at]unternet.org
I remember the first time I saw a Macintosh. I was in my late teens, very much a young techie, and visiting what few computers stores there were at the time was a treat for me, I'd maybe get an opportunity to play with some of the new, cutting-edge stuff I could only dream about affording. At the time I was using Z80-based systems running CP/M, so there were no fancy bitmapped graphics for me, only a text terminal with ASCII/ANSI character sets. I'd heard about this "Macintosh" thing, and happened upon one, and sat and played with it for a few minutes. I found the "graphical user interface" to be "cute", but somewhat useless. After poking around with it for a few minutes, I thought to myself "well, this graphical thing is cute and clever, but let's get a look under the hood at the real operating system" and attempted to find a way to exit to the command line I expected was underlying this frilly graphical thing on the screen. Imagine my surprise (and to a lesser degree, horror!) when I discovered that this frilly, almost childish-looking graphical thing on the screen was in fact the operating system itself! I shook my head and blinked in disbelief and walked away, disbelieving that anyone could ever do anything useful with such a machine. To this day I've never owned an Apple product, but I guess I do have to admit that they were on to something big with the Mac.
..and no, Mac fans, I am not trolling you, and this is not flame-bait either, this is a true story, so spare me the hate, OK?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The Blackbird.
It was chunky by modern standards, but back in 1994 it was elegant and sleek. I still think it looks really good. More importantly, I think the 540c was the best computer for *working on* I've ever had. It had a terrific keyboard, a trackpad whose operation has never been equalled in my opinion, and you could swap out the optical drive for a second battery for a then-astounding four hours of battery life.
The screen was in modern netbook range for size (9.4 inches/24 cm diagonal), and very low resolution (640 x 400), but somehow it was very comfortable to work on for a long time. The entire system had only 4MB of RAM, but the software was built around this and it felt like plenty. About the only thing I didn't like was the proprietary Ethernet transceiver connector, (a) because it was proprietry and (b) because it was garbage. That's it. Everything else was as perfect as the technology of the day could make it.
If I could have a mint 540c with software and a pair of fresh batteries, I'd use it instead of my modern laptop for a lot of things like writing where I had to focus on one thing for a long time, use a keyboard and didn't need a lot of CPU. Alternatively I'd settle for a laptop with a really good keyboard.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're joking. The PC was an attempt to retain control, quickly churned out by IBM. It was just there to keep down the new micros that were starting to look popular, and the design was never intended to last.
It worked too - IBM retained control over the business market for quite a while, and didn't realise until OS/2 and microchannel that it had actually lost the control it thought it had kept.
Cheers,
Ian
A/UX was indeed expensive. But even the early Macs could be decent Unix machines, as time (and open source a decade or more later) proved. The SE/30 was an incredible machine - able to take up to 128MB of RAM back when 'standard' was 1MB or less! Mine has seen lots of use as my piddly little home webserver.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
A mouse driven text editor is nice as a set of training wheels but kind of a drag if you ever get anywhere beyond total novice.
Usable the first time you sit down with it and usable 10 years later aren't always the same thing.
If you are too dumb to use the build in (and well defined over the whole platform) keyboard shortcuts of Mac text editors - how the hell are you going to use vi or Emacs?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
The mac wasn't aimed at your typical vim user in the same way a Toyota Corolla isn’t aimed at professional drivers.
Come on. We all know this. Its a 30 year old argument.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Some apps reimplemented command lines, and a lot of apps went to the super-limited interface, of course... but most stepped into the relatively new paradigms of the GUI (Apple not being the first, but popularizing it)
Some friends and I were Apple II developers back then. We therefore had automatic acceptance into the Mac developer program. So we signed up and bought a Mac as soon as possible.
:-)
Months before the Mac shipped, Apple sent the Inside Macintosh manuals (a set of three ring binders). So we had docs but no computer, Apple found a way to get developers to read the manual.
While reading Inside Macintosh they introduced us to the new GUI paradigm and offered a convincing argument to go with the GUI and not just implement a terminal/console user interface.
We couldn't afford a Lisa for development so we got 68,000 coprocessor boards for our Apple II's, cross assembled 68K assembly, and downloaded the binary to see it run. Took me days to get an application menu going, it was very frustrating, then I learned that the A5 registers was not for general purpose use.
These chains on your ankles and wrists aren't meant to restrain you but to keep you from falling off the side of the ship.
That is correct, or did you not notice they can be easily removed by anyone that knows how to swim?
Apple really doesn't care if you wander off the edge of the ship. They just don't want the 95% of people who would be harmed by doing so to accidentally do so. If you really want to help people, that's the right way to look at the problem at a large scale.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley