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The Apple Mac Turns 35 Years Old (theregister.co.uk)
On Thursday, Tim Cook took to Twitter to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Macintosh, recalling how it changed the world. "35 years ago, Macintosh said hello. It changed the way we think about computers and went on to change the world. We love the Mac, and today weâ(TM)re proud that more people than ever are using it to follow their passions and create the future," Cook tweeted. The Register provides a brief history lesson on how the Mac changed how users interact with computers. Here is an excerpt from the report: After the disastrous debut of the Lisa, and the abject failure of the Apple III, it was down to the Steve Jobs-led Macintosh project to save the day for the troubled computer manufacturer. Rival IBM had launched the Personal Computer XT just under a year earlier, in March 1983, with up to 640KB of RAM and a mighty Intel 8088 CPU. It also included PC-DOS 2, which would go on to underpin Microsoft's operating system efforts in subsequent decades. IBM had started to rule the PC industry, but what the IBM PC XT did not have was a graphical user interface, sticking instead with the sober command line of DOS. The Macintosh, on the other hand, had a GUI lifted from Apple's ill-fated Lisa project, except (and unusually, as things would turn out) retailed at a lower price of $2,495 (just over $6,000 in today's money). It ran faster than the Lisa too, with its Motorola 68000 CPU clocked at 7.8MHz.
The good news ended there. The machine shipped with a woeful 128KB of RAM, which was shared with the black and white 512 x 342 pixel display built into the box. That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable, and fans would have to wait until September for Apple to unleash a 512KB version for another $300. The only storage provided was a single 400KB 3 1/2;-inch disk, an improvement over the 360KB 5¼-inch floppies of IBM's PC XT and the nature of the box meant that any extra storage would have to be external. Users became quickly accustomed to swapping floppies in order to do what little useful work the pitiful 128K would afford. Third parties eventually launched hard drives for the machines, which had to be attached via the serial port. Apple would make a 20MB drive in the form of the Hard Disk 20 available in September 1985 for the 512KB Mac at a cost of $1,495. Owners of the original 128K Mac, however, needed not apply. The limited RAM made the new Hierarchical File System a non-starter.
The good news ended there. The machine shipped with a woeful 128KB of RAM, which was shared with the black and white 512 x 342 pixel display built into the box. That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable, and fans would have to wait until September for Apple to unleash a 512KB version for another $300. The only storage provided was a single 400KB 3 1/2;-inch disk, an improvement over the 360KB 5¼-inch floppies of IBM's PC XT and the nature of the box meant that any extra storage would have to be external. Users became quickly accustomed to swapping floppies in order to do what little useful work the pitiful 128K would afford. Third parties eventually launched hard drives for the machines, which had to be attached via the serial port. Apple would make a 20MB drive in the form of the Hard Disk 20 available in September 1985 for the 512KB Mac at a cost of $1,495. Owners of the original 128K Mac, however, needed not apply. The limited RAM made the new Hierarchical File System a non-starter.
Still beats Windows ME.
for a computer that revolutionised the very concept of a computer. The Macintosh was not about RAM, or CPU, or colour. The key part was the mouse, and GUI that could make use of it. That alone made it the most suitable device for a wide range of activities.
When people of modest means could start a successful software company with a great idea. All you needed to get version 1.0 out was something that kind of worked better than everything else. You could get enough revenues to support the development of improved versions and grow into a booming company. Today, you need massive amounts of cash to develop because every customer demands features A to Z, enterprise scalability, and rock solid testing before they will even look at it. It has turned into a game that only the big boys can play.
And theyâ(TM)ve made it a pleasant experience for people who refuse to geek.
I think the commerical announcing the Mac was one the best commericals ever, if not the best. I remembered it well even though it would be many many years later before I saw the commercial again.
Article is incorrect about "That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable". I personally upgraded my own.
Just another day in Paradise
I want a box I can put multiple video cards, half a dozen hard drives and several PCI cards in.
It will have a very busy, high heat duty cycle so nothing with laptop parts, please. It's going to be using all of the electricity that comes out of the wall so give me a box that can move a lot of air through it.
My Mac Pro 5,1s are hanging on but I can use a refresh. Currently nothing, nothing in the Mac line up is anything close to a replacement and please don't suggest that using EGPUs makes sense on a desktop machine.
I want a new full sized tower for heavy lifting.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
was buying a Mac
in '85 I bought a 'Fat Mac''
I spent about NZ$10,000
(a rich uncle had left me some money)
in '88 I sold it to pay for a down payment on a laser printer
What was wrong with the Mac?
Not enough buttons on the mouse
Not enough keys on the keyboard
Not enough colors on the screen
(screen too small)
zero expandablity
and the local apple dealer wouldn't sell games
From '86 until I left NZ in 2002 I owned Amiga computer(s)
A lot of people failed to understand the Mac at the beginning but the friendly and attractive and intuitive interface really caught on.
Yes and no. There was quite a bit of Apple evangelism going on. GUI did not necessarily just catch on in 1984, Apple worked hard to see that it did. Surely GUI would eventually catch on but with 1984 tech maybe a push was necessary.
:-) It was an incredibly wise move by Apple IMHO.
Keep in mind that the embrace of the GUI had to occur both with the consumer and the developer. Apple was very smart in this regard. As a published Apple ][ developer we were automatically accepted into the Mac developer program. This gave us early access to the Mac at a reduced cost.
Several months before Apple sent us our Mac we were sent the documentation. A big part of that first delivery of the documentation was basically the evangelism convincing us to go GUI, to *not* just emulate a 40x25 or 80x25 text display and port our software directly. Being deprived of hardware and incredibly excited and curious we read everything Apple sent us. For all I know this may be the only time in history where indie developers sat down and thoroughly read the documentation before writing any code.
They were always called "applications" on Macintosh. It's even reflected in the type code "APPL" used for applications.
No. Windows 3.1 changed the PC world, that is where the PC world decided to go GUI. Windows 95 is merely where people said this is almost as good as a Mac. Mac OS was quite a bit crufty by the Win95 era. MS had WinNT which was far ahead of Mac OS. Apple did not get good again until Mac OS X.
6.5" was not a problem, you just put a 1" margin on both the left and right.
:-)
For something as formal as a thesis where the right probably needs to be 1/2" one would do the writing and digital proofreading with a 1" margin then when happy change the margin to 1/2" print and do the hard copy proofreading.
I know this sounds awkward but the alternative was a text based editor, or gasp a typewriter. The margin kludge was the least painful of the options.
Lol, the IBM PC wasn't open until Compaq came along and reverse engineered the BIOS. Then IBM came with the PS/2, with it's proprietary keyboard/mouse connectors and later on MCA bus.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Back in the 80s I worked for a small company doing upgrades to the original Mac. It was a glorious hack, add an extra board and a hard drive.
I always felt Jobs missed an obvious opportunity by not incorporating Hypercard into MacOS ala smallTalk with the Xerox Alto. There was discussion of doing this, but Jobs made a poor decision and eventually canned the whole program. Not everything he did was "visionary".
My first Mac program was developed on the MacXL, I think it was a repurposed Lisa. The program was used at CSUN for some psychology experiments.,
External GPU.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Oh, I did not know there are Mac users that stupid that they throw away a three year old Mac.
I hope I can apply somewhere so they better hand them over to me?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The IBM was open. You could buy the Technical Reference Manual from IBM. It had full schematic diagrams of every bit of the hardware, including the floppy diskette drive and power supply. The expansion slots were intended from the start to host third party interface addons.
The commented BIOS source code was even published in the Technical Reference Manual. It wasn't 'open source' in the modern sense, but every bit of the design was open and disclosed.
One of which needs to be utilized for the charger cord. And they are USB-C connectors, because Apple prefers that people use a dongle to connect their garden-variety USB-A Flash drives. And a dongle to read their SD cards, connect their legacy scanner, etc. etc.
But "popularized"? The Mac is at its most popular today, and it's still a small niche.
Even if you believe the fantasy that the Mac is a "Small Niche" (with north of a hundred million of desktop Mac units sold over the years), just the fact that Windows has borrowed a lot from the Mac over the years means that yes, in fact, the Mac was responsible for many GUI ideas being popularized... look at the Windows GUI pre and post Mac.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I received a 128K MAC in 1984 while a student at Drexel (we were part of the Consortsium and paid $2k for out Macs). We had to buy one and, having just purchased an IBM PC in 1982, I was not pleased at first. Yes, 128K was dismal. But, we successfully used it for word processing, graphics, lab work, and games. Initially, we had to develop using a Lisa because the Mac did not have a native development suite. That changed soon enough with Aztec, Lightspeed, and even Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo Basic. Microsoft released Basic for the Mac as well.
I upgraded my Mac to 512, 512KE, and to MacPlus with a whopping 2MB. It travelled around the world in my Navy stateroom after I graduated where I continued to develop crypto software.
I sold the Mac at a flea market for $50 some 10 years later. I regret having sold it. Our Macs were signed by the entire team. Collector editions???? Others turned their macs into fish tanks.
The ROM in the original Mac (and upgrades) were truly amazing pieces of code. QuickDraw enabled the lowly 128K machine to do some amazing things. Say what you want, but the Mac was revolutionary.
I used Windows and Linux machines in my work. Didn’t buy another Mac until 2011. I now have a MacBook Pro as well as that 2011 iMac (despite being unable to upgrade the OS now). I love my Mac. Is it a gaming computer? Fuck no. But, I don’t play games. I use it for work where I am a solutions architect. It gets the job done. But, I want a iMac Pro. Lol.
Mac OS 8 and 9 sucked, but this is what the iMac launched with and I believe that was successful still. e.g. people bought it to get a computer that goes on the Internet.
The real success did not occur until Intel CPUs and Mac OS X. That is where their marketshare doubled, that is where people no longer had to choose PC or Mac software, they could have both thanks the Boot Camp. Yes there were emulators but dual boot solves a lot of compatibility and performance problems. Although moving to Intel helped greatly here to, only the API had to be emulated not the instruction set as on PowerPC based system.
The Apple II was similar, at least at first. I think the schematics and ROM source was included in the box. Of course the floppy drive came a bit later and was an interesting hack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
actually Jobs was the reason why the Apple III failed in the first place. The design was ok, but jobs insisted on a fanless design and the cooling fans were pulled, the rest is history.
The slow disk copying (at least after a decent amount of RAM was finally available) was apparently the result of a bug.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
* They are still at least 2x the price of non-macintosh computers with similar hardware
* They still come with under-powered CPU's compared to their competition
* They still come with a minimal amount of RAM
* They are still not designed to be "up-gradable" (often RAM and CPUs are soldered in place, etc.)
Yep, the Amiga would have died a heck of a lot sooner if the Mac had been cheaper, but it was ghastly expensive. My mother had a Macintosh IIci for her DTP work, she had got it through an Apple employee so it came at a substantial discount. That meant that for a IIci with no cache card, 5MB RAM, 8*24 non-GC display card, and the Macintosh Two-Page Mono Display it was a bit over $5,000. I (eventually) had an Amiga 2500, while she was still using that. Same MC68030@25, I had 6MB RAM, and my HD controller had both MFM and SCSI interfaces — though you could only boot off the SCSI, not the MFM. Also, my machine had an internal 5.25" half-height bay. That let me use used MFM disks instead of SCSI ones, and since I lived near Seagate I was able to get those at $1/MB.
That two-page mono display was beautiful, though. Square pixels, paper white... Back then you really got more when you bought a Mac. Then PC clone hardware came in a deluge (around the 486 era) and none of that stuff was special any more. You could spend as much as you wanted on a PC, and get the same kind of quality or even better, and it would still be cheaper and faster. And the 68040 was too expensive, and the '060 too late.
Apple should have either switched to x86 much sooner, or gone to ARM instead. POWER turned out to be a waste of time and money. The Newton was ARM6-based, and they probably could have gone down that road for the post-Quadra machines. Apple could have been all-ARM by now. Probably better for all of us that didn't happen though, given what ARM is today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Mac Plus (1986) could be outfitted with 4096K RAM, and that's the upgrade I pursued with my 128k Mac. I think this was in 1989 when I was a junior in college. By the time I was a senior, I purchased a 100mb SCSI hard drive, and it rocked.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
It's funny, I remember being distinctly unimpressed when I saw the Mac for the first time at a local electronics store. :)
I was super-impressed the first time I saw a Macintosh, but admittedly it was a Mac Plus. I had a C= 16 at home, and had used various Apple IIs at a couple of different schools, as well as the IBM PC Jr. Then I went to Jr. High and they had the one Mac Plus in a lab full of Apple 2s plus one Laser 128k, and the experience of using the GUI was amazing in comparison. Then I got an Amiga 500, and started throwing rocks at Macs...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So were the the first cars, the first touch phones, the first planes and penicillin. Al inventions start like that. Hell even the wheel was probably a toy for rich boy cavemen at first
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
The PS/2 mouse connector was proprietary, but the keyboard port wasn't. It's just the same old AT keyboard on a Mini-DIN instead of a DIN. Unfortunately, they used the same connector, and you couldn't interchange the connectors on PS/2s, nor their successors (PS/Valuepoint). The only motherboards I know of where they are interchangeable are Intel (as in their own motherboards, not just boards for their CPUs), and I'm not sure which. I remember being able to plug them in wrong and have them work anyway around the Pentium MMX period. But perhaps there are also others, and I just haven't encountered them... I used to work for the county of Santa Cruz and we had an all-IBM network at the time with IBM mainframes which I had nothing to do with in the courthouse basement, and PS/2s at the various sites, naturally all on token ring. Departments used netware 3 for file services. PS/2s sucked rocks and the MCA bus was stupid. Apple had autoconfiguration on NuBus and Amiga had that and a cheap cardedge connector on Zorro, although Zorro was slow AF until Zorro III so maybe I should leave them out of it :)
UGH, PS/2s. I need some air.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bullshit. The Atari ST was cheap and incredibly usable and capable, had a great software base and was nowhere near as expensive as a 286 or a Mac. Built in MIDI as well. Many GUI based software suites got their start on the ST. You could also get a PC Ditto and Spectre GCR cartridge and emulate all 3 platforms for less than the cost of a decent 4MB Mac SE.
Macs were not difficult to work with in the slightest and far less of a pain in the ass to deal with than a DOS/Win3.1 machine. They were just expensive.
The Amiga was cool but not as easy to deal with out of the box as an ST or Mac.
Reality must really chap your hide, knowing that Apple has never been a market leader, and that Bill Gates was 100% correct when he told Apple what was going to happen - and they ignored him. Apple has always been an interesting "also ran" option, that makes things shiny - but really doesn't innovate. They just copy others, polish, and try to sell for more money.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The set Macintosh cost and sound, graphics, speed, lack of networking held computing design back for years.
It did nothing of the sort. At its peak Apple had something like 8% of desktop market share. It never held anything back. Microsoft, on the other hand, legitimately did hold back computing by doing things like abusing their monopoly position in a variety of ways, and funding SCO v. Linux.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Amiga was cool but not as easy to deal with out of the box as an ST or Mac.
I don't know STs, but the unboxing experience was similar for Macs and Amigas. Mac gave you System and Hypercard while Amiga gave you Workbench and Amiga [Microsoft] BASIC. Either way you plugged stuff in and switched it on, and followed the directions. There was one notable difference; System 6 was like what, eight floppies counting hypercard? Workbench 1.3 fit on one floppy (Workbench 2 took... 2? 4? I forget) and BASIC was on one more floppy.
If you were trying to do serious things, the Amiga was much easier, because it had a shell. Stuff that was tedious on Macintosh was simple on Amiga, once you figured out their wildcarding system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Newton was crap until they got XScale CPUs. They started with 25MHz or so, and the XScale was like 250MHz. That was just when Newton started to get usable, so of course that was when they decided to toss it. Except for the Beeb and XScale days, until this decade, ARM had just never been a performance architecture, it was all about low power.
POWER wasn't inherently bad, the problem was that Motorola wanted to make low-power embedded chips (which ARM would later kill them in) hobbled with a slow front-side bus, and IBM wanted to make high-end workstation/mini-mainframe chips that needed liquid cooling (forget using them in a laptop).
And Intel had a lot of problems of their own, remember the Pentium 4? The Intel Mac came just as Core architecture started. Imagine the fun of having a Pentium 4 in a Mac.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"The Newton was crap until they got XScale CPUs. They started with 25MHz or so, and the XScale was like 250MHz."
The earlier ARM processors used in Newtons had similar IPC to 68k, so they didn't have far to go to be more powerful than what they had already. But xscale would have been an acceptable basis. Its power consumption was never competitive with other ARM implementations, but that doesn't matter on the desktop - it was still lower than just about everything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"