The Apple Mac Turns 35 Years Old (theregister.co.uk)

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The Apple Mac Turns 35 Years Old (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on Sunday January 27, 2019 @09:20AM from the beige-box-of-the-future dept.

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 5Â¼-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.

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So much venom by thsths · 2019-01-27 09:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.
1. Re:So much venom by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-27 09:57 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  nextstep is what Job developed after the Mac and after he left apple. The Mac introduced those concepts to the lay public and nextstep build upon them, especially with regards to networking
2. Re:So much venom by NormalVisual · 2019-01-27 09:59 · Score: 2
  
  Nope, it was the Xerox Alto. The Lisa and Mac UIs owe an awful lot to the tour that Xerox foolishly gave to Apple in 1979, and consequently Apple popularized the desktop metaphor years before NeXT was even a twinkle in Job's eye.
  
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3. Re:So much venom by cdsparrow · 2019-01-27 10:05 · Score: 2
  
  I feel shame, did mean to write xerox instead of nextstep...
4. Re:So much venom by magusxxx · 2019-01-27 10:11 · Score: 2
  
  I wish they would have also included Display Postscript.
  
  --
  Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
5. Re:So much venom by drinkypoo · 2019-01-27 10:13 · Score: 2
  
  The Macintosh was not about RAM, or CPU, or colour.
  The CPU was great, the color was fine, even 1bpp was acceptable. The RAM, however, was inadequate for a windowing operating system. 512kB would have been a more reasonable place to start. Even the budget-minded Amiga 1000 had 256kB. Speaking of the Amiga, the real problem with the Mac was that it was all-graphics with no graphics acceleration.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
6. Re:So much venom by pigwin32 · 2019-01-27 10:15 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  NeXTSTEP was probably the revolutionary there... The mac just brought those concepts to a wider audience really.
  NeXTSTEP wasn't released until 1989 so no, the Mac was revolutionary in its own right. Yes it aggregated existing tech but delivered it in a polished package and made it accessible to a wider audience. NeXT was what happened after Steve Jobs was sacked from Apple in 1985.
7. Re:So much venom by dcw3 · 2019-01-27 11:01 · Score: 2
  
  Did you have one? I did, and later a 512ke (which I still have). 128k worked perfectly fine for those windows, though I admit that I later put in a memory upgrade board. Your Amiga came out in July of '85, nearly a year and a half later, and by then, the 512k had been available for quite a while...released in Sep '84.
  
  --
  Just another day in Paradise
8. Re:So much venom by Solandri · 2019-01-27 14:30 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  You gotta remember that 13" was considered a big screen for a computer back then. Most were 10" or 11" (the IBM PC had a rather generous 11.5" screen). So a 9" display wasn't that big a step down. Especially since the Mac was designed to be portable (one of the commercials had a guy putting it into a backpack). I never really understood what Jobs insisted on it being portable, but he did. At a 3:2 aspect ratio, that meant the screen was 7.5" x 5" - big enough to display a letter-sized sheet of paper with half inch margins (3/4" or 1" margins were the norm) without side-scrolling.
  
  The other reason for using a fixed screen size is because Apple wanted to make it truly WYSIWYG - your friend's thesis when printed would not only look identical in form, but it would also be identical in size. If the screen was showing an 11 point font, it was exactly the same size as an 11 point font when printed. Regular monitors at the time didn't have a way for the monitor to communicate its physical size and supported resolution back to the video card. So sticking with a fixed monitor was pretty much the only way they could do it for the first iteration. This is why Macs became ubiquitous in the publishing industry.
9. Re: So much venom by magusxxx · 2019-01-27 19:08 · Score: 2
  
  We're talking way before OSX.
  If you were using one of the early versions of Adobe Illustrator you'd have to tell it to render in order to see the final image. Mattering on complexity, this took some time. And was tedious going from wireframe to render and then back to wireframe to change even the simplest of things.
  With Display Postscript this was all WYSIWYG. NeXT capitalized on this in their advertisements. Where they showed someone using Illustrator in real-time while the Macintosh was limited to toggling between views.
  
  --
  Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
10. Re: So much venom by drinkypoo · 2019-01-28 00:43 · Score: 2
  
  That wasn't because display ps. That was because horsepower. Macintosh didn't have accelerated graphics built in until quadra! And their accelerated graphics card for Macintosh II cost as much as a PC! Next machines had graphics acceleration. Back then they had Adobe applications for other Unix too, including framemaker, Photoshop, and illustrator. Iirc they had them for sun and SGI. All SGI machines have some kind of graphics acceleration, albeit minimal on older machines like the indigo, and sun offered accelerated video from way back though, like having graphics at all, it was an added-cost option. (Sun machines would operate just fine with a serial console and no framebuffer installed at all.)
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
11. Re:So much venom by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-28 00:46 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  In fact, Wozniak racked his brains for a month trying to figure out how to do overlapping windows (and updating said windows) to come up with regions. He promptly got into an airplane crash and when Jobs went to visit Woz in the hospital, the first thing Woz said was "Don't worry, I still remember regions". Woz later asked Xerox about it and they said they didn't have overlapping windows.
  Woz didn't work on Mac system software. You're thinking of Bill Atkinson's car crash:
  https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Still_Remember_Regions.txt
12. Re:So much venom by drinkypoo · 2019-01-28 03:40 · Score: 2
  
  I never really understood what Jobs insisted on it being portable, but he did.
  He insisted on having a built-in display because it made the cost of a computer+display less, and he didn't believe that the experience of using a computer on a television was satisfactory because he wanted square pixels. I tend to agree with that decision, BTW. I was an Amigan for a long time, and rectangular pixels suck rocks. Also, the other machine they were working on at the time was the Lisa, which also had a built-in monitor. (Lisa was later renamed Mac XL, and would run up to IIRC Macintosh System 5.)
  Once you build an all-in-one, you're an asshole if you don't put a handle on it. Luggables were also a relatively popular form factor at the time. They too had minuscule screens, my Kaypro 4 had a similar-size screen to a Macintosh... but it was text-only, and the terminal emulation was adm3a at that. It only scrolled in one direction, god it was terrible.
  
  Regular monitors at the time didn't have a way for the monitor to communicate its physical size and supported resolution back to the video card. So sticking with a fixed monitor was pretty much the only way they could do it for the first iteration. This is why Macs became ubiquitous in the publishing industry.
  Meh. Apple could have implemented something like DDC in their own monitors, and in the early days almost nobody used an Apple with a non-Apple monitor — even the bulk of Apple 2 systems were topped with an Apple display. They went so far as to reuse the DB15 connector which the rest of the world was using for ethernet (AUI) and then later had to add an expensive new ethernet connector to their machines so they wouldn't have a second DB15 back there (AAUI). If they were going to use a different connector anyway, they might as well use a different signal.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"1984" by PineHall · 2019-01-27 10:33 · Score: 2

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.
Re:Could be worse by PolygamousRanchKid+ · 2019-01-27 10:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

Was Windows ME really bad, or just irrelevant?
If I recall correctly, Windows ME was really bad and irrelevant.
Our support folks recommended that everyone wait a year for Windows XP. Irrelevant.
One department in my lab played with it a bit, just to see if their Windows product ran OK it. They gave up on it, because of constant BSODs. Bad.

--
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Memory by dcw3 · 2019-01-27 10:54 · Score: 2

Article is incorrect about "That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable". I personally upgraded my own.

--
Just another day in Paradise
1. Re:Memory by Anonymous Coward · 2019-01-27 11:46 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  I think they mean at launch...but Apple did offer a "Mac Plus" upgrade kit later for $995. Steve Jobs was against it:
  "Even though the diagnostic port was scuttled, it wasn't the last attempt at surreptitious hardware expandability. When the Mac digital board was redesigned for the last time in August 1982, the next generation of RAM chips was already on the horizon. The Mac used 16 64Kbit RAM chips, giving it 128K of memory. The next generation chip was 256Kbits, giving us 512K bytes instead, which made a huge difference.
  "Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add.
  "But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory."
  https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt
Where's my new Mac Pro full-size workstation? by sandbagger · 2019-01-27 11:04 · Score: 2

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.

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---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Re: Could be worse by NicBenjamin · 2019-01-27 11:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

Uhh...
Lisa was an Apple product. Jobs actually ran the team that designed it, and named it after his daughter (to be fair, he repeatedly denied that under oath, as part of his decade plus long quest to avoid child support). In January '84 the only GUIs actually on the market were Lisa, MacOS, and a remarkably craptacular version of Windows. GEMS was a year later, and never really became a thing in the US. Amiga came out a few months after that.
Embrace of GUI needed consumers and developers by perpenso · 2019-01-27 12:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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. :-) It was an incredibly wise move by Apple IMHO.
Win3.1 not 95 changed PC world by perpenso · 2019-01-27 12:32 · Score: 2

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.
Re: Could be worse by UnknownSoldier · 2019-01-27 12:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

> In January '84 the only GUIs actually on the market were ... (snip)
Yup, GUI's were all the rage in the mid 80's.
> and a remarkably craptacular version of Windows
While Windows 1.0 was announced in 1983 it doesn't actually ship until November 20, 1985. Ironically a Microsoft engineer coined the term "vaporware" due to it taking so long! Who knew.
> GEMS was a year later
GEM (not GEMS), announced in 1984, was released on 28 February 1985 before Windows. Ventura Publisher, released in 1986, the first DTP on PCs used GEM. I'm not sure why it took until the March 1987 issue of Infoworld to review it (lead in time?). Technically, Aldus Pagemaker 1.0 was released in July 1985 for Mac OS but it didn't get ported over to Windows 1.0 until 1987.
And in 1986 GEOS was released.
Lost Opportunity by imisshypercard · 2019-01-27 13:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

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".
Re: Could be worse by NicBenjamin · 2019-01-27 15:20 · Score: 3, Informative

They forced Digital Research to change some elements of their interface, but did not drive them out of business. If you are familiar with MacOS and you see some screenshots of early versions of GEM you won't argue that Apple was wrong to sue those guys. They never sued GeoWorks.
They sued MS in '88. That was Windows 2.0, BTW, so it's not like it was a system anyone actually wanted. That suit dragged on until '97 when Jobs signed a deal with Gates. By '97 the Wintel monopoly was so well established that IBM's OS/2 Warp was an also-ran.
Yes popularized by SuperKendall · 2019-01-27 17:09 · Score: 2

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
Re:Could be worse by 4im · 2019-01-27 21:53 · Score: 2

Was Windows ME really bad, or just irrelevant?
If I recall correctly, Windows ME was really bad and irrelevant.
Our support folks recommended that everyone wait a year for Windows XP. Irrelevant.
One department in my lab played with it a bit, just to see if their Windows product ran OK it. They gave up on it, because of constant BSODs. Bad.
Actually, anyone with any sense having to use Windows (yes, I also was on Linux back then, dual-booting with OS/2 Warp 3), went with Windows 2000. IMHO one of the best releases of Windows - NT with decent performance and sensible GUI, no activation yet (came with XP), none of the instabilities of the DOS-based versions (i.e. Win95/Win98 or ME), and of course no telemetry yet.