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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.