The Apple Mac Turns 35 Years Old (theregister.co.uk) 250
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.
So much venom (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.
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NeXTSTEP was probably the revolutionary there... The mac just brought those concepts to a wider audience really.
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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
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I wish they would have also included Display Postscript.
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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 togglin
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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 a
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The big fix that NextStep brought to the GUI was using display Postscript instead of QuickDraw, which meant what you see was REALLY what you get. Display and Printing would be much more similar after that, rather than 2 completely different systemns.
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Nope, it was the Xerox Alto [wikipedia.org]. 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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I feel shame, did mean to write xerox instead of nextstep...
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It happens, no worries. ;-)
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Keep in mind that they got quite a few shares of Apple out of that tour.
In hindsight the foolish bit isn't that they let the tour happen, it's that they sold out right after Apple's IPO for something $10 mil.
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Pre-IPO investment opportunity in a darling company that ended up generating more capital during their IPO than any company since Ford.
Damn, wish I could have gotten screwed like that. If Xerox got screwed by anybody, it was by themselves for:
1. not bringing the Alto system to market themselves, instead being too focused on copy machines to realize they had invented the future and had it to themselves.
2. not hanging on to the investment they did make in Apple, which would be worth 5x more than the IPO clos
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This urban legend gets repeated so often that most people think that it's true . . .
The Lisa did *not* originate in that tour. *Prior* to the tour, it was already being designed with a graphical interface, and there were mockups of the tentative interface. These have been available on the web for decades, although the link that I used to use stopped working years ago.
There were definitely changes made and design influences from the visit, an effect which should not be understated, but it is patently untru
Yes popularized (Score:3)
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.
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Microsoft got plenty back on that investment, as well as all the revenue from selling Mac office apps (which was profitable for them) and then porting some of the features that the Mac App team came up with into Windows Office.
Oh, and they didn't pay $1B from stealing QuickTime right in the middle of their DoJ antitrust suit, which was the reason they settled anyway. They knew they were going to lose that one and the only strategy they had left was to wait for Apple to bleed out or settle.
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Look at the MacOS GUI pre and post Amiga OS. Both of which were influenced by Xerox. At the time they were all feeding off each other.
Speaking of influence, I'd say the single most influential GUI element was the start button. As much as we mocked it when Windows 95 came out, it's been widely copied. Followed by the Android notification shade, which was quickly copied by iOS and then desktop operating systems (Windows 10 has one that comes in from the right, I think MacOS has "toast" or something, many Linu
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Speaking of influence, I'd say the single most influential GUI element was the start button. As much as we mocked it when Windows 95 came out, it's been widely copied.
The Start button is just the NeXT Dock menu in the opposite corner, and the taskbar is just the NeXT Dock running left to right instead of top to bottom, plus a notification area. (While we're at it, Microsoft was on the Motif WG, which is why Windows' window manipulation menus and handles are essentially the same as the Motif interface.) So Windows pioneered... the notification area?
Re: So much venom (Score:2)
The GUI was already popular long before Windows 95 came along. Amigas, Atari STs, Wintel running Win 3, OS/2 2.0 were all going full swing with GUIs, and text based apps like Word Perfect were basically an anachronism by the time Win 95 released.
My first PC, an Amstrad PC1512, came with GEM Desktop, although without the trashcan that the Atari ST version had. This was somewhere between your Windows/286 (Windows 2.0) and Windows 3.0, the latter being when Microsoft started catching up with competition. Win
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Win95 was big because it revamped the UI, made the first break from Windows being no more than an app on top of MS-DOS and brought in more preemptive multitasking, although things like the resource limitations that made it start behaving weirdly and then crash helped maintain MicrosoftÃ(TM)s reputation for making toy operating systems.
Microsoft loves limitations. While Unix was architected for expansion from the start, DOS and Windows were always written to the limitations of the machine. Why bother to plan for the future when you can just sell the users another version, right? It worked for them, so I guess it was a good plan. Windows NT 3.51 for example only supported filesystems up to 2GB. That was a huge shame, because NT4 was where they merged the kernel and graphics memory spaces in order to improve graphics performance, and that's
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You don't have to have massive sales volume to bring new ideas to the marketplace. There are stacks of examples of this across every industry and market segment going back to the first guy who traded something for something else thousands of years ago.
Re:So much venom (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.
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Xerox Parc and some other workstations at the time had the advanced GUIs. The NeXT computer came long after the Mac and was basically a simple competitor to other workstations.
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The Alta had a GUI, but it was not advanced. It didn't, for example, have overlapping windows. Alto windows were tiled at best.
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
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Overlapping windows isn't that big a deal. There was even a Linux window manager that avoided overlapping them. It was the "desktop" orientation that encourage treating windows like pieces of paper on a desk.
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Nothing is "that big a deal" when it's already been done and you have orders of magnitude more computing power to play with.
It was very much a big deal in the early days of GUI development.
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Woz didn't work on Mac system software. You're thinking of Bill Atkinson's car crash:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.p [folklore.org]
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Not that long after the Mac: 1990. But by Jobs stealing Apple's "Supermac" team, he set Apple's engineering back many years as they dorked aound with the less-impressive LC and Centris models.
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It wasn't Woz - it was Bill Atkinson [wikipedia.org] who developed QuickDraw and "regions."
What's funny is that he basically did it in his spare time to help out the Mac team, as he was a developer specifically assigned to Lisa during the Mac development.
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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.
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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.
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The Mac didn't multitask though, at least not until later when more memory was common. As such it could get away with less RAM.
I'd argue that true pre-emptive multitasking was the bigger innovation. Graphics just got cheaper and many earlier machines were limited more by the affordable monitors of the time than by the availability of graphics hardware. Multitasking really made the desktop work as it was supposed to, as we know it now.
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The Mac didn't multitask though, at least not until later when more memory was common. As such it could get away with less RAM.
128k just wasn't even enough for one halfway decent graphical application, even at 1bpp, and with RLE of your PICTs.
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My point wasn't so much that things couldn't be better with more RAM or pre-emptive multitasking, but in Sept '84, that wasn't something you'd find in a PC. Saying 512k "would have been a more reasonable place to start" would have been way above anything else available, and caused the price to be even more outrageous than it already was...~$2500 or around $6000 in today's dollars. And functionally, the products available for the 128k mostly worked fine.
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Not to mention it was set up to allow the user to "multitask" but it wouldn't do pre-emptive multitasking itself...
Cooperative multitasking did suck, but it worked most of the time. Besides, home computers of the day didn't have enough RAM for serious multitasking of graphical applications. It wasn't until the next generation of them (Macintosh II, Amiga, 386 PCs) that this changed. Those first machines could only really handle running one "big" (for the time) program anyway. Hell, the Macintosh 128ke could barely handle that, they had to go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish it, coming up with a complicated binary
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Maybe, maybe not. I had used a mouse before this, and the original mac was sort of a joke among people I knew,. It looked nice but didn't do much. The GUI with the desktop orientation was odd (most people hadn't seen the Xerox workstations), prefacing the later arrival of Microsoft Bob. The GUI at the time was fine on very expensive workstations with much bigger screens, but for a "home micro" it didn't add much.
On the other hand it created devotees almost immediately. Certainly easier to use and more soph
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What I remember most was the screen, which could horizontally display only 6 inches of the 7 inches-per-line (or was it 6.5”) of text my friend was typing - he’d gotten one of these Macs specifically to write his thesis on. To me, that just seemed like a ludicrous design decision... not being able to simply read one entire line without scrolling.
I was not a Mac fan at all until they made the switch to Unix; although I do have fond memories of staying late after work sometimes to play Scarab of R
6.5in WYSIWYG, no problem, 1in margins (Score:2)
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.
Re:So much venom (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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A TV didn't prevent you having square pixels, and in fact the Amiga did support them with modes like 640x512 or 320x256.
The problem with TVs was the poor picture quality, especially in the United States where RF was often the only option, and sometimes composite. In Europe we at least had RGB via SCART, although on most sets of the era 640 horizontal pixels was really pushing it.
The other issue was that TVs needed interlace to do 512 vertical lines, where as monitors could support more than ~250 vertical li
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A TV didn't prevent you having square pixels, and in fact the Amiga did support them with modes like 640x512 or 320x256.
It didn't prevent them, but it wasn't suited to them. And the Amiga did support them, but they didn't look good. At low resolutions they didn't appear square, and at high resolutions you had to interlace.
The other issue was that TVs needed interlace to do 512 vertical lines, where as monitors could support more than ~250 vertical lines with progressive scan.
Yeah, that. You just couldn't get good high-res video quality out of a TV back then. Today, using a TV as a monitor is a much better strategy.
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It was a huge lesson for Jobs. The key to a revolutionary product is to make it just revolutionary *enough*, and then sell endless rounds of solid upgrades.
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Sound ability was limited on all computers of the era. Digital signal processors were ungodly expensive (as much as a computer; didn't come down in price until the 1990s), so sound synthesis was unaffordable. Memory was ungodly expensive too, so you couldn't play back high quality sound samples either (th
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Color too.
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Err, Apple released a computer in 1986 with a "Ensoniq ES5503 DOC 8-bit wavetable synthesis sound chip, 32-channels, stereo", "The ES5503 DOC is the same chip used in Ensoniq Mirage and Ensoniq ESQ-1 professional-grade synthesizers."
This did upset Apple Records.
Had other advanced features like a colour GUI at a time when the Mac was still black and white.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The Appletalk/Localtalk adapters came later (1989?); it was over 200kbaud, and much cheaper than Ethernet, and similar length limits. Third-party cable and adapters were common (I even built some).
It wasn't just 'between Macs', there was localtalk for PCs and printers. It was a hot way to network laser p
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AppleTalk could use inexpensive phone cable instead of expensive serial cables. I installed Ethertalk (the CAT5 version) at a bunch of K-12 schools from 1991-93, while their Apple II labs were running phone-cable based Corvus networks, and their PC's were using LANtastic, phone cable based networks.
Apple's Mac ran 4 channels of audio onboard at a time when PC's required sound cards and dicking around with IRQ's. the "Bong" chime when it booted was a chord; if RAM was bad or seated poorly, the chime played w
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Networking, sound, color all got held back.
The set computer design was great for profits per computer sold.
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Ah...the good ol' days! (Score:2, Offtopic)
"1984" (Score:3)
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I found it patronising.
Memory (Score:3)
Article is incorrect about "That 128KB was resolutely not upgradable". I personally upgraded my own.
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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 h
Where's my new Mac Pro full-size workstation? (Score:3)
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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MacRumors said the new Pro will come out this year and will be again modular and easily upgradable.
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I want a box I can put multiple video cards, half a dozen hard drives and several PCI cards in.
Sorry buddy, this doesn't fit with Apples "Dongle" aesthetic. You are supposed to buy a MacBook Pro and a Thunderbolt dock, with a chain of Thunderbolt HDDs and external GPUs hung off that. The longer the chain the better, and ideally you will have a few additional USB chains with hubs and more dongles on them.
Your computer just doesn't cut it if it doesn't have multiple huge dong(le)s.
I want a new full sized tower for heavy lifting.
Surely dumbbells are cheaper and more durable.
My biggest mistake (Score:2)
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)
Lost Opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs (Score:2)
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.
Mac Plus (Score:2)
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.
Re:Could be worse (Score:4, 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.
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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.
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Windows ME was utter shit.
I unfortunately needed to use it a few weeks, as I bought a new computer for my GF. But luckily I could downgrade it. For some reason Windows 98 did not install on it, so I needed to exchange the hard drive for one that had Win98 already on it. I don't remember what was "wrong" or "odd" ... I tend to forget my computer nightmares, luckily ... I had so many already.
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Different driver model that hardware manufacturers could not follow correctly. Lots of crashy things came out of it.
Re: Could be worse (Score:2)
Everyone and his cat thinks ME is the worst thing MS ever made, even worse than Vista
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That explains it! I have a dog. That must be how I missed how horrible it was.
Embrace of GUI needed consumers and developers (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.
:-) 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.
Re: Could be worse (Score:5, 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.
Re: Could be worse (Score:4, 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] (not GEMS), announced [toastytech.com] 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 [google.com] 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 [wikipedia.org] was released.
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Re: Could be worse (Score:2)
I actually used Ventura on Gem. Was totally rad except I only had a dot matrix printer.
But it triggered a lifelong fascination and sort of career with DTP and documents. Today I toyed with indesigns touch mode as a result.
Re: Could be worse (Score:4, 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.
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You're conflating Apple v Microsoft actions.
Look and Feel was closed in '94 when Apple's appeal to the US Supreme Court was denied.
The suit you mentioned that Jobs and Gates settled was a different ongoing action about unlicensed use of QuickTime code / patents that Apple would have won, which is why Microsoft settled. Apple didn't have the resources to pursue it over all the appeals and bullshit without no longer being a company that actually produced anything but lawsuits at the end.
Microsoft paid for th
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In January '84 the only GUIs actually on the market were Lisa, MacOS ... Apple IIs also had the option for graphical OSes and there was a hobbyist UCSD Pascal based GUI OS for Apples, too. (I used all of them, so I know :D )
That is not correct
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You first.
Xerox was very well-compensated for that in Apple stock options. If they'd just kept the roughly $1 Mil worth of stock they were given they'd have hundreds of millions.
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It's not stealing if you develop an idea that its originator had no intention of bringing to the market. That's why patent systems are supposed to include an exploitation requirement.
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What the fuck?
You probably meant that they "stole" it from Xerox, except that they came and raided Xerox PARC with permission from Xerox, granted through giving them a bunch of Apple stock. Read: compensation.
It's not Apple's fault that they bought the future for such a meager price. That would be on Xerox for not knowing that they had already invented the next 30 years of computing at a sleepy little office in Palo Alto.
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They were always called "applications" on Macintosh. It's even reflected in the type code "APPL" used for applications.
Re: Good 'ol Days ... (Score:2)
The slow disk copying (at least after a decent amount of RAM was finally available) was apparently the result of a bug [folklore.org].
Win3.1 not 95 changed PC world (Score:3)
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Apple spent many millions of dollars trying to produce an in-house operating system that had pre-emptive multitasking. The MacOS before OS X was a dismal kludge. Eventually, they gave up and let NeXT take them over and bring in a Unix clone.
Its not a clone, its a certified Unix based on BSD. ;-)
Re: Win3.1 not 95 changed PC world (Score:2)
Next was owned by Steve and he was, at the time, fired from Apple
Real success was Intel CPUs and Mac OS X (Score:2)
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.
Re: It was an expensive piece of shit (Score:2)
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
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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 expens
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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.
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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 aroun
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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.
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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?
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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
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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...