The joke about the Mac 128 was that it only had enough memory to tell you to put in the next floppy disk.
At the time, my high school got some Macs. I didn't have the funds for a Mac at home (cutting grass, raking leaves, delivering newspapers didn't do it) so I tried to do it on the cheap. I got an Atari 520ST and a Mac emulator called the "Magic Sac". The Magic Sac ran the actual Macintosh OS (I don't think it was up to System 7 yet) and required actual Mac ROMS that the vendor did not provide. I went to Apple dealers with the ridiculous story that I needed to replace the ROMs in my Mac for some reason and naturally nobody believed me. I eventually did get the ROMs at some kind of users group meeting and had a running Mac in emulation on my Atari. As you can imagine, it really sucked.
But, the real story is the Lisa, without Lisa, there would be no Mac. The Macintosh was a revamped Lisa...Lisa was $10,000.
The reality is that the Lisa would have likely been the Mac had Jobs not been forced off the team. It's of course infamously allegedly named Lisa after his daughter. Jobs started that project, and only turned his attention to the Mac as a competitor after he was ousted whilst looking for something else to do. For all practical purposes, the Lisa was the Mac, and the Mac is the Lisa 2.0 -- it's a direct evolution. Only the marketing of the product was different, until they buried the Lisa in a landfill in Utah, and introduced the Mac Plus as a replacement business computer boasting similar features.
I wouldn't say that. The Lisa was much more advanced (preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a hierarchal file system, hard drive support, supported higher memory) than the Mac. The Mac was a much "lesser" system and had to be to bring the cost down.
Seems like the “eventually” part is the thing that all the “if Steve Jobs was still alive” people don’t want to remember. There really weren’t any instant successes in Apple’s history. It’s almost always a new thing that gets incremental upgrades until it becomes the brilliant thing everybody thinks it was in the first place.
Then we forget all that, and when we watch it happening again in real time, It’s all “Apple is doomed, Tim Cook is an idiot, and if Steve Jobs were alive, we’d have an instant success every six months!”
Eventually may be a given but not in any sort of good timeframe. Take for example the stirrup...something completely obvious in hindsight but humans have been riding horses since 4500BC and the stirrup on a treed saddle didn't appear until somewhere between 206BC and 302 AD in China. It didn't make it to Europe until 6th century AD.
Without Jobs and the Mac we could have been using ever better versions of command line interfaces and textual user interfaces (curses) for a couple more decades. That a GUI is obvious hindsight ignores that if the Lisa and Xerox had been the only early examples and market failures its possible IBM PCs and Unix wouldn't have moved to GUIs.
Likewise full screen smartphones are "obvious" in hindsight but without Jobs and the iPhone we would have been treated to ever better versions of the blackberry and stylus based UIs.
Jobs was unique in that he jumpstarted two major computer interface paradigm shifts. Three if you count voice interaction with virtual assistants which we probably should.
He didn't just skate to where the puck would be but knocked it in that direction when everyone else wanted it to go somewhere else.
There were plenty of full screen mobile phones already around when the iPhone came out. But none had iTunes and yes, most used styluses. Nevertheless, the first iPhone was useless, it became barely usable with 3G.
I ordered a Mac 128 about three weeks after the initial release, along with the color printer. Later upgraded that machine to the 512K motherboard, and when available, added the external floppy drive, all of which made the Mac much more usable.
After 35 years, I still see the same basic interface that I saw the first time that I turned on that 128k Mac, albeit much refined and performant today.
The only other exciting machine of that time was the Amiga, though I never considered it was a variety of reasons.
I purchased mine within a few weeks of the release. I don't remember a color printer being available? I got the B&W Dot Matrix ImageWriter. It was only a B&W computer.
The Amiga was in many ways superior. I sold both in a retail store for awhile. I was super envious of the Amiga's color screen and expandability. So, when the Mac II came out, we finally had relative parity. These were fun days in the computer world for sure.
I ordered a Mac 128 about three weeks after the initial release, along with the color printer. Later upgraded that machine to the 512K motherboard, and when available, added the external floppy drive, all of which made the Mac much more usable.
After 35 years, I still see the same basic interface that I saw the first time that I turned on that 128k Mac, albeit much refined and performant today.
The only other exciting machine of that time was the Amiga, though I never considered it was a variety of reasons.
I purchased mine within a few weeks of the release. I don't remember a color printer being available? I got the B&W Dot Matrix ImageWriter. It was only a B&W computer.
The Amiga was in many ways superior. I sold both in a retail store for awhile. I was super envious of the Amiga's color screen and expandability. So, when the Mac II came out, we finally had relative parity. These were fun days in the computer world for sure.
Yes, I remember being lectured constantly about the superiority of the Amiga ad nauseam. So why is it in the graveyard of failed hardware and the Mac lives on? Many of the Amiga users I knew switched to PCs after its demise and not the Mac. That tells me their bias was so strong against Apple they just couldn’t do it.
Surprised no one has posted a link to https://www.folklore.org — "Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it."
But, the real story is the Lisa, without Lisa, there would be no Mac. The Macintosh was a revamped Lisa...Lisa was $10,000.
The reality is that the Lisa would have likely been the Mac had Jobs not been forced off the team. It's of course infamously allegedly named Lisa after his daughter. Jobs started that project, and only turned his attention to the Mac as a competitor after he was ousted whilst looking for something else to do. For all practical purposes, the Lisa was the Mac, and the Mac is the Lisa 2.0 -- it's a direct evolution. Only the marketing of the product was different, until they buried the Lisa in a landfill in Utah, and introduced the Mac Plus as a replacement business computer boasting similar features.
I wouldn't say that. The Lisa was much more advanced (preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a hierarchal file system, hard drive support, supported higher memory) than the Mac. The Mac was a much "lesser" system and had to be to bring the cost down.
Yeah. On the first page of comments I posted several links from Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org that describe the two projects running in parallel and even competing with each other (Jobs running the Mac team after usurping it from Jef Raskin, but here’s another one that mentions it:
Raskin’s original vision of the Mac sucked. It would have been text based with no mouse and no GUI.
The Canon CAT was his vision and lacked GUI and mouse. He may have been to Xerox PARC first but completely rejected everything they learned.
The one button mouse was obviously the wrong choice given that everyone can keep track of what two buttons do...IF it was his contribution, and some folks dispute that, it was another poor one.
Raskin also had a tendency to “embellish” his accomplishments. He, as Andy once commented, was NOT the father of the mac but it’s strange uncle...one with a nearsighted vision of where computing would go.
He’s another example of an engineer under Jobs that did well at Apple and never did anything really relevant again after...and IMHO his primary contribution to the Max was hiring Atkinson and promoting Hertzfeld from service to development.
One button mouse made sense when the GUI was much rudimentary.
But over time as GUI became complex, there's a strong need for a secondary button especially for context menus.
There were plenty of full screen mobile phones already around when the iPhone came out. But none had iTunes and yes, most used styluses. Nevertheless, the first iPhone was useless, it became barely usable with 3G.
It's silly to claim that the first iPhone was useless. On the contrary, for me and hundreds of thousands of others, it was a vast improvement over the phones we had previously. I liked my Sony phones until the iPhone came out - then they were crap.
3G wasn't the greatest when the iPhone came out but it was surprisingly adequate. The iPhone didn't work quite how I expected but it was still great. I thought the stock quotes would update in the background, for example, but no.
I appreciated the Raskin video (High Tech Heros) very much in spite of the stupid interviewer! Overall, it was a horrible interview because of that nut, but having not heard all of that info from the mouth of Raskin before, it was an informative watch.
Raskin’s original vision of the Mac sucked. It would have been text based with no mouse and no GUI.
The Canon CAT was his vision and lacked GUI and mouse. He may have been to Xerox PARC first but completely rejected everything they learned.
The one button mouse was obviously the wrong choice given that everyone can keep track of what two buttons do...IF it was his contribution, and some folks dispute that, it was another poor one.
Raskin also had a tendency to “embellish” his accomplishments. He, as Andy once commented, was NOT the father of the mac but it’s strange uncle...one with a nearsighted vision of where computing would go.
He’s another example of an engineer under Jobs that did well at Apple and never did anything really relevant again after...and IMHO his primary contribution to the Max was hiring Atkinson and promoting Hertzfeld from service to development.
The one button mouse was and is the right choice. It was so much the right choice that Apple still ships it today.
Out of the box, the Magic Mouse that you get with a new Macintosh is configured to be a one button mouse. Sure, most of us immediately reconfigure it to two button and then promptly forget about it, but one button is all you need to operate a Macintosh, it was designed that way from the very beginning, and millions of users are very happy with that.
And your assertion that "everyone" can keep track of what two buttons do is flat out false. I've got dozens of clients who are quite capable of proving you wrong. Yes, most are older, but the reality is that two buttons confuse some people. I've even got business owners who just don't get it when it comes to a two button mouse. I've even got a former president/COO of a major US company I guarantee you've heard of who simply can't handle two buttons.
Raskin wasn't always right, but he was right far more than he was wrong.
I miss ClarisWorks, from the System 7 / OS 8 era. My first Mac was a PowerMac 6100/60, bought July 1994. Booting into what I regarded as the little integrated marvel that ClarisWorks was, gave me the same sense of wonder as running GEOS did on my C64 in the 80s.
Macintosh changed the world on Day 1. Today's computers still look like that first Mac including the same command key shortcuts. I saw it on day 1 release, ordered it the next day.
And Steve absolutely deserves credit for making that Mac what it was. He wasn't the programmer or the hardware engineer, but he put together that team, gave them the vision, and pushed them to change the world.
A couple of stories of Steve recruiting people who came and did great work - this whole site has so many great stories on how Macintosh was built
There’s an old joke that goes, “I have George Washington’s axe, the one he chopped down the cherry tree with. Of course since then it’s gotten two new heads and four new handles.”
The systems today do vastly different things, in different ways, on different hardware, with a completely different OS, and different software, designed by different people, working under different management.
It is still a computer by Apple, but is it a Macintosh anymore?
I distinctly remember using the first Mac for the first time. Where I worked all of the engineering documents were hand written by engineers like myself and committed to typewritten form by dedicated “technical writers.” They used DECmate word processor machines with VT220 terminals so all edits had to go through the hand written to typed loop. It was painful. This was in the mid to late 1980s and we were literally doing copy & paste using paper and paste both for editing and inserting hand drawn or mechanical writer generated diagrams
At some point the company gave us exactly one Macintosh computer to share with the entire group of 20-40 people including managers, engineers, and proposal writers. This machine was seen as exotic and was exclusively used for drawings and more so for creating presentations in Presenter/PowerPoint. Of course all of these presentations were printed on vellum paper for use with overhead projectors.
It all seems so primitive by today’s standards. But in retrospect one of the things that advanced personal computers did in the business world was to eliminate a lot of intermediaries like tech writers and administrative assistants. The tasks held by those roles and others were folded into the engineering and business roles so now you have engineers being concerned about things like document formatting, fonts, and putting together snazzy presentations.
On the surface this added responsibility may sound like a trivial distraction, but on a human level it helped professionals gain a better understanding of how to communicate and connect with people outside of their technical enclave more easily. Being technically astute is great, but if you can’t share your discoveries and great ideas easily with the rest of the community in which you live and work your efforts may be wasted.
The Macintosh made it easier for professionals and people in general to express themselves in a faster, more fluid, and communicative manner by decreasing the time and effort required to move ideas from their source (brain) to an audience without losing as much in the traditional translation layers. I could put together both the written and graphical content myself and move things along more quickly.
The Macintosh, regardless of its sales numbers, established a new standard for human-personal computer interaction. The PC world eventually caught up, but it was a laborious transition to bridge the text-based to graphical-based human interaction model, something Apple nailed right out of the gate with the Macintosh.
The Macintosh’s impact on how personal computers relate to their users is far greater than the impact of the Macintosh machine itself. The Macintosh wasn’t the first expression of the new way to do personal computing but it was the first machine that brought the new model to the masses in a compelling and relatable form. And the beat goes on to the present.
Who would have expected to read something like this on AI: “Without question, it is unfair that Raskin fails to get credit for the Macintosh and it is undoubtedly true that Jobs didn't deserve it.”.
The systems today do vastly different things, in different ways, on different hardware, with a completely different OS, and different software, designed by different people, working under different management.
It is still a computer by Apple, but is it a Macintosh anymore?
It still has a menu bar and doesn't support touch. File structures developed for 800K floppies (HFS) are still the main way of structuring documents. It has however lost all quirkiness.
Who would have expected to read something like this on AI: “Without question, it is unfair that Raskin fails to get credit for the Macintosh and it is undoubtedly true that Jobs didn't deserve it.”.
Thank you.
The computer released isn't at all what Raskin was building, the soul of Macintosh comes from Steve. Not just in 1984, the modern OS comes from what Steve did at NeXT and brought back to Apple. iPhone, iPad, etc, all come from that OS too.
Here's an idea, interview the brilliant Andy Hertzfield and Bill Atkinson, ask them how important Steve Jobs was to Macintosh. I can 100% guarantee that they would never say Jobs didn't deserve credit and would be appalled to see anyone write that.
Comments
At the time, my high school got some Macs. I didn't have the funds for a Mac at home (cutting grass, raking leaves, delivering newspapers didn't do it) so I tried to do it on the cheap. I got an Atari 520ST and a Mac emulator called the "Magic Sac". The Magic Sac ran the actual Macintosh OS (I don't think it was up to System 7 yet) and required actual Mac ROMS that the vendor did not provide. I went to Apple dealers with the ridiculous story that I needed to replace the ROMs in my Mac for some reason and naturally nobody believed me. I eventually did get the ROMs at some kind of users group meeting and had a running Mac in emulation on my Atari. As you can imagine, it really sucked.
I had this: https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/mac_pc_on_st.html
I wouldn't say that. The Lisa was much more advanced (preemptive multitasking, protected memory, a hierarchal file system, hard drive support, supported higher memory) than the Mac. The Mac was a much "lesser" system and had to be to bring the cost down.
The Amiga was in many ways superior. I sold both in a retail store for awhile. I was super envious of the Amiga's color screen and expandability. So, when the Mac II came out, we finally had relative parity. These were fun days in the computer world for sure.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Leave_Of_Absence.txt
But over time as GUI became complex, there's a strong need for a secondary button especially for context menus.
3G wasn't the greatest when the iPhone came out but it was surprisingly adequate. The iPhone didn't work quite how I expected but it was still great. I thought the stock quotes would update in the background, for example, but no.
And Steve absolutely deserves credit for making that Mac what it was. He wasn't the programmer or the hardware engineer, but he put together that team, gave them the vision, and pushed them to change the world.
A couple of stories of Steve recruiting people who came and did great work - this whole site has so many great stories on how Macintosh was built
https://www.folklore.org/Joining_the_Mac_Group.html?sort=date
https://www.folklore.org/Font_Manager.html?sort=date
The systems today do vastly different things, in different ways, on different hardware, with a completely different OS, and different software, designed by different people, working under different management.
It is still a computer by Apple, but is it a Macintosh anymore?
The computer released isn't at all what Raskin was building, the soul of Macintosh comes from Steve. Not just in 1984, the modern OS comes from what Steve did at NeXT and brought back to Apple. iPhone, iPad, etc, all come from that OS too.