Documents offer glimpse into Apple's early days

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  • Reply 21 of 42
    dr millmossdr millmoss Posts: 5,403member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    Actually when it was pre ordered there was no color monitor or card available. After the original release however, within a month or so, it was updated to color.



    Ah. Well, a color monitor was only for rich people anyway. I had a 19" greyscale monitor on my IIx and thought I was in geek heaven.
  • Reply 22 of 42
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    Ah. Well, a color monitor was only for rich people anyway. I had a 19" greyscale monitor on my IIx and thought I was in geek heaven.



    That was a great setup because grayscale was much better for typesetting than the 24 bit color because in order to get black text the system had to display it in rgb and the low pitch caused fuzzy text.
  • Reply 23 of 42
    Thanks Dan for the document. Also, have you ever got your Porsche out of the driveway?





    James & Duncan
  • Reply 24 of 42
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by iCarbon View Post


    it amazes me to think thatr people invested in these guys -- based on these documents, they sound worthless...



    goes to show why I'm not a venture capitalist!!!!!



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ejulien View Post


    The image of the man is actor/director Orson Wells from a Paul Masson commercial. The commercial ends with the claim, "We will sell no wine before its time." You can see the commercial on YouTube.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    It's funny because it's true.



    BTW, for those who aren't old enough to remember, the picture is a caricature of Orson Wells, as he appeared in the Paul Masson wine TV commercials of the time, where he says "we will sell no wine before its time."



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mikeyrad View Post


    Gawd, is this a sign of getting old(er) or what? I thought that everyone knew the Orson Welles commercial for Paul Masson wines until I Wikipediaed him. He died in 1985!



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by chronster View Post


    I recognized the image, I just couldn't remember where. I'm not old enough to remember the commercial, but somehow I recognized that image. Thanks for shedding some light



    edit:

    I think I remember him from the muppets actually. He was on a VHS my mom recorded off TV and I watched a lot as a very young kid.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by matthawaii View Post


    I guess not so interesting as Woz was not on the mac team



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Napoleon_PhoneApart View Post


    Ah - Orson Welles for Paul Masson and John Houseman for Smith-Barney. Those were the days...



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    Back then, many regarded the Paul Masson commercials as an indication of how low Wells had sunk in his career by that time. I prefer to remember him as Harry Lyme in "The Third Man."



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Maestro64 View Post


    Actually, apple attempted to put the TFT LCD display used in the first lugable laptop computer in the original Mac with the 9in black & White CRT, what really happen was it made more sense to make the lugable then an actual original mac.



    Those times lines was off by a few years, 87/88 was the time they explored the Mac with the LCD.



    grant it the cost targets was way off, I think my Mac 128 cost me $3200.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JohnnyKrz View Post


    What is the VLC? I can find nothing about it and I don't remember anything about it.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Maestro64 View Post


    Very Low Cost



    it never happen that is way, it was a vision



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    Back then the CRTs all had really curved glass screen and people used to refer to the new high quality CRTs as flat screen since there was very little curve to them. This was probably the intended reference not LCD flat screen. I don't think anyone was selling LCD in the 80s. But yeah the costs were really high. I paid around $7,000 for the first Mac II with B/W monitor, there was no color option.



    Interesting story on that one. I ordered it before it was available and the computer store, I think ComputerLand, called me and said my computer had arrived. I drove down to the store about ten minutes away. When I arrived the salesman said that each store only received one Mac II and the owner of the store had taken it home for himself so I was SOL basically. I told him to call the owner at home and ask him to return the computer to me since I had already paid for it. Along with a Laserwriter and a scanner, PageMaker 1.0 and Illustrator 1.0 for a total of around $17,000. So he called the owner and surprisingly they returned the computer to me the next day.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    A couple of historical points of order:



    - The Macintosh II did indeed have a color card option.

    - The Macintosh Portable was released in 1989, and had a 9.8" LCD display. All that for only $6,500!



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    Actually when it was pre ordered there was no color monitor or card available. After the original release however, within a month or so, it was updated to color.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    Ah. Well, a color monitor was only for rich people anyway. I had a 19" greyscale monitor on my IIx and thought I was in geek heaven.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    That was a great setup because grayscale was much better for typesetting than the 24 bit color because in order to get black text the system had to display it in rgb and the low pitch caused fuzzy text.







    Did you all see A Letter to Three Wives when it came out in theaters!
  • Reply 25 of 42
    bageljoeybageljoey Posts: 2,004member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Napoleon_PhoneApart View Post


    Ah - Orson Welles for Paul Masson and John Houseman for Smith-Barney. Those were the days...



    Well, my broker is E.F. Hutton and E.F. Hutton says...
  • Reply 26 of 42
    bageljoeybageljoey Posts: 2,004member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by lightstriker View Post


    Did you all see A Letter to Three Wives when it came out in theaters!



    I really hope this is funny to those who get it, because you bogarted alot of space with that multiquote!
  • Reply 27 of 42
    aplnubaplnub Posts: 2,605member
    Omnigraffle had to be in beta format when that ORG chart was created.
  • Reply 28 of 42
    philipmphilipm Posts: 240member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    Back then the CRTs all had really curved glass screen and people used to refer to the new high quality CRTs as flat screen since there was very little curve to them. This was probably the intended reference not LCD flat screen. I don't think anyone was selling LCD in the 80s. But yeah the costs were really high. I paid around $7,000 for the first Mac II with B/W monitor, there was no color option.



    I didn't remember that there was a break before colour was available. Maybe because I was in a distant part of the world at the time that didn't get the latest stuff fast. The other thing about the Mac II was it didn't use the same slot architecture (NuBus vs. whatever the PC slot architecture was called then) as the mass market competition, so graphics cards etc. couldn't be ported over from PCs just by writing a driver as you can today.
  • Reply 29 of 42
    philipmphilipm Posts: 240member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aplnub View Post


    Omnigraffle had to be in beta format when that ORG chart was created.



    And they didn't have a very good spelling checker: "penney pinching", "Eurpoe". I was also amused to see Apple IIs described as "mainframes". I wonder if anyone with tech knowledge was allowed near the IPO.



    I'm inclined to agree with their view that they were well-placed to dominate the existing market players. They were sophisticated enough to understand that they couldn't dump technology on department stores without adequate training. It's interesting to see how quickly they understood the value of international markets and the necessary allowances. The fact that Apple Europe was originally set up by an entrepreneur then re-absorbed may explain how Apple got into the habit of over-charging for the European market.
  • Reply 30 of 42
    johnnykrzjohnnykrz Posts: 152member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by philipm View Post


    I didn't remember that there was a break before colour was available. Maybe because I was in a distant part of the world at the time that didn't get the latest stuff fast. The other thing about the Mac II was it didn't use the same slot architecture (NuBus vs. whatever the PC slot architecture was called then) as the mass market competition, so graphics cards etc. couldn't be ported over from PCs just by writing a driver as you can today.



    PCs had ISA. That was one of the first things that really stood out to me as something that 'just worked' on the Mac. With ISA, you would often have IRQ conflicts when installing new hardware and installing/running DOS drivers could be a bitch too.
  • Reply 31 of 42
    Interesting to see mention in official Apple documents of the "Telephone Interface Board" and a "Voice Recognition System". I may be wrong, but that Telephone Interface Board (and maybe the Voice Recognition System too) may be what was known as the "Charlie board" (I don't know who Charlie was in this), designed and prototyped by John Draper/Captain Crunch, famous phone phreak and friend of Jobs and Wozniak. Draper originally put it to use in his Apple II to dial thousands of phone numbers automatically, and recording what each one did when it answered, in order to create a list of "interesting" phone numbers--it could record whether the number answered with a computer modem tone, a busy signal, a fax tone, voice, etc. I think it was rejected as an Apple product once some of Apple's higher-ups decided having a product with such origins might be bad for PR.
  • Reply 32 of 42
    jcassarajcassara Posts: 39member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post


    In relation to the Tandy TRS 80 machine, the competitor analysis goes so far as to state that the Apple IIA will "definitely outsell the TRS 80 'hands down' regardless of the large number of potential retail locations in the Radio Shack chain."



    I love the hubris there. Didn't quite work out that way, though.







    Like with the Macintosh, it's a misconception that the Apple II was "widely successful" right out of the gate. You'll see the trend continues:







    Hey, don't get me wrong: I love the products and today we're using our Apple Macintoshes to post to these forums (as opposed to our Commodore-Amiga 9000s or Tandy TRS-09XI's), but it really steams me when Apple Revisionism touts the two Steves singlehandedly started the personal computer revolution.
  • Reply 33 of 42
    dr millmossdr millmoss Posts: 5,403member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jcassara View Post


    Like with the Macintosh, it's a misconception that the Apple II was "widely successful" right out of the gate. You'll see the trend continues:



    The Mac wasn't wildly successful from the outset. It had a good year in 1984 but fell behind expectations the following year, which is one of the reasons why Steve recruited Scully to run the company.



    Anyhow, there's more than one way to read those charts. Before 1982, if you take out the Atari, which was more a game machine than anything else, and the Commodore 64, which was hardly a serious personal computer, the Apple II was pretty much in sales parity with the other models available then, and the TRS-80 was on its way towards history. It wasn't until the IBM-PC caught on that the lines really start to diverge.
  • Reply 34 of 42
    bigpicsbigpics Posts: 1,397member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    The Mac wasn't wildly successful from the outset. It had a good year in 1984 but fell behind expectations the following year, which is one of the reasons why Steve recruited Scully to run the company.



    Anyhow, there's more than one way to read those charts. Before 1982, if you take out the Atari, which was more a game machine than anything else, and the Commodore 64, which was hardly a serious personal computer, the Apple II was pretty much in sales parity with the other models available then, and the TRS-80 was on its way towards history. It wasn't until the IBM-PC caught on that the lines really start to diverge.



    I was serious about and did serious work (at my job) with my Commodore 64. Paperclip (word processor) was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen, and Print Shop put me in the flyer printing biz....
  • Reply 35 of 42
    dr millmossdr millmoss Posts: 5,403member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bigpics View Post


    I was serious about and did serious work (at my job) with my Commodore 64. Paperclip (word processor) was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen, and Print Shop put me in the flyer printing biz....



    I did some serious work on mine, but in truth it was not much of a computer. It's main attraction was price. It was cheap!
  • Reply 36 of 42
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    I did some serious work on mine, but in truth it was not much of a computer. It's main attraction was price. It was cheap!



    What we used our machines for is irrelevant. The sales figures remain fact: to claim the Apple II single handedly ushered in the personal computer revolution, as Apple and people like Mark Stephens would you to believe, is folly and fanboy revisionism.



    And if you re-read my original post, you'll see I didn't express that the Mac was a runaway hit. Quite the contrary.
  • Reply 37 of 42
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    Well, at the very least Apple was the first to ship a mainstream computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse, so insofar as that became the template for personal computers to this day they certainly can claim to have revolutionized that market. Just as they need not claim to have invented the MP3 player, smart phone or (in all probability) the tablet in order to claim to have revolutionized those categories (yes, making some assumptions about any eventual Apple slate thing).
  • Reply 38 of 42
    Sorry, it's difficult to pick up a thread that died seven months ago. I'm not even going to try.
  • Reply 39 of 42
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    Sorry, it's difficult to pick up a thread that died seven months ago. I'm not even going to try.



    Huh, hadn't noticed. Usually when a zombie thread walks it's kind of random; in this instance someone waited seven months to reply.



    Maybe he's trapped in some kind of space-time discontinuity. I can picture jcassara, apparently frozen at his keyboard, typing one letter a day..... while from his perspective we're moving too fast too see.



    Wait, that's a STTNG episode.
  • Reply 40 of 42
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    Huh, hadn't noticed. Usually when a zombie thread walks it's kind of random; in this instance someone waited seven months to reply.



    Maybe he's trapped in some kind of space-time discontinuity. I can picture jcassara, apparently frozen at his keyboard, typing one letter a day..... while from his perspective we're moving too fast too see.



    Wait, that's a STTNG episode.



    I like your explanation, but actually, it was an original ST episode. I am so sorry to know this.
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