I wouldn't dispute much of that (though as always, saying that change has a single source is normally betraying a bias).
But "the world" does not equal the PC hardware industry, and Apple being influential and widely copied does not equal them "forcing" anything.
I'm not knocking Apple, they're great, and clearly a very important player in computing and technology. But they didn't "force" the "world" to "change". It's an OTT headline.
When Steve Jobs got on stage for the iPhone did he say that the Mac had changed the world? No, check the transcript, he said it changed the computer industry.
"Apple's Macintosh, a leader in the computer industry for 30 years" - much more acceptable and a realistic headline that still does good service to Apple.
One can't really say that the Macintosh was a leader in the computer industry for 30 years, so that's actually inaccurate, unless Apple mysteriously owned Microsoft, and Intel. It was an innovator, sometimes leader, that was so influential as to change the landscape of our lives.
Actually, the headline should have been "Apple has repeatedly changed the world" full stop. Here's just a couple of reasons why:
Apple brought computing to the masses, changing how we live our everyday lives. The Apple IIe was the number one computer in education for a decade, changing the landscape of education. Scores of children in the U.S. learned about computers and about the working world on an Apple IIe. The Mac, iBook, the eMate, the Newton, for example, and other products were stepping stones on the way to the iPad, changing not just education but scores of industries and how they operate, including medicine, manufacturing, policing, art, music, sales, everything. The iPhone has changed how we communicate with each other. Sure, other smartphones came first, but none so easy to use in order to reach a critical mass and to redefine how we use our "phones". It's easy to argue we no longer use phones, we use handheld computers as communicators for all kinds of tasks, including office productivity, music, research, etc. Thanks to the iPhone, we now communicate different. It didn't change an industry, it changed our world.
But let's get back to the Mac, which also happens to be the underpinning of the iPhone and iPad, and has also changed the world. The Mac changed how we interface with the world, and made all other industries take the design of everyday things and how we interact with their products seriously. After the Mac, people wouldn't be satisfied with overcomplicated interfacing with products. Products had to be better designed, easier to use, more elegant. Apple's designs for the Mac, especially since Steve Jobs returned to the company, changed products in most industries. When the iMac first came out in 1998, candy colored products began to show up everywhere, for example, and not just in the computer industry. When Apple changed course in its design tastes with more elegant and somber colors and designs, other industries followed suit and the candy all but disappeared. The Mac led mostly through its influence, innovation, and clever repurposing and reconstruction of existing technologies. Its venerably ease of use, and user interface guidelines taught others what could be done to better their industries, and also made their tools better. Its technologies and innovations also changed how creative industries work. Publishing, film, music, have all been changed by the Macintosh. The way advertising agencies work, design, develop have changed and improved thanks to the Mac. The Mac hasn't necessarily always been the leader, but it has touched on every aspect of our lives, wether we see it, use it, or not.
In terms of the computer industry, the Mac has, for 30 years, also been the industry's research lab. Apple's products, innovations, and development decisions have becomes a test bed for others to follow. When the Mac was the first to include CD-ROMs, or USB, remove the floppy, etc., others criticized, but carefully watched how it went before following suit. Technologies like Quicktime, which Microsoft attempted to outright steal, changed video forever, something we now take for granted when we download movies from Netflix, Amazon or iTunes, and view them on our iPads, iPhones, AppleTV, Macs, or WinTel PCs. Quicktime is at the heart of the mpeg-4 format, used basically, everywhere.
These are just a couple of simple examples, off the top of my head. Imagine how extensive the influence and changes that the Mac and Apple products and technologies have ushered into the world. And though you're right that perhaps they didn't "force" the world to change, one could easily argue that by being such a force for change and creating tools that were better and more efficient, they forced everyone else to do so. Just like we had to give in (forced) to machines digging out tunnels, Apple tools and products have forced us to change the way we use technology, do business, communicate, work, educate, etc. They're not the only ones who changed the world, but they have been a force for change.
I recall those early detractors of the Mac. Some of them seemed ridiculous even back then and look absolutely preposterous now. Things were said such as "It's just a toy," especially pointing out the toy-ish idea of a GUI and that something called a "mouse" (the word will never catch on) couldn't be taken seriously at all. Of course, no real, serious computer person would ever want to use such unprofessional stuff.
Has anybody ever used one of those silly mouse thingies? ;-)
I recall those early detractors of the Mac. Some of them seemed ridiculous even back then and look absolutely preposterous now. Things were said such as "It's just a toy," especially pointing out the toy-ish idea of a GUI and that something called a "mouse" (the word will never catch on) couldn't be taken seriously at all. Of course, no real, serious computer person would ever want to use such unprofessional stuff.
Has anybody ever used one of those silly mouse thingies? ;-)
People said that it was a toy because the thing had a much wimpier CPU than a run of the mill PC and the famous 128KB of memory, so almost unusable for anything serious in that configuration. The GUI was always viewed as a good thing in my recollection, especially since professional workstations already had GUIs at the time.
I theorize the next iMac will have an ultra-thin screen and the electronics will migrate into the base (which won't be massive, but somewhat similar to the "iPad Air" styling. In other words, a slim wedge).
They don't like to have seams in their products. Putting the components in the base would be like putting ~150W components into a Mac Mini and then they have to put the cabling through the hinge. The way it is now is pretty much the ultimate iMac design. I reckon the next big change will be to make it 4K/Retina/2160p. If the display prices don't drop quickly enough, the next iMac update could be a very weak update (Haswell refresh?) and might explain them holding back Thunderbolt 2 so they have a feature to add. 3D gesture input can be another unique element eventually.
People said that it was a toy because the thing had a much wimpier CPU than a run of the mill PC and the famous 128KB of memory, so almost unusable for anything serious in that configuration. The GUI was always viewed as a good thing in my recollection, especially since professional workstations already had GUIs at the time.
I gather that you have no idea what the world of personal computing was like in 1984. The Mac used the Motorola 68000 processor. Before it developed its SPARC RISC processor, Sun used the 68000 as the basis of its workstations including its original workstation. Also based on the 68000 were computers from Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, IBM, and many others. In the case of IBM, its Scientific PC was a Unix-based desktop based on the 68000. IBM also sold a System 360 PC--don't hold me to the exact name--that did exactly what its name implies. The System 360 PC ran IBM System 360 applications on the desktop. It was based on dual 68000-processors that IBM recoded to run System 360 binaries.
The 68000 and its follow-on members of the 680x0 family were the workstation processors of choice during the 1980s and early 1990s. Let us not forget that the NeXTstations from NeXT were based on this family. The 680x0 was replaced by RISC processors from various foundries, not Intel. Intel eventually drove its competition in scientific and engineering workstations out of business.
The point is that when the Mac was developed, Intel processors were the choice for running WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Apple based the Mac on the processor used in desktop engineering workstations.
Just a quick word about the 128 kB RAM in the original Mac. Forget not that the Macintosh Toolbox ROM contained vast majority of the OS. The ROM shared a continuous memory map with RAM. Executables and data had almost complete access the 128 kB RAM. Compare that to the competition of the day.
I gather that you have no idea what the world of personal computing was like in 1984. The Mac used the Motorola 68000 processor. Before it developed its SPARC RISC processor, Sun used the 68000 as the basis of its workstations including its original workstation. Also based on the 68000 were computers from Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, IBM, and many others. In the case of IBM, its Scientific PC was a Unix-based desktop based on the 68000. IBM also sold a System 360 PC--don't hold me to the exact name--that did exactly what its name implies. The System 360 PC ran IBM System 360 applications on the desktop. It was based on dual 68000-processors that IBM recoded to run System 360 binaries.
The 68000 and its follow-on members of the 680x0 family were the workstation processors of choice during the 1980s and early 1990s. Let us not forget that the NeXTstations from NeXT were based on this family. The 680x0 was replaced by RISC processors from various foundries, not Intel. Intel eventually drove its competition in scientific and engineering workstations out of business.
The point is that when the Mac was developed, Intel processors were the choice for running WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Apple based the Mac on the processor used in desktop engineering workstations.
Just a quick word about the 128 kB RAM in the original Mac. Forget not that the Macintosh Toolbox ROM contained vast majority of the OS. The ROM shared a continuous memory map with RAM. Executables and data had almost complete access the 128 kB RAM. Compare that to the competition of the day.
I have a very good idea of what personal computing was like, and there was not a single workstation with less than 1MB of ram. Recall that the original Mac shipped without a hard drive. Nor did it have a floating point coprocessor, which every 68K based workstation had. All the nerds at the time preferred the 68K to the x86 architecture, due to better memory model, but certainly not all 68Ks were created equal. Nor did it have a decent OS (not that DOS was any prize, but at least it was programmable; Mac was, by design, a non-turingcomplete device [Jef Raskin's "one button" philosophy]), so technically-inclined but not fanatical users were frustrated. In addition, you probably forget that the original Mac was not a very successful product UNTIL the LaserWriter came out. Desktop publishing was the killer app.
I have a very good idea of what personal computing was like, and there was not a single workstation with less than 1MB of ram. Recall that the original Mac shipped without a hard drive. Nor did it have a floating point coprocessor, which every 68K based workstation had. All the nerds at the time preferred the 68K to the x86 architecture, due to better memory model, but certainly not all 68Ks were created equal. Nor did it have a decent OS (not that DOS was any prize, but at least it was programmable; Mac was, by design, a non-turingcomplete device [Jef Raskin's "one button" philosophy]), so technically-inclined but not fanatical users were frustrated. In addition, you probably forget that the original Mac was not a very successful product UNTIL the LaserWriter came out. Desktop publishing was the killer app.
Whether you realize it not, you just confirmed that Macs were based on the same processors used by Sun and other workstation manufacturers. This confirmation completely eviscerates your contention that Macs had "wimpy" processors. To drive the point home, 128 K Macs benchmarked to about 50% of Sun workstation. It is interesting that you brought the LaserWriter into the conversation. The LaserWriter was also based on the 68000. Two revolutionary devices both based on a "wimpy" processor? Hardly.
There were more...especially obscure ones like the Fortune. In 1984-1985 I recall helping with a printer driver that could collate long documents on a weird branded 68K workstation with very wimpy stats. It was an all-in-one like the Mac running AT&T unix. If it had 1MB RAM I'd have been surprised. It looked like an oversized terminal.
And personal computing was difference than workstation computing anyway. The IBM XT from 1983 also shipped with 128KB stock and the Fat Mac (512KB) shipped in Sept 1984.
Quote:
Recall that the original Mac shipped without a hard drive.
So did the Iris 1000 (although arguably that was a terminal) as well as some workstations that shipped with ROM and a floppy. Or a tape drive.
Quote:
Nor did it have a floating point coprocessor, which every 68K based workstation had.
No. The MC68881 was designed for the 68020. I cannot recall ANY 68000 machine having a math co-processor.
All the nerds at the time preferred the 68K to the x86 architecture, due to better memory model, but certainly not all 68Ks were created equal.
Every 68000 was equal as far as I know or it got a different model number. Like the low end 68008 or the enhanced 68010.
Quote:
Nor did it have a decent OS (not that DOS was any prize, but at least it was programmable; Mac was, by design, a non-turing complete device [Jef Raskin's "one button" philosophy]), so technically-inclined but not fanatical users were frustrated.
WTF? Do you even know what Turing completeness is? Hint: it has nothing to do with mouse buttons. It was programmable (duh) and you could get Basic, Pascal, C and the 68K Assembler MDS dev pack. Yes, in 1984 you had to develop on the Lisa since the dev kit wasn't ready until 1985 although I think MS shipped their basic for the mac in 1984.
In 1984 Unix was still working out graphical user interfaces. X was just evolving from W. SGI had MEX which would be quickly retired. Sun's NeWS may or may not have been out in 1984. Three button mice wouldn't really become common among workstation users until the late 80s when standardized by X.
On the PC ONLY the left (primary) mouse button had a defined behavior with the right mouse button behavior up to the application until Windows 3.1. Right mouse button bringing up a context property window didn't become common until the 90s.
In fact I don't recall using or needing any sort of mouse in the mid-80s for unix coding. Hell, most folks were using vi and not even emacs. The way most folks used computers was via a terminal. Anyone here remember termcap and VT100 emulation?
There was nothing wrong with MacOS for the time and as noted by many the GUI design has withstood the test of time.
There were more...especially obscure ones like the Fortune. In 1984-1985 I recall helping with a printer driver that could collate long documents on a weird branded 68K workstation with very wimpy stats. It was an all-in-one like the Mac running AT&T unix. If it had 1MB RAM I'd have been surprised. It looked like an oversized terminal.
And personal computing was difference than workstation computing anyway. The IBM XT from 1983 also shipped with 128KB stock and the Fat Mac (512KB) shipped in Sept 1984.
So did the Iris 1000 (although arguably that was a terminal) as well as some workstations that shipped with ROM and a floppy. Or a tape drive.
1. I am comparing the Mac to the Sun 2. It is silly to compare it to the Sun 1 which shipped a couple of years earlier (and did not ship very much; it was basically used as a fancy monitor at Stanford).
2. When I say 68K, I mean 68xxx. In particular, the Sun 2 already shipped with a 68010 and a floating point (and various other) coprocessor.
3. The Sun 2 already shipped with 4MB of RAM
4. Some (actually a lot of) Sun2s and Sun3s were diskless, but that was possible due to the wonders of NFS mounting volumes on the server. Mac never had anything similar for several years.
5. The Suns DID have a GUI several years before the Mac (and they inherited it from the Alto, though Alto and the Xerox D-machines were much fancier).
6. The processor speed (even ignoring the coprocessor issue) is much less important than the amount of RAM.
7. The Unix workstations were designed to be programmed, in direct opposition to the Mac.
so
8. For many years Macs had the reputation of "secretaries' machines".
I used to do development with NeXT and Apple, and while I LOVED the NeXT (I am still pining for a nice greyscale monitor), I could never get into programming the Mac, even in the much later days of MPW and CodeWarrior. By the way, the NeXT also used the 68(020), but the 8MB of RAM made an infinite difference.
1. I am comparing the Mac to the Sun 2. It is silly to compare it to the Sun 1 which shipped a couple of years earlier (and did not ship very much; it was basically used as a fancy monitor at Stanford).
And yet there were still workstations that shipped with less than 1MB RAM. Like the mentioned Fortune workstation.
Quote:
2. When I say 68K, I mean 68xxx. In particular, the Sun 2 already shipped with a 68010 and a floating point (and various other) coprocessor.
Really? Which floating point co-processor on the Sun-2? And in any case even IF that the 68010 Sun-2 shipped with a co-processor it does not prove that EVERY 68K workstations shipped with a co-processor which includes the original 68000 CPU using your rather lame excuse.
Quote:
3. The Sun 2 already shipped with 4MB of RAM
Which has nothing to do with proving the assertion that "NOT A SINGLE" workstations shipped with less than 1MB or more of RAM.
Quote:
4. Some (actually a lot of) Sun2s and Sun3s were diskless, but that was possible due to the wonders of NFS mounting volumes on the server. Mac never had anything similar for several years.
Implementation of NFS was started in March of 1984 and used experimentally.
Peer to peer file sharing didn't happen until System 7 (1991) but Apple had file sharing as early as 1987. That's not even including TOPS which was bought by Sun in 1987 and supported the Mac and NFS.
Quote:
6. The processor speed (even ignoring the coprocessor issue) is much less important than the amount of RAM.
LOL. Goalpost moved. But yes, the 512K Mac (late 1984) was better than the 128K Mac (early 1984).
Quote:
7. The Unix workstations were designed to be programmed, in direct opposition to the Mac.
Which is why no one ever programmed a Mac. Direct opposition? Are you in Colorado? Because you must be smoking some good stuff.
Quote:
so
8. For many years Macs had the reputation of "secretaries' machines".
LOL...they were too damned expensive to be secretary machines which were invariably PCs.
DTP machines perhaps.
Science machines perhaps. When I worked at NASA I had a new Mac IIfx but there were older Mac IIs (complete with 68020 with a 68881 FPU 1MB stock and expandable to 20MB) which were first released in 1987 doing science visualization. NCSA Telnet was released in 1986 because of the widespread use of the mac by scientists.
March 2 1987. A mere three years after the first 128K Mac. Not "Many Years". Not "Several Years". A "Few Years".
Secretaries machines? Not so much. You didn't see many macs at all in the business world.
Quote:
I used to do development with NeXT and Apple, and while I LOVED the NeXT (I am still pining for a nice greyscale monitor), I could never get into programming the Mac, even in the much later days of MPW and CodeWarrior. By the way, the NeXT also used the 68(020), but the 8MB of RAM made an infinite difference.
If you are still a programmer you must be simply brilliant given how precise you've been in this thread (oh, when I said 68000 workstations I meant also 68020 machines too!). And your nuanced understanding of the definition of "Every" and "Not A Single". I'm curious, when you write if (x == 0) do you also mean "well, except in these cases where x > 0 but I forgot about them".
Did you do development or did you manage development?
I would hazard a guess if you did development on the NeXT in the early days you'd be bitching about how craptastic that MO drive was and how NeXT sucked ass for "many years" when in reality it was 2 years before they dumped it. And the first NeXT in 1988 had a 68030 not a 68020. The 1990 NeXTCube and the NeXTstation (which I had at one point) used the 68040 and HDDs.
I used to do development with NeXT and Apple, and while I LOVED the NeXT (I am still pining for a nice greyscale monitor), I could never get into programming the Mac, even in the much later days of MPW and CodeWarrior. By the way, the NeXT also used the 68(020), but the 8MB of RAM made an infinite difference.
The talk of specs always seems to creep in and it always misses the point about the Mac. Back in the early days, people made their own standards where there were none. AppleTalk, OSes without protected memory and user privileges, Quickdraw vs OpenGL, ADC vs VGA/DVI, all these things would change. The impact Apple made was in how people thought of computers. It wasn't about computation power or programmability, it was about how they would become life accessories. To the people who had to add functionality, the constraints were a headache and there were headaches on every platform like not having standardised media frameworks (we still don't really - there's no single OpenAV framework like OpenGL for working with video/audio) but that's not the point of impact. The point of impact is on the buyer end.
One of Apple's most powerful statements was 'the computer for the rest of us', it wasn't 'the computer for the same people all the other computers are for'. All this meant though was the other computers were designed by technical people for technical people. While that led some to regard them as dumbed down and toy-like, it made the mistake of thinking that technical and non-technical groups were mutually exclusive. OS X is enough evidence that this isn't the case. You can have the full power of a unix machine with a simple interface.
Apple's influence over the computer industry is evidenced by the changes that became widely adopted after they pushed for them. They weren't always first to do them, they didn't always push things that became widely adopted but all the way through the development of computer technology, Apple has influenced the direction. They have never followed the direction of other companies and produced me-too products.
People can say that the Mac has such a small marketshare that its influence is small but that was the seed that started it. It influenced Windows. Without the Mac, there would be no Windows in its present form. Without Apple, there would be no NeXT and eventually iOS and without that you wouldn't have Android in its present form. Focusing on the processors used over the years or the value for money is the wrong way to look at it. They never used the fastest parts, they were never the cheapest but they always put forward changes nobody else bothered about (typography for example) and most of them changed the direction of the entire industry.
This makes people uncomfortable for some reason. They are happy to give Microsoft credit for their role, IBM, Samsung, Google, Unix contributors, Intel, AMD and so on but Apple they have a problem with. I think it's in part driven by them doing things their own way e.g using PPC processors or the above proprietary technology and making OSes that only run on their own hardware. This business model makes their products far more expensive in some cases and so the user experience lauded by the users is denied to people who can't or won't pay so much for it. I think that leads to an irrational hatred of them and a need to constantly revise history to diminish their role. Their role is sometimes exaggerated on the other side but when people say things in all seriousness to the effect that technology today would be almost identical without Apple's influence at all, it's plain to see who's got it wrong. If your life is better for having technology in it, you are free to align yourself with whatever company's business model best suits you but Apple has earned a simple thank you for their part in bringing those options about, they don't deserve the efforts to rewrite them out of history.
The first Mac I owned personally was a G4 PowerMac Tower (the one before the "Titanium" tower). Late 1990's or so. Still running Mac OS 9 at the time, but OS X appeared soon after, within a year or two later... that was it for me. I was FORCED to leave behind all my Windows 3.11 machines... along with all the late nights, hair-pulling, 6-times-a-year reinstalls and nightmare "registry" management issues....
The last Windows OS I used was Win 2k (a sibling of NT which was also installed) at my company, which was acceptable as a network file manager and not much else where we were concerned...
Once the second iteration of OS X arrived, I was permanently off PC for life. Apple really twisted my arm hard too!
My world changed where computers are concerned. By force.
And without Android you wouldn't have iOS in its present form. Group hug!
This is another mistake that people make, which is to equate vastly different levels of contribution. When someone spends years of R&D to make such a paradigm shift as the iPhone and all its associated technology that the contrast between what came before and what came after is unrecognisable as being in the same class and then someone comes along and says 'it uses the same kind of drop-down panel someone else added first so everybody's sharing', it ignores that difference in contribution. All the way until iOS 6, Android fans were saying iOS was stale and never changed, then when iOS 7 came along, it somehow copied an Android theme but then they deride it as child-like with its pastel colors. It can't be both stale/undesirable and heavily influenced by a preferred competitor. The few elements that showed up first in Android and the Palm Pre OS don't constitute a major change in the way people use the products.
This is the same with Windows. Apple (and Xerox) worked through the mistakes, all the UI guidelines to refine it to something that works well. Windows added nothing to that and didn't even copy it properly because they didn't copy the guidelines, they copied the result of the guidelines and further revisions move away from it until you get inconsistencies and poor user experiences. This happened with Android. They rushed to copy the look and feel of iOS like they did with Blackberry first but they copied the result and it produces the same inconsistencies you get with Windows.
The idea that one product couldn't exist without another has to consider this difference in contribution. Without iOS, Android would look like Blackberry. Without Android (and using the assumption that Apple even used the theme as a reference), iOS would look like iOS 6 without a drop-down panel. That's a big difference.
That may be a record for how many words someone has put in my mouth. Instead of getting into a lengthy debate over things I never said I'll just say that I agree with a lot of your post. Not all of it, but a lot of it.
Comments
If that's your opinion that's fine, but extrapolation is very much opinion, and I don't think it's appropriate in good reporting.
Just saying.
Originally Posted by Crowley
I wouldn't dispute much of that (though as always, saying that change has a single source is normally betraying a bias).
But "the world" does not equal the PC hardware industry, and Apple being influential and widely copied does not equal them "forcing" anything.
I'm not knocking Apple, they're great, and clearly a very important player in computing and technology. But they didn't "force" the "world" to "change". It's an OTT headline.
When Steve Jobs got on stage for the iPhone did he say that the Mac had changed the world? No, check the transcript, he said it changed the computer industry.
"Apple's Macintosh, a leader in the computer industry for 30 years" - much more acceptable and a realistic headline that still does good service to Apple.
One can't really say that the Macintosh was a leader in the computer industry for 30 years, so that's actually inaccurate, unless Apple mysteriously owned Microsoft, and Intel. It was an innovator, sometimes leader, that was so influential as to change the landscape of our lives.
Actually, the headline should have been "Apple has repeatedly changed the world" full stop. Here's just a couple of reasons why:
Apple brought computing to the masses, changing how we live our everyday lives. The Apple IIe was the number one computer in education for a decade, changing the landscape of education. Scores of children in the U.S. learned about computers and about the working world on an Apple IIe. The Mac, iBook, the eMate, the Newton, for example, and other products were stepping stones on the way to the iPad, changing not just education but scores of industries and how they operate, including medicine, manufacturing, policing, art, music, sales, everything. The iPhone has changed how we communicate with each other. Sure, other smartphones came first, but none so easy to use in order to reach a critical mass and to redefine how we use our "phones". It's easy to argue we no longer use phones, we use handheld computers as communicators for all kinds of tasks, including office productivity, music, research, etc. Thanks to the iPhone, we now communicate different. It didn't change an industry, it changed our world.
But let's get back to the Mac, which also happens to be the underpinning of the iPhone and iPad, and has also changed the world. The Mac changed how we interface with the world, and made all other industries take the design of everyday things and how we interact with their products seriously. After the Mac, people wouldn't be satisfied with overcomplicated interfacing with products. Products had to be better designed, easier to use, more elegant. Apple's designs for the Mac, especially since Steve Jobs returned to the company, changed products in most industries. When the iMac first came out in 1998, candy colored products began to show up everywhere, for example, and not just in the computer industry. When Apple changed course in its design tastes with more elegant and somber colors and designs, other industries followed suit and the candy all but disappeared. The Mac led mostly through its influence, innovation, and clever repurposing and reconstruction of existing technologies. Its venerably ease of use, and user interface guidelines taught others what could be done to better their industries, and also made their tools better. Its technologies and innovations also changed how creative industries work. Publishing, film, music, have all been changed by the Macintosh. The way advertising agencies work, design, develop have changed and improved thanks to the Mac. The Mac hasn't necessarily always been the leader, but it has touched on every aspect of our lives, wether we see it, use it, or not.
In terms of the computer industry, the Mac has, for 30 years, also been the industry's research lab. Apple's products, innovations, and development decisions have becomes a test bed for others to follow. When the Mac was the first to include CD-ROMs, or USB, remove the floppy, etc., others criticized, but carefully watched how it went before following suit. Technologies like Quicktime, which Microsoft attempted to outright steal, changed video forever, something we now take for granted when we download movies from Netflix, Amazon or iTunes, and view them on our iPads, iPhones, AppleTV, Macs, or WinTel PCs. Quicktime is at the heart of the mpeg-4 format, used basically, everywhere.
These are just a couple of simple examples, off the top of my head. Imagine how extensive the influence and changes that the Mac and Apple products and technologies have ushered into the world. And though you're right that perhaps they didn't "force" the world to change, one could easily argue that by being such a force for change and creating tools that were better and more efficient, they forced everyone else to do so. Just like we had to give in (forced) to machines digging out tunnels, Apple tools and products have forced us to change the way we use technology, do business, communicate, work, educate, etc. They're not the only ones who changed the world, but they have been a force for change.
Just pondering...
Great article DED! My first Mac was the Intel based white MacBook, which is still going strong today. My old Ma uses it run her pub!
What?
Jobs wasn't pushed to leave Apple in 1986. You meant 1996.
He meant 1986, or at least should have, since that IS when Jobs was booted.
Has anybody ever used one of those silly mouse thingies? ;-)
I recall those early detractors of the Mac. Some of them seemed ridiculous even back then and look absolutely preposterous now. Things were said such as "It's just a toy," especially pointing out the toy-ish idea of a GUI and that something called a "mouse" (the word will never catch on) couldn't be taken seriously at all. Of course, no real, serious computer person would ever want to use such unprofessional stuff.
Has anybody ever used one of those silly mouse thingies? ;-)
People said that it was a toy because the thing had a much wimpier CPU than a run of the mill PC and the famous 128KB of memory, so almost unusable for anything serious in that configuration. The GUI was always viewed as a good thing in my recollection, especially since professional workstations already had GUIs at the time.
They don't like to have seams in their products. Putting the components in the base would be like putting ~150W components into a Mac Mini and then they have to put the cabling through the hinge. The way it is now is pretty much the ultimate iMac design. I reckon the next big change will be to make it 4K/Retina/2160p. If the display prices don't drop quickly enough, the next iMac update could be a very weak update (Haswell refresh?) and might explain them holding back Thunderbolt 2 so they have a feature to add. 3D gesture input can be another unique element eventually.
The 68000 and its follow-on members of the 680x0 family were the workstation processors of choice during the 1980s and early 1990s. Let us not forget that the NeXTstations from NeXT were based on this family. The 680x0 was replaced by RISC processors from various foundries, not Intel. Intel eventually drove its competition in scientific and engineering workstations out of business.
The point is that when the Mac was developed, Intel processors were the choice for running WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Apple based the Mac on the processor used in desktop engineering workstations.
Just a quick word about the 128 kB RAM in the original Mac. Forget not that the Macintosh Toolbox ROM contained vast majority of the OS. The ROM shared a continuous memory map with RAM. Executables and data had almost complete access the 128 kB RAM. Compare that to the competition of the day.
I gather that you have no idea what the world of personal computing was like in 1984. The Mac used the Motorola 68000 processor. Before it developed its SPARC RISC processor, Sun used the 68000 as the basis of its workstations including its original workstation. Also based on the 68000 were computers from Hewlett-Packard, Radio Shack, IBM, and many others. In the case of IBM, its Scientific PC was a Unix-based desktop based on the 68000. IBM also sold a System 360 PC--don't hold me to the exact name--that did exactly what its name implies. The System 360 PC ran IBM System 360 applications on the desktop. It was based on dual 68000-processors that IBM recoded to run System 360 binaries.
The 68000 and its follow-on members of the 680x0 family were the workstation processors of choice during the 1980s and early 1990s. Let us not forget that the NeXTstations from NeXT were based on this family. The 680x0 was replaced by RISC processors from various foundries, not Intel. Intel eventually drove its competition in scientific and engineering workstations out of business.
The point is that when the Mac was developed, Intel processors were the choice for running WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Apple based the Mac on the processor used in desktop engineering workstations.
Just a quick word about the 128 kB RAM in the original Mac. Forget not that the Macintosh Toolbox ROM contained vast majority of the OS. The ROM shared a continuous memory map with RAM. Executables and data had almost complete access the 128 kB RAM. Compare that to the competition of the day.
I have a very good idea of what personal computing was like, and there was not a single workstation with less than 1MB of ram. Recall that the original Mac shipped without a hard drive. Nor did it have a floating point coprocessor, which every 68K based workstation had. All the nerds at the time preferred the 68K to the x86 architecture, due to better memory model, but certainly not all 68Ks were created equal. Nor did it have a decent OS (not that DOS was any prize, but at least it was programmable; Mac was, by design, a non-turingcomplete device [Jef Raskin's "one button" philosophy]), so technically-inclined but not fanatical users were frustrated. In addition, you probably forget that the original Mac was not a very successful product UNTIL the LaserWriter came out. Desktop publishing was the killer app.
I have a very good idea of what personal computing was like, and there was not a single workstation with less than 1MB of ram.
1982 - Sun-1 shipped with 68K and 256KB stock. Upgradable to 2 MB
1983 - Fortune 32:16 - SYS 7 Unix, 68K and 256 KB stock
There were more...especially obscure ones like the Fortune. In 1984-1985 I recall helping with a printer driver that could collate long documents on a weird branded 68K workstation with very wimpy stats. It was an all-in-one like the Mac running AT&T unix. If it had 1MB RAM I'd have been surprised. It looked like an oversized terminal.
And personal computing was difference than workstation computing anyway. The IBM XT from 1983 also shipped with 128KB stock and the Fat Mac (512KB) shipped in Sept 1984.
So did the Iris 1000 (although arguably that was a terminal) as well as some workstations that shipped with ROM and a floppy. Or a tape drive.
No. The MC68881 was designed for the 68020. I cannot recall ANY 68000 machine having a math co-processor.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68881/
WTF? Do you even know what Turing completeness is? Hint: it has nothing to do with mouse buttons. It was programmable (duh) and you could get Basic, Pascal, C and the 68K Assembler MDS dev pack. Yes, in 1984 you had to develop on the Lisa since the dev kit wasn't ready until 1985 although I think MS shipped their basic for the mac in 1984.
http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=8&id=669
In 1984 Unix was still working out graphical user interfaces. X was just evolving from W. SGI had MEX which would be quickly retired. Sun's NeWS may or may not have been out in 1984. Three button mice wouldn't really become common among workstation users until the late 80s when standardized by X.
On the PC ONLY the left (primary) mouse button had a defined behavior with the right mouse button behavior up to the application until Windows 3.1. Right mouse button bringing up a context property window didn't become common until the 90s.
In fact I don't recall using or needing any sort of mouse in the mid-80s for unix coding. Hell, most folks were using vi and not even emacs. The way most folks used computers was via a terminal. Anyone here remember termcap and VT100 emulation?
There was nothing wrong with MacOS for the time and as noted by many the GUI design has withstood the test of time.
1982 - Sun-1 shipped with 68K and 256KB stock. Upgradable to 2 MB
1983 - Fortune 32:16 - SYS 7 Unix, 68K and 256 KB stock
There were more...especially obscure ones like the Fortune. In 1984-1985 I recall helping with a printer driver that could collate long documents on a weird branded 68K workstation with very wimpy stats. It was an all-in-one like the Mac running AT&T unix. If it had 1MB RAM I'd have been surprised. It looked like an oversized terminal.
And personal computing was difference than workstation computing anyway. The IBM XT from 1983 also shipped with 128KB stock and the Fat Mac (512KB) shipped in Sept 1984.
So did the Iris 1000 (although arguably that was a terminal) as well as some workstations that shipped with ROM and a floppy. Or a tape drive.
1. I am comparing the Mac to the Sun 2. It is silly to compare it to the Sun 1 which shipped a couple of years earlier (and did not ship very much; it was basically used as a fancy monitor at Stanford).
2. When I say 68K, I mean 68xxx. In particular, the Sun 2 already shipped with a 68010 and a floating point (and various other) coprocessor.
3. The Sun 2 already shipped with 4MB of RAM
4. Some (actually a lot of) Sun2s and Sun3s were diskless, but that was possible due to the wonders of NFS mounting volumes on the server. Mac never had anything similar for several years.
5. The Suns DID have a GUI several years before the Mac (and they inherited it from the Alto, though Alto and the Xerox D-machines were much fancier).
6. The processor speed (even ignoring the coprocessor issue) is much less important than the amount of RAM.
7. The Unix workstations were designed to be programmed, in direct opposition to the Mac.
so
8. For many years Macs had the reputation of "secretaries' machines".
I used to do development with NeXT and Apple, and while I LOVED the NeXT (I am still pining for a nice greyscale monitor), I could never get into programming the Mac, even in the much later days of MPW and CodeWarrior. By the way, the NeXT also used the 68(020), but the 8MB of RAM made an infinite difference.
1. I am comparing the Mac to the Sun 2. It is silly to compare it to the Sun 1 which shipped a couple of years earlier (and did not ship very much; it was basically used as a fancy monitor at Stanford).
And yet there were still workstations that shipped with less than 1MB RAM. Like the mentioned Fortune workstation.
2. When I say 68K, I mean 68xxx. In particular, the Sun 2 already shipped with a 68010 and a floating point (and various other) coprocessor.
Really? Which floating point co-processor on the Sun-2? And in any case even IF that the 68010 Sun-2 shipped with a co-processor it does not prove that EVERY 68K workstations shipped with a co-processor which includes the original 68000 CPU using your rather lame excuse.
Which has nothing to do with proving the assertion that "NOT A SINGLE" workstations shipped with less than 1MB or more of RAM.
Implementation of NFS was started in March of 1984 and used experimentally.
http://www.cse.nd.edu/~dthain/courses/cse598z/fall2004/papers/nfs.pdf
Page 124. 2nd paragraph. Title "Implementation".
NFS would not get released until May 1985 in SunOS 2. The first RFC came out in 1989.
AppleTalk. Released 1985. Not quite the same thing but the LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge provided the Mac Plus (1986) with ethernet.
AppleShare 1.0 released in 1987 provided file sharing to the Mac ecosystem.
http://lowendmac.com/roundtable/12rt/022-appleshare-anniversary.html
I guess for you "several" = two.
Peer to peer file sharing didn't happen until System 7 (1991) but Apple had file sharing as early as 1987. That's not even including TOPS which was bought by Sun in 1987 and supported the Mac and NFS.
LOL. Goalpost moved. But yes, the 512K Mac (late 1984) was better than the 128K Mac (early 1984).
Which is why no one ever programmed a Mac. Direct opposition? Are you in Colorado? Because you must be smoking some good stuff.
8. For many years Macs had the reputation of "secretaries' machines".
LOL...they were too damned expensive to be secretary machines which were invariably PCs.
DTP machines perhaps.
Science machines perhaps. When I worked at NASA I had a new Mac IIfx but there were older Mac IIs (complete with 68020 with a 68881 FPU 1MB stock and expandable to 20MB) which were first released in 1987 doing science visualization. NCSA Telnet was released in 1986 because of the widespread use of the mac by scientists.
March 2 1987. A mere three years after the first 128K Mac. Not "Many Years". Not "Several Years". A "Few Years".
Secretaries machines? Not so much. You didn't see many macs at all in the business world.
If you are still a programmer you must be simply brilliant given how precise you've been in this thread (oh, when I said 68000 workstations I meant also 68020 machines too!). And your nuanced understanding of the definition of "Every" and "Not A Single". I'm curious, when you write
if (x == 0)do you also mean "well, except in these cases where x > 0 but I forgot about them".Did you do development or did you manage development?
I would hazard a guess if you did development on the NeXT in the early days you'd be bitching about how craptastic that MO drive was and how NeXT sucked ass for "many years" when in reality it was 2 years before they dumped it. And the first NeXT in 1988 had a 68030 not a 68020. The 1990 NeXTCube and the NeXTstation (which I had at one point) used the 68040 and HDDs.
Jesus.
The talk of specs always seems to creep in and it always misses the point about the Mac. Back in the early days, people made their own standards where there were none. AppleTalk, OSes without protected memory and user privileges, Quickdraw vs OpenGL, ADC vs VGA/DVI, all these things would change. The impact Apple made was in how people thought of computers. It wasn't about computation power or programmability, it was about how they would become life accessories. To the people who had to add functionality, the constraints were a headache and there were headaches on every platform like not having standardised media frameworks (we still don't really - there's no single OpenAV framework like OpenGL for working with video/audio) but that's not the point of impact. The point of impact is on the buyer end.
One of Apple's most powerful statements was 'the computer for the rest of us', it wasn't 'the computer for the same people all the other computers are for'. All this meant though was the other computers were designed by technical people for technical people. While that led some to regard them as dumbed down and toy-like, it made the mistake of thinking that technical and non-technical groups were mutually exclusive. OS X is enough evidence that this isn't the case. You can have the full power of a unix machine with a simple interface.
Apple's influence over the computer industry is evidenced by the changes that became widely adopted after they pushed for them. They weren't always first to do them, they didn't always push things that became widely adopted but all the way through the development of computer technology, Apple has influenced the direction. They have never followed the direction of other companies and produced me-too products.
People can say that the Mac has such a small marketshare that its influence is small but that was the seed that started it. It influenced Windows. Without the Mac, there would be no Windows in its present form. Without Apple, there would be no NeXT and eventually iOS and without that you wouldn't have Android in its present form. Focusing on the processors used over the years or the value for money is the wrong way to look at it. They never used the fastest parts, they were never the cheapest but they always put forward changes nobody else bothered about (typography for example) and most of them changed the direction of the entire industry.
This makes people uncomfortable for some reason. They are happy to give Microsoft credit for their role, IBM, Samsung, Google, Unix contributors, Intel, AMD and so on but Apple they have a problem with. I think it's in part driven by them doing things their own way e.g using PPC processors or the above proprietary technology and making OSes that only run on their own hardware. This business model makes their products far more expensive in some cases and so the user experience lauded by the users is denied to people who can't or won't pay so much for it. I think that leads to an irrational hatred of them and a need to constantly revise history to diminish their role. Their role is sometimes exaggerated on the other side but when people say things in all seriousness to the effect that technology today would be almost identical without Apple's influence at all, it's plain to see who's got it wrong. If your life is better for having technology in it, you are free to align yourself with whatever company's business model best suits you but Apple has earned a simple thank you for their part in bringing those options about, they don't deserve the efforts to rewrite them out of history.
Without Apple, there would be no NeXT and eventually iOS and without that you wouldn't have Android in its present form.
And without Android you wouldn't have iOS in its present form. Group hug!
The first Mac I owned personally was a G4 PowerMac Tower (the one before the "Titanium" tower). Late 1990's or so. Still running Mac OS 9 at the time, but OS X appeared soon after, within a year or two later... that was it for me. I was FORCED to leave behind all my Windows 3.11 machines... along with all the late nights, hair-pulling, 6-times-a-year reinstalls and nightmare "registry" management issues....
The last Windows OS I used was Win 2k (a sibling of NT which was also installed) at my company, which was acceptable as a network file manager and not much else where we were concerned...
Once the second iteration of OS X arrived, I was permanently off PC for life. Apple really twisted my arm hard too!
My world changed where computers are concerned. By force.
Thank you Apple. Seriously.
This is another mistake that people make, which is to equate vastly different levels of contribution. When someone spends years of R&D to make such a paradigm shift as the iPhone and all its associated technology that the contrast between what came before and what came after is unrecognisable as being in the same class and then someone comes along and says 'it uses the same kind of drop-down panel someone else added first so everybody's sharing', it ignores that difference in contribution. All the way until iOS 6, Android fans were saying iOS was stale and never changed, then when iOS 7 came along, it somehow copied an Android theme but then they deride it as child-like with its pastel colors. It can't be both stale/undesirable and heavily influenced by a preferred competitor. The few elements that showed up first in Android and the Palm Pre OS don't constitute a major change in the way people use the products.
This is the same with Windows. Apple (and Xerox) worked through the mistakes, all the UI guidelines to refine it to something that works well. Windows added nothing to that and didn't even copy it properly because they didn't copy the guidelines, they copied the result of the guidelines and further revisions move away from it until you get inconsistencies and poor user experiences. This happened with Android. They rushed to copy the look and feel of iOS like they did with Blackberry first but they copied the result and it produces the same inconsistencies you get with Windows.
The idea that one product couldn't exist without another has to consider this difference in contribution. Without iOS, Android would look like Blackberry. Without Android (and using the assumption that Apple even used the theme as a reference), iOS would look like iOS 6 without a drop-down panel. That's a big difference.
That may be a record for how many words someone has put in my mouth. Instead of getting into a lengthy debate over things I never said I'll just say that I agree with a lot of your post. Not all of it, but a lot of it.