Seems like yesterday! It was tough going at first but then in the November of that year, we had a ton of them delivered for the "Test Drive a Macintosh" campaign which went very well. Our clients could take a Mac home for the night. Many 'tests' converted to sales even though the buyers had no actual use or need, they were just so damn cool.
November 8, 1984
We’re those 128K or 512K Macs?
It is all a bit fuzzy but the 128 was released in September and this campaign in November was no doubt to bolster its sales after the lackluster sales of the original Mac. We were still shifting lots of Apple ][s, Apple ///s and several Lisas at that point.
I think you mean the 512K was released in September. I seem to recall reading it was the 512K which was really needed to re-launch the Macintosh to the public for that campaign. The 128K just simply didn't have enough memory to use with one 400K disk, and most weren't buying the external drive at the $2500 price point. That extra RAM allowed the entire application programs to be held in memory along with large documents and files, not to mention actual multi-tasking. I think by the time the 512K was released, the Lisa 2 was already using the Macintosh emulator too, followed shortly by the Lisa being rebranded Macintosh XL. Those must have been interesting times to be in that business. Do tell -- how many Apple ///s did you personally repair by dropping it on the floor? Ha
None thankfully but those Lisas were a slipped disk waiting to happen! Yep, the 512k you are right but they also released a revised 128k same time according to Wikipedia.
It was an unbelievably fascinating time to have owned Apple dealerships for sure. A few years later we were into the DTP era and the roof came off.
Upgrading 128Ks to 512K was a college side hustle.
Seems like yesterday! It was tough going at first but then in the November of that year, we had a ton of them delivered for the "Test Drive a Macintosh" campaign which went very well. Our clients could take a Mac home for the night. Many 'tests' converted to sales even though the buyers had no actual use or need, they were just so damn cool.
November 8, 1984
We’re those 128K or 512K Macs?
It is all a bit fuzzy but the 128 was released in September and this campaign in November was no doubt to bolster its sales after the lackluster sales of the original Mac. We were still shifting lots of Apple ][s, Apple ///s and several Lisas at that point.
I think you mean the 512K was released in September. I seem to recall reading it was the 512K which was really needed to re-launch the Macintosh to the public for that campaign. The 128K just simply didn't have enough memory to use with one 400K disk, and most weren't buying the external drive at the $2500 price point. That extra RAM allowed the entire application programs to be held in memory along with large documents and files, not to mention actual multi-tasking. I think by the time the 512K was released, the Lisa 2 was already using the Macintosh emulator too, followed shortly by the Lisa being rebranded Macintosh XL. Those must have been interesting times to be in that business. Do tell -- how many Apple ///s did you personally repair by dropping it on the floor? Ha
None thankfully but those Lisas were a slipped disk waiting to happen! Yep, the 512k you are right but they also released a revised 128k same time according to Wikipedia.
It was an unbelievably fascinating time to have owned Apple dealerships for sure. A few years later we were into the DTP era and the roof came off.
Upgrading 128Ks to 512K was a college side hustle.
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.
Nobody is suggesting Jobs was inconsequential. That would be silly. Just that the iPhone didn’t really take off until the third or fourth generation device was in the wild, with an App Store open and starting to offer apps that did more than make fart noises. People imagine Jobs did the dog and pony show with the first iPhone and six months later it was ubiquitous. In truth, he did the dog and pony show with a couple of prototypes held together with spit and duct tape, and six months later it was barely on the market, only on AT&T, with a low-res camera, an OS that couldn’t even do cut-and-paste, and most people were still dismissing it as a toy that lacked the needed physical keyboard. That’s always the story with Apple introductions, just now some people have a highly selective memory and an imagined ghost of Steve Jobs to serve for a straw-man comparison to the supposedly crumbling Jobs-less Apple.
The IBM mainframe company/outsourcer (sort an early version of AWS) I worked for plunked MacIntosh's on each our desks -- right beside he green screen IBM terminal. That, at the time, made zero sense to me: we were 100% IBM -- so why weren't we given IBM PC's?
But, soon the logic became apparent as I was able to do things on the Mac (such as MacDraw) that simply were not possible using Microsoft/IBM PC technology. Eventually, IBM released their PS2 with OS2 and that matched and exceeded the capabilities of the Mac -- but unfortunately, by that time, the company had gotten less progressive and stuck with Windows.
I still miss that Mac -- but one thing that I continue to marvel at was when I took it in it's canvas bag over to a colleague's house and his pre-school daughter just picked up the mouse and started drawing and doing stuff with it -- like it was totally natural to her. That was the magic of the Mac: Powerful yet incredibly simple.
I was shocked when they plopped a MacIntosh on my desk at work since we were a 100% IBM IT Outsourcer.
But soon that little thing became an integral and vital piece of doing my job -- thanks mostly to McWrite and McDraw. And when, a few years later, they took it away and plopped an IBM PC (actually a clone) on my desk I simply wasn't able to do my job as well because I had lost those vital tools.
And, to this day, I have never found a replacement for McDraw that works as well as it did.
Apple's first real success was in reality the LaserWriter driven by a Mac. It created new industries and shook up old ones.
While the late Steve Jobs for sure was no easy genius for the world and Apple employees to handle, he never showed the ineptness shown by current Apple management - in particular for the Mac side of things.
The Mac was/is the made-available version of ideas and devices that go back to Doug Englebart, PARC, and the extensive experience Apple already had in their computing market that was significantly involved in the home and education sectors. That gives you a lot of info about what "plain old people" will use.
The logical extension of the Mac concept is approachable, user-focused computing, the logical extension of a text-based computer would not be embraced to the same extent. Jef Raskin was a very skilled person, he was interested in using some of the novel interface ideas from some of the interface innovations, but ultimately they relied on learning a lot of memorized things. With the Mac-led GUI, your choices were made more clear, visually accessible, and there was less memorization needed. Some of that is being lost in the ornate nature of many apps, while I can forgive Blender for needing a lot of moving parts (sorry!) I believe at one time MS Word, even in GUI, had 1,100 or so functions.
Amazing how much mindshare Apple had back in the day. I remember going to my sister's graduation at Stanford in 83. After, I drove to LA, but on my way, I stopped in front of Apple HQ in Cupertino to take pictures. That was all before the Mac.
Didn't get my first Mac, until the SE in summer of 87. Lugged it all over the world, stuffed under airplane seats and in the overhead bin. That universal power supply was surprisingly robust, as the power was quite variable, making the startup chime sound funny. I still have that Mac in the basement.
I never had the original Mac, but my first post-Commodore computer was a Mac SE. I had the version with dual floppies, because I couldn't afford the massive 20MB hard drive. I'll never forget the unique sound it made when you turned it on. Some combination of the whirring of the boot floppy disk, the power supply and the CRT screen heating up. Eventually gave it to someone who turned it into a fish tank and put it in his office.
I was a Apple II owner/user at the time that the Apple Mac 128 was released. I saw it and had to have one. My friend was the manager of a retail computer store that was an authorized Apple and IBM dealer. I got that Mac 128 at just above dealer cost along with a ImageWriter printer!
So, I did, circa
March 1984, and yet, when I took it to Spain, my whole family laughed at me.
All of them were proud user of the keyboard and commands, the computer for professionals,
they said. And look at today, what do we have? Very simple, even if some people
get rubbed: Macs and MacWindows (grin)
Macintosh history is fascinating, and I never tire of hearing it retold. It certainly was a big influence on me back on the 90’s when I finally could afford one (PowerMac 8100) and in fact, I consider one of my greatest accomplishments finally convincing my mother to buy one for herself. She used to always complain about Windows, but was afraid she wouldn’t be able to “read her documents”. Of course, those fears were soon allayed and her computer woes were no more.
I was shocked when they plopped a MacIntosh on my desk at work since we were a 100% IBM IT Outsourcer.
But soon that little thing became an integral and vital piece of doing my job -- thanks mostly to McWrite and McDraw. And when, a few years later, they took it away and plopped an IBM PC (actually a clone) on my desk I simply wasn't able to do my job as well because I had lost those vital tools.
And, to this day, I have never found a replacement for McDraw that works as well as it did.
I was in an advertising and design program in high school, and 1/2 way through the 2 year program we got a couple SE’s with Aldus Pagemaker 1.0, plus the other two you mentioned. It was like you died and went to heaven. Good times.
I was just a baby, literally, and born and raised in Scandinavia, but I imagine it must have been exciting to sit in the audience when Steve Jobs unveiled the very first Macintosh.
One of the reasons he was removed was that he had now visited Xerox PARC and had been pushing to change the Lisa to be more like the machines he'd seen there
Larry Tesler (who famously invented copy & paste) demonstrated the Alto to Jobs (in December 1979?) – and actually left PARC in 1980 to move to Apple and head up the Lisa project.
"Jobs was there going What is going on here? You're sitting on a gold mine! Why aren't you doing something with this technology?"
Check here for his Alto cut/copy/paste demo at the CHM (which recorded other cool Alto demo videos as well.)
More info on the development of the Lisa UI (as well as the Macintosh) can be found at Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org:
It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill [Atkinson] thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.
I had the 128k Mac and ImageWriter when it was launched and it was transformational for the quality of work I could produce with it, especially when the LaserWriter came along. A major part of the experience was the amazing community that developed around it and the Mac press that evolved with it. As a visual thinker, I always struggled with text-based interfaces and the Mac liberated me from those and made computing enormous fun, despite the frustrations and impatience that comes with a new platform.
Kudos to all those involved in the creation of the Mac on this anniversary. The excitement and the pace of development was a significant part of my life at that time.
I had been using Commodore PET and 64 systems in addition to some work on mainframes so I was used to command line. When I saw the Mac I thought it was a toy. A few years later I got an Apple, first a C than an E, still mostly command line. But my partner got a Mac SE at work. When we started looking for a computer, in 1987-88, we first looked at some Compaq systems but quickly I got the message to look at Apple. Mind you the Academic discount we got because my partner worked at the University helped. But once I started really USING MacOS, System6 as it was called, I adapted quickly. From then on it’s been nothing but Macs in our house. For a couple of decades I was in IT and joked that they paid me to fix Windows ***, I buy Macs so I don’t have to do that at home.
Comments
But, soon the logic became apparent as I was able to do things on the Mac (such as MacDraw) that simply were not possible using Microsoft/IBM PC technology. Eventually, IBM released their PS2 with OS2 and that matched and exceeded the capabilities of the Mac -- but unfortunately, by that time, the company had gotten less progressive and stuck with Windows.
I still miss that Mac -- but one thing that I continue to marvel at was when I took it in it's canvas bag over to a colleague's house and his pre-school daughter just picked up the mouse and started drawing and doing stuff with it -- like it was totally natural to her. That was the magic of the Mac: Powerful yet incredibly simple.
While the late Steve Jobs for sure was no easy genius for the world and Apple employees to handle, he never showed the ineptness shown by current Apple management - in particular for the Mac side of things.
The logical extension of the Mac concept is approachable, user-focused computing, the logical extension of a text-based computer would not be embraced to the same extent. Jef Raskin was a very skilled person, he was interested in using some of the novel interface ideas from some of the interface innovations, but ultimately they relied on learning a lot of memorized things. With the Mac-led GUI, your choices were made more clear, visually accessible, and there was less memorization needed. Some of that is being lost in the ornate nature of many apps, while I can forgive Blender for needing a lot of moving parts (sorry!) I believe at one time MS Word, even in GUI, had 1,100 or so functions.
Thank you! That looks interesting. I'll download it later today.
Didn't get my first Mac, until the SE in summer of 87. Lugged it all over the world, stuffed under airplane seats and in the overhead bin. That universal power supply was surprisingly robust, as the power was quite variable, making the startup chime sound funny. I still have that Mac in the basement.
So, I did, circa March 1984, and yet, when I took it to Spain, my whole family laughed at me. All of them were proud user of the keyboard and commands, the computer for professionals, they said. And look at today, what do we have? Very simple, even if some people get rubbed: Macs and MacWindows (grin)
Check here for his Alto cut/copy/paste demo at the CHM (which recorded other cool Alto demo videos as well.)
More info on the development of the Lisa UI (as well as the Macintosh) can be found at Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
Kudos to all those involved in the creation of the Mac on this anniversary. The excitement and the pace of development was a significant part of my life at that time.