Steve Jobs' First Public Demonstration of the Macintosh, Hidden Since 1984

[Piggie]

It wasn't about how locked down the PC was but how IBM had such total control over the market. Once there's a monopoly, it will halt progress. As the other guy already said, Steve Jobs NEVER liked customizable systems and didn't care about "user choice".

He was right in many ways, but he went a little far sometimes. The other Apple people moderated him. And yes, I have read the biography; what the other poster said is 100% true.

P.S. Thanks to Steve Jobs, Flash is nearly dead. It always sucked and got worse with every update.

What do you wish me to say "Well Flash outlived the person who hated it?"

Point being Flash was never an issue on PC's
I and millions upon millions of PC users were happy with flash, no issue at all, minimal CPU load, animations, online games.

Steve (and the crew) stopped Flash having access to any parts of their machine that would make it run as great as it did on a PC, plus of course he wanted to kill it also so he could make money from, then similar quality little games on his app store.

Again, awkwardness, ignorance, pig headedness and greed.
Thank god he's gone, and hopefully in time the computing industry from the damage he's done.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

I suppose a lot of it stems from the old Superbowl advert by Apple, all the breaking free ffrom the lock downs of IBM and the PC, Apple coming to the rescue.
Now Apple is way way more locked down than the IBM PC they fought against at the time.
I don't know any other company today as locked down and controlling as Apple

All due respect, this post + your signature made me chuckle. You own a PS3 and Xbox One and say you don't know any other company today as locked down and controlling as Apple? C'mon. Take a step back and broad look at companies today. From car makers to console makers proprietary and mandatory jailbreak killing firmware is in the air. AT&T likely still would not unlock iPhones but for Apple's insistence. So let's can the hyperbole that Apple is someone the most locked down, controlling company on the planet.

As for the "Superbowl ad" The Mac was coming to the rescue with a GUI/mouse based system, easily understandable and usable "for the rest of us" who were not computer geeks with a relish and joy for DOS based command lines. Don't make it out to be something it was not.

The Mac never promised to be an open system, and, in fact, during Jobs tenure the only way to buy a Mac was direct from Apple. He never wavered on his anti-licensing position. And the original all-in-one Mac was not easily upgradable either, and certainly not something Apple condoned. It was up to 3rd party companies to devise a "case cracker" and super long torx wrench to upgrade RAM (necessary if you wanted your SE/20 to run OS7 rather than buy a new Mac or pay an authorized service center out the wazoo).

 

[macs4nw]

When watching this presentation, you are struck by the energy, spontaneity and off-the-cuff unrehearsed nature of the whole product introduction. So un-like the meticulously planned and orchestrated 'photo ops' product intros, that seem to be the norm with most companies today.

An amazing window to the past that by comparison, now seems refreshingly honest and primitive!

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Steve (and the crew) stopped Flash having access to any parts of their machine that would make it run as great as it did on a PC, plus of course he wanted to kill it also so he could make money from, then similar quality little games on his app store.

Again, awkwardness, ignorance, pig headedness and greed.
Thank god he's gone, and hopefully in time the computing industry from the damage he's done.

This came up as a quote for my message (OK after checking again, it would seem that message was deleted since the post is nowhere to be found and by a different person). But in any case, I'd be the first to admit Steve was pigheaded and greedy, but I'd be interested to hear about this "damage he's done." Macintosh is 6-10% of the market at best. Why would anyone including Adobe care about whether Steve liked Flash on the Macintosh? The last time I checked the latest Flash was available for the Mac with full acceleration so I don't really buy that bit either. Now if you are talking about Flash on the iPhone, OK, that DID have some impact, but Flash was a DOG on mobile devices when the iPhone first came out. I'm sure it was fine on PCs as you claim, but the PC isn't an iPhone and the amount of CPU power was not comparable at the time. If anything, Adobe stepped up making Flash more efficient and had more hardware acceleration support. If anything, Adobe is the one that ignored making the Mac version of Flash as good as the Windows one, but again, why would they when it's a small part of the overall market?

Now if you want to argue about Steve's effect on the Mac in general, again, what damage? One can argue all day long that there could be an "XMac" or a gaming Mac or whatever and how short-sighted Steve was to ignore certain parts of certain markets, etc. in favor of small and thin (god knows I've made those arguments), but the fact is without Steve, the Mac would be dead now and Apple out of business so it's hard to argue he did more damage than good. I'm sure there's some hardcore OS7/8/9 users that didn't like where OSX went, at least in some areas, but other than not keeping drivers and OpenGL up-to-date, I think it's a pretty nice operating system and to me, at least, much preferable to Windows with its malware problems, registry slowing things down over time and constant fragmentation of the filesystem even with NTFS. OSX really has none of those problems. Frankly, I can only imagine how stagnant the PC would be if the Mac had never existed. It might still be running a Dos-based system for all we know.

As for making money, I think we both know Bill Gates was ALL about that as well. He's still richer than Steve ever was and he did it by ripping off CPM and forging business deals that wouldn't allow places to compete that also sold Amigas, Atari STs or Macs. They had to be exclusive to putting Dos then Windows on their machines or they would be charged full price for the OS and that made their machine uncompetitive. It didn't end there either. People defend that as just being a capitalist, a good businessman, etc., but when Steve Jobs did it he's a greedy pig? Come on. Both companies are greedy as are most corporations. If you want to run a "good" company, you don't open it up for public trading because the only thing that drives corporations are stockholders and stockholders aren't there to donate for charity purposes.

 

[Casiotone]

Yeah, flashback videos are very nostalgic and you start to think, Gee, they had this GUI in 1984! Whoa! But then I think back to my own life and realize, hey, I was playing the game Impossible Mission ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivHFP3dJAkM ) on a Commodore 64 that very same year! Listen to THAT voice and look at those graphics in color!

The following year (1985), the Commodore Amiga (later called the 1000) came out and frankly, it kicked the Mac's hind quarter back then. Up to 4096 colors for stills and 32 colors (later 64) for up to 320x480 and 16 colors up to 640x480 and you could pick your own monitor or even use a large television with a simple adapter. The Amiga had a GUI interface with mouse control like the Mac, but also had a more Unix-like than Dos-like CLI/Shell. So, back then I was a little underwhelmed by the Apple II due to the C64 and the Mac due to the Amiga. (I just ran across this video from NewTek for the VideoToaster 2.0 released in 1992 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7O4xqRqhPY ). To think that desktop computers were capable of THAT just 8 years after the original Macintosh came out is astounding, IMO. The original Video Toaster came out for the Amiga 2000 in 1990, only 6 years later! The Mac didn't even get color until 1987 (only 3 years prior).

The video dismisses all home computers except the Apple II and the IBM PC, but Commodore sold more C64s than any other single model home computer back then. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 ). I still miss going to my C64 (later Amiga too) user group every month. Good memories.

The comments about Unix being "a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation" and it being "really OLD technology" were funny given OSX today IS UNIX as were the ones about local area networking being a joke right now as Ethernet never really took off, but back then things looked pretty different than today.

Not sure how a low-resolution color C64 game can be compared to a GUI based OS. I'm glad Apple didn't settle for those ugly rectangular pixels.

What you're saying about the Amiga "kicking the Mac's hind quarter" is a gross oversimplification. Each platform had its advantages, and Amiga nostalgic tend to completely overlook the Macs advantages.

Despite having some nice things like "real multi-tasking" that took many more years to arrive on the Mac, the Amiga OS was a relatively primitive GUI OS.

It could display windows, icons, buttons and menus but that's about it. The Mac on the other hand came with many powerful APIs that simply didn't exist on the Amiga. APIs to help deal with localization in any language, typography, networking, printing, vectors and many other tasks needed to build complex interfaces.

Doing the same thing on the Amiga required programmers to write a lot of the code that came for free with the Mac OS. That explains why many complex graphic and desktop publishing tools were only available on the Mac and why it dominated the desktop publishing revolution in the late 80s and early 90s. Graphic/publishing software on the Amiga that came close to a Mac equivalent existed, but they can be counted on one hand and usually fell short of reproducing the same experience and features.

Yes the 1987 Mac II was much more expensive than the Amiga, but it was simply not in the same category. You could plug SIX 640x480 RGB monitors on the Mac II with an extended desktop (256 colors at first, and 16 millions colors starting in 1990). You could daisy-chain up to 7 external SCSI devices like HDDs.

The Video Toaster hardware was a relatively powerful solution for the price, but most everything happened in this external hardware, the Amiga itself didn't do much aside from controlling the box.

 

[mrhick01]

I honestly believe if you took Steve THEN forward in time to show him how Apple is now he would be horrified.

The young man with dreams about freedom and breaking the chains of control by the large corporations, turning into what Apple is today, over controlling money making machine not offering people choice, but making people want what you make. The total opposite of most other things we buy in life.

It is sad, and they say about you can often end up becoming the thing you most despised.

It's such a shame to see what Apple have become when they could of been less about how much money they could make, and more about giving the people the things they want.

How? Steve just died over two years ago.

He handed over the company to the man that he hand-picked for the job.

Why would Steve be disappointed (if he were still alive)?

 

[pubwvj]

There has been very good efforts on [legacy support]. A lot if it was done by the now quite rich and retired original Mac engineers.

This needs to be done officially by Apple and built right into the MacOSX and iOS. It doesn't even need to be emulation, although that is a nice start, but could be done be done with cross compilation wrappers. Apple needs to do the legacy support because they have the expertise, created the systems and still own the copyrights.

 

[jm001]

Apple basically wrote the book on how to properly do a product presentation/introduction. You can still see the same elements in Jobs' presentations from 2000 and on.

The villains have changed over the years :

IBM --> Microsoft --> Google (Samsung)

but Apple still stands strong. Great video (those commercials bring back memories) and still an awesome company.

 

[MaulRx]

I sort of want to buy a Mac now.

 

[Xenc]

No you don't.

It loads now. Thanks.

 

[Piggie]

How? Steve just died over two years ago.

He handed over the company to the man that he hand-picked for the job.

Why would Steve be disappointed (if he were still alive)?

I mean if you took young free thinking steve, bringing out out radical items, and showed him today's Apple lumbering monolith which just makes the current item a little thinner and a little faster.

Not sure he would of liked the original Apple II or Mac to be glued together so no one could get in and upgrade anything. buy the spec you need NOW or tough luck.

 

[Dr Charter]

It's not even retina. Lame. : )

 

[smithrh]

What the heck is a "knowledge worker"?

Hopefully I'm not replying to a troll LOL!

This comment goes to show people how different things have become since the early 80s.

Back then: no internet, no widespread computer usage by regular folks, no cell phones... More importantly, the US was still a manufacturing power then. Tangible things were made, by people, by hand.

A huge part of the population held manufacturing jobs, and they paid fairly well.

Economists and other forward-looking people supposed (rightly) that a new class of workers would emerge, those that dealt in "information" or "knowledge."

Instead of making things, they would deal with information/data/knowledge and make something new from it, usually more information/data/knowledge, perhaps in a more refined or accessible form.

It was quite a wild concept for a lot of people to accept then.

Now, it's hard to find someone in the manufacturing field and dead easy to find people working on information.

 

[Yumbo]

I sort of want to buy a Mac now.

Let the good times roll.

 

[japanime]

Really?

Laugh like a 7th-grader at his name all you want, but Harry McCracken is arguably the finest tech journalist around. He never grandstands (David Pogue), is never a fanboy (Walt Mossberg), and never dismisses a topic with an ignorant "yep" or "nope" (Jim Dalrymple).

 

[localoid]

Now I know where Stephen Hawkins got his voice from, well they do sound much alike, don't you think?

To most humans ears, all speech synthesizers of the '80s sounded exactly alike.

Actually, Hawkins still uses a "Calltext 5010", a hardware device manufactured in 1988, which is based on a version of DECtalk, a speech-synth and text-to-speech software which were both products of Digital Equipment Corporation. DECtalk that was first introduced in 1984, the same year the Mac was first introduced.

 

[kalsta]

Yeah, flashback videos are very nostalgic and you start to think, Gee, they had this GUI in 1984! Whoa! But then I think back to my own life and realize, hey, I was playing the game Impossible Mission ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivHFP3dJAkM ) on a Commodore 64 that very same year! Listen to THAT voice and look at those graphics in color!

The following year (1985), the Commodore Amiga (later called the 1000) came out and frankly, it kicked the Mac's hind quarter back then. Up to 4096 colors for stills and 32 colors (later 64) for up to 320x480 and 16 colors up to 640x480 and you could pick your own monitor or even use a large television with a simple adapter. The Amiga had a GUI interface with mouse control like the Mac, but also had a more Unix-like than Dos-like CLI/Shell. So, back then I was a little underwhelmed by the Apple II due to the C64 and the Mac due to the Amiga. (I just ran across this video from NewTek for the VideoToaster 2.0 released in 1992 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7O4xqRqhPY ). To think that desktop computers were capable of THAT just 8 years after the original Macintosh came out is astounding, IMO. The original Video Toaster came out for the Amiga 2000 in 1990, only 6 years later! The Mac didn't even get color until 1987 (only 3 years prior).

The video dismisses all home computers except the Apple II and the IBM PC, but Commodore sold more C64s than any other single model home computer back then. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 ). I still miss going to my C64 (later Amiga too) user group every month. Good memories.

I have similar memories. The Apple II at my primary school was my only experience with a computer, until I got my own computer around 84/85—a Commodore 64. Ah yes, Impossible Mission… I remember the time I finally cracked it, late at night after a mammoth 5+ hour game if I remember correctly.

I was too poor to get an Amiga, but a couple of my friends had one and yes, it blew everything else out of the water. I saw a Mac around the same time, and didn't get what the fuss was about at all—what, with its tiny black and white screen! Sure, the mouse was cool, but I was drawing artwork directly to a TV screen with a light-pen (I think that's what they called it) and my C64. I don't think many people realised you could even do this.

My friends and I lobbied our high-school for Amigas in the new computer lab they were setting up and then they went out and bought… wait for it… Apple IIs!!! *sigh* We couldn't believe it. The Apple II was great in its day, but it was old technology by then.

Mind you, I'm enjoying the Apple II all over again now with the Sweet 16 emulator and the Aztec game we used to play in primary school.

The comments about Unix being "a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation" and it being "really OLD technology" were funny given OSX today IS UNIX as were the ones about local area networking being a joke right now as Ethernet never really took off, but back then things looked pretty different than today.

Yes, I was thinking the same thing about each comment! He was spot on with his overall vision of the mouse-based PC becoming the next great ubiquitous desktop appliance (after the phone), and some of the details, like the 3.5 inch floppy being the format of the 80s—but those comments about UNIX and Ethernet belong right up there with Gate's alleged 640K being 'enough for anybody' comment—which he never actually said!

I also enjoyed Bill Gate's comment around 27 minutes!

Microsoft is choosing this Apple Macintosh environment, because over time the other environments won't be interesting.​

 

[Renzatic]

Yes the 1987 Mac II was much more expensive than the Amiga, but it was simply not in the same category. You could plug SIX 640x480 monitors running at 16 millions colors on the Mac II with an extended desktop.

Half right, half wrong. The Mac II had a 16 million color palette, but could only display 256 colors simultaneously at 512x384.

 

[Casiotone]

Half right, half wrong. The Mac II had a 16 million color palette, but could only display 256 colors simultaneously at 512x384.

You're right that the Nubus Mac video cards only supported 8-bit in 1987, I misread the Wiki article (actually I already knew it was the case but had forgotten). I didn't intend to mislead anyone into thinking it was possible in 1987 so I fixed my post.

The Macintosh Display Card 8*24 was indeed only released in 1990, which then made the six 24-bit monitors set up possible on the Mac II, IIx and IIfx, which was only previously possible in 8-bit.

 

[FakeWozniak]

What do you wish me to say "Well Flash outlived the person who hated it?"
[...]
Again, awkwardness, ignorance, pig headedness and greed.
Thank god he's gone, and hopefully in time the computing industry from the damage he's done.

This reminds me of an unrelated question I meant to ask folks a while ago...

Does Mac Rumors have a way to "block, censor, omit, redact" comments from certain users?

 

[dgdosen]

wow...

The thing that pops out at me is how different the state of computing was back then. Sure, it changes gradually every year... so much so that I was thinking to myself that things hadn't changed so much since the 80s. Watching a video like this helps clarify just how much has changed. And it's only changing faster.

Plus the plug for vans at the end... I was wearing Chuck Taylor's and Air Jordan's back in the day.

 

[bare spots]

watched today, glad i got to see that it, thanks

 

[petsounds]

Really fascinating. I think I enjoyed seeing some of the Macintosh creators talking more than I did Steve giving his talk.

There's a few things I thought were interesting...

* By 1984, Steve's style of public speaking -- his cadence, pacing, his sense of theater, and ability to communicate technical concepts in a humanistic way -- was already well-developed, and not much different than the keynote speeches he gave after his return to Apple.

* Though I was around back then, and my first Mac was a Macintosh Plus in 1987, it was enjoyable to see people gasp in surprise and applause at basic Macintosh GUI concepts we have long taken for granted.

* It's surprising that Steve would personally come to a computer user group meeting at this point in Apple's history, with many of the Mac engineers in tow, and let the audience ask whatever they wanted. Especially when the Macintosh was not really targeting these types of computer enthusiasts/hackers/geeks, but instead a general audience of, as their ads put it, "the rest of us". I guess this was sort of a transitional time for the industry, with one foot in hobbyist land and one foot in computer-as-appliance.

* Steve saying "we won't leave any pioneers behind" (in reference to Lisa owners getting free hardware upgrades) is sure not a philosophy Apple shares today. Several Apple products have been marooned through incompatible software and ports, with no recourse for customers.

* When I got my Mac Plus, I thought the mouse tutorial disk was very clever, so it was nice to see the person that wrote it. This is probably something else that people born in the 80s and 90s take for granted, but back then almost no one had used a mouse before. A tutorial was required to teach people how to click, drag, and perform other mouse gestures in order to operate Mac software. Sort of interesting that the same thing was NOT done for the iPhone.

* It was a bit shocking to see Steve be so open about future product plans. I wonder why he changed attitudes on this to being very secretive.

* I didn't realize they had announced a whole new Lisa line in conjunction with the Macintosh; I had thought the Lisa was quickly phased out after the Mac was introduced. I never knew anyone who had a Lisa; I wonder how many they actually sold.

 

[iWaldo]

Damn, that made me want an original Macintosh...

 

[devinci99]

wow.

I didn't know there was only 235 people in America in 1984. :O

Yes, I know he meant 235 million. But i had to rewind just to make sure I heard what I thought I heard.

Another thing that made me smile was comparing how far technology has come. Steve said many times in that keynote that the Macintosh has twice as many dots as the Apple II and the PC, and was truly High Definition.

Fast forward... my only recent memory of HiDef is when they co-introduce the 720p and 1080p devices. I wonder if the term High Definition would be used again in another 10-15 years.