Really? My experiences in the Apple Stores remains much better than wandering into the cavern of a Best Buy.
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The Mac Turns 40: Read Apple's Announcement From 1984
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As someone who used a Compaq Portable with a 9" green phosphor screen at work at the same time as I owned a Mac 512K (also with a 9" screen), the Mac screen was a huge upgrade. The Mac screen was 512x342 square pixels with variable fonts and font sizes while the Compaq was 640x200 with a 80 × 25 text mode with 8 × 8 pixel font. No comparison. I used each without any particular bias though. The Compaq was a work machine that I used 9-10 hours a day and the Mac was my personal computer. At the time, they didn't seem to have much in common.
No. Multiple button mouse came at about the same time as the Mac
“..
X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984.[3]
….”
X Window System - Wikipedia
And certainly the Xerox Alto system in a bit less distrib than than X windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#History
Mircosoft just trimmed to two instead of one.
The mouse is wired ??? Complaints about this in the 80’s Or early 90’s ? Probably not
Apple did the “hockey puck” mouse before they ever got to wireless
Apple pointing devices - Wikipedia
One button was as much about lowering costs as anything “normal” on mouse design in the early 80’s ( Lisa also simplified )
“ …
Here are the instructions Jobs gave Hovey. This is what innovation sounds like:
…”
Steve Jobs and Xerox: The Truth About Innovation
We recently wrote that the next big innovation has already been discovered. In fact, it's already 10 or 20 years old. Our job as innovators is to improve the existing old technology into the next big thing. This is the process of innovation: take something that has been discovered and improve it.
zurb.com
Chuckle , that all modern Macs support option-click to get yet another menu context is suggestive that it was not all that overly brilliant . More so a “Simpler” solution than a “Simple as possible and not Simpler” elegant solution .
I wonder if Apple will do an announcement/website update — I remember they did back in 2014. I think it was "Happy birthday, Macintosh" or something like that, and there was a slideshow of sorts showcasing the history of the Macintosh.
I know the Macintosh (okay, Mac in today's nomenclature) has kind of fallen to the wayside, but I'm hoping Apple will acknowledge its 40th anniversary.
I know the Macintosh (okay, Mac in today's nomenclature) has kind of fallen to the wayside, but I'm hoping Apple will acknowledge its 40th anniversary.
Good old days. I'm guessing they'll wait until 50th anniversary to bring out some special commemorative product. Maybe 10th year of AVP existence.
I don't necessarily agree but one potential reason Apple customers may have been treated like "royalty" back then is because they were spending a lot more money on average (adjusting for inflation) on products. The starting retail price of an iMac today is only $1,299 compared to the $7,500+ inflation adjusted starting retail price of the original Macintosh in 1984.
"Initial reaction to the Macintosh has been strongly, but not overpoweringly, favorable. A few traditional computer users see the mouse, the windows, and the desktop metaphor as silly, useless frills, and others are outraged at the lack of color graphics, but most users are impressed by the machine and its capabilities. Still, some people have expressed concern about the relatively small 128K-byte RAM size, the lack of any computer language sent as part of the basic unit, and the inconvenience of the single disk drive." Greg Williams, BYTE Magazine, May 1984
Sounds familiar today.
Sounds familiar today.
Congrats Mac !!! My first Mac was a iBook G3 900Mhz. It came with Mac OS X 10.2.4 . Great times. On to another 40 years.
And still lives on with physical media! I have a Superdrive--the one they sold with the first MacBook Air to allow CD/DVD usage--which I still occasionally use for watching old, obscure DVDs, of which I have many. You can eject discs in exactly the way you describe. It is quite satisfying. I'm not saying I like to insert discs multiple times just so I can eject them...but I'm not saying I don't.
Love these strolls down memory lane...
First Mac I played with was a Mac SE my Dad brought home from work (Write Now, Mac Paint, Mac Playmate....)
At home we got an LC 4/40 with 12" colour monitor (which looked pretty sleek IMHO).
Later the PowerMac 6100/66 with DOS compatible card (now that was a fun thing... later added the G3 "riser card" to that).
Then the Power Mac G3 350 MHz. This one was my first very own Mac. I loved that thing. First with the 17" CRT, later the 21" CRT "blue whale". Got the nVidia Voodoo 5 5500 PCI card in that later as-well I still have that Mac.. super cool!) Finally that combo could run Unreal (the original) well 😄
Going into the Mac OS X era, and Intel era, now the ARM era, I purchased all sorts of new Macs ("classic" Mac Pros, iMacs) and "Classic Macs" for my collection.... (Mac 128k, Colour Classic, TAM, Cube, Next Station, Xserves....)
First Mac I played with was a Mac SE my Dad brought home from work (Write Now, Mac Paint, Mac Playmate....)
At home we got an LC 4/40 with 12" colour monitor (which looked pretty sleek IMHO).
Later the PowerMac 6100/66 with DOS compatible card (now that was a fun thing... later added the G3 "riser card" to that).
Then the Power Mac G3 350 MHz. This one was my first very own Mac. I loved that thing. First with the 17" CRT, later the 21" CRT "blue whale". Got the nVidia Voodoo 5 5500 PCI card in that later as-well I still have that Mac.. super cool!) Finally that combo could run Unreal (the original) well 😄
Going into the Mac OS X era, and Intel era, now the ARM era, I purchased all sorts of new Macs ("classic" Mac Pros, iMacs) and "Classic Macs" for my collection.... (Mac 128k, Colour Classic, TAM, Cube, Next Station, Xserves....)
And that keyboard is looking very weird too, with 6 rows of keys and too many of them! At least there's no 7-fingered hands typing on it!
Attachments
And, I'd like to say...
Thanks!
...to all the early adopters along the way who fought through the haters that turn up at every point trying to kill Apple. Because of you, who bought products with forward-looking faith and great imagination to see these computers as tools that we use to turn dreams into reality.
Thanks!
...to all the early adopters along the way who fought through the haters that turn up at every point trying to kill Apple. Because of you, who bought products with forward-looking faith and great imagination to see these computers as tools that we use to turn dreams into reality.
Wouldn't it be cool if they also unveiled some hitherto unknown awesome feature in Apple Vision Pro. You know... just to make a splash before it gets into customer's hands...
Agree! I can still "hear" the sound as the drive thought about it for a second, primed, and then spat the disk out! Very satisfying
One of my all time favorites! 🏴☠️ A big thanks to Steve and everyone else involved for bringing us the Mac.
I worked for a savings and loan in Abq. My boss and I both bought a 128 on the day it was released, he got his from Sears and I got mine from Rocky Mountain computers. He and I were system programmers on a IBM 4341 mainframe. I got mine the same day and he waited 3 months for his.
The year I started secondary (high) school.
I went from the ST, to an Amiga.
Loved the demo scene. Shame the company went bust, as the Amiga was a superb machine.
I feel grateful that I’ve seen the computer scene progress from its infancy (first computer was a 48k Spectrum!)
I went from the ST, to an Amiga.
Loved the demo scene. Shame the company went bust, as the Amiga was a superb machine.
I feel grateful that I’ve seen the computer scene progress from its infancy (first computer was a 48k Spectrum!)
