The Macintosh in 1984 | Hacker News Reader

The Macintosh in 1984

toastytech.com

"Makes you really wonder why Windows 2000 requires 128 MEGS to run."

Yeah, you just wait fifteen years when folks complain that the new laptop offerings max out at 16Gb. I need an order of magnitude more RAM, but I can't say I'm getting even twice the productivity I did in 1984. I use that extra RAM so that someone can serve me ads and bug me ad hoc through whatever chat app is fashionable at the time. If I'm lucky I'll use that RAM for something interesting like a VM. But most of the time I use it so that the Java runtime doesn't bog my machine down.

SSDs, OTOH, now there's something that has improved my productivity.

I ran into a line from Woz a while back claiming that those early Macs were resistant to viruses etc because most of it existed on a ROM chip rather than an HDD.

In essence, the Mac had more in common with the C64 and Amiga then it had with the PC.

And had the most in common with the atari st.

Damn it, i keep forgetting about that one. Maybe because i never knew someone that owned one.

I only ran into them long after they became obsolete (there were/are lots of them in germany and the uk, and probably the countries around/in between them).

They were so similar that an add-on was sold for the atari st that allowed one to run mac system on it, somewhat faster than the equivalent mac :)

> If I'm lucky I'll use that RAM for something interesting like a VM. But most of the time I use it so that the Java runtime doesn't bog my machine down.

Java is a VM. I presume you mean vmware/docker/vbox which can and typically does take as much memory as Java.

And yes SSD will for sure improve Java performance as the initial load of loading tons of classes is typically what is slow in Java.

Speaking of SSD I bet ironically though what most people are using the loads of ram for is actually disk cache (whether they know it or not).

Java is a VM. I presume you mean vmware/docker/vbox

That would be correct. I was just pulling from a mental list of "who is usually a memory hog when I look at Activity Monitor?" and not thinking in strict terms of what I wrote.

...and typically does take as much memory as Java.

My experience says: I wouldn't be so sure about that. :-) Hence my listing of the Java runtime. (I'm not Java whiz, so I could probably optimize a thing or two, but I spend a lot of time with Android. And between Android Studio and firing up the runtime to run an emulator, Java can regularly take up multiple gigabytes of RAM.)

Well to be fair Windows 2000 ran ok with 64Mb and possibly even less

Win2k was much more performant than the 128k MacOS. It was a multi-user operating system and could serve those multiple users at the same time across the network. It also wasn't as slow, not by a long shot. Performance monitoring, system logging, dealing with a much higher resolution and colour depth, networking stack, user configuration... it did a hell of a lot more.

Bloat in the browser is really not comparable to the suggestions of bloat in the article - Win2k did so much more than 1984's mac.

I know we've made lots of progress in the past 30+ years, and we can do plenty of wonderful things now.

But sometimes, when I see what was possible with so few resources, and then press shift-esc in Chrome and notice my Facbook tab using a few hundred megs of memory, I feel a little bit sad.

Or sometimes, after putting together a complex web UI using React, I feel pretty good about what I've accomplished. And don't get me wrong, I love using React and Angular 2. But then, I think back to how much more civilized UI development felt nearly 20 years ago using VB6 and Delphi, and I feel a little bit sad.

I actually feel more sad about the second point than I do about the first point, because we can often afford to waste hardware resources these days. But as good as modern web UI frameworks and libraries are in many ways, I still feel a bit like someone who once had a chainsaw but is now forced to chop down sequoias with a hatchet.

Thing is that the web didn't start with a UI in mind. It was basically shoehorned into that as Netscape and Microsoft battled over control of the "intranet", and then the dot-coms took the results and ran with them to the present day.

HTML started out as a document markup scheme for scientific use, with the ability to embed links to other such documents much like a scientist puts in references in their publications.

Only by overlaying a mass of CSS and JS do we get something that resemble a UI.

Having been born 9 years after 1984, I look at this and think how little desktop operating system GUI's have changed in 32 years. The same menus, windows, icons are all still very familiar, albeit with more visual 'eye candy' nowadays.

Was about to correct you on "32 years" then realized you were correct. Wowsers... time flies.

Back then they actually tried to make things simpler and easier to use. Now it seems most "innovation" is geared towards more control by the supplier or some designers who got bored and change things for change's sake.

Functionality-wise it seems both Windows and Mac are stuck somewhere in the 90s.

Frankly i find a repeating pattern with all tech development.

You have a early "runway" phase where you get the basics hammered out, then you get a near vertical phase as those basics get rapidly refined. Then it plateaus as those the ROI on those refinements worsen.

Between the 60s and now we have had multiples of these "S" curves happen back to back. And now most, or all, are plateauing.

To the point that these days you need a GPU just to show the desktop...

The original MacOS and Macs lacked tons of features (compared with peer computers at the time), but it clearly was a sea change, and it's paradigms have stood the test of time.

But there are big changes you can't see here. The biggest that the original Mac didn't have was networking. Ubiquitous networking has radically changed computing.

From the article:

  > All of this was designed to run in 128k of RAM.
  > Makes you really wonder why Windows 2000
  > requires 128 MEGS to run.

Indeed. Is this because the infamous recent JavaScript bloatation isn't unique to JavaScript --- that OS developers too tend to rope in greater and greater amounts of libraries, frameworks, etc., to accomplish the same thing?

It's true that today's operating systems do more, but it's still drawing text and shapes on a two-dimensional screen. Do today's advances in multitasking, color, and so on, really need 1,000 times as much memory (100 MB) --- or even 100,000 times as much (10 GB)?

Well, in this example I don't wonder at all. Sure, Mac OS ran in 128K of RAM, but IMO it ran kind of poorly. At a minimum, it seemed right on the edge of being under-provisioned. In contrast to Win2K, which could pre-emptivively multitask applications, serve up files to other computers, allow remote access to the user land desktop, and had color. So no, actually, I don't "really wonder" why Win2K required 128Mb of RAM. Sure, there was probably some bloat in there, but there was also a lot of utility that came with those higher RAM requirements.

EDIT: and in response to parent's edit, no, the utility I list should not require 100K x the RAM of the original Macintosh. We could probably do a lot of it with 100 times less. But you'll be waiting another twenty years while we figure out how to cram all that into a smaller space. Or we could just say "fuck it", build it now, and just bloat the RAM requirements. That doesn't excuse >100Mb web pages, but I'm willing to put up with some bloat if my apps can be segregated from one another such that they don't take the whole machine down (as just one example of where I'm willing to compromise).

It took until after the 1988 DRAM shortage ended in 1989-1990 (that started just after OS/2 1.0 was released) before more than 1MB to 2MB of total RAM became common. Then for years 4Mbit DRAM prices was stuck at the $12 to $14 range, which is part of why NT 3.1 did not catch on. Then DRAM prices declined fast starting in 1996 until 1998.

Well before Win2K, System 7 could cooperatively multitask applications, serve up files to other computers, allow remote access to the user land desktop, and had color.

http://toastytech.com/guis/mac755.html

Debates continue today on preemptive vs cooperative.

https://vorpus.org/blog/some-thoughts-on-asynchronous-api-de...

"The Finder's user interface is far superior to that of the "MS-DOS Executive" used in Microsoft's Windows 1.x and 2.x or even the Program Manager / File Manager of Windows 3.x. It wasn't until Windows 95 (11 years later) that Microsoft would even come close to the look and feel of the Finder - then they threw it all away and replaced it with a web browser in Windows 98."

Can someone explain this? What was so much better in Finder that wasn't matched even in Windows 3.1?

I'm still amazed that the Mac Finder still doesn't let you cut and paste files with Cmd-X, Cmd-V like you can in Windows. That's one thing I miss from Windows. It was so much easier to move files around. Having to have 2 windows open and drag and drop using the mouse is so much more inconvenient than keeping your hand on the keyboard the entire time.

My understanding is that it violates the mental concept of a cut. When you cut in a document, the text gets removed from its original location. A file can't be such removed.

Somehow Windows users figure it out, and find it very useful. :)

Indeed. While the desktop metaphor is a interesting starting point, it can only be pushed so far before it becomes more a bother than a boon.

Or that you can't paste a URL in the filename field of an open-file dialog... That's a really neat Windows feature I was using all the time. Now on OSX I have to right-click on a page/image, save it to my local drive, then go back to the dialog, navigate to the directory where I saved the file, and load that.

You can drop a file on the OSX open-file dialog to navigate to that location and select the file. That helps a bit.

It's had that feature for a long time.

Copy the file, then "paste" it with the Option key. That performs a move operation.

Or, to put in another way: ⌘-C then ⌘-Opt-V

Sigh. Talk about hiding keyboard shortcuts.

Not really... Option is the standard Mac way of modifying a command. In this case the modification is "place these here and remove the originals".

It's only "cut" on Windows because it's a leaky abstraction from a document based approach. That makes no sense in a filesystem. It would be extraordinarily strange for Apple to have ported that broken abstraction.

The "cut" shortcut works as you'd expect in document-based programs.

It might be a standard modifier, but you don't go around every menu pressing and depressing option to see the alternatives. I mean, you can, but to use your metaphor, it's a leaky way of exposing available options. All options should be shown when you click on a menu, without having to press extra keys.

"Cut" greys out a file in the Windows File Explorer, showing that it could be cut n' pasted. Cut n' paste is a leaky metaphor for "Move this from here to there" anyway, which is what people want to do 80% of the time when they use this function. People can deal with leaky metaphors that follow the same vector as the original.

Everything you wrote ONLY makes sense because you know how Cut works.

It's literally affirming the consequent as applied to UI design and isn't helpful at all.

Well someone better figure out a better metaphor soon so we can move files with a couple keyboard combos...

File Manager did not have icons for files. It was basically just a listing of filenames.

The MS-DOS Executive was a quasi-graphical shell that shipped in Windows 1.0 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_shell#MS-DOS_Executive). Windows "Program Manager" was strictly a "launch pad" to start applications and didn't support arbitrary file management. "File Manager" handled file management operations (though if memory serves you could launch applications from it). Finder integrated file management and application launch. Arguably this wasn't integrated in Windows until the Windows 95 Explorer shell came along.

Windows 3.1 didn't have a combined file manager/program launcher. Instead, there were two different apps. There was the program manager:

http://toastytech.com/guis/win31progman3.png

Those icons don't represent files; they are 'program items', i.e. launchers.

This was the file manager:

http://toastytech.com/guis/win31winfile.png

You could launch programs from this, but only if you knew where they were installed and were willing to navigate there and then figure out which cryptically named .exe file it was. And, yes, the windows-in-windows organisation of both applications was a mess. Losing entire subwindows off the side of the program manager because you'd placed them somewhere and then resized the outer window, making them invisible, was totally a thing.

The classic Mac, with its combined file manager and program launcher, and its single-file applications (usually), and its human readable filenames, and generally a whole bunch of little subtle usability features such as the way that icons remembered whether they'd been placed manually or had been autoplaced, was enormously better.

Ah yes, progman. I am unsure if anyone ever ran it other than maximized (only pesky problem was that switching between running programs required a trip to the desktop, or remember to hit alt-tab).

As for finding something based on directory location and file name, thats how you had to do it in the underlying DOS anyways so you quickly memorized your most used paths (if you fired up Windows at all).

> All of this was designed to run in 128k of RAM. Makes you really wonder why Windows 2000 requires 128 MEGS to run.

OSX 10.0 Cheetah was released on March 24, 2001 and had a system requirement of "128 MEGS".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#System_requireme...

I'm not sure why people downvoted you but I +1 because it is important to understand when this article was written (btw I can't stand articles or other content that isn't dated).

I assume this article was written around 2000 when Microsoft hate was in full swing. I was in college at the time and probably would have said the exact snide comment by the author.

Comparing Windows 2000 to 1984 Mac isn't really that funny or even a good comparison of whoa look how little resources. It is like comparing a spaceship to a car.

HN seems to be really facts-averse some days. Seems you're getting the same treatment.

It is called groupthink. Screw diversity of opinion or facts. Down voting is an awful mechanism. I don't mind upvotes or flags but downvoting should go IMO. The fascination/love of nostalgia is so rampant these days. Apparently screw progress. South Park really nailed it on the head this season [1] [2].

"'member the 1984 Mac OS" -- Member berries

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_Berries

[2]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=member%20berr...

Net downmodding = groupthink, but net upmodding = diverse and factual?

> Net downmodding = groupthink, but net upmodding = diverse and factual?

I didn't make those explicit equations nor is it that black and white. It is far more complicated.

If you want more of a "net" it is we have a HN culture that prefers pressing the downvote instead of offering a simply comment as to why the previous comment is incorrect or why they politely disagree. Like I have honestly no idea why the parent*5 was downvoted.

If the downvote is content filtering I could understand that (ie downvote because other comments are more relevant/correct) but the problem is that it is called karma and you can downvote 1 point comments. If it was fairly positive comment (ie lets say more than 1 point) and it lost points I think that would be better. Still it is crappy mechanism for content filtering.

Some people honestly think they are doing service downvoting comments. I guess I don't agree.

As for the groupthink I meant it less for downvoting and more for the love of nostalgia. I probably could have done a better job explaining.

Never mind that although MS have been quite the market bully, Win2k was quite solid.

I still think the early Mac versions were some of the prettiest, friendliest UIs I've ever used. Sadly, there's nothing today with that combination of simplicity, elegance and friendliness.

I think the downfall started with the Macintosh II and colour …

I find the old icons were easier to distinguish between each other than today's saturated and color-filled icons. Of course today we have way more icons / apps than there was on the old mac, but today's icons all have very similar shapes. Switch your screen to grayscale (in Accessibility settings) and many of the modern app icons in the Dock all look very similar.

I'm of the opinion that there was a time, very early and ever-so-briefly, when icons were useful in distinguishing on thing from another. But now we have so many of them, all demanding our attention, and looking quite similar to one another. App icons on macOS maybe not so much, but for sure toolbar icons. IIRC, there are even usability studies out there that back me up on this, though I'm too lazy and apathetic on the topic to go look them up.

Point being, useless as icons might be these days, "we've always done it this way" and either no one dare go against the grain or no one has a better idea.

I use fewer applications than I used a few years ago (a lot of them got "eaten" by the web browser or by emacs), and still have difficulties telling them apart with "modern" icon themes. This isn't because there are so many applications (they're fewer!) but because the icons are all flat, non-descript and brightly-colored. Virtually all of them consist of a single geometrical shape or a capital letter on a contrasting-color background.

I know this is supposed to be "honest" and "clean" and to present "the essence" of that application. It sounds great on paper or in a book on design, but it's absolutely terrible on a computer screen.

You're probably correct, though subjectively I didn't start feeling like something was amiss until Mac OS 9, perhaps as early as 8.5.

I think OS X, as the child of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS, ended up somehow less than the sum of its parts.

I don't know. Maybe I just used my Macs differently, but I didn't really notice a lot of changes to the GUI after it went color. It was the same, just in color. What elements are you thinking of that went away or got worse after the Macintosh II?

Well, nothing was particularly bad about the colour Macs; it's just that in retrospect they were the start of the movement to photo-realistic colour, and I miss the old B&W pixelart.

As an Amiga guy I hated the Mac GUI. I was always hunting fro something in the menu and couldn't find till my Mac friend came and helped me. Funny thing is I am still that guy on OS X.

There's a search box in the Help menu that filters/locates menu items.

The problem is Apple uses different words for what I want. I remember when I couldn't find render for exporting a video project. I was then informed that it isn't called render on Apple. I threw something and broke it (I forgot what I broke but it wasn't expensive but I felt like a HUGE jerk)

"All of this was designed to run in 128k of RAM."

Macintosh 1984: more features than most web apps with 1/1000th the RAM requirements of some of them. That's if rumors I've heard about 100MB+ web apps are true.

Don't forget there was also 64kB of ROM, from which certain system routines were run.

Ok, now it's between 1/500th and 1/1000th. :)

Scroll through this. It's not even a web app. Just a short interview.

https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/jony-ive-talks-about-pu...

I don't know about you guys, but my first reaction was "Yuck!".

Wow, a 40MB web page.

That's ridiculous! Exactly kind of thing I'm talking about. Had to enable several scripts then wait a long delay to get the whole site. Then scrolling was a little weird. Quite a step back from the Mac experience except for superior color and resolution of today. I'd seriously take a text-based Q&A off Gopher over this site.

Like today, was it impossible to quite the app with a single mouse click?

It was either Command-q or press and hold File and drag down to Quit.

Yes, you had to hold the mouse button, so it's still one click. And that still works, you just don't have to do it.

If you hold down the mouse button while entering the app, it counts as half a mouse click.

But first, we need to talk about parallel universes.

No, that's not a single mouse click... Now I wonder if you couldn't do it in Xerox Alto as well.

Anyone who find this interesting should watch this Steve Jobs 1995 Interview. [about how Apple was 10 years ahead everyone in 1984] [1] [about how this was achieved][2]

[1]: https://youtu.be/TRZAJY23xio?t=3182 [2]: https://youtu.be/TRZAJY23xio?t=3994

What's most interesting is the lack of change from 1984 to today's macOS. I have a theory that all GUIs are stuck at whenever they were first released.

Macs in 1984 single app at once, thus screen level menu.

X in 1984, but wasn't really about the UI.

Windows 1985, multiple apps, thus window level menu.

RISC OS 1987-9, 3 button mouse and multiple apps, dedicated menu button, app vs document distinction, drag and drop load/save.

A big reason for being such, is that of familiarity and muscle memory. Note all the bellyaching about Windows 8's start screen.

Heck, i don't mind claiming that the _nix DEs did best when they were trying to emulate Windows rather than dream up their own.

It looks better than sierra :/

In my opinion, Mac OS 7 [0] was one of the best versions of Mac OS. It was small enough for people to understand most of it. I liked how one could extend the system using Extensions. Debugging problematic Extensions wasn't too hard, one could just remove suspect Extensions from the System Folder and perform a restart.

I think at the start of Mac OS 8, more and more bloat was added to the system, without significantly increasing it's usability.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

Totally agree. On Windows it's the same with Windows 2000 and XP.

i still prefer the ui of 98, even if the system itself was unstable and very bad at multitasking.

Assuming you had a suspect extension.

Otherwise it was time to do the restart dance with Conflict Catcher.

Outside of the GUI angle, that makes me think of booting DOS.

Something didn't work out quite right? Comment out a line or two from the boot files and hit reset.

Damn it, i still run Linux that way. Having stuff conditionally start or stop just makes my head hurt.

You'll search far and long to find a WIMP UI that looks better than the pre-colour Mac Finder. Actually the visual restraint of Sierra is a step back towards the cleanness that was lost when the Finder was colourised. The early version http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4ffb37e469beddc9590... was tasteful but lost a little of the magic; later pre-OS-X redesigns were worse; Aqua was a carnival midway.

It needs a picture of the monochrome MacPaint fill patterns!

I heard that the display drivers for the first Macs were written in Pascal. I don't have any links that prove it, but it was considered crazy back then not to write pixel routines in assembly...

They weren't, although there was a lot of Pascal-ism in the Mac. The 'pixel routines' were very much assembly and the source (and some historical context) is now available here:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

The first Macs had no display drivers. They were sending video pixel data from RAM directly to the electron gun of the video display (with some help from various PAL/TTL glue and interrupts, natch [1]).

The toolbox that all 68K-based Macs used to draw stuff on the display was called QuickDraw, written in 68000 assembly language code by Bill Atkinson. It was descended from Bill's work on the Lisa and LisaGraf, the graphics toolbox used in that project. While the first APIs for Mac were indeed in Pascal (including MacPaint) the base toolkit was all in assembly for speed.

Apple recently donated the source code for QuickDraw and MacPaint (a historical work by Atkinson) to the Computer History Museum:

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K/512K_technical_...

no it was 68k asm: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-...

however, Pascal was the official OS language, and all the original documentation (Inside Macintosh) for the APIs was written in Pascal.

128KB? GEOS managed much of the same functionality in 38KB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

monochrome still works nowadays. I'm a large fan of the old amber monitors.

efficient use of visual and machine resources. not quite the bloat we've inherited these days. I use i3 and enjoy a blue-on-black colorscheme.

128k of RAM is enough for anybody!

I'm also a fan of i3, but I use a monokai color scheme

It wasn't even enough for the original mac :p the 512kb fat mac was released shortly thereafter in an attempt to correct the situation.

The nostalgia makes me feel happy.

This website is more than the Macintosh! Be sure to check out the other OS's too!

Still better font rendering than Windows 10

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