Original Macintosh Business Plan: July 12, 1981 | Hacker News Reader

Original Macintosh Business Plan: July 12, 1981

archive.computerhistory.org

58 pointsgatsby11 comments

One would expect serious business customers will move up to Band 4 [$3K+] and the job of Macintosh and VLC is to migrate the remaining Band 3 [$1500-$3K] customers down to Band 2 [<$1500], leaving Band 3 manufacturers out in the cold!!

Prescient. Most server are at $3K+, and most personal machines are sub-$1.5K these days. Relatively little exists in the $1.5K-$3K market these days (besides what I'd guess to be a small quantity of high end work stations and low end servers).

Smalltalk is mentioned on the last line of the software evaluation. (One below "Sesame Street". It was originally designed to be used by kids. It is used by grade school kids, even today.)

Anyone else notice the 'No Xerox' sign on the pages?

Seems to have a double meaning of "don't copy this" and "don't send this to Xerox".

I love how the product line pages look almost exactly like the current product line pages at store.apple.com

Consistency consistency consistency.

Several things that jump out at me..

The repetitive emphasis on MacBasic (which never really shipped from Apple, but did from Microsoft)

No mention what so ever of the internet (which was very nascent and pretty much non-existent in 1981). I doubt they saw it coming.

Brief mention of RS-232 Mac Net (which became AppleBus, then AppleTalk and LocalTalk on RS-422)

Mac screen size resolution was smaller than what finally shipped.

They had not yet made the leap to the 3.5" floppy (other than possibly on the Lisa)

Retail Outlets and Direct Sponsors ... They wanted to encourage sales via Fuller Brush ? I remember when the iMac G3 was briefly sold via Sears, with modest (at best) results.

The shift to 3.5" disks occurred in 1983-1984. I recall the very initial Lisas shipped with a 5¼ disk, but switched to 3.5 later in 1983, the Mac shipped with 3.5 disks (but possibly only single-sided/400k). The Apple 2 line shifted to 3.5 disks with the 2gs around 1985-1986.

Interesting! I'm curious as to what the "VLC" referred to in the plan is.

"Very Low Cost" is my guess. Maybe it's the Apple IIc, which was released in 1984 for $1295.

You're correct. VLC was one of many codenames for the Apple IIc, source: http://books.google.com/books?id=mXnw5tM8QRwC&lpg=PA46&#...

I like "The advantage of a product line is that each individual product does not have to do everything"

Looking at this was just worth the last page. :)

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