Busy Being Born (2004) | Hacker News Reader

Busy Being Born (2004)

folklore.org

117 pointsfortran7725 comments

Folklore.org is a priceless jewel. To have an archive of oral history regarding the early development of the Mac and Life at Apple is fantastic. It makes me reflect on how closed companies are these days the only insight we see into how they work comes from discovery during legal cases. (I’m thinking of Apple v Samsung and Apple v Epic right now)

One past thread:

Busy Being Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10188952 - Sept 2015 (8 comments)

2004 is the earliest year that this article exists at archive.org. Obviously that's just an upper bound for it. If anyone knows a more accurate year, we can change it again.

I remember seeing these photo sets long before that. Probably 2000 or 2001, or maybe earlier. But I couldn't tell you for sure.

EDIT: "The initial version of this site was written in the fall of 2003, running on a single server in my basement". I guess my memory is faulty.

I had a Lisa 1 on my desk for a couple weeks in late 1983. Hard to imagine now how completely freaky it was at the time, the forerunner of all future graphical interfaces. The Object Pascal manual seemed like rocket science. All I wound up using it for was making a report, but I made sure to put some unnecessary graphics in, just because I could!

I've been through much of folklore.org in the past, but I missed this part the other times:

"...into a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill had dated them. 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 thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure."

Considering the amount of work it would take for a single person building a text-based computer prototype to switch to a WIMP-based computer prototype in the late 1970's, I think that Bill is being modest. People used to be that way.

The thing is that that first windowed interface has such striking resemblance stylistically to the Smalltalk interface (see Smalltalk 76, black titlebars, minimalistic windows, etc) I'd have a hard time believing it wasn't influenced by the visit.

Even more so, look at this Smalltalk 74 interface here: https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Small...

I'm still not clear on what the Apple team saw at PARC that day, but it seems like it made a huge impression at least to start.

For those who haven't heard the Bob Dylan song and would like to (probably my favorite by him, the lyrics are something else and it's worth looking those up by themselves):

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CJHbfkROow

Two obscure features of the Lisa that weren't retained on the Mac (IIRC):

Pixels on the Lisa were not square. Tall rectangular pixels made for better font rendering.

The Lisa had virtual memory? Not sure about that, but there was a neat feature that trapped stack overflows. The OS could expand the stack with the overflow trap was triggered.

The Lisa had a base&bounds MMU (a bit like a pdp-11) not a full paging MMU - we ported pre-sysVr2 (ie pre paging) Unix to it

I need to read up on the Lisa MMU some more, it's interesting because my impression was that 68k in general was not friendly to these things as it was not possible to recover from a bus error.

Is the idea that you couldn't demand page, but that there'd be memory protection of some kind through the MMU for the entire process by rewriting addresses?

I remember reading that some workstation vendors ran two 68k CPUs in parallel in order to make it possible to recover from a bus error. Until the 68010 was released with the fix for this.

I used to port Unix to 68ks - there were several ways to get around this issue - 68010s could happily take a page fault, or you could use the (tacky and expensive) two 68k thing (few did, it was a real pain).

For a traditional swapping kernel (ie anything prior to SVr2) the only time you ever needed to be able to recover from a page fault was when you did automatic stack extension, there was a simple solution to this, have the compiler emit a "tst n(sp)", or similar instruction at every subroutine entry - because it was an instruction without side effects the kernel could recognise it, extend the stack space (by enough extra to be able to do the next call, hence the 'n') and resume execution by faking the appropriate kernel stack frame

Apropos of nothing, these photos remind me of trying to join a "club" for the video game Pitfall (on Atari) which required sending proof of a 20,000 score by mailing them a Polaroid of your TV screen.

EDIT: Wow! I guess it's a known thing (glad I didn't imagine it): https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/10/26/a...

That’s also how you would submit scores to the GamePro magazine scoreboard back in the day.

I keep wondering whatever happened to the Apple Lisa OS source code release that it was announced that Apple was going to do... several years ago...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/source-code-for-appl...

Pictures were an underrated feature, especially the fact that they were a standard drawing language in the graphics library.

The videogame Avara used them as its file format for levels. This made it possible to create levels with any graphics program that spoke the drawing PICT format.

Wow those Polaroids are going on 42 years old. Wonder how they're preserved/archived.

Incredible part of early Apple history, a lot of which was destroyed around the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in the late 90s.

> Incredible part of early Apple history, a lot of which was destroyed around the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in the late 90s.

I'm curious why you think this! Apple donated their museum and historical collections to Stanford in late 1997, and given the comprehensive nature of the gift I'd be very surprised to hear of a Jobs-driven "purge" before that happened.

https://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/971119apple.html

Oooo that's good info, thanks! I seem to recall reading it somewhere, perhaps as context after the publication of AppleDesign: https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...

Really appreciate your correction here!

I don’t know for sure either, but I’ll be sad if that happened!

I remember the well deserved Lisa hype. But $10,000! I saw one in my professor's office a few years later shortly after the mac had been introduced. I was in awe.

I’m always amazed at the price of early computers. My dad made $12,000 a year back then. Even the original Macintosh was an outlandish $2,499.

The IBM PC AT was $6,000 and the first Compaq 386 was $12,000!

Yes, my dad had a Model 80 and even older one and they were worthless when we tried to sell in 2019. We got $50 for both together. Think I should've kept the keyboard it had the best keyboard ever made (in my opinion).

But we kids never had a Nintendo or XBox but we always had the latest computer hardware at home. I can still remember that my dad showed us the cd-rom drive in the 80s it was massive.

I get the impression that Steve Jobs had no sense for what people were willing to pay for products. Macs were overwhelmingly present in schools, but I doubt many could afford them even if they wanted to. $2495 was an insane amount of money in 1984

Jobs wanted a lower price for the original Mac but lost to others who wanted to take profits. After his departure he complained about the high Mac prices and their effect on Mac market share. Conversely there’s a reason that Gassée the father of the Macintosh II was smirking about the high prices of the current Mac Pro line: https://mondaynote.com/mac-pro-fooled-you-90d560fcca99

I've always been partial to the 1st picture of 14th set there, before they moved the menu bar to the top and ditched the window tabs.

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