A Macintosh History 85.10
systemtalk.org
systemtalk.org
The post discusses ExperLisp for Macintosh, but I’ve never managed to find a copy. If anyone knows the whereabouts of an ExperLisp binary, I’d love to try running it.
I’ve only written about two months so far, but more will follow soon. Let me know if you have any suggestions or corrections.
A creative era when a mainstream Mac magazine has could cover everything from Excel to 68000 assembler, role-playing games to icon design, and Lisp to desktop publishing. Computers and their users have yet to be confined to silos.
“Why Apple’s New IIGS Is Going To Help The Mac”
https://vintageapple.org/macuser/pdf/MacUser_8612_December_1...
The problem was that "application/rss+xml" was being encoded as "application/rss+xml". This worked on NetNewsWire, so I didn't notice.
The Macintosh version is the original Excel; there was never an MS-DOS version.
Think about it: At 128k RAM and small COU, you can’t even afford separation of concerns into application layers, and thus can’t delegate work to independent teams, because simply a method calling another one is a performance hit. Multitier architecture is already a posh, modern luxury.
Then came lambdas and Java streams, twice as slow as for-each loops, but look nicer, albeit with incomprehensible stacktraces. Luxury all around!
Then came Electron.
Looking forward to Docker-Driven Programming, where each function is a Docker Compose and gets rebuilt and rethrown at each exception.
A few quotes from this issue:
"In the old days, the ignorant confused Lisp with 'Artificial Intelligence' - AI which doesn’t exist, but someday might."
"Vimco is what it sounds like and what it sounds like is as important as what it looks like. VMCO is the Visual/Vocal MAUG Conferencing Utility. It’s a communication program that integrates MacinTalk, Apple’s speech synthesis program, and the conferencing (or group meeting) software on CompuServe MAUG special interest group."
"Does Switcher allow multiple applications to actually run simultaneously? Switcher - lets multiple applications reside in memory simultaneously. It does not, by itself, allow those applications to actually be executing simultaneously..."
We'd stepped into the future.
Maybe this is just the process used for designing the layout, which is then used to re-flow and re-print all the "fragments" so they can be remounted and photographed cleanly?
This video shows a bit of the process such as the Rubylith sheets used to create masks for each color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxddg3dNKgw
For newspapers, even in late 90's a lot of them were just in B/W.
Of course, the screen was monochrome black and white, so you’d have to print things to see them, and I’m not aware of any printer driver ever supporting it (Color QuickDraw, when it arrived, didn’t build on this, as far as I know).
Chances also are this part of the code was less well exercised than other parts. It may have been buggy.
On the plus side, colors were 32-bit (see http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc..., where both fgColor and bkColor are 32 bits), but as indicated in the first link, you could only record a fixed set of 8 colors in pictures.
(Links are to a 1996 book, but that info was present in the phone book edition of Inside Macintosh (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...), too)
In 1982, I was in 6th grade, and my best friend's father was a graphic designer. I remember the computer he used, an Itek Quadritek, a very big thing with multiple cabinets taking up his whole office. It used the 8-inch floppies for storage. It was probably a mini computer, and he also had a high resolution monochrome imagesetter to output to developed paper.
In college in 1989, because the editor heard I was a CS major, I was tasked with modernizing the school newspaper production equipment to use Mac desktop publishing, installing the Macs, QuarkXPress and Photoshop software and new Linotype PostScript film imagesetters. What they were using before for a decade at least were Linotype terminals (and I expect for long before that, Linotype machines). I was not aware of what the terminals connected to, but there must have been a mini computer somewhere. The printing terminals used a markup language (not unlike html) to output copy in whatever type-size, fonts and justifications to a monochrome developed paper, which would be physically cut with razors and physically pasted with glue up on newspaper-sized paste sheets, and then those sheets were shot with a huge stat camera to go to film, then the film negative was developed and the image burned onto metal press plate with another huge machine called a platemaker.
I worked in printing for years as a prepress operator, and all of those huge stat cameras and platemakers, the developing sinks, all of it, everywhere, were dragged into the parking lots of commercial printers to be hauled away to landfills or junk yards. I remember thinking it was throwing away a fortune, stat cameras alone were like $20K new, twice the cost of the new PostScript imagesetters.
The classic commercial printer bindery was a warehouse-sized room that included 20+ in staff, paper cutting machines, paper folding machines, collators, Cheshire machines, and other equipment like envelope stuffers and book binding machines. By 2003/4, a pdf file could be printed from a Mac or Windows desktop to a large, 50-foot long press that outputs perfect bound paperback books, nothing in between, the entire bindery built-in. But professional/commercial offset printing even today still often requires metal plates, so the pdf (what prepress has been generating for 25 years rather than film or plate) outputs direct to metal plate (DTP).
In 2001 I was working at a startup that involved pulling the digital feed directly from major newspapers around the world to make it available in a reader, idea was you could read the New York Times online appearing exactly like the printed edition about 5-7 hours before it hit the stands, sometimes late the day before depending on when copy went to press. Even in 2001, every single major newspaper used it's own proprietary digital system, though everything was moving to pdf, which had been standard for almost a decade at commercial printers. In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle still had no desktop publishing nor digital output to film and were still using physical cut and paste layout and stat cameras. I expect they migrated to desktop publishing within a few years, but I nearly fell out of my chair when I discovered a major newspaper's production department was a decade behind all the others. Their production manager agreed with me that it was unbelieveable.
Marvel Comics's former typesetter (and editor and technical artist and all-around production guy) Eliot R. Brown maintains a blog where he posts a number of pictures and stories from his time at Marvel in the '70s, '80s, and '90s.
One of his articles concerns the typesetting computer he used at the time... it's well worth a read: https://www.eliotrbrown.com/wp/one-shot-erbs-custom-typesett... (there's a picture of it in the article)
> The miracle of type that you could do in your own office was quite a while in coming. But for Marvel, it took place in 1982. There was a first “digital” typesetting computer, but you wouldn’t believe how it worked. To really appreciate it, I would have to draw diagrams. You still might not really believe it—such a wild contraption. But then Marvel got a Mergenthaller Linotype Print Maker and paid a low $15,000 if I remember correctly. Mergenthaller used to make the hot type monstrosities and were probably sighing in relief when cold type came to be. There's a picture in the article
> ‘Cold’ here means, simple black type on white paper. You do a little typing, press the ‘go’ button and remove the paper cassette from the machine, put the cassette in the light-tight chemical processor and bang, in as little as 3-4 minutes, cool, calm and collected—there’s your type.
> There were several “tricks” here. There was a high-resolution CRT tube (just like a TV set, but about an inch across and able to resolve 2400 lines per inch) and a primitive digital computer. It ran on DOS. The machine was an inert piece of junk until you loaded in the “operating system” via a disk. Disk Operating System meant the whole shootin’ match of a program was on a 5.25” floppy disk.
> And you had to load that program every time you turned the machine on. It forgot how to be a typesetting machine every power-down.
> I kid you not. No “hard drive.”
> This was an early computer. It had a green monochrome monitor that was a whole 9” across! No mouse. Only arrow buttons to move the cursor around. It also used a series of commands that would make font changes, from regular to bold or italic. But don’t forget to change it back—because you did not see a representation of that type style. In fact, you really had to pay attention. For one thing, the monitor displayed letters in a grid. Very simple. All the same size, from periods to the letter “M.” I used to quip, “Every letterspace counted.”
And Hack (now in bsdgames)/Nethack and variants like Slashem, OFC.
On Ultima IV, it's a must on any platform, too. Even the C64 version was good enough and the world felt huge.