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Comment by gramie | Hacker News Reader

It may be hard for people who weren't using computers back then to understand what a leap this was, why it was worth applause. I never had a Mac, but I appreciate what it did to drive the industry toward usability.

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When my Mac arrived in 1984 as a freshman at CMU, I unpacked it and plugged it in around 5pm and myself and several friends played with MacPaint and MacWrite until dawn the next day.

A friend brought his Macintosh home from CMU (the summer of '84 or '85?). We spent a good part of the summer making our own cassette tape labels using MacPaint and an ImageWriter printer. It should have been obvious then that Desktop Publishing was chomping at the bit, not even waiting for an affordable LaserWriter.

The thing is, you didn't need to learn anything "computery" to operate the Mac. No special languages or commands, nothing. You could literally walk into a computer store, sit down at the demo machine and use the thing. And it was pervasively graphical - that was completely new. Sure, that was old hat to the folks at Xerox PARC, but for the average person it was like going from a bicycle to an X-wing fighter. Nothing else was even remotely comparable.

At the same time I remember being struck by, "Where's the BASIC prompt? How do I program it?"

Apple created a Macintosh Basic, but Microsoft threatened not to renew Apple's license for the basic included with the Apple II computers that were the companies bread and butter at that time unless they killed it.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

The software did leak out and was widely spread by user groups.

A couple of publishers had already printed books on it when Microsoft had the software killed, so you could even find manuals for it.

I remember using a Macintosh (a Plus?) for the first time in approx 1988 and being confused about you created a file. Being a serious command-line user, it took me several minutes to a realise that you had to launch an app first.

I wasn’t alive then but I imagine it’s similar to what the iPhone announcement was for me.

Scrolling + rubber band effect, pinch to zoom, or just using your fingers to control a device. It was magical!

For the younger generation those are very normal and mundane things. It’s just how their devices have always worked.

I’d say the MacPaint demo was bigger. We had touch screen devices before the iPhone and several failed attempts at tablets (then called “slates”). The iPhone interface felt like a big leap but still an evolutionary one that we all know someone was eventually going to nail. Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it. Sure it drew a lot from Lisa and Xerox but at that stage most people weren’t familiar with those and that had certainly never believed it would end up in an affordable device any time soon. I remember Amiga invoked similar responses for me too. Then first time I saw an Amiga in the flesh it seemed almost magical.

I don’t think we will ever have breakthroughs like that again because of the way how tech is often previewed in public (to drive up hype) and the laws of diminishing returns with regards to computational upgrades. Plus I think people are more used to seeing hardware breakthroughs so expect more these days.

> Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it.

That's exactly what the experience of using a Mac was like. And it was just beyond comprehension that you could actually get one.

Magical for those that never used a Nokia 7710, released three years earlier, but I agree with the sentiment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7710

I had a 7710 for a few weeks, interesting concepts, but half-baked implementation and so slow you couldn’t really use it. Gave it back. It was more of a strange tech demo, than a usable phone. You can’t compare it to the iPhone.

With the half backed support for MMS and other features on iPhone 1.0, I surely can.

What's weird is that I was working on prototype handsets for Nokia in 2004 and I have never seen that handset until today. WTF. (Note: the prototypes I was working on were all designed around stealing Apple's iPod mojo and baking it into their phones)

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