A Macintosh History (1986)
systemtalk.org
systemtalk.org
Apple had the credibility to do so in the first place, of course, because of its success with the Apple II. In turn, Mac's share of the market was minuscule compared to what the IBM PC had built around itself since 1981, as any comparison of PC/PC World/InfoWorld to the above Mac publications would have shown. But it was enough to survive for the long term. Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990, but it is a niche, and a reasonably defendable one; Amiga's desktop video niche was correspondingly much smaller, and ST never found one at all outside maybe music.[1]
I wrote "superior hardware", not "superior hardware and software". Not enough attention has been given to just how good classic Mac OS was from the beginning. The care given to both the UI and underlying architecture is obvious. Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows. Yes, Amiga had out-of-the-box true preemptive multitasking.[2] But what good is it if the OS doesn't have quality libraries, toolkits, and primitives? As baroque and obscure as Inside Macintosh was for the Mac developer c. 1985, at least he had it as a resource, and at least the OS was sophisticated enough to justify such a baroque and obscure tome in the first place. And Atari TOS? Don't make me laugh.
[1] Yes, yes, Europeans, I know that Amiga and ST were much more successful across the Atlantic. That only meant that the PC takeover of the entire market just skipped the DOS era in Europe, as opposed to not happening at all.
[2] I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place
What we skipped was a Mac's era in Europe, until Microsoft rescued Apple and OS X came to be.
In Portugal during the early 90's the only place I could touch a Mac was at the university campus and we had a single Apple reseller located in Lisbon for the whole country. Otherwise they were only present in foreign computer magazines.
Aldus PageMaker was reviewed in Nov ‘85: https://systemtalk.org/post/macintosh-history-8511/#go-ahead....
MacUser had its first Desktop Publishing supplement in June 1986: https://systemtalk.org/post/macintosh-history-8606/
Even if Commodore hadn't killed the company through bad management alone they never would've survived selling computers with Workbench.
By the end they were selling machines that could pump out higher resolutions than before but still shipping them with fonts & a UI designed to look good on crappy television sets
AFAIK, the only part of AmigaOS that was "outsourced" was that they used TripOS as the base underlying DOS, but AFAIK Intuition and Workbench were all done in-house by Commodore engineers.
> I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place
AmigaOS is the entire package, AmigaDOS is the underlying DOS that everything else runs on top of. It doesn't really matter to anyone, however, except those actually doing low-level AmigaOS development
I was there and involved in that at Apple and elsewhere. It does not do justice to describe things this way, although the business people might be tempted to.
There are fundamental modes of communication between humans over millennia and more recently in the last 150 years. When voice was reproduced in a recording and passed further than the eye can see, you could say that was a "niche market".
more could be said, but in the environment of 1985-1990, print was the authoritative means of communication. The printing press including photo reproduction and printing techniques was being re-invented as a digital process.
I think Apple is coming back to that vey confusing model now with M1 macs needing their internal SSD to boot (effectively a part of the firmware) but a million times more complicated because of sheer code size and a giant security model
Eventually RAM was faster than ROM and starting with the first iMac they moved to having the classic MacOS ROM in a file that got loaded into RAM on boot.
“I'm giving up on trying / to sell you things that you ain't buying.”
I miss this sort of drama...