The Apple Macintosh Primer (1984) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

The Apple Macintosh Primer (1984) [pdf]

vintageapple.org

54 pointskeepamovin13 comments

57 pages in before we get a single screenshot. In a lot of ways, I miss this kind of weird ass writing about introducing people to computers with so little previous context to computing.

OTOH, 57 pages in before we start telling us how to use it seems like the fore bearer of 2023 recipes on web pages: "I love chocolate chip cookies. My mother used to make them for me back in 1970s after a day out in the late fall. My mother died in the late fall in 1986, and that is the year I set out to recreate my mother's cookie recipe for myself."

The Mac itself was a lot better. It shipped with

- a “Guided Tour” floppy that contained a “Mousing Around” application that taught you to operate the mouse, for example by dragging a path through a maze.

- two audio cassettes “A Guided Tour of Macintosh” (https://archive.org/details/GuidedTourOfMacintoshAudioTape) and “A Guided Tour of MacWrite/MacPaint” (https://archive.org/details/GuidedTourofMacWriteMacPaint) that accompanied the “Guided Tour” disk (with prompts to keep the audio synchronized with what happened on screen)

Someone is sitting on the jumptorecipe.com domain. My fantasy is they're working on a simple website with recipes, and none of the babbling prose or instructive ads.

Reality is such a site probably can't make money, and I don't know why today's Google would bother even crawling it.

There was a chrome plugin, “Recipe Filter” which produced a beautiful recipe card to print or read from whatever site you threw at it. It worked really well.

The author got tonnes of backlash/abuse from people writing recipe sites.

Yeah, the site operators' perspective is that such an extension is same as an adblocker. But everyone else's perspective is that (a) they're hungry and (b) see (a).

Recipe sites aren't exactly high stakes, but they're one of the worst mismatches between the needs of customers and the business plans of providers. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that solving the recipe-site problem is isomorphic to saving the web.

Sometimes I miss the simplicity of the early Mac. For example, as per this book, the Finder had just five Menus - Apple, File, Edit, View, Special. Really easy to grok in a few days. I understand that the much greater capabilities and power of today's computers necessitate a more complex UI. I just wish we could have both the power and the simplicity.

40 years later and MacOS app menus are barely changed:

Apple - (Current App Name) - File - Edit - View - [App-specific items] - Window - Help

For Finder, there's still only one app-specific menu item, now called 'Go' instead of 'Special'.

Well, one could say that having 8 instead of 5 menus is a 60% increase. Also, the number of items in each menu has increased as well.

I'm also amused to see that 40 years later that they have "Copy Macintosh HD" on the Edit menu - like it's a floppy disk you can just copy to drive B :)

There was such a fear and fetish back then relating to computing. If you got some sort of computer you needed stacks of third party books and training classes. Lots of memes (often spread on paper!) about how hard it is.

I talked to the CTO of Palo Alto back around 2000 about why they bought exchange (including a huge computer to run it) rather than Netscape’s system, a local product that wouldn’t have needed the huge computer. “The icons look different so the training program would have cost more than the whole exchange buy”.

Weird he referred to "Apple, Inc." rather than "Apple Computer Inc." — Apple only dropped the "Computer" after the return of Steve Jobs (and the success of the iPod, etc. made them no longer exclusively a computer company).

The book is interesting if for no other reason than the (slim) list of software and hardware that was available in 1984 for the fledgling machine.

Kinda heinous to link to a big PDF when that entire site is amazing and deserves support not more serving costs.

Look at that. How nice is that? Moving away from line numbers in the 80's while maintaining compatibility.

Applesoft BASIC with Line Numbers

10 HOME: M$ = "MESSAGE"

20 FOR X = 1 TO 20

30 GOSUB 200

40 NEXT X

...

210 HTAB 20 - LEN(M$)/2

210 PRINT M$

220 RETURN

Applesoft BASIC without Line Numbers

HOME: M$ = "MESSAGE"

FDR X = 1 TO 20

GOSUB CENTER

NEXT X

...

CENTER

HTAB 20 - LEN(M$)/2

PRINTM$

RETURN

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