Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan (12 July 1981) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Preliminary Macintosh Business Plan (12 July 1981) [pdf]

archive.computerhistory.org

66 pointsLammy35 comments

The last PDF page is a play on the Paul Masson and Orson Welles wine commercials of the time.

The 1978 commercial says “ We will sell no wine before it’s time”

The PDF business plan says “ We will announce no Apple before it’s time” And shows a man drinking wine who could be Orson Welles.

Thanks for the info, i knew the comments would turn up some gold!

The ~(Xerox)~ notice gave me a chuckle as that's what the Macintosh is of the demo Steve Jobs saw at Xerox PARC.

Jobs and co. no doubt took inspiration from Xerox PARC but I think the narrative that they just copied the Alto or the Star is a bit ahistorical and does the Macintosh team a disservice. If you sit down with each of them, it quickly becomes apparent just how much work went into making the Macintosh’s iteration of the GUI friendly and intuitive compared to Xerox’s drafts - to say nothing of the accomplishment of squeezing it into a desktop micro.

Firstly the comparison should be Lisa to Alto/Star, Macintosh is a degree removed.

That being said, I've sat down with both and it's pretty clear both A) how very similar a significant chunk of the elements / components / systems are. And B) how much more advanced the Xerox system was from the Lisa one.

The argument isn't that Lisa (and Macintosh, by proxy) were a direct copy of the Xerox system. It's that by Apple's own arguments against Microsoft in court, the similarity to Xerox is even greater than that between Windows 1.0-3.1 and early Macintosh versions.

The context of the argument matters, it doesn't exist in isolation. It's not like one day people just decided Apple plagiarized Macintosh.

I have to add that the Star is quite clunky when compared to the Lisa (and the Mac). For instance, you'd need to select an icon and press the "Copy" key on the keyboard in order to copy it to another folder (rather than just dragging it like the Lisa, and later Mac did). Same for moving files. You also couldn't directly edit a file stored in a floppy - floppies were strictly for moving data to other computers. IIRC, you couldn't even drag a window to another place on the screen, or drag the lower-right corner to resize it.

Sure, the Star was the prototype and the Lisa refined. But Microsoft made the exact same arguments about utilizing the right mouse button and context menus, where Macintosh didn't; Apple countered that those were mere "interfacing changes".

Again, the point isn't "I would sit down and accidentally think I'm using a Mac" (though, you certainly would more likely think that than Windows), it's "how much of this exists because of the other one, and how similar is it in concept".

Sadly, the most interesting pattern of the Lisa was how it hid the applications (kind of the same way the Star did) behind the stationery metaphor. It was a bit like the "Create New" menu on Windows that I don't remember seeing after some time after Windows 95 and NT4. I think there was a "Templates" folder where you could add files to show up on that menu.

"A visual history of the development of the Lisa/Macintosh user interface"

https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

see also: "Origins of the Apple Human Interface” (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4

Calling the Xerox system 'drafts' is a disservice to its invention.

As noted by deaddodo (thanks), I was merely referencing how Apple tried to sue Microsoft, raising eyebrows of Xerox who then called Apple out--who 'took inspiration' from who and how much all came out into public record. While we're at it may as well credit Douglas Engelbart for "The Mother of All Demos" (1968) for conceiving of such devices.

It's merely lighthearted amusement to see Xerox 'credited' on the docs. The Macintosh was the greatest thing to happen in 1984, I still remember reading and rereading my SciAm issue where I first saw it. I was already into graphics/gaming on the Atari but seeing WYSIWYG was something else. Xerox, Apple, Microsoft all get some credit for invention, refinements, and bringing it to the consumer masses.

Microsoft couldn't have copied dragging windows and icons from the Star because it wasn't there - that would come straight from Apple (or, at least, from someplace else other than Xerox).

> took inspiration from Xerox PARC

Apple also took several people from Xerox PARC, including Larry Tesler (cut and paste, Object Pascal, Apple Lisa, Newton, etc.) who had demonstrated the Alto to Steve Jobs.

In 2017 Tesler recorded a demo with the Computer History Museum on their restored Alto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z43y94Dfzk

And of course Charles Simonyi went from PARC (Bravo) to Microsoft (Word).

>that's what the Macintosh is of the demo Steve Jobs saw at Xerox PARC.

Apple licensed many technologies from Xerox that were used to make Mac OS and other applications.

Mac OS was a copy of Smalltalk the same way an A380 is a copy of the Wright Flyer.

NeXT is the closer copy of Smalltalk. Mac OS is the diluted version.

"I said to both Steve and Bill Gates — this was during the controversy of whether Apple and Microsoft had stolen ideas from Xerox — and I told them, 'Look, we want you to steal the ideas, but for Christ's sake, steal the whole idea.'" -- Alan Kay

Kind of amazing that I'm working on new product plans right now and they still look exactly the same. The #s are 1,000-10,000x higher (quantity and dollars), but the concerns are still the same.

I really wish that some company somewhere would just accept a couple of interface options and form-factors and promise to keep them available over the long-haul and be successful with it (and that one of their designs would include a Wacom EMR stylus).

The Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was about perfect for me, but when I finally had to look for a replacement there weren't any running Windows, so I had to move up to a Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (which interestingly, its replacement seems to use the same case).

Anyone know what the "VLC" is that is mentioned?

I was assuming “Very Low Cost” while reading it but am totally just making that up for lack of a better contextual fit.

I think that's what became the Apple IIe. From this plan, the VLC seems very associated with the Apple II, and Wikipedia has a compatible timeline in the History section of the Apple IIe page[1]:

> In September 1981 InfoWorld reported—below the PC's announcement—that Apple was secretly developing three new computers "to be ready for release within a year": Lisa, Macintosh, and "Diana". Describing the last as a software-compatible Apple II replacement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe

This page [1] suggests it's the IIc though.

[1] https://www.apple2history.org/history/ah08/

Interesting that the 1981 Mac design was for a cheaper computer with GUI graphics like the Lisa. Originally it was to be a 6809 based system like the TRS80 COCO. Jobs did a high tech makeover of the Mac to borrow tech from the Lisa.

After Jef Raskin got kicked off the Mac, his concepts of a easy-to-use, non-mouse-based computer eventually turned into the Canon Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

IIRC Raskin kept on trying to take some sort of partial credit for the Mac over the years, but the actual Mac that was made had pretty much nothing to do with his initial concept.

See:

https://www.folklore.org/I_Invented_Burrell.html

Though, to be fair, he did name it:

https://www.folklore.org/Bicycle.html

and for an actual answer see:

https://www.folklore.org/The_Father_of_The_Macintosh.html

Jef Raskin's initial idea, I believe, was more of a text system that would have been possible with the 6809.

The Canon Cat was a further development of this idea.

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

I can't find any demo or screen shots of the Canon Cat system in use, but I imagine it to be somewhat along the lines of the HASCI concept, which had been brewing around the same time.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n404/...

HASCI actually shipped on the USA version of the Epson QX-10 as "Valdocs", an integrated document management system.

> I can't find any demo or screen shots of the Canon Cat system in use

There's an advertising video on YouTube showing it in use for text editing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_TlE_U_X3c

Wow, of course.. didn't think of video.

That video is great, a VCR tape collection of corporate demos by Jef Raskin's company, apparently for investors and resellers.

YouTube suggested a short, informal demo posted only 10 years ago, about 6 minutes:

https://youtu.be/jErqdRE5zpQ?si=A1kK2FhR9-LhoZIU

A bit less familiar with it so a quick and dirty video I suppose but a great demonstration of what it would be like to use one now.

Essential history! Thanks!

You can try out the Cat in emulation from the comfort of your browser: https://archive.org/details/canoncat

Phenomenal. Excellent catch!

If only I could convince mobile browsers to enable the onscreen keyboard in web-based emulators...

For instance, Infinite Macintosh has an explicit "Keyboard" that I should trivially peek at. It has a different problem mapping the iOS keyboard to ancient computers. Hmm.

Has anyone figured out a way to work around this?

> Interesting that the 1981 Mac design was for a cheaper computer with GUI graphics like the Lisa.

The 1981 design also had significantly lower resolution graphics (384x256) than Macintosh released with (512x342). Any idea when this was changed?

Early 1982. https://folklore.org/Five_Different_Macs.html:

“In the beginning of 1982, the original 68000 design was more than a year old, and the software was nowhere near finished, so Burrell was afraid some of the trade-offs of the original design were no longer current. He used the expansive canvas of a custom chip, where additional logic was almost free, to update the architecture. The most important decision was admitting that the software would never fit into 64K of memory and going with a full 16-bit memory bus, requiring 16 RAM chips instead of 8. The extra memory bandwidth allowed him to double the display resolution, going to dimensions of 512 by 342 instead of 384 by 256. He also added bells and whistles like a fancy, DMA-fed sound generator with four independent voices. This was the fourth version of the Macintosh design.”

I wish they had used the same 12" screen used on the Lisa, but in a vertical position (and with some extra pixels from a slightly faster memory system - or a slightly slower frame rate and longer persistence).

Hmm. Versus Apple II/III, detached keyboard, built-in display, and mouse.

I also like "Imagine two posters next fall, the first appearing In retail dealers and Sears"

> 4. Is our schedule realistic?

No. No it is not.

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