Thirty Years of Mac [video]
apple.com
apple.com
Just because these artists and engineers are talking about a Mac does not make their functions exclusive to the platform. Also, going back 30 years you have to endure some turd-Macs along the way (some brilliant ones too). Many jokes were had at the expense of our Mac brothers in the late mid to late 90's (even early 00's) about their platform of choice as we ran circles around them in gaming, graphics and pretty much any other benchmark besides money spent.
It's not the case now (switch to Intel changed that) but I would love to see a similar piece in praise of the PC. And no I don't mean just Windows, I'm talking about the generic term. Computers are awesome, let's not fall in love with a corporate brand and think it's fundamentally something different when it's not.
But the simple fact is that Apple's original Macintosh was the definitive introduction of modern personal computing to the general public. It's not an arbitrary "30 years of personal computing"... it's commemorating a watershed moment.
The Apple ][ was more popular by far than the original Mac, and even so it wasn't the first definitive PC. I remember seeing a lot of Commodore PETs around when I was young... way more than Macintosh.
While the Apple II and the Commodore PET were undoubtedly very popular and did put computers into the hands of home users, they really were not "modern" computers. To quote the Wikipedia article I referenced above:
"The first computer to popularise the desktop metaphor, using it as a standard feature over the earlier command line interface was the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The desktop metaphor is ubiquitous in modern-day personal computing; it is found in most desktop environments of modern operating systems: Windows as well as Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems."
Well, I should clarify. The Amiga was -demo'ed- in 1983 but not released until 1985.
Mac brought to the mass many things we take for granted today -- graphical interface, mouse, all-in-one form factor, SSD, etc.
Once popular brands -- IBM, Compag, Gateway, DEC, Sun -- are gone. Mac is still here and going strong. Not remarkable at all?
The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all sorts of concerns with architecture, open source/free software, macho "real programmers" insecurities, etc.
For fun read this, 2 yeas before the switch to Intel: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/06/23Apple-and-IBM-Intr...
I mean think about it, Apple makes next to no money on desktops, why would they prioritize power over energy consumption? Every once in a while they'll trump up some weird graph/metric like "24X FASTER" when talking about new chips in their devices, yet just about every keynote they talk up (in concrete numbers) how much longer batteries last. Hell, the latest release of OS X's biggest feature is enhanced energy management.
This is one of the biggest things that makes comparing Macs to PCs kind of silly to me—if you want raw power, you should absolutely go with a Windows box. Apple loses on that every single time, and they are fine with that.
The differences between the PS3 and Xbox 360 processors and toolchains is probably a good analogy. While in theory the Cell of the PS3 is more powerful, it was easier to get the Xbox to work optimally. (Although, ironically, they were both PowerPC based CPUs).
But the reason why Apple changed over to Intel chips had nothing to do with raw performance. It had everything to do with power - as in watts. Apple was beholden to the PowerPC manufacturers (Motorola/IBM) for their chips.
The major markets for PPC chips was either at the very high-end (HPC) or the very low-end (embedded). While Apple was the main customer for the mid-range chips, they didn't have much relative volume, so they didn't have much sway in the chip roadmap. Because of this, it was difficult to get high-performance/low-power chips. Apple went for years with a G4-based Powerbook because they couldn't get a G5 version that would work in a laptop - it required too much power.
The reason why they switched to Intel was that Intel was already working on the high-performance/low-power chips that Motorola just couldn't offer.
The PowerPC architecture itself was very high-performance, but recent years have shown that raw performance isn't as important as performance per watt for consumer use. If you're building a super computer, that's another story. From a pure CPU architecture standpoint, I'm still a fan of RISC.
Or the Acorn Archimedes of the time, which was turning in floating point benchmarks 10x faster.
The best example of this would be the Video Toaster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster For much of the 1990s, it was the king of real-time broadcast video production, unsurpassed until the advent of hardware-accelerated PC graphics late in the decade.
They were good for high end graphics and video of that era but I think SGI quickly caught up and surpassed them there. The other bit about Amiga that seems to be forgotten, just how proprietary the hardware was. We had a floppy drive go out and, to this day it remains as one of the more difficult to get to parts of all the computers I have had to crack open to replace a part in.
(I am happy to be downvoted for the joke, so just keep going :) )
We can live without wind turbines and scuba diving, but shitting and having something to read on the crapper is essential.
It is also really, really hard for those of you too young to have been there for the Mac's introduction/launch to understand just how amazing this piece of tech was in comparison with the popular alternatives at the time.
It was so unbelievably alien and so intimately familiar at the same time. I am a long time gadget/tech lover and there has been no single event that I remember with such vivid clarity.
Also, there is no single piece of tech that I have ever wanted to own so badly. I actually switched careers (design/illustration > programming) so that I could afford to buy one!
I think it's okay to have a moment like this for the faithful. Yes, it's a bit indulgent, but it will be over in a day or two.
"Folklore.org: Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it"
I don't own a single Apple device, but I still find the stories fascinating. It makes me wish I could've worked with those engineers.
Today there are new people somewhere trying to do something that seems difficult, maybe impossible, and certainly rather pointless to the outsiders looking at it from the comfort of the establishment's balcony.
I'm pretty sure it's easier to look for those people today than it was in 1980, when you still needed to be physically in the right place.
Now I'm more than willing to accept that I'm not the exact target for this video, and that the subject matter of the following video makes it a slightly unfair comparison, but the contrast to the quality of the Steve Jobs tribute video is vast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2WpieYRks
The latter video literally takes my breath away.
And, more the fault of my mind than the copy, but "a tool for exploring new fields [that I otherwise couldn't]" - the same could be said of a machete. :)
Expensive compared to what? Because to do the things you can do with a $1000 PC, you needed $100,000 or more before depending on the field.
Your personal typesetting engine? 128-channel audio recording? With effects? Video editing? Bitmap editing? CAD?
Those are all things that existed only for high end workstations or specialized devices before the personal PC, and the Mac played a huge role in the development of this (it will take years for Windows to catch up.
Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.
Macs helped artists be artists, but they weren't 'truly worldwide democratisation' for creativity, not by a long shot. That title in tech goes to digital cameras. The one prolific form of creativity that spreads throughout the wider public is due to the CCD, not Garage Band (the proportion of the public who are musicians has declined over the past century). Digital photography is the democratisation of creativity, if anything is.
Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC. And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs. And your own personal typsetting engine? Seriously? The content of a well-written letter takes a backseat in value to being able to put a crappy starburst on a bake-sale flyer? Even crappy teen angst poetry is more creative than the way the general public used those personal typsetting engines.
As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills. And CAD is far from the domain of Macs, the item being lionised in the video - for example, AutoCad has been on Windows for 28 years, and took an 18-year hiatus on the Mac during this time. I mean, if the argument is "Macs were the original personal computer", then that's wrong too - PCs had been around for years before Macs came along. Macs have been something special, but democratision isn't a strong point - indeed, for a goodly portion of their life, the Mac has been used as a status symbol; hard to do for something that is supposedly democratised.
Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.
Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power". When a minority gains the right to vote, that's democratisation. When an elite social group gathers more professional power, that's something else.
That's not a relevant question. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to play acoustic guitar on the streets, sure, you don't need much. That doesn't meant that everybody wanted to be creative in that way.
Some people (milions) wanted to make records like the Beatles or Kraftwerk, or Led Zepellin etc. Some even wanted to write orchestral scores like they heard from John Williams.
That you can write a song on a $20 ukelele doesn't mean that wanting to write a 5-piece band with reverbs, compressors, clean sounds and 24 channels is not a valid artistic endeavour.
That you could buy an 4-track and record some demo-quality material doesn't mean that the PC hasn't lowered to barried to entry, to the point that someone can produce in his garage/bedroom songs that could only be produced with tens of thousands of dollars of studio time.
The same with movie/video production. At best you had access to (expensive) 8 or 16mm film and mighty expensive specialist tools. Now you can have a full blown editing suite, and HD or even 4K cameras for a few thousand dollars.
>Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC.
Postdated and made possible by the personal PC. I didn't say it appeared instantly along the PC. First there was cheap MIDI and sequencers, something that helped tens of thousands of electronic musicians.
>And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs.
This is dense. Of course "machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs". NOW THEY ARE. That's my point.
Again you somehow assume that I said that all those things were made possible the very moment the PC was available -- whereas what I said is that were made possible BY the PC.
The $100,000 price tag is the equivalent of what you get, in sound mangling capacity, with a $2000 PC and a $500 DAW -- recording, reverbs, etc.
Actually, there were synths, like the Fairlight that only ultra rich artists could afford, people like Gabriel, and that costed $25,000 to buy. Now you can get the same exact specs as an $10 iPad app.
>As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills.
Perhaps you've been confused. Artist creativity in the sense of what options artists have to create things. Artists including industrial designers and such. Not in the sense of "how creative an artist is", e.g the quality of his output.
This is about how enmpowering the PC has been for lots of artistic endeavours. E.g not if Bach is better than Depeche Mode, but that Depeche Mode could get the sounds they wanted in the first place.
>Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power".
Not really, it just means "more people than before get a go".
If something was available to X and now is available to 1000*X, that's democratization.
May I remind you that ancient Athenian democracy, one of the fullest and most direct examples of democracy in how the election body operated, excluded women and slaves?
Your rebuttals on the other hand, seem to have retreated into a defence of personal computers in general. I didn't make a comment on that. I said that the -Mac- is not a -truly- -worldwide- -democratisation- when it came to enabling creativity. Those were the words used in the video, in the context of what the video was talking about.
Well, the personal computers in general were lead into the path by the Mac -- the GUI, the image/video/editing capabilities were first emerged in a usable form there (with the notable mention of Atari (for MIDI) and Amiga (for graphics), though those were more fringe machines.
It's only around Windows 95 that PC people started getting into this game on somewhat equal footing (and worse usability for quite a while afterwards).
The Macintosh is largely irrelevant as a platform for CAD. It pretty much always has been.
In the early days this was because it lacked a reasonable facility for floating point hardware. In the middle years it was a combination of small market share, price performance ratios, and limited hardware options leading to many vendors ignoring or abandoning (in the case of AutoDesk) the platform. Things got so bad that even Mac specific software companies such as Diehl Graphisoft and ArchiCad suffered the pain of going dual platform for the sake of survival. Bentley Systems simply dropped Mac.
Today, the Mac version of AutoCAD is gimped, Dessault's big boy toy Catia wants real Unix and their low end Draftsite is still in beta. Here's the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software
Reality doesn't really match the images created via product placement.
Apple ripped all of the features you describe straight from the Amiga. It could barely do sound because Apple Corps kept suing them for trademark infringement.
It's nice to look back at the Macintosh's history with rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, it isn't true, nor is it even remotely indicative of the technology at the time.
I see comments sneering about the "democratization" claim, and while I wouldn't have chosen that word, it's worth keeping in mind that Pagemaker and Photoshop enabled Macs to rival $25K+ dedicated, single-task workstations of the day. They really did revolutionize industries. And they both started their lives as Mac exclusives.
I liked the Amiga, too, and it really was ahead of its time in certain respects, most notably video processing. And it kicked the Mac's ass for years in anything relating to multitasking. And it really did revolutionize video production the same way the Mac revolutionized DTP and image processing. But let's not go overboard and claim that everything the Mac was doing by 1986-87 was somehow "ripped off" from the Amiga. The Amiga certainly got capable layout and image software, but that software wasn't creating markets the way the Toaster was -- or the way Pagemaker and Photoshop did.
(As for sound, well. There's no one hardware/software combination that strikes me as a real paradigm shift in the music sequencing or recording field, certainly not in that era; cheap MIDI interfaces drove that across all platforms. Apple didn't make sound software back then but that certainly didn't mean the Mac wasn't used extensively for it with third-party tools.)
Good try, but no. Graphics and DTP professionals used the Mac. Heck, Photoshop debutted there -- it took several years to even be released for Windows, and several more to be used by proffesional studios on that platform.
Very few used the Amiga. It was mostly used for title work in small TV/video productions in Europe.
In Europe, Atari ST and Amiga ruled in terms of music, DTP, 3D and video production at consumer level, before the PC got widespread.
Mac was always out of reach for most pockets.
Actually I meant to write: it took years for Windows to catch up.
I actually prefer the timeline view (of the same people):
http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
In some ways it's quite remarkable how little has changed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
(The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers somewhere far away from San Francisco.)
The illusion that all designers are on Mac is probably
because HNers don't often meet the ordinary designers who
have a boring corporate job or are struggling freelancers
somewhere far away from San Francisco.
3D artists, however, have been just as consistently Windows-based. I've never met a single one of them with a Mac.
I love Windows, but the recording industry lives on Macs.
- 1984, original Macintosh
- 1985, Jon Appleton, pioneer in electro-acoustical music and key figure in the development of the digital synthesizer
- 1986, April Greiman, seminal figure in the New Wave graphic design movement
- 1987, Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research
- 1988, Ahn Sang-soo, pioneer in Korean typography
- 1989, John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop
- 1990, Craig Hickman, creator of Kid Pix
- 1991, John Maeda, artist and pioneer of motion graphics
- 1992, David Carson, graphic designer and art director of Ray Gun magazine
- 1993, Robyn and Rand Miller, creators of Myst
- 1994, Hans Zimmer, composer
- 1995, Dave McKean, comic book artist and filmmaker
- 1996, Tinker Hatfield, Nike shoe designer
- 1997, Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, creators of Wired magazine
- 1998, Alex Townsend, creator of the Computer Bus that helped bring computer access to Manx schools
- 1999, Moby, electronica artist
- 2000, Nick Knight, prolific fashion photographer
- 2001, Takagi Masakatsu, musician and filmmaker
- 2002, John Stanmeyer, photographer for TIME and National Geographic magazines
- 2003, Philip Jackson, founder of Sportstec that makes sports analysis software
- 2004, Noemi Trainor, principal of Mexico's Varmond School which is spearheading a digital-first educational program
- 2005, Jürgen Mayer H., architect
- 2006, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, co-creators of the Radiolab podcast
- 2007, Nicholas Felton, prolific graphic designer known for his "Feltron Annual Reports[1]" and supposed progenitor of Facebook's timeline
- 2008, Es Devlin, prolific costume designer
- 2009, Dr. Pardis Sabeti, pioneer in genetics research and bioinformatics
- 2010, Dr. Maki Sugimoto, surgeon who uses 3D printing to model patients organs to help prepare for surgery
- 2011, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, co-founders of Codecademy
- 2012, Daito Manabe, artist who specializes in electronic and holographic installations
- 2013, Éric Fournier, Sakchin Bessette, and Dominic Audet, co-founders of Moment Factory
- 2014, the new Mac Pro
[1]: http://feltron.com
Not that it's significantly better, but there are 5 women, not 3: April Greiman, Jane Metcalfe, Noemi Trainor, Es Devlin, and Dr. Pardis Sabeti. However, they did choose Rosetto instead of Metcalfe for 1997's main photo, so there's a case to be made for 4 (though Metcalfe is in the photos when you scroll down).
It just says: Look, in the past 30 years, the Mac was where men did great things. OR, we selected 30 great things that happened in the past 30 years. And men did them. And Apple was there.
Really?
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5307992/inside-the-mind-of...
I've heard of Commodore users having that affinity for C64s and Amiga owners and a few other manufacturers... I've never heard a person say they fell so in love with their Compaq Q2150... There's something special about the Macintosh. I think it's that it's so clear that the manufacturers really cared about the user experience that they inspired the same in the software developers for the platform.
I love writing in C and compiling on OS X, Linux and FreeBSD with the same Makefile!
First external to Bell Labs deployment was in 1972 though.
CLOSEUP OF FINGERS TYPING
VOID_0 I love Macs because they have the unix core, so you can compile anything written for linux servers natively without using a virtual machine.
CLOSEUP OF CODE BEING TYPED
CLOSEUP OF TERMINAL COMPILING CODE
VOID_0 So yeah, that's pretty neat I guess. I mean it's not that flashy or anything, I'm really just using it as a fancy text editor. The build quality of these things is pretty good. All my friends are doing the same thing on cheaper linux computers, but I don't like those as much.
The Mac's 25th anniversary went by rather unremarkably under Steve's management, if I remember correctly. He famously gave the Apple's museum to Stanford as soon as he returned.
A company as old (for this industry) and successful as Apple must always look relentlessly to the future in order not to fall too much in love with its own accomplishments to prevent it from reinventing itself.
Either you are inside their walled garden, or out (the better place for me).
Where's my captive frontend dev to explain this to me when I need him?
This roughly corresponds to the decline and near extinction of the Mac. Having programmers leave your platform is a very, very bad thing.
The number of developers increased in absolute terms just as they did when the iPhone came out, but the ratio of developers to regular users didn't, because the technologies mainstreamed and the sales to regular users were very high.
Back in the pre-acquisition NeXT days, the ratio of developers to users was incredibly high because overall sales weren't that great.
Still, I liked the colorful Macs a lot. They cheered up daily work. A pity, that we are back to gray boxes.
I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.
Windows: People just don't have the same affection for Windows: it tends to be something that's used, grudgingly, often for work, rather than something that people are genuinely pleased by. I'm sure people will disagree, of course, that's just a big generalisation. Also, since Windows is available on a whole range of hardware, it suffers (in this specific regard) from the same fragmentation as Linux: there's isn't so much one single thing to get attached to.
The thing is, Linux doesn't have the PR machine that Apple does, nor the number of fans among journalists, nor the recognition by the public.
They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ("you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their client-base rewriting the entire universe every time they move the goalposts.
For comparison:
MSDOS is 32 years old. Stuff still runs from day one.
Windows is actually 28 years old. Stuff still compiles from day one (windows' original API isn't much different to today's windows). Stuff still runs from circa 1995 on current machines.
Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.
I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple made a different choice, and their platform is all the better for it. I like that they deprecate things and don't keep us held back by ancient technology.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
To quote:
"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
There have only been two instances of that: 68k to PPC and then Mac Toolbox to Cocoa. Carbon held the gap for a number of years by porting Mac Toolbox APIs to use modern things like protected memory. Both of those events were necessary and welcomed changes.
PPC to Intel was not a major rewrite for anyone except people who already knew what they were doing.
What's the problem here? Providing new APIs that reflect the advancements in software technology made in the last 45 years is a _good thing_.
Ergo, mac?
Besides HN links, where one might indicate "autoplay" there are also popup pages that play music and tons of other sources of unwanted audio.
I have seen it on some posts before.
It's Jan 2014, still my power horse and going rock solid, i'm quite happy.
I found this also annoying reading iWoz, it was as though there were no other computers out there at the time, but the Tandy Trash80, the Pet and Sinclair's computers were all doing very nicely when Woz was "inventing" the computer.
What could be probable reasons for the same?
I'm referring to the 'What they did with it" section in Your First Mac page (https://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/).
>What could be probable reasons for the same?
The circles for each year are generated off of the results from the three-question survey Apple is conducting on that page (click the "Tell us about your first Mac" button below the lede). The questions are:
1. Which Mac was yours? (which determines the year)
2. Where were you? (which ostensibly determines which localized site your responses will count towards)
3. How did you use your Mac?
So the size of the gaming circle in a particular year is determined merely by the number of people who filled out that survey, self-reported that they bought their first Mac in that year, and said they used that first Mac for gaming.
But sheesh, this ad is schmaltzy even for me!
The actual photos and stories following the video are MUCH better and I enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane. :-)
It still sort of works but the plastic is all broken off. I should probably throw it away, it was beautiful though.
btw, this post is risky for my karma, but I am always suprised to see very old mac still frequently used.
The glass covering is way easier to clean than my old plastic Mac laptops, and most of their plastic cases are cracking.
0:18 -- Air Review - H
1:10 -- Moderat - Bad Kingdom
1:56 -- Air Review - Young
If you scroll past the video to the timeline, then click on any of the sections, it'll expand and say who the person is and what they did.
apple didn't invent a lot of the technologies they're famous for - the mouse, the windowed GUI, postscript, desktop publishing, etc. they did, however, make it accessible. they took it from the research labs - PARC especially - and let us mere mortals use it.
i recall in the late 80s going in to my dad's engineering offices in middle school to type up papers and have them laser printed. that was revolutionary, a truly transformative moment in computing. it took MS quite some time to come to parity.