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Comment by FigBug | Hacker News Reader

They were entrenched in a few niche markets: Education, Music Production, Desktop Publishing. Photoshop, Pagemaker, ProTools were all Mac first, so that's where the users were and they were locked in due to files, plugins, fonts etc.

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None of that stuff existed yet. We're talking about the CP/M era companies that failed to transition to the IBM PC era, essentially pre-Mac, though some of them did last into the late eighties, IIRC.

Oops. Misread "survive to the 90s" as "survive the 90s"

Technically, Atari and Commodore survived to the 90's but both were gone by the mid 90's. Along with Jay Miner, sadly.

[edit] I often wonder if there had been a in the same price range, better 16-bit or 32-bit successor to the 6502 would things have turned out differently?

Those things did come to exist in the '80s, and they were what helped the Mac to survive that decade. PageMaker and the Apple LaserWriter were announced on the same day in early 1985. And while by the late '90s it was mostly lock-in and loyalty that were keeping graphics and publishing professionals on the Mac, in the late '80s the Macintosh clearly was the best platform for GUI print and graphics applications (unless you considered workstation systems maybe, which most users weren't doing). Windows didn't take off until version 3.0 in 1990; Photoshop wasn't available for it until 1992. (Photoshop itself wasn't so dominant at that stage though.) The Mac was the flagship platform even for Microsoft's GUI office software: both Word and Excel were originally Mac software, Word for Windows didn't arrive until '89, and WinWord didn't become a hit until Windows 3.0 and WinWord 1.1 in 1990. In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that "core" Microsoft—the MS that dominated computing with Windows and Office, rather than the earlier company that produced good BASICs and got lucky with MS-DOS—was fundamentally a Macintosh ISV (a good Macintosh ISV, mind you) that got ideas above its station.

That's how I remember it. The Mac came out only four years after the IBM PC and allowed Apple to sew up the GUI market for about five years. They were able to maintain a big quality edge for far longer.

Apple also introduced the first LAN (Apple Talk in 1985) you could set up pretty much by just connecting your Macs with a cable. I recall working at places where the only way you could transfer data between the PCs was by floppy, but people who had managed to convince management they needed a Mac were all wired together. Microsoft didn't introduce Windows for Workgroups for another seven years.

If Apple had tried to evolve the II series they probably wouldn't have survived.

A well kept secret was that Apple sold an AppleTalk card for the IBM PC, which was hands down the easiest way to network PCs. That's how I laser printed my dissertation. ;-)

The Apple II could not evolve. It was locked down by the expectation that new systems would run old software, and the old software made all kinds of nonstandard system calls, e.g., jumping into the middle of system routines to save one or two cycles. In other words, Apple didn't know their own software interface. Even upgrading to the IIe was a heroic undertaking. This experience is why, I believe, the Mac was always a closed system.

Well, there was Novell NetWare some time before Windows for Workgroups arrived. Of course the crushing of NetWare was a major campaign in Microsoft's war for dominance over personal computing.

Sure, but NetWare was the industrial strength solution. It was too expensive to set it up at home or at a company with fifty employees.

They pioneered cheap network hardware with NE2000.

Who would be crazy enough to network 50 endpoints over slow serial daisy chain? Arcnet was another story, but not significantly cheaper.

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