Thirty years ago, Apple introduced the Macintosh with the promise to put the creative power of technology in everyone’s hands. It launched a generation of innovators who continue to change the world. This 30-year timeline celebrates some of those pioneers and the profound impact they’ve made.
Apple is also asking what your first Mac experience was. For me, it was a computer I had saved up for for a long time. Back in those days – around 2002-2003 – the Mac was virtually non-existent here in The Netherlands (or at least in the area where I lived), and the only place I’d ever seen Macs was at the dental department. Colourful iMacs – fun machines.
In any case, I was intrigued, and eventually bought an iMac G4 800Mhz. In my view, the most beautiful design the iMac ever had, but mine eventually died of a logic board failure within a few years (a notorious problem). I still think they’re beautiful little machines, and would love to have the ultimate G4 iMac.
After that first iMac, I owned several Macs – an original iMac, a PowerBook G4 15″, a PowerMac G4 dual 450Mhz, a Cube, my current iMac from 2012, and my favourite, a 12.1″ iBook G4. There’s one Mac I really want to add to my collection as soon as possible: the iBook G3/466 Special Edition. If you have one of these and would like to get rid of it – let me know.
You should check out the Low End Mac swap list. While it’s US oriented, there are some people on there willing to ship internationally. And there may be some European users on there too. I’ve had lots of good trades on there over the past few years; it’s full of great people who happen to be classic Mac aficionados.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lemswap
My first Mac experience was the first iMac with that horrible hockey puck mouse. I believe this was the first computer/gadget that ushered in the era of style over substance, and got people to care about what color it comes in more than anything else. And I hated it with a passion, not only for this reason, but because the whole thing just sucked ass. OSX is better, but I don’t like it much either, and wasn’t happy when MS added the OSX-style dock to Windows 7.
My first Mac was a Mac II in 1987. I was part of a small design and print cooperative and we became convinced that desk top publishing was the future. So we borrowed the money and bought a Mac II with a huge memory of 8 Mbt of memory, a LaserWriter, a big screen (CRT and the size of a small refrigerator) and Pagemaker software. I wasn’t the group page lay out worker so I didn’t actually use it during the working day but I stayed on after work most days so I could learn how to use it and learn Pagemaker and I fell in love with the technology. I had used CPM and DOS based PCs before but using the Mac was like travelling to another dimension, I was in love with the thing.
I didn’t get a Mac at home until sometime in the early 1990s when I got a second hand Mac IIci. It had a modem and I still remember the utter thrill I had when after the usual whistling and buzzing a managed to download an actual small programme to run on my computer. I couldn’t believe you could get software through the phone line.
OK this is seriously cultish but I couldn’t resist it. Apple has created a custom font that depicts each Mac model from the past three decades. Story and download link here:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/how-to-get-apples-custom-font-cele…
My first “mac” experience was Hackintosh 7.x While I am a big fan of Apple designs and products, I will never buy anything from them.
My dad had bought a Macintosh SE for around $2000 when he was the editor of a small newspaper and did desktop publishing with Quark Xpress. Later, as a journalist, he started uploading stories and (though I think his memory is faulty on this one) apparently photographs via Compuserve to the central office, which was unheard of at the time.
My parents paid an enormous sum of money to upgrade to 2 MB of RAM. I still remember them opening our Mac up on the kitchen table and how tightly packed everything was. They shooed me away, worried that if I so much as breathed on it the machine would collapse.
I started using the Mac when I was 6 to play shareware games and soon I asked my dad how I could make my own. After thinking about it for a while, he made a copy of the game “GunShy” on the desktop and renamed the file “My Game.” Double clicking on the “new” game was one of the most tense moments of my childhood. I really thought that there was a possibility that the computer had read my mind and magically generated a game according to my specifications!
That old Mac SE sits in my apartment now, some 20-something years after it was purchased. Still works with all the original components, save for the upgraded RAM. The HDD is starting to die, but I’ve looked into this and–it seems too incredible to believe–apparently modern SCSI drives can be made to work as replacements.
Thanks, Mac =)
EDIT: My family could barely afford to pay our bills at the time, it’s really incredible that my dad purchased such an expensive machine. But it had a huge impact on me. Like a lot of other people I know, I pay my bills as a programmer/engineer using computer skills that I’ve built up through my education, but I like to think that I have a very fundamental “feel” for computers that is less common. I think this is due to the fact that I grew up with one from a very young age, kind of like how “car guys” grew up in their dads’ garages.
I think it’s clear that the next “Macintosh SE’s” will be 3D printing machines. When I have kids, I hope to have a top-of-the-line machine for them to explore with.
Edited 2014-01-24 21:56 UTC
Similar in many ways to my own story. My dad was given a “computer” to work on by his newspaper. It wasn’t a Mac. I kind of suspect it was a one of the first Compaqs. But my first experience with a mac was the mac se as well. My parents were friends with the principal of the elite private school in town. He let us into their computer lab filled with Mac secomputers. I really preferred the c64 I was allowed to play with at home, where I had to write any software I wanted to use. Macs seemed too easy. I think that was due to the limited software on them and the lack of an obvious programming interface.
In a different life that passed not too long ago, I was a history Ph.D. student doing my research in the Vatican Secret Archives. I was using texts from the 1300’s and 1400’s as part of my dissertation research.
The information systems at the Vatican archives are sometimes reminiscent of Harry Potter. For example, the main catalog for the archives’ medieval collections is literally a manuscript written by hand in the eighteenth century, and although there were poor-quality photocopies stored elsewhere researchers used the original manuscript that was kept in the reading room. It’s strange to think that so much of our knowledge of the past depends on a single book kept in a single room. (Keep in mind that the Vatican Secret Archives are one of the most important sources in the world for our knowledge of medieval history, both secular and religious.)
When I actually began to request the manuscripts for my research, however, I was surprisingly handed a stack of CD’s. These CD’s contained high-resolution JPEG scans of the originals, which date back to the 300’s. (Yes, this means that the archives’ collections are entirely digitized and have been for some time, although they refuse to release the images to the public.)
So how does this relate to Mac’s? Well, once I received the CD’s, I was only allowed to view the JPEG’s in a special reading room filled with…iMac G4’s, the same kind that Thom likes so much.
wow incredible story!!! Hey, I’m even happier to be a catholic apple fanboy now haha
Did you find something interesting/secret in the papers? Like Jesus was married or something like that? xD
Haha, no nothing secret. The “secret” in the archives’ name (Latin: Archivum Secretum Vaticanum) simply means “separate” in Latin. Traditionally the Vatican’s various departments would file their documents in their own buildings. Alternatively, often the heads of the departments would treat them as personal property and they would end up in the archives of various noble Italian families. In contrast, the separate/”secret” archives were established to house the documents separately from the departments. They were considered the Pope’s archive, kind of a bureaucratic reform intended to improve recordkeeping. Kinda boring once you learn the truth =P
I did find some important stuff, however, about Africans in Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Turns out that Europe did *not* discover Africa; it was the other way around! Alas, that is a story for another day…
The Romans had colonies in Africa over 2000 years ago.
You’re right to point out the fact that the Romans had colonies in Africa (and the Greeks, and the Phoenicians, and the…) That fact alone shows how arbitrary our narratives of European “discovery” really are. For that matter, it suggests how arbitrary “Africa” or any other continent is. I’m sure this resonates with many people OSNews since it’s basically the same issue we face when we talk about “revolutionary innovation” in consumer tech.
So “the discovery of Africa” is really more a term of art than an absolute idea. It usually refers to the fifteenth-century Portuguese voyages to sub-Saharan Africa. The tagline for my dissertation was “The African discovery of Europe,” something sure to grab eyeballs.
My real point, however, was to undermine the whole notion of the Renaissance as this revolutionary break from the Middle Ages. One of the commonly cited starting points of the Renaissance is the supposedly seminal European global outthrust (e.g., Portuguese in Africa, Columbus in 1492) that supposedly brought Europe into regular contact with supposedly exotic people. But the documents I found demonstrated that Africans (Ethiopians, specifically) were highly esteemed guests in courts from Germany to Spain to Switzerland to France, greatly sought after by princes and popes. They were given military escorts, their likenesses were carved into the doors of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, the possibility of royal marriages (!) between the Ethiopian emperor and Catalan kings was even raised. This all happened well before Europe overcame its “medieval isolation” in the fifteenth century.
Yeah, the middle ages should be coinned as dark ages actually.
It always amazes me how we, as society, were so developed in the greek/roman days, only to loose all of that during the middle ages.
Not to mention all the knowledge that was lost thanks to the fire in Alexandria and the books that were burned during inquisition times.
Not to mention what we lost when the Mongols siege Baghdad, the Tigris apparently ran black with the ink of the books that were thrown into it.
We’re pretty lucky that the Mongols had a funeral because that was the only thing that turned them around and stopped them from sacking the whole of Europe too.
Edited 2014-01-26 13:52 UTC
Nah, historians shun the 2nd term; and we actually moved away from calling them dark ages (that was the term used by the next epoch, which also called itself in superlatives…)
Middle ages were also a time of progress, remodelling of society on a path to modernity.
He probably was …back then, not many people would treat an unmarried man of his age seriously.
My first Mac experience was with the first PowerPC based PowerMacs, 6100s I think. We got them at university in 1994, I think, and we all we ran on them (in my classes at least) was:
– MS-Dos based m68k emulator
– In a vm86 virtual dos box.
– In an emulated Windows PC virtual machine
– Using emulated m68k MacOS
– On a PowerPC.
For its time, the PowerPC 601 was a screaming CPU, and we made it work for it’s living.
My only other Mac experience was chucking MacOS 9 off an old original iMac (blue, I think, 233MHz) at work, and loading Debian onto it. That was a bit much for the installed 64MB, so I ponied up for an upgrade to 96MB, after which it ran like a dream (after replacing that stupid puck with a proper 3 button mouse.)
Happy days.
I want Mac, but it’ll probably be a long time before I plop down the cash for one. I prefer cheap computers. The last Macintosh I had was an LCII, which I ran NetBSD on. It was long out-dated by the time I got my hands on it.
I would like to get my hands on a Quadra 650, though, because I am immensely intrigued by A/UX:
http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html
It’s weird that after all the false starts, dead end projects, and huge corporate reorganization that had to occur to get MacOS X out, they essentially wound up with A/UX.
Probably the biggest difference was A/UX was a true SysV Unix, rather than the BSD/Mach hybrid that OSX is.
It was very nice in some ways: fantastic keyboard … well, fantastic keyboard. It also happened to be the most unstable and bug-ridden computer I’ve ever had the pleasure to use (I owned an Abit BP6 dual Celeron some years previous). Of course, Apple also did all they could to force it into obsolescence, so re-installing OS X (which was mandatory now and then) was something of a chore: first I had to install 10.2, and then Xpostfacto, and then 10.3, the first usable version of OS X.
It made me realise that a Mac is expensive to buy, and even more expensive to own. Highly overrated.
If it wasn’t buggy broken scripttard bull thrown together by some PSD jockey who doesn’t know enough about building websites to be doing so.
I hate artsy-fartsy crap form over function bull… probably why I’m not a big fan of Mac’s, even if I’ve got a G3 toilet seat (sitting in parts in a bin right now) and a SE. (which just got a 16mhz 68020 Radius board and a 160 meg drive added to it).
Of course the real laugh for me is despite their wild rewriting of their importance in the history of computers, I never even encountered an Apple of any sort until junior high; a laugh since I’d been knee deep in microcomputers since ’77, my first being an Elf I built myself. Never even heard of or knew anyone who owned an Apple in their home until the early ’90’s — TRS-80, Sinclair, Atari, Commodore, even Coleco — sure, tons of them. Apple? YEAH RIGHT!
Admittedly, I’m in Wayne Green country.
… and it’s so badly written a poll it doesn’t even track attempts via cookies, much less IP or any other method…
So the script kiddies on 4chan/g already have a greasemonkey script up to stuff it; possibly to the point of DoS on it too.
Some real kooality with a capitol K right there. Seriously, how do web developers this inept get their jobs, much less keep them?!?
Oh thats right, ignorant suits with checkbooks who think they can get sound IT advice from the pages of Forbes, which is the equivalent of getting financial advice from Popular Electronics.
Apple, for and by people who don’t know anything about computers — and it shows.
oh please.
apple engineers are some of the best in the business.
don’t confuse marketing company webmasters with apple engineers.
Oh PULLEEZE… you’re talking the same asshats that intentionally crippled PCMCIA slots so the only thing that works in them are buffalo adapters, then called it ‘airport’, underclocked 500mhz G3 processors in the toilet seat 266mhz iBooks so they could put insulating foam around them instead of heat sinks and fans — resulting in burning holes clear through the dialup adapters… You’re talking the jackasses who flipped ground and slave select on IDE ports to try and cripple the ability to use third party optical drives. You’re talking the dumbasses who designed systems like the G4 cube or WORSE, the Apple 3 where thanks to Jobbo the clown’s rampant hatred of fans heated up the solder enough for chips to literally fall out of their boards!!! There’s a reason people often joke “Apple wouldn’t know proper cooling if it stripped naked, painted itself purple and hopped up on a table to sing “Oh look at what a big cooling fan I am!”
Just look at a G5 tower for proof of that; where typically the processor spends it’s entire life thermally throttled down.
… and that’s before we talk them having all the non-standard sleazeball ‘genius’ of Packard Bell. If it wasn’t for the reality distortion field making investors wet their panties, Apple would have gone the way of Packard Hell AGES AGO…
Apple Engineering is damned near an oxymoron… though entirely what happens when you let the artsy-fartsy types who know nothing of actual engineering or design run things.
Trust me, I used to be an Apple service tech — though at the time all that involved was a 2 hour class on how to use their RMA system since there really was no such thing as fixing an Apple. Dead optical drive in the G3/G4 age you were lucky in most cases if the owner got the same MODEL machine back.
Edited 2014-01-28 03:06 UTC
All the stuff you mention is a decade old though.
wow angry much?
care to list the asshat maneuvers by every collective PC engineer since 1982? that list would dwarf your “apple makes minuscule product decisions every few years that affect my stupid job” list. your list was a bunch of “so what” when you compare against the basic use of a computer every day of your life. like non-apple machines never fail? pleeeeze.
i’m talking total product — total life, total cost of ownership, total customer satisfaction.
if apple engineers were such asshats why are they able to constantly create something smaller, lighter, more energy efficient, with tighter tolerances and lower failure rates (of course all equalling higher resale value) than anything else on the planet?
c’mon – they all use the same base materials and many of the same parts. but start drop testing the pretty apples against competitors and those asshat engineers start looking pretty amazing.
c’mon, anyone wanna drop test their non-apple against my apple?
i have lived with an apple or two in my bag/pocket for decades now and they are built MUCH BETTER than other brands. Thats engineering friend, to be able to deliver that product with that build quality at a market rate.
Sometimes it’s hard to discern which group is more fundamentalist/absolutist; the Apple haters or the Apple fans.
My experience too. MacOS Apples were as rare as rocking horse shit in Australia.
I started on a DEC10 and PDP-11s in 1982. Bought a C64 in 1983. Used DOS and Windows. I saw my first Apple in 1993 and didn’t use one until 1995.
I suspect this is the case for most of the world outside the U.S (and maybe also in the U.S).
I hadn’t seen a Mac until the mid 90’s and that was like once and I didn’t see another one for a the longest time.
Plenty of Amiga’s, C64’s, TI-99’s, Spectrum’s & PC’s though. Apple was kinda like “Oh, so you’re not a real computer user then?”
Yes. In Canada, Apple products were monstrously expensive compared to other computers. The very first time I saw anything Apple was in 1987 – an Apple IIc in a store closing “blowout clearance sale” for $1300. I thought the price was a misprint. This was an out-of-box demo model with gummy stickers on it! When the sales lady said the price wasn’t a misprint, I swore loudly in disbelief. Earlier that year I had bought a brand new CoCo III for $99.
When I first saw Macs in a computer store a few years later, my mind was blown again looking at prices from $3800 to $8000. My Amiga 500 cost $700. No wonder nobody I knew back then owned Apple products.
Of course, the same was true with IBM PCs. I never saw a real IBM until decades later. I only started seeing PCs around 1990 when the clone market picked up.
When AMD won a legal battle with Intel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am386#History_and_design
Yeah, the first Macs I saw & used were high school machines …the ~dozen of them (plus another ~dozen at the 2nd high school) probably the only Macs in a ~20k city.
And by the time I used them (98-2000), they were quite antiquated – Macintosh Classic and LC475 models. Generally, how such expensive machines ended up in schools always seemed kinda shady – in Poland, a country in economic hardships throughout most of the 90s, and ripe with corruption.
In homes people had Commodore 64, Ataris, Amigas, and then, around the turn of millennium, PCs…
Edited 2014-01-29 22:13 UTC
I haven’t had a Mac experience yet and not exactly looking to have one either.
the same here. my only contact with Apple products was configuring things on coworkers/clients iPhones
My first Mac was a PowerMac G3 B&W that I bought back in 1999 at a webstore called “Submarino” here in Argentina (it bankrupted few years later hehe, bubble times).
I always loved the Macs (since the first time I’ve seen one in 1988) but I had PCs and Amigas instead cause Macs were very fucking expensive here in Buenos Aires. Being a poor boy sucks haha
But well… since 1999 I used Mac exclusively, OS9 first and then OSX, never looked back. I don’t care about any other platform for personal use (at work I use linux, cause I’m a unix admin.. sucks hard as desktop but I have no other option… it’s a company policy).
As I always say: I don’t mind, I can use Linux or Windows… as long as you pay me to do it!!! hahaha
My first Mac experience was on the Macintosh LCIII running System 7 in my dad’s office at the local community college. I would hang out there on days off of school and play with the Macintosh.
Various memories:
playing Hangman and Sokoban
an adorable little animated tutorial that taught you how to use the mouse by having you do stuff like move things around the desk in a virtual office and feed the virtual fish. There was a funny looking animated man wearing a black Apple sweatshirt who guided your progress.
I was fooling around once with changing the system alert sound and I think I “broke” something while clicking the same sound rapidly over and over, because the sounds never played quite right after that.
a neat utility called Scrapbook. I was fascinated by the full color map that was on one of the pages.
wondering why you couldn’t put a photograph as the background image, and could only make weird patterns with colored dots on a different background color.
a general fascination with the full-color, stylized and pixelated graphics.
The university had a Mac room for students and a few teachers used them as well.
In Portugal the Macs were bloody expensive, you could only find them used on universities, mostly.
There was only one shop for the whole country in the capital, Interlog, that acted as Apple representative.
PC, Atari ST and Amiga systems were much more affordable and easier to find.
The GUI and hardware systems from Atari and Amiga systems were way better that what those Macs offered.
One example, is that as far as I am aware, there was zero demoscene on the Mac.
I had the pleasure of working @ Xerox in Rochester NY in 1983 on their Alto and Star workstations. So the “€œobvious†choice for a personal computer was a Mac. I’ve been “€œmousing aroundâ€Â€Â ever since:
1985: 512K Fat Mac w/“ ext 3 1/2″ floppy disk drive w/ the imagewriter printer. My brother still has the machine, inside back case signed by the Mac Team.
– Upgraded 2x: first was to 2MB memory + SCSI Port
– Second was 68030, (aka SE/30) &€“ 4MB RAM, faster SCSI port
1988 – Quadra 700 (one of the “€œfinestâ€Â mechanically designed boxes ever! ) w/19†CRT and the Quickdraw Laser printer.
1992 – Mac Clone from Motorola, PowerPC 603e based. upgraded printer to handle Postscript w/Accelerator box.
2000 -€“ original clamshell iBook, orange & still packed away @ my mom’s.
2001 – PowerMac G4, Quicksilver, 867 MHz G4, Maxed memory (896MB, go figure), 19†LCD setup. First OS X box. Added 2nd HDD &€“ still have this system stored away.
2002 – 12†iBook (white) – great travel machine. . . Still have this too. Found out later that this was a left-over from State of Maine program, since it’s not “white” but “opaque” (battery replaced, that how I know). Had WiFi, which wasn’t “stock” in those days.
2012 – 15†MBP – my workhorse now. Quad i7, 8G RAM, 500GB HDD
Absolutely the “€œbestâ€Â€Â machines on the planet. . . Bar none!
My first Mac was the Macintosh Performa 6200CD. I remember my elementry school had all Macs in the classroom which included the all in one mac’s (the 5200CD I believe) and at the time, Apple was running Saturday morning infomercials about a family that decided to get a Mac and it’s benefit. Soon (or rather after 2 months of constant whining to my Dad lol), we drove down to Sears and purchased the 6200CD for about $2000. I still remember the box: it was HUGE. Looked like the size of our washing machine because it included the 15″ monitor and the CPU and all. Mac’s even back then had a style because they all came in a nice white-beige color that was cool and less yellowish than PC counterparts. Heck they even had a microphone included which till this day I will say was the best PC Microphone I’ve ever used. I remember running Clariswork, eWorld, and a bunch of other programs. I remember the first time I received a Fax from my uncle in Bangladesh on the Mac and my Dad saying “Wow, how advanced has this world become” lol. Mind you this was 1993 or 1994.
Ofcourse as we hit close to 1995, and Windows 95 was released, things began to change. Eventually after doing limited things on the Mac, things began to die down. I got tired of playing power pete all day and wished Mac’s had more games. Then one day my brother got a present in the mail from Mac Play and we loaded up the original Wolfenstein remastered for Mac by Mac Play. It was AMAZING. Then we we would get some games and Macs seemed cool again. As I got older, that Mac had become to get slower and slower. We had problems and we invested in buying a whopping 4MB of additional ram so now we had 12MB of ram in total. Things didn’t seem that much different. Then the logic board had issues and Apple came and replaced it with a 6300CD logic board, essentially a free upgrade but seemed to be the same to me. AOL 3.0 was released and it brought in some new life for the Mac until eventually we bought our first PC and the Mac was eventually garbaged. It just sat there and took up too much space.
God I wish I didn’t throw out that old Mac
A little edit:
After speaking to my dad, he says the price was almost $4000. WOW!
I started working on a Mac in 1996 when I got a job at De Digitale Stad (The Digital City), a free Internet provider set up by XS4ALL and the city of Amsterdam. It was very easy to learn how to use it as it was nearly identical to using a Commodore Amiga.
One day the Mac was gone, replaced by a Windows 95 PC. The Mac was sitting disconnected in a corner. I reconnected it, but a few days later the Windows PC was back and the Mac gone. Later I found it in the attic and offered to buy it, but this was rejected.
I got my hands on a Macintosh Plus ED, just for fun. I was able to access the Internet on it by dialing in to DDS and XS4ALL and doing my stuff on their remote UNIX shells. My Amiga 1200 and a Windows 3.1 (later 95) were my main machines.
While this Mac was cute I couldn’t do much with it. Small b/w screen, no hard disk.
In 2005 my employer told me to buy a computer for working from home. I bought an iMac G5. It replaced my Linux PC. At first I wasn’t too happy though. OS X 10.3 Panther wasn’t that great, the mail client didn’t understand my IMAP subfolders and I didn’t know which browser to use, MSIE or Safari. Both were crap. I did enjoy my iPod Mini. Still the best iPod I owned and used it alone during my train travels.
OS X 10.4 Tiger was a mayor improvement, now the iMac was starting to become usable.
In 2006 I got a MacBook, 2007 an Intel iMac and in 2012 my latest iMac. Meanwhile I collected a number of Macs. A few G3s, a G4, a Powermac, a couple of classic ones (SE, LC, Plus). Also a few MessagePads, eMates.
For work I now use an iMac at home and at work, a Windows 8 PC and a Windows 7 IBM Thinkpad (from 2005, upgraded with memory and SSD) and a MacBook Pro.
On my Commodore 64 I used to play The Bard’s Tale, but just before completing it I switched to an Amiga. Now I’m playing it again on a Macintosh SE FDHD. I’ve got 2 Archmages so I’m preparing for my assault on the castle.
While these classic Macs are cute and fun, I would have never bought one when they were new. Small b/w screen, limited in what it could do and rather expensive. For me it was the Commodore 64/128 and then Amiga.
I get the feeling many youngsters only know Macs from the more recent OS X versions and have absolute no idea how the early models used to be.
I never cared that much for them, as I mentioned one another thread. When I did a trainship at CERN, I got to discover lots of old books there about Mac OS development.
For me it seemed that my Windows 3.x coding days were much more pleasant than what was described in those books. Specially given the break from Object Pascal into C and the MPW tools.
These classic Macs are cute and fun to play with, but it’s hard imagine anyone buying one new in the 80’s and be happy with it. Unless you were in to laser writers and DTP I guess.
For a lot less money you have an Amiga or Atari ST.
If someone gave me a Mac back then I’d sit and stare it wondering what to do with it. Hell, I’d prefer a 2nd hand Commodore 64 over a Macintosh because it had the games and software.
It’s sad when you read a brief history of the computer at home it goes from Apple to IBM, to Mac, to Windows. Two decades of Apple vs IBM & Microsoft. Where’s Commodore and all the other players?
Apple was a very small player, certainly in people’s homes. The Macintosh in 1984 was their 80’s high light, but for ordinary people it was a commercial and nothing more. Most people couldn’t afford one and if you had one you couldn’t do much with it.
I use mine to Play the Bard’s Tale, because it doesn’t take up much space on my desk thanks to the builtin screen.
i agree with your overall point but i wouldn’t call apple a bit player in people’s homes in the 80’s. lots of people in my area, middle class and upper middle class, had apple II’s.
plus most schools had apple II’s on carts that rolled around, if not set in the class permanently.
the price of the atari’s, commodores, tandys was nice. i bought an Atari shortly after learning the basics on a Tandy Coco1 and Coco2. i couldn’t afford an apple until college when i got a loan (from apple) to get my first one, and the whole rig cost.. .. .. … .. . $4500!!! holy shit. it was a midlevel machine with good monitor, printer, and a software package. man prices have really come down.
apple’s were the most expensive back then, but they were also the closest to professional. i know amigas were big in television and animation, and atari st’s did midi before anyone else, but each platform was a mess.
believe me, i worked television when we had amigas as our chyro and graphics machines, and the things crashed every hour. it was a dead end and people were pushing apple to add the amiga features, which they did slowly.
atari st did midi audio well but that was such tiny market. and believe me atari was dead before that machine even shipped. people weren’t using general purpose computers to record and edit audio until the mac and early pro-tools in the mid 90’s.
You are right, but I was refering more to the Macintosh offerings. They didn´t offer much to a broad audience and were too expensive for it as well.
The Apple ][ line was great and a much better fit for most people. I still have getting one on my wish list as I want to play Ultima on it.
Amiga´s are great, but indeed crashed a lot when doing serious work. Games did fine though.
the first mac i messed around with was a dual g5 powermac
that thing felt slow even compared to my 500mhz laptop running xp
i was quite surprised by that…
First experience was with Macintosh at school powered with Mac OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh_classic.jpg
To this day, the system still has interesting issue of crashing the port (floppy to usb) when abruptly remove it. OSX still has that bug.
Who still uses floppies with OS X?
Anyway, we also had Mac Classics in high school. Our setup included System Blesser so we could switch between System 6 in English and ChineseTalk so we could do proper typesetting for the Chinese page of the school paper.
I do, not often, to transfer files to my Mac SE.
The bug I encounter is that it all works fine, until I eject the disk and reinsert the same or another disk again. It won’t work. I have to re-plug the USB floppy drive first.
Maybe there’s something wrong with your drive, mine works nice even with Mavericks. Which is quite surprising.
Yes, could be. I don’t use it often enough to buy a new one. It’s a minor annoyance.
I’m pretty sure the Mac Classic didn’t have USB…
Except OS X has nothing to do with classic Mac OS.
In some ways yes, the old bug that caused a floppy drive port to crash until reboot by ejecting it without unmounting first in Mac OS seems inherited by OS X with the USB. 100% reproducible on any version of OS X including Marverick meaning Apple still hasn’t fixed. It might be different OS but it seems sharing the same functional code. Try it yourself.
How come?!
Classic Macs did not have USB ports as far as I can remember.
The OS was mostly written in Object Pascal, with some pieces done in a mix of C and C++ (PowerPlant) in the later OS generations.
Mac OS X code comes mainly from NeXT, with device drivers (IO Kit) being written in Embedded C++.
Which code do you mean they could at all share?!
I see the confusion. In my original post, I realized I unintentionally forgot that part: the bug that caused floppy drive port to crash on Macintosh Classic without unmounting first is still present on modern Mac with USB port.
You can write similar algorithm to different language but retain similar problem .
Mac SE – still runs. With external 40mb hard drive.
My first Mac was an iBook G4 12″. Absolutely loved the machine, it was smaller than the usual notebooks and came with the same price tag, just a bit underpowered, and with two batteries I could run it for the whole day. It was funny to watch the other guys in the student room fighting over a wall socket.
Now I’m on a MBP 15″ Retina and wouldn’t swap it for anything else.
getting computer users to pay two or three times the price for hardware specs that are mediocre at best. Apple is also celebrating its monopoly power with regards to patenting the obvious and then squashing any competition, or at least it tries…seems open source Android has proven a bit tough for it to tackle. But then again, it can always intimidate the the phone manufacturers themselves by patent trolling.
I saw through Apple’s facade decades ago and will never own any of their hardware. But then again, when one purchases an overpriced Apple device one never really owns it, rather; one merely uses the device under Apple’s strict supervision.
I was fortunate enough to avoid exposure to Apple’s computers until the late 90s (exposure to their fanboys on usenet was bad enough without having to deal with the actual computers). Then the company that I worked for hired an in-house designer, who wasn’t capable of working on anything other than a Mac.
He had one of the early beige G3 “power” Macs, with a internal Zip drive as a BTO option. One day, he couldn’t get a disk to eject – then on reboot, it wasn’t recognized at all, meaning there was no longer even the option to eject (thanks to Apple’s long-running obsessive hatred of physical eject buttons*).
To compound bad design with even more bad design, the only method to physically eject the disk was to use the “paperclip hole”… except the hole in the front of the case didn’t line up with the actual eject hole in the drive. So getting the disk out required removing the front of the case, just to get at the eject hole.
And that was one of Apple’s better-designed systems, especially compared to some of the crap they came out with later. The eMac, for example, has possibly the worst internal design of any desktop computer I’ve ever seen. It’s like someone at Apple deliberately set out to create a kiln/torture chamber for hard drives
*Pre-iMac, you could walk into an office with all of the computers removed and still easily spot the desks belonging to Mac users – they’d be the ones with a collection of straightened paperclips for ejecting stuck diskettes, thanks to Apple’s hilariously unreliable software-triggered eject.
someone named “ballmer known best” commenting about bad design?
wow
Yawn. Come back when you discover the “Shift” key, son.
We started seeing the first Mac brochures and such around campus in February of ’84. I recall going to a computer store to see the machine. My friend just sat there moving the mouse back and forth across the menu bar going “Wow!” as the menus came and went.
Later, we got a Mac store on campus, and I bought my own 128K machine for $1480, plus a box of floppies for $40 *cough*.
First development system I got for it was a first cut UCSD Pascal that basically had Quickdraw support and not much else. I spent an entire evening creating my own “button”.
I later managed to get a hold of the more modern UCSD system. We tried to compile a simple program, and as we only had a single drive, that compile took at least 40 disk swaps, and eventually failed. We didn’t do that again.
Later tacked on a $400 400K Floppy, and bought Aztec C — with it’s shell command line clone tools and vi clone. I also got a 512k upgrade from a shady office in Pasadena.
Eventually got Think Pascal — that was one of the best early development solutions for the Mac.
A formative moment, however was going to a MacFest ’85, and meeting a guy showing me the original Apple port of the Xerox SmallTalk on a Mac Plus. That was a great experience. This was the same Apple port that formed the foundation of Squeak in the mid-90’s, based on the original Xerox image.
I used to bungie the Mac on the back of my scooter, with the padded mac case that we all had. Dragging it to user group meetings, etc. That was great fun. Definitely part of the Mac culture at the time.
Upgraded it to the HFS ROMS and 800K drives, and eventually sold it for $750, using the money to buy a motorcycle (best trade I’ve ever done). That was ’88 or so.
I didn’t own another computer, save for a TRS-80 Model 100, until I bought my NeXTStation in 1993. I owned the Slab before I even got my first PC. I also later bought a Powerbook 520C.
Now I have a first gen, 8 year old Mac Pro, eyeing the new one, but not quite convinced yet.
Crossroads.
Mine was with shitty old Macs in elementary school back in the early to mid 1990s. Sorry, but that word is the only one I find fitting to describe those things, because those machines crashed harder than the Windows 95 systems I used around that same time period… and that’s quite an accomplishment. Their speed (or more accurately, the lack thereof) and instability was amazing. Needless to say, I didn’t have too pleasant an experience with those systems…
Yet, I have to admit, that there was *something* about the OS’ interface that I kind of liked. Yet at the same time, there was a lot I despised. In general, I primarily stayed a Windows user and shunned Macs, until I left Windows for Linux back in 2006 (and yes, to this day, I still shun Macs and, more specifically, Apple products in general).
Though my first mac was an early 2009 White MacBook, I loved these machines since I read about the Quadra 700 and 900 computers (circa 1991) in a computer magazine when I was a kid. I never was able to see one of them “live” but the specs and the amazing “System 7” on them were really impressive.
Edited 2014-01-27 03:17 UTC
My first Mac experience is not from owning it. In the late 80s there was a traveling Amrican exposition. It was called Designed in America or sth along those lines. It came to my country – Bulgaria – which was, at the time, still under the old communist regime. I had just started with computers courtesy of the Apple ][ clones manufactured in Bulgaria (Pravetz-82).
Anyway, one of the exhibits in the expo was a classic Mac. It looked like alien technology. There was a Bulgarian guy sitting at the computer and using some program to paint a woman’s face. I guess he was a painter because he drew it very nicely although I’d think it was his first time using such program. At some point there were tears in his eyes and down his cheeks. I don’t know why. But I’ll never forget this.
I didn’t buy my first until about 1994. It had a PowerPC 601 and a boring grey pizza box case. PowerMac 7100/66AV I believe, was the pre-Jobs’ model number.
I used to to do multitrack audio production on that machine, radio production and sound for video. I don’t remember windows users in 1994 even trying to challenge me to switch. I had quicktime built in, stable audio drivers, and some early PCI-based interface.
Used to run software named Deck from a long-gone company called OSC (purchased by Macromedia, also now gone).
People just don’t know. Besides the Amiga, no one else was in media production. Windows boxes ran the front office, accounting, stuff that didn’t touch any media files. Just like DTP and marketing – don’t let windows even touch that file, or you will have all sorts of problems with it down the line.
It was around the time of WinXP that some media production started to be done on Windows. Don’t rewrite history, or make it seem like “the one weird designer” used a mac. almost ALL designers of modern media (print, web, music, film, video) use a mac, and have for at least 20 years.
Quote market share all you want, even the commercials for your favorite non-apple tech are made on apples.
For music production Atari ST was much more influental system than the Macintosh ever was and the software many people use today on Macs to make music actually originates from the Atari ST. Ataris of the day could also be used for DTP just fine.
And I would be real surprised if the thing that actually got people into electronic music was not tracker music on Amigas and Atari STs.
Also 20 years ago I do not thing many people used Apple for any serious video production as there were many bigger names still in business. If you were making special effects to movie and there was a choice between Apple and SGI systems, I doubt many would have chosen Apple for that kind of work, as it would have been like eating soup with a fork.
Edited 2014-01-28 07:06 UTC
Atari ST was influential but it was a disaster as a platform. Atari was dead before that machine even shipped. The built in MIDI and early decent sound chip is what set it apart, but no pro studios were mixing records on Atari ST’s. ST’s more than likely lived in electronic musicians’ studios, next to their keyboard rig.
The Mac with pro-tools passed Atari’s in the pro audio market in no time. ST’s are like the model T’s of audio – a neat early proof of concept, but that was a dead end we all knew it.
Atari’s next best machine was the Amiga, which was sold to Commodore and then killed slightly slower than the ST line. With that video card and routing, the Amigas got a hold in broadcast graphics and CGI. But those things crashed more than macs and the business end also got f’ed up.
I agree that Apple didn’t compete with SGI back then. An SGI machine was a specialized beast, whereas the mac could still help your little sister type her paper.
Don’t forget about the professional “daily” users, not just high-end hollywood stuff. Local media and corporate media went to mac production chains as soon as apple or avid added enough features.
By the way, Digidesign Soundtools was also available for Atari and if I am not mistaken it later became Pro Tools.
Yep, and I’m not doubting the importance in the early digital audio field of Atari ST, nor the importance in early digital video of Amiga. But both those platforms were passed up in the first decade of that market.
Remember, I owned several Atari’s in the 80’s (never an ST though I wanted one) and worked in 2 different jobs using Amigas for broadcast production. I know Apple couldn’t compete at those early, low price points – neither could anyone else – that the trailblazers were doing.
But those companies all went out of business, and Apple’s margins and general-purpose focus allowed them to refine the production tools. Now a $900 macbook could do more audio and video production tricks, than those early workstations costing thousands (my one job had a $3k amiga with a $4k video card and breakout box).
Not quite. Atari was a very popular low cost platform because of its MIDI capabilities. But it was pants for other parts of the music production/recording pipeline. Same applies to any other platform, Mac included. E.g. there were some high end music systems built around the Macintosh which dominated the music industry for a while, which were out of reach of most struggling musicians. But by the late 90s and early 00s, MacOS was one of the, if not THE, dominant music production platform. The amount of SW/HW running on Classic MacOS was one of the main pain points during the transition to OSX. It turns out that as crappy as MacOS was, it was very good platform for supporting low latency HW subsystems which are crucial for music production/recording.
I think you may be confusing “video production” with “CGI,” which refer to 2 different aspects of the AV industry. For a few years mac was the main platform for low/middle end non-linear video editing, mainly because of Avid and Premiere both of which were launch on Mac initially.
Cool story, bro.
Perhaps some kind soul will come along to enlighten us… maybe someone who believes that Macs had PCI support in 1994? *snort*
That’s because most of them are tech-tards who are incapable of working on any OS/software except what they were taught on. It helps that most people teaching design & media production are similarly handicapped – so they’re incapable of teaching with anything other than a Mac.
Nubus perhaps, def not PCI.
I’m trying to remember my first DA interface, maybe I was using on-board before buying the PCI card.
Oh no wait, I borrowed an AudioMediaII card, I think it was. Was that Nubus or some other card bus, I don’t remember, don’t really care.
Many (most?) creative professionals mainly use/view computers as tools. It’s something some computer geeks have a hard time grasping.
I’ve been using “PCs” since 1980 when I used an Atari 400.
I’ve used (not just played around with) over 30 OSs on “PC” hardware plus Amigas and Trash80s and … started with Linux with Corel Linux when they had WordPerfect for Linux and UNIX. But IBMs OS/2 was the first OS that I loved.
It wasn’t until 1998 when I bought one of the Bondi Blue iMacs with OS 9 on it. I came from using IBM’s OS/2 which was much better than OS 9. BUT OS/2 was going away and Windows (which I support at work) makes me cringe even to this day.
As has been noted, OS X wasn’t very good until 10.2 came out. By then I had bought a iMac Lamp in 2000 to go along with my Bondi Blue.
I still “demo” the iMac Lamp when people who are sick of Windows tell me all they want to do is import a video, edit it, then make a DVD that they can share. They are surprised that it turns out to be that easy on a Mac. THEN I tell them how old it is and then show them how fast it is on my (bought used) Powerbook G4 laptop or my 2006 white 24″ iMac or my late 2009 Mac Mini.
By the way. They ALL still work with no problems. The few hardware problems I had were fixed under warrantee. I’m a VERY satisfied user and I love that OS X is built on top of BSD UNIX.
Windows I support at work and they pay me to know it and use it. I love the money I get but would rather be using my Macs.
First experience (if you can call it that) was in the late 80’s. Not sure the model but an acquaintance had one. One of the small black and white models. I was intrigued by the capabilities of it back then. First time using one (again not sure the model) was at work. I worked in the QA department at a software publishing house. Though I was generally DOS/Windows area they put one on my desk because they needed help testing one. I rather enjoyed working on it because I found it fresh, though I was never as proficient with it as a DOS/Win box. IIRC that one was a Quadra whatever, maybe???
My first mac was a Macintosh IIci back in the early 1990s, my folks business was utilizing them for some medical imaging software and we got a machine for the house as well. I had no clue how expensive these things were at the time. The next mac I got was when I was a tad bit order in the mid 1990s, it was the Performa 6400, sadly it only lasted a few years and wasn’t quite the workhorse that the IIci was in its time. My last Macintosh Desktop was the Power Mac G4 (AGP) in 2000. In 2004 I bought an iBook followed by a PowerBook in 2005 and finally my current MacBook Pro from late 2008. Always wanted a Mac Pro but couldn’t justify the high costs, instead I opted for a Hackintosh this past year since I like internal expandability and Apple apparently thinks it’s okay to have a machine with everything integrated onto a board for 3K…no thanks.
Edited 2014-01-28 16:50 UTC