24 Jan
2024
24 Jan
'24
1:56 p.m.
On 25 Jan 2024, at 08:21, Tony Jones via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 12:53 PM Murray McCullough via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Agreed.
The Apple Mac, 40 years old, came from Xerox
PARC’s GUI and Apple’s LISA.
Not sure that it really changed computing though! Financially it didn't
help Apple until after 1997 and Gate's investment.
I struggle with the whole "birth of the Mac" story.
It starts with the "Jobs visit to Parc" story which is often told as if he
single handedly made off with Xerox's crown jewels, ignoring the fact that
lots of people had been given prior demos of the Smalltalk 76 and 78
systems. Certainly he had the vision to appreciate what he saw and the
ability to capitalize on it, but it was hardly the "making off with a
secret" it's claimed to be. Then there is the whole "Lisa was a failure
story.
Lisa had several issues that hampered its success, in my view:
The price was too high, relatively.
The twiggy drives were unreliable, and it really needed a hard drive, which was additional
cost on top of the already high base cost.
The screen pixels were rectangular. It mightn’t seem like a big deal, but if you’re a
software developer choosing between Lisa and Mac, it’s a factor.
The Mac (developed at significant cost largely because
Jobs felt slighted)
launched for I believe $2,495 with a 9" screen, 128k RAM, minimal software
and a single tasking OS).
At the same time the Lisa 2/5 was released at $3495 with a 12" screen, 512k
RAM and a true preemptive multitasking OS.
I think the advantages of the Lisa OS were largely invisible to purchasers at the time. It
wasn’t something we’d been trained (by Apple DOS, or CP/M, or MS-DOS) to consider.
Perhaps for those with experience using a “proper” OS it might have been a factor?
I don’t recall it being really highlighted by Apple, either. I imagine the hand of Jobs in
that, making sure marketing didn’t hurt the Mac.
The 128K of the Mac was so limiting that a few months
later they had to
shortly after launch the Fat Mac (512K) at $2,795
In the mid 90s Mac's were still crippled by the original Mac OS design.
Badly behaving apps crashing the entire system was common. Multiple
projects to design a replacement had failed.
Ultimately the “Blue Box” environment for OSX kinda solved this problem, emulating aMacOS
Classic environment inside Unix processes.
But Jobs wasn’t a software engineer, and this was an engineering issue.
Sure he turned it all around with the Next acquisition
and the $2.9
trillion rest is history but I sometimes wonder what would have happened if
they'd somehow been able to stop Jobs and instead focus on the Lisa.
Without the Lisa, the Mac would have been perceived as “too expensive”. As it was, if you
wanted the GUI-style system, a Mac was the cheap(er) option.
I think the Mac would have tanked without this in the first year or so.
d