15 Oct
2012
15 Oct
'12
10:17 a.m.
On Oct 15, 2012, at 12:48 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 12:26 PM, David Riley
<fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, I guess I didn't think of that as a "toy", partly because
I've spent the last few months working on a better LocalTalk<->
Ethernet bridge than the ones that existed 10 years ago. I did
know plenty of people who thought of Macs as expensive toys;
most of them probably still do.
On Oct 15, 2012, at 11:59 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Networking is a bit of a stretch for "home toy machines", but even a
128K Mac came with AppleTalk/LocalTalk from day one. It didn't take
off right away, but the support was there for it. I'd say it became a
useful, desirable feature once the Apple Laserwriter I came out - a
built-in network to share a $5000 resource with every Mac in the room. My recollection is that there was a perceptual
divide between "serious
machines for serious business" and "toy machines for playing around
with at home"...
o Color
o Sound
o Network Interface
o Graphics co-processors
o Multitasking OS
o Input devices other than traditional 'keyboard'
Not disputing anything, but I'm curious about early examples of
network interfaces and multitasking OSes for machines which were
typically designated as "toys". Color, sound, graphics chips and
alternate input devices are obvious candidates, but aside from
OS-9 for the 6809, I'm drawing a blank on the other two. As for multitasking OS, I'd have to trot out the
Amiga in 1985.
Completely derided as a "toy machine" by both the PC and Mac crowds,
again, from day one, multitasking OS. I can't find a reference to the
original quote, but sometime around 1985 or 1986, Steve Jobs and Bill
Gates were deflecting calls for each of their products to support
"true" multitasking (vs the existing "Switcher" or "TSR"
mechanisms
that let you push one app to the side to run another in the
foreground) with claims that you "couldn't do it" on a machine that
had less than 2MB (that being more than most people had in front of
them at the time). At the time, my interpretation was more along the
lines of "it's too hard to wedge our code onto the machines of today,
so you'll get it when we get around to doing it and after you buy
bigger hardware". The end result was the same - eventually, machines
got larger, code got larger, too, but desktop multitasking OSes are
the norm.
It might have had less of a reputation as a toy if Commodore had
taken it seriously, too. I worked with a guy who worked on the
Amiga OS in the early days, too... he had about the same opinion
of ("Classic") Mac OS' multitasking features as George Carlin
did of baseball.
- Dave