More broken Apples...

Date: Sun, 3 May 2009 10:25:51 -0400 From: ray at arachelian.com To: Subject: Re: More broken Apples... I'm replying to two messages at once here. :-) Fred Cisin wrote: Warren Wolfe wrote: If you're talking about the original Mac, this is true. But keep in mind that Jef was off the Mac project before it changed directions. Jef's design for the Mac would have made it another text oriented system with an 8 bit, or 16 bit CPU. While it's true that Jef convinced Steve Jobs to go to Xerox PARC, the original designs for both the Mac and the Lisa (which Jef wasn't working on) did not include the GUI. Steve got kicked out of the Lisa team and he took over Jef's team, pushing Jef out - that's how the Mac became the Mac. See folklore.org for those bits of history.

The apps that shipped with the original Mac weren't meant to be high end power user apps. They were something to work with until profession apps hit the market. For most users they got the job done. Otherwise, Apple wouldn't have tried to get Lotus and Microsoft to port their wares to the Mac, and supposing that the original Mac wasn't the one released in 1984, but instead the Mac SE or the Mac Plus was, if Apple had built fully functional replacements for Microsoft Word and Lotus 123, then that would have slowed down the software market for the Mac as it would have pissed off the big software houses. That would have limited the original Mac far more. Whenever you have a new machine to market, your biggest problem is the lack of software and convincing existing app makers to port to your platform. To answer the question of why you'd want easy to use software, that push really does come from the corporate world. My favorite example for this is Java, I don't want to get too far off topic, but corporations love java because training houses can churn out java "programmers" (more like code monkeys) quickly in six months or so, and they're cheap and replaceable. They don't understand that some programmers are worth 10-100x more than others and that they should hire those with real skills instead of those who just passed a course (or they do, and just don't care). But the same can be said of other types of employees that were wanted back in the mid-late 80's - those that could work word processors, since computers were expensive (as compared to say typewriters). :-) (The above isn't intend to knock Java as a language, or claim that there are no high end Java coders, just that it's very easy to learn & churn, like Visual BASIC before it.) Jef's actual idea of what the Mac should be was realized into the Canon Cat (and previously, the Swift board for the Apple II). My own experience with the Cat has been that it isn't easy to learn, at least, not if you're used to previous word processors that have cursor keys. The leap keys aren't intuitive and aren't easy to use initially, but once you get used to them, and get past the learning curve, they are quite speedy. So that's the opposite of both your observations. Personally, I found the lack of cursor keys, especially up/down cursor keys extremely frustrating. So, no, this wasn't necessarily easy for noobs to learn either. As for doing difficult jobs that the ROM didn't provide features for, guess what? The Cat was fully programmable. Learn Forth and you can make it do just about anything the hardware allowed for. The same was true of the Mac - if you had a Lisa and the Workshop to reprogram your Mac with (Ok, later, Mac development packages were released) :-) Or if you really needed that feature, and aren't a programmer, you went out and bought Microsoft Word or whatever had the feature. As for speed keys and advanced features, well Duh! They're right there on the keyboard, plain for all to see, you don't even have to open the manual to look at them. Certainly a lot easier to access and learn than the obscure keys in Word Perfect. Gee, what does shift/control-F5 do again? What about Alt-F5? What about F5? Oh right... it's not there on the keyboard, I'll have to spend time with a manual if I want to do anything advanced. I don't see what the Jef bashing in the two above messages is about, really. If you guys are bashing the Mac, then Jef had little to do with the Mac - the design constrains on the Mac came from two things: cost of parts such as RAM, and design decisions (which came from management.) As the target audience was word processing, the Cat had a good word processor that handled almost everything someone would want from a word processor at the time, including a built in spell checker. It also had terminal software, so you could send your documents between Cats over phone lines. So it met a lot of the needs of the users of that era. And if you needed to do math, the editor could be used in that way. Not quite as a spreadsheet, but passable for lite needs. All the software was built in, you turned it on and it came up where you left off (if you left your work floppy in the drive), and no hassles with first loading a disk operating system, then loading an application. You powered it on and it just worked - exactly where you left off when you had shut it off. It wasn't a hobbyist's machine, it wasn't expandable, but it was programmable. And it was something you could run your business with in that day and age. Certainly was a lot nicer and far less expensive than some of the bigger word processing systems such as the Wangs. An interesting tidbit: - as I understand it, the Cat originally was designed to support proportional fonts, and the Cat's display, like the Mac's, is a bitmapped display. But Canon for whatever reason (either lack of fonts in their printers, or concern about the speed of printing graphics) asked IA to use monospaced fonts in the Cat. So the parent company did have a lot of influence as to the design of the Cat, but over all, for an appliance, the Cat did a good job for what it was intended to. The original Mac would have been a wonderful machine, provided it had a lot more RAM, and provided it was at least sold with an external floppy drive. IMHO, the first truly usable Mac was the Plus (at least the models that had hard drives). The 512KE came close. And yes, I still think the Mac should have had the Lisa's operating system rather than the other way around, but that just wasn't possible with the cost of hardware at the time. (As slow as the Lisa was, it was light years ahead of the first Mac in terms of capabilities. The Mac Plus with a hard drive was equivalent to what the Lisa had in terms of hardware resources. You really do need at least 1M of memory + a hard drive for that kind of machine.) But, even with severely limited resources, you could still get a usable GUI system and do useful work. GEOS on the C64, hooked up to a decent printer could come close. Nowhere as easy to use as a Cat in terms of just turn it on and go, but perfectly fine for home word processing and the like. I remember doing my homework with this setup and driving the teachers nuts because everyone else handed hand written loose leaf homework. :-)