Opinion: The top 10 standout Macs of the past 25 years
Launched in January 1984, the first Apple Mac opened the door for a computer revolution that led to the PowerBook, the iMac and even the iPhone. Columnist Michael DeAgonia chooses the 10 Mac models that made the biggest splash.

In the beginning: The making of the Mac
Just how did the first Apple Macintosh computer come to be? The course of events that led to the Mac as we know it was convoluted, the result of luck or coincidence as much as planning. Here’s the story.

The Mac at 25: Successes and regrets, Apple’s had a few
In these heady days when Apple seems to be gaining ground in a number of places and ways, it’s important to remember that everything that followed from the first Mac was not a given. Here’s a look at five successes and five mistakes Apple made during the past 25 years.

Opinion: What will Macs be like in 25 years?
Columnist Seth Weintraub pulls out his crystal ball to predict the future of the Mac — including whether we’ll have Macs at all in 2034.

Timeline: Milestones in the Mac’s history
Take a trip down memory lane as we revisit the Mac’s highs, lows and in-betweens from 1978 to today.

Mike Markkula (1977)

Raskin had been responsible for Apple’s publications, particularly manuals, and actually was to more intensely oversee the developers writing the applications for the Apple II. “I told him [Markkula] it was a fine project, but I wasn’t terribly interested in a 500 dollar game machine,” Raskin later remembered. “However, there was this thing that I’d been dreaming about – it was [that] it would be designed from a human factors perspective, which at that time was totally incomprehensible.”

In fall 1979, Raskin wrote his article “Computers by the Millions“, in which he drafted his version of a computer for the masses. Markkula insisted on the report to be treated as a confidential internal report. The essay was not published until 1982 in the SIGPC Newsletter, Vol. 5, No. 2.

Raskin had chosen a completely new approach, because until then, the “technically feasible” is what defined a computer’s design. The academic computer scientist, who had kept secret his diploma from the Apple founders at the time of his appointment (as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs approached academics extremely distrustfully), wanted to design a computer for the normal person in the street – which of course could not to be unattainable.

The expression of the “Person in the Street” formed by Raskin became a dictum at Apple – abbreviated as PITS. Raskin’s first draft envisioned a closed computer including monitor, keyboard and printer able to work without any external wires – and all that for 500 dollars. In return, the Macintosh should only be equipped with a tiny five inch display, a cheap CPU (6809) and a main memory calculated extremely tight at 64 kilobytes.

Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin

At that time, Steve Jobs had not taken particular interest in the Macintosh project – and due to some dim apprehension, Raskin tried everything to exclude the Apple co-founder. Yet in the summer of 1980, a serious conflict between Jobs and Apple’s president Mike Scott was brewing as Scott intended to edge Jobs out of the concrete development of the new Lisa. With his capricious and at times fairly aggressive management style, Jobs had snubbed many developers. In addition, Scott did not think him capable of a major management role and thus planned to assign him the less important role of a company spokesman and promoter in advance of Apple’s initial public offering on December 12th, 1980.

In 1982, Jef Raskin left Apple and founded the company Information Appliance, Inc. in order to realize his original concept of the Macintosh project. The company brought the “SwyftCard” to market, which is a firmware card for the Apple II. The card featured a program package which was also offered on disk as SwyftWare. With the Swyft, Information Appliance later offered a laptop computer, which, however, experienced only moderate commercial success. Raskin licensed the Swyft design to Canon, which constructed the “Canon Cat” on its basis in 1987.

Jef Raskin with a design model of the Canon Cat

In his book “The Humane Interface”, Raskin later described his vision of a computer interface constructed for the human being and oriented to human needs – rather than to technology.

On February 26th, 2005, Jef Raskin died at the age of 61 years.

However, Steve Jobs knew what he wanted. He had seen the graphical user interface of the Xerox Alto at Xerox PARC. Instead of green letters on a dark background, white document windows with black text appeared – just like a sheet of paper. Several different fonts could be selected. The graphics board controlled individual pixels on the screen freely. By means of a mouse, a pointer could be moved on the screen in order to mark texts or issue commands. Files were represented by icons on a virtual desktop.

The Alto was not available on the market. For this experimental computer, the main memory alone would have cost about 7,000 dollars at the time. Jobs wanted a computer even better than the Alto – and also better than Apple’s Lisa. However, the new marvelous machine should cost only a fraction of the Lisa’s price, which was about 12,000 dollars, inclusive of external hard disk.

Pirate flag above the Mac
developers’ building “Bandley III”

Within Apple, Jobs gathered a small, conniving team – and he did not care for other projects in the company. Andy Hertzfeld, one of the most important software designers in the Macintosh developers team, remembers:

Steve Jobs kind of came bopping by my cubicle saying OK you’re working on the Mac now. And I said well I have to finish up this Apple 2 stuff I’m doing here. No you don’t that stinks that’s not going to amount to anything you gotta start now. And I said well just give me a few days to finish and he said no and what he did was he pulled the plug on my Apple 2 that I was programming just losing, losing the code I’m working on and start taking my computer and walking away with it and what could I do but follow him out to his car cause he had my machine he plopped it down in the trunk and drove me over to this remote building, took the computer out, walked upstairs, plopped it down on a desk, well you’re working on the Mac now. While Jobs pursued his MacMission he needed a more orthodox chief executive to run the company. A respectable face who could sell to corporate America. He chose Pepsi-Cola executive John Sculley. Sculley refused – leave Pepsi for a 4 year old company that had been set up in a garage! Are you serious?! But it was hard saying no to Steve Jobs.

The Macintosh Pirates

Above the roof of “Bandley III”, a pirate flag with the Apple symbol as eye patch was waving – and on deck of the virtual pirate ship, Steve Jobs was standing as a man who wanted to prove it to them all. Jobs’ first victim was Jef Raskin, who had fought against the application of a mouse and instead preferred a pen or a joystick. After Jobs had relieved his opponent of the responsibility for the software, Raskin gave in exasperatedly and left Apple Computers in March 1982. In retrospect, Raskin can claim that he was the first at Apple to have presented the vision of an inexpensive, easy to handle computer for the masses. Yet in order to keep “his” Macintosh below the price limit of 1,500 dollars, Raskin also wanted to make technical compromises which would have put at risk the Mac’s success. Thus, for instance, he insisted on limiting the main memory to a tiny 64 kilobytes. Jobs accomplished 128 kilobytes – and afterwards, even this space was actually far too tight for the system programmers.

Raskin did not particularly support the innovations the Lisa team had picked up in the Xerox PARC and therefore disapproved of the change to the more capable 68000 processor, which was included in the Lisa as well. It is hardly imaginable what would have become of the Mac if Raskin had asserted his extreme parsimony and his resistance to the mouse. After the internal disputes had been settled, the Mac team now fully concentrated on the in-house competition against the far larger Lisa developing team. Beforehand, Jobs had enticed away from the Lisa team ingenious programmers such as Bill Atkinson and Steve Capps.

Love and Hate

As a project manager, Steve Jobs had been highly controversial not only within Apple. “He’s also obnoxious and this comes from his high standards. He has extremely high standards and he has no patience with people who don’t either share those standards or perform to them,“ Bob Metcalfe remembers. He is the inventor of the networking standard Ethernet, who had worked as a researcher in the neighboring research institute Xerox PARC at that time. “He’s also obnoxious and this comes from his high standards. He has extremely high standards and he has no patience with people who don’t either share those standards or perform to them.” However, Metcalfe still thinks a lot of Jobs as he had made the vision created in the Xerox PARC become reality. “Steve Jobs is on my eternal heroes list, there’s nothing he can ever do to get off it.”

The respect for Jobs is also shared by Andy Hertzfeld, who had written the Mac’s kernel in the Macintosh ROM, although he was sometimes afflicted with his boss’s tantrums: – quotation – Kenyon set to work again and shortened the booting process by further three seconds.

In the internal competition at Apple over whether the Lisa or the Macintosh would be finished first, Jobs got the short end of the stick. He lost a personal 5,000 dollar bet against the Lisa team leader John Couch when the Apple business computer was launched in January 1983 – at least one year previous to the Macintosh. However, the Lisa computer soon proved to be a huge flop. With a price of 10,000 dollars (exclusive of hard disk), it was far too expensive;the graphical user interface devoured Lisa’s power such that the computer did not work particularly briskly; and it lacked the necessary programs to induce the business world to buy the Lisa in large numbers. Moreover, the newly established distribution team could hardly resort to any experience in handling Corporate America.

Videolink YouTube

Videolink YouTube

Videolink YouTube

The Apple Macintosh computer

Few computers – indeed, few consumer items of any kind – have generated such a wide range of opinions as the Macintosh. Criticized as an expensive gimmick and hailed as the liberator of the masses, the Mac is a potentially great system. Whether it lives up to that potential remains to be seen.

The Apple Macintosh

The Macintosh is not without its problems. Resources are tight – it needs more memory and disk space – and software has been slow in coming to market. Many have criticized its price ($2495). In fact, there are indications that Apple considered a lower price ($1995) and then rejected it. It doesn’t seem to have hurt the Mac’s market – people are still buying them faster than Apple can make them – but there’s the potential for backlash if the machine doesn’t deliver on all its promises.

Whatever its problems and limitations, the Mac represents a breakthrough in adapting computers to work with people instead of vice versa. Time and again, I’ve seen individuals with little or no computer experience sit down in front of a Mac and accomplish useful tasks with it in a matter of minutes. Invariably, they use the same words to describe it: “amazing” and “fun.” The question is whether “powerful” can be added to that list.

The Macintosh dot-matrix printer

The Display

The display is small (9-inch diagonal), but it has very high resolution (512 by 342 pixels). Every pixel is crisp. Several things make the display unusual. First, the Macintosh has no “text mode.” Instead, the display is always bit-mapped graphics. Second, the display is black-on-white rather than amber-, green- or color-on-black, giving it an ink-on-paper effect. Third, the pixels are equally dense both horizontally and vertically, eliminating the “aspect ratio” problem that plagues other graphic systems. (In other words, a box 20 pixels wide and 20 pixels high will be a square.)

A sample printout from the Macintosh using its printer and the MacWrite word-processing program. The printout was obtained using MacWrite’s high-quality output mode, as opposed to the draft and ordinary quality modes. The output here is shown at 100 percent of actual size.

The Mac’s display does create a problem. Computer graphics are memory-intensive, once you start drawing pictures, you start using up lots of memory. The video display itself consumes about 22K bytes (or about one-sixth) of the total RAM. Any off-screen manipulation (windows) or information (fonts) chews up additional memory quickly.

The Keyboard

The Macintosh keyboard.

All in all, I like the keyboard. I’m a fast touch-typist and occasionally I overrun the two-key “rollover” (the number of keys you can press down simultaneously), but I never lose characters because of buffer overflow. The keyboard’s layout is compact, so I can easily reach any key – well, almost any key. The Command key, located between the left Option key and the space bar, is in an awkward position. often hit the Shift key or Option key instead. I don’t like function or cursor keys and the mouse renders them fairly useless, so their absence doesn’t bother me at all. A separate numeric keypad is available for $99 (it plugs in between the keyboard and the Mac). This keypad has cursor keys on it, but I wonder how many applications will recognize them.

The Mouse

The rear of the Mac. Note the icon labels. The bottom row of connectors is for (from left) the mouse, second floppy disk, printer, modem and speaker.

Of course, the mouse isn’t always a perfect solution. Some commands can be tedious to perform via the mouse and pull-down menu. For example, deleting text to the right of the cursor in MacWrite can only be done with the mouse. This is a nuisance if you have only one or two characters to delete. I’d also like the mouse’s cord to be a little longer and sometimes I have trouble finding enough surface area to work the mouse, but these are minor complaints. The mouse is an excellent feature of the Macintosh.

User Interface

User interface Macintosh 1.1

In creating the Macintosh’s unique user interface, Apple has attempted to make the abstract seem concrete. Few things are as abstract as the data and programs stored and used on a computer. The Mac takes that abstraction and presents it as something familiar a desktop cluttered with pencils, papers manila folders, and even a wastebasket. Do you want to put a document in a folder? Pick it up with the mouse and put it in the folder. Do you want to throw something away? Pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. Abstractions take on real forms that we can understand and use without obscure commands or bizarre syntax.

Another important aspect of this user interface is the way in which the Macintosh makes commands available to the user. As I write this review with MacWrite, the top of my screen has an Apple symbol and six words (File, Edit Search, Format, Font, and Style) written across the top. If I point at any of the items with the mouse and press the button, a menu of options appears on the screen. When I release the button, the menu disappears. All available commands appear in the menus. I haven’t had to memorize or learn much; in fact, I opened my MacWrite manual only once or twice, briefly. The same is true at the “desktop” level. Any actions can be performed via the pull-down menus or by direct “physical” manipulation of the objects shown. The best feature of the Mac documentation is that I almost never have to refer to it.

My one complaint about the user interface is that it’s slow. Sometimes running a program or opening a file seems to take longer than it should. File copying on a one-drive system is also tedious.

A special disk-copy utility is now available that lets you copy an entire disk in just four swaps – not too shabby when you realize that this utility uses nearly 80 percent of the total RAM just to hold the data. Unfortunately, this utility won’t solve the problem of copying several files onto a disk that’s already formatted and in use. There is a simple solution: more RAM.

Memory Limitations

The top of the Mac with the cover removed. The disk drive and digital circuitry are below the cathode-ray tube; the analog circuitry is to its left.

So the question arises: why did the Macintosh design team so limit their machine? The most common reason I’ve come across is that the Macintosh team wanted to provide a standard environment for software developers and users (although the latter is less often cited). In other words, software developers know that a Mac will always have 128K bytes of RAM and users will never have to worry about software requiring more RAM than they have. The idea is sound, but it causes two problems. First, 128K bytes is not enough RAM for a standard, especially in the Macintosh environment, where graphics chew away at your free space. Second, there will be no standard for software developers when the 512K-byte upgrade becomes available. Many software developers are ignoring (or unable to use) the 128K-byte machine and will release the packages for 512K-byte machines only. Unless Apple plans a free update to all Mac owners, the standard environment will no longer be standard.

Another argument I’ve heard to support the concept of such limited memory is that the expansion slots were dropped to avoid power and cooling problems and to keep the user out of the machine. Again, this is a good idea if you provide sufficient resources in the unexpandable model. I have no complaints with Apple’s choice of two RS-422A ports, an external disk port, the mouse port, and audio output. External video would be nice, but it isn’t critical. But there’s just not enough memory.

Others argue that 128K bytes of RAM is enough because so much of the work is done for you in the 64K-byte ROM. The ROM toolbox (the optimized 68000 machine-language routines that handles all aspects of the user interface) is truly a marvelous thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that large, complex programs need lots of memory, especially if the displays are all graphical. A supporting argument points to MacPaint and MacWrite, saying, “See, these work fine!” Yes, they do, but both have easily reached limits. Furthermore, these programs were developed over a long period of time, concurrently with the Macintosh. The authors of these programs knew a lot about optimizing code for the Mac. Software developers with less time and more ambitious designs will find the lack of RAM a serious roadblock.

I also have heard that the upgrade to 512K bytes will eliminate all such problems because there will be more than enough RAM for any application. Again, I disagree. You can never have enough RAM. I think it’s no accident that the Commodore 64, with 64K bytes, has dominated the low-end market over machines that have (or had) 8K, 16K, or 24K bytes. Apple gave the IIc, which uses an 8-bit 6502 chip, 128K bytes of RAM. Why the company limited the 68000, a 32-bit chip, to the same initial amount of memory is beyond me. Even the fourfold upgrade is too limiting. Apple delights in stating how much better the 68000 is than the 8086/8088 chips used in the IBM PC and compatibles, yet most of those systems can use more RAM than the Mac. Where’s the advantage?

Obviously, I think that 128K bytes is not enough RAM to make the Macintosh a truly powerful machine. My attempt to run the Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark on the Mac provides one indication of its RAM limitations. Once BASIC was loaded into the Mac, there was too little space left in memory for the Sieve program. To fit the program into memory, I had to declare all variables integer. This will, of course, speed the execution time considerably. Thus, the speed of the Mac Sieve is not commensurable to the other two systems. (If you are curious, the modified benchmark took 96.4 seconds on the Mac.) The upgrade to 512K bytes will help considerably, but it’s still an inexcusable limit. I am convinced that this limited RAM has held up the release of Mac software. As I write this, it has been three months since the Macintosh was released, and all the Apple dealers in town have only three software packages for the Mac besides MacPaint and MacWrite, which are still bundled. Mac should have had at least double the initial and upgrade RAM, i.e., 256K bytes and 1 megabyte, respectively. It may be that Apple will release yet another upgrade when 1-megabit chips become available in mass quantities, or they may just release a new machine.

Although the RAM is a limitation of the Macintosh, the ROM is a tremendous strength. In what is undoubtedly one of the marvels of modern programming, the Macintosh design team crammed an unbelievable amount of power into the 64K bytes of ROM in the form of tightly written, highly optimized machine code. In doing so, the team provided standard user interfaces, so that most application programs on the Mac will be used in similar forms. I tried some prerelease programs with no documentation and I was able to use them almost immediately. Try that under CP/M or MS-DOS. The ROM toolbox is a vital facet of the overall amazing nature of the Macintosh.

The Macintosh also lacks adequate mass storage. At first, it doesn’t look bad: it consists of one single-sided 3½-inch built-in disk drive (made by Sony) holding 400K bytes. Having only one disk drive can be a nuisance, but it’s acceptable if the drive holds enough data and if you can copy it easily. However, the system files on a Macintosh disk take up over 200K bytes, or half the disk. Even with trimming, you only have about 220K bytes of usable space on a bootable disk. If any other company marketed a CP/M or MS-DOS system with a single disk drive with only 220K bytes of free space, no one would buy it. It takes a lot of time and disk swapping to copy files or to back up a disk. The Mac’s only saving grace on this point is that it automatically ejects the disk and prompts you for a new one.

The 128K-byte Macintosh with one single-sided drive is not a powerful machine. You can do useful work with it, and the user interface beats all other cold. But for the same price or less you could go out and buy, for example, a Compaq with 256K bytes of RAM and two 360K-byte disk drives. And I could get lots of software for it – programs that can handle larger, more difficult tasks than the Mac currently can. The upshot is this: a $3000 Macintosh with 128K bytes of RAM, a 400K-byte disk drive, and an Imagewriter printer, is an amazing machine but not really a powerful one. A 512K-byte Mac with two 400K-byte disk drives is both amazing and powerful, but it is also expensive ($3500, including printer and not counting any cost for the RAM upgrade). In the two-and-a-half months that I’ve owned my Mac, I’ve often wondered if I should have bought one so quickly. However, the arrival of MacFORTH (see the text box “Software for the Mac” on this page) has done much to quell my reservations. I can now create my own windows, graphics, and pull-down menus, and the “fun quotient” of my Mac has made a quantum leap. Besides, I suspect that by the time this sees print, prices will have dropped and the software base will have expanded considerably.

Conclusion

You won’t find another machine that’s as easy to use or as much fun as the Macintosh. In the right configuration, it can do as much as any microcomputer on the market. However, you should go for a 512K-byte system with two disk drives and a printer. Anything less and you’ll find yourself frustrated by the machine’s limits.

I have no doubt that I would have bought a Macintosh sooner or later, and I have no intention of getting rid of the one I own. The Mac’s a gem – rough, slightly flawed, but a gem nonetheless.

by Bruce F. Webster

Bruce F. Webster (7909 Ostrow St., Suite F, San Diego, CA 92111) is vice-president of FTL Games and Oasis Systems. He received his B.S. in computer science from Brigham Young University and did graduate work at the University of Houston. His hobbies include reading and war-gaming, especially science-fiction and fantasy war games.

Videolink “Get a Mac” ad: Calming Teas.

Videolink “Get a Mac” ad: Off The Air.