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.

At a glance

Apple Macintosh Review Byte

Manufacturer
Apple Computer Inc.
20525 Mariani Ave.
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1010

Components
Size: 13.5 by 9.7 by 10.9 inches (main unit)
2.6 by 13.2 by 5.8 inches (keyboard)
Weight: 19.5 pounds
Processor: Motorola 68000 (7,8336 MHz)
Memory: 128K bytes of RAM; 64K bytes of ROM
Display: 9-inch built-in monitor; high-resolution bit-mapped display (512 by 342 pixels); adjustable
Keyboard: 58 keys, detached, standard layout, no function keys, software-mapped
Mouse: single button, mechanical tracking, optical shaft encoding
Mass storage: built-in single-sided 3½-inch Sony drive (400K bytes)
Sound generator: four-voice sound
Interfaces: two RS-422A serial ports (230.4K bps transfer rate); external-disk interface for second (optional) disk drive; mouse interface; synchronous serial keyboard bus

Operating System
Proprietary unnamed

Optional Hardware
Imagewriter dot-matrix printer: $595
Numeric keypad: $99
Carrying case: $99
Modem (300 bps): $225
(300/1200 bps): $495
Security Accessory Kit: $49
Second floppy-disk drive: $495

Optional Software
See text box

Documentation
160-page user’s manual

Price
$2495 ($2990 with Imagewriter)

Apple Macintosh Review Byte - Benchmark 1

Apple Macintosh Review Byte - Benchmark 2

* The Sieve benchmark couldn’t be run on the Mac (see text for details).
** The new Disk Copy program was not available at press time.

Steve Jobs:

It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM dominated and controlled future. They are increasing and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?

Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Macs. This is in contrast to most IBM compatible PCs, where multiple vendors create hardware intended to run another company’s software. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems, designs, and prices. Apple does use third party components, however; current Macintosh CPUs use Intel’s x86 architecture. Previous models used the AIM alliance’s PowerPC and early models used Motorola’s 68k. Apple also develops the operating system for Macs, currently Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. The modern Mac, like other personal computers, is capable of running alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows, the latter of which is considered to be the Mac’s biggest competitor

Apple Macintosh

The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype.

Bright engineers: Andy Hertzfeld, Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith and Jerry Mannock

Bill Atkinson, a member of Apple’s Lisa team (which was developing a similar but higher-end computer), introduced him to Burrell Smith, a service technician who had been hired earlier that year. Over the years, Raskin assembled a large development team that designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software; besides Raskin, Atkinson and Smith, the team included Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Jerry Manock, Susan Kare, Andy Hertzfeld, and Daniel Kottke.

Smith’s first Macintosh board was built to Raskin’s design specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (KB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and was capable of supporting a 256×256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. Bud Tribble, a Macintosh programmer, was interested in running the Lisa’s graphical programs on the Macintosh, and asked Smith whether he could incorporate the Lisa’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor into the Mac while still keeping the production cost down. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that not only used the 68000, but bumped its speed from 5 to 8 megahertz (MHz); this board also had the capacity to support a 384×256 pixel display. Smith’s design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which made production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had the complete QuickDraw picture language and interpreter in 64 Kb of ROM – far than most other computers; it had 128 KB of RAM, in the form of sixteen 64 kilobit (Kb) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 KB by means of soldering sixteen chip sockets to accept 256 Kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. The final product’s screen was a 9-inch, 512×342 pixel monochrome display, exceeding the prototypes.

The original 1984 Mac OS desktop featured a radically new graphical user interface. Users communicated with the computer not through abstract lines of code but rather using a metaphorical desktop that included items that the user was already familiar with.

The design caught the attention of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. Realizing that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, he began to focus his attention on the project. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and the final Macintosh design is said to be closer to Jobs’ ideas than Raskin’s.

After hearing of the pioneering GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, Jobs had negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options. The Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces were partially influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Macintosh group’s own ideas. Jobs also commissioned industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger to work on the Macintosh line, resulting in the “Snow White” design language; although it came too late for the earliest Macs, it was implemented in most other mid- to late-1980s Apple computers.[4] However, Jobs’ leadership at the Macintosh project was short-lived; after an internal power struggle with new CEO John Sculley, Jobs angrily resigned from Apple in 1985, went on to found NeXT, another computer company, and did not return until 1997.

1984: Introduction

This television commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl, launched the original Macintosh.
The Macintosh 128k was announced to the press in October 1983, followed by an 18-page brochure included with various magazines in December. The Macintosh was introduced by the now famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, “1984″. The commercial most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984 and is now considered a “watershed event” and a “masterpiece.” 1984 used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by her white tank top with a Picasso-style picture of Apple’s Macintosh computer on it) as a means of saving humanity from “conformity” (Big Brother). These images were an allusion to George Orwell’s noted novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised “Big Brother.”

For a special post-election edition of Newsweek in November 1984, Apple spent more than US$2.5 million to buy all 39 of the advertising pages in the issue. Apple also ran a “Test Drive a Macintosh” promotion, in which potential buyers with a credit card could take home a Macintosh for 24 hours and return it to a dealer afterwards. While 200,000 people participated, dealers disliked the promotion, the supply of computers was insufficient for demand, and many were returned in such a bad shape that they could no longer be sold. This marketing campaign caused CEO John Sculley to raise the price from US$1,995 to US$2,495 (adjusting for inflation, about $5,000 in 2007).

Two days after the 1984 ad aired, the Macintosh went on sale. It came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint. Although the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, it was too radical for some, who labeled it a mere “toy.” Because the machine was entirely designed around the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten; this was a challenging undertaking that many software developers shied away from, and resulted in an initial lack of software for the new system. In April 1984 Microsoft’s MultiPlan migrated over from MS-DOS, followed by Microsoft Word in January 1985. In 1985, Lotus Software introduced Lotus Jazz after the success of Lotus 1-2-3 for the IBM PC, although it was largely a flop. Apple introduced Macintosh Office the same year with the lemmings ad. Infamous for insulting its own potential customers, it was not successful.

Feature stories about the Apple Macintosh on this web site:

• The history of the Apple Macintosh
  • It all began with “Annie” – The Vision of a Computer for the Masses
  • Rich Neighbour with Open Doors – Apple and Xerox PARC
  • Steve Jobs discovers the Macintosh Project
  • “1984″ – The famous Super Bowl Ad
  • Archrival and Knight in Shining Armor – Microsoft’s Relationship with Apple
  • Showdown at Apple: John Sculley vs. Steve Jobs
  • The Macintosh – The many facets of a slightly flawed gem – reprint from the magazine “Byte” (1984)

  Source:

  Macintosh. (2008, October 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:51, October 12, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Macintosh&oldid=244185329

  This article is published under the GNU General Public License

  ]]> http://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2008-05-25/apple-macintosh/feed 2 http://www.mac-history.net/mac/2008-05-23/tv-ad-for-the-first-apple-macintosh-1984 http://www.mac-history.net/mac/2008-05-23/tv-ad-for-the-first-apple-macintosh-1984#comments Fri, 23 May 2008 19:19:26 +0000 Christoph Dernbach http://www.mac-history.de/?p=31 “The computer for the rest of us.”
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