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Well the Xerox Star was $16,000, the Mac $2,000. And the Mac did have localTalk, a super cheap 232 kbps office network that worked really well. When the Mac wa
by valuearb 10y ago
Well the Xerox Star was $16,000, the Mac $2,000. And the Mac did have localTalk, a super cheap 232 kbps office network that worked really well.
When the Mac was released, the Xerox team actually had a much different reaction than yours. Notice the screen shots in the PDF, every object fits in a rectangular area. The original Mac supported non-rectangular regions, making it's graphics far more advanced than the Star, despite the much lower power hardware. Xerox engineers were flabbergasted the Mac could do that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- leejoramo 10y agoIndeed, one of the big reasons for the Mac's early success was built-in networking. GUI + standard networking + laser printer = revolution of graphics design and production
- digi_owl 10y agoAnd may be providing Apple an inside track with MSM to this day...
- rjsw 10y agoThe Xerox Alto doesn't use a framebuffer, it only stores bitmaps for each window and the microcode looks at them to work out what to put on each scanline of the display. In comparison, the original Mac "wastes" RAM by always reserving enough to represent the whole screen but this does give it more flexibility in what you draw to it.