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* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, fr
by leoc 5y ago
* On the software side, Big Mac's vision of Unix with Macintosh on top is familiar from NeXT and OS X. It was also roughly paralleled by many other projects, from Pink/Taligent and BeOS to OS/2 and WinNT. But it's worth asking where Jobs and the other Big Mac supporters got the idea from in turn. One obvious source of inspiration for the NeXT work was Xerox PARC, and Jobs seems to have been acknowledging (or claiming) that influence in the famous clip from the 1995 Triumph of the Nerds "lost" interview where he talked about not understanding the importance of PARC's networking or OO work originally https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-interview/#more-4292 https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 . Furthermore Alan Kay had just joined Apple in 1984 https://www.quora.com/What-was-Alan-Kays-experience-like-working-at-Apple https://www.quora.com/What-was-Alan-Kays-experience-like-wor... . But there were plenty of other, very immediate possible inspirations for Big Mac in the commercial workstation market. There was high-end stuff like Apollo/Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo/Domain or Lisp machines, but above all there was Sun. By 1983 the Sun-2 workstations had proven that you could already get a real Unix running on a desktop machine, using the same m68k architecture family as the Mac, that you could put a PARCish GUI on top of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunView and that you could make money selling it. And on the other hand Sun's high prices and gimcrack user experience would have bred confidence that Apple could do much better, at least with a couple more years for prices to decline. I can't think of anything to confirm that Sun was an influence, but it more or less has to have been.
* What about the networking, though? (Apart from all other possible inspirations, Sun was already trumpeting that "the network is the computer" by this time.) There's no mention anywhere of any network port on any Big Mac prototype, and it seems reasonable to assume that Big Mac was intended to have no integrated networking hardware. But I don't think this indicates that networking was unimportant to the Big Mac vision. Jobs put plenty of emphasis on networking in his February 1985 Playboy interview https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_1985 https://allaboutstevejobs.com/verbatim/interviews/playboy_19... , and he seems to have been very much on board with (and likely involved with?) Apple's efforts to roll out a LAN offering in 1984 and 1985 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 https://www.macgui.com/news/article.php?t=491 . I think the most likely explanation was that, like the non-colour screen, this was a cost-driven decision. In 1985 integrated networking would have been expensive and useless to most modem users, and vice versa, while many users weren't yet ready to pay for either LAN or dial-up hardware. And of course networking hadn't yet really converged on (not-quite-)RJ45 Ethernet—Apple itself had only just started pushing AppleTalk!—so even for LAN users there was a good chance that any integrated LAN hardware would be an expensive waste.
* That just leaves the PARC-influenced "object-oriented" element which later showed up on the NeXT in the form of Objective C and the NeXT APIs. Had Big Mac's software already taken some steps in this kind of direction? Or was it an ambition for later, or simply not on the roadmap at all yet? I have no idea.
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- leoc 5y ago* "Milwaukee" wasn't Big Mac, even though (if Levy is correct) it was also sometimes referred to as "Little Big Mac". As Aventure-Apple states (and Levy confirms), it was a rival (or at least completely indepdendent) effort. Insanely Great says that it was a grassroots initiative by engineer Mike Dhuey focussed on creating a version-2 Macintosh with internal expansion slots. (And it wasn't even the only other project working on a successor Mac in the time between the release of the original and Jobs' firing.) Jobs likely didn't even know it existed, as it was hidden from him to prevent him from killing it. At some point (according to Levy) this meshed with Jean-Louis Gassée's vision of a high-end Macintosh line which would give power users the things they liked about the PC. He went so far as to get "OPEN MAC" number plate for his car, where 'open' in this case referred to slots. Insanely Great seems to suggest that Gassée had this ambition even before he heard about Milwaukee/Little Big Mac, but it's not competely clear on that point. In any case, after Jobs was gone and Gassée had been given the reins, he killed off Big Mac and Milwaukee was allowed to become Macintosh II. * The Apple Extended Keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Extended_Keyboard with its Model-M based layout was by far the biggest Apple keyboard up to that point and was clearly part of the Macintosh II power-user vision just as slots and colour were. (IIRC it was explicitly justified as making the Mac compatible with PC software.) And so it's no surprise that Jobs didn't like it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/841771 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/841771 . * It isn't quite directly stated anywhere I know of, but it's clear that rival visions of Macintosh cost, margins and market share were a big factor in the internal strife. Even back at the launch of the original Macintosh, Jobs had been very unhappy that the price had been set at $2500 rather than $2000 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... . There's also a video clip from the '90s, almost certainly from his NeXT days, complaining bitterly about Apple's decision to choose high margins and low market share for the Macintosh, but I can't find it atm. Despite the big screen and the ambitious Unix-based OS rewrite which probably imposed a big RAM penalty, Big Mac's creators evidently hoped (realistically or not) that it would compete for something like the mainstream market. On the other hand, whether or not this was quite Gassée's vision from Day 1, the Macintosh IIs were and remained brutally high-margin, priced to soak those who not only both needed a high-end Mac and could afford one but were also trapped on the Mac platform, while the all-in-one Macs (and even the later LCs, to a lesser extent) were kept underpowered but also swingeingly expensive. It's not a coincidence that Gassée popped up to smirk and leer when the 2019 Mac Pro's prices were announced https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163321 . To be fair, the Macintosh II pricing strategy actually did make Apple a great deal of money, for a while. Meanwhile NeXT was, ironically, in no position to compete for the mass market.