7 ms·

There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going

There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this", which is pretty much how I felt upon encountering the Mac for the first time (not until 1990). My opinions tend to be pretty weak these days (like a three-handed economist), but with a typical teenage passion, I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. When I finally got my own (i)Mac in 2000, it was no longer quite so perfect. Although, I think the OS X 10.3 - 10.5 era got close.

technothrasher 5y ago
> I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years! Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”
- jandrese 5y ago
  Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.
  - lproven 5y ago
    It is one of those things, yes. Not just an "everyone's tastes are different", which of course they are... but sometimes I see GUIs and think "yikes, how can you bear to look at that all day?" For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant. GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/ https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good. As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.
zabzonk 5y ago
> There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. Oh, come on: - tiny screen - one-button mouse - little memory - expense - poor tools - closed architecture - yada yada I remember when the Mac first came out, the guy in the next room had one. I asked him "How do I write some C code on this?" Blank looks.
- parenthesis 5y ago
  On the one hand, I can't disagree with you, but on the other, it's like saying that Fred Astaire isn't good looking enough to be a movie star.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    But he could dance a little. The original Macs were not really useful at all.
    - wwweston 5y ago
      News to me as someone who used them to do things as a kid (music sequencing, sound design, software experiments, vector/bitmap art). Modern machines are incredible and do so much more but these were useful in their time.
      - zabzonk 5y ago
        My comment was on the original Macs - those with almost no memory, one floppy drive, and huge expense.
        technothrasher 5y ago
        For me at least, WYSIWYG word processing was the killer app on the original Mac. The 8-bit machines and current DOS machines at the time just couldn’t compare, although windows PCs caught up pretty quickly.
walrus01 5y ago
> When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this" a good idea in theory until you see that the original Lisa sold for what would be the inflation-adjusted price of $24,000 USD today.
- earleybird 5y ago
  Got one of those Lisa's on my own dime so I could run Smalltalk-80. It was years before anything else caught up :-)

technothrasher 5y ago

> I could not understand why anyone would use Windows, or how Windows could even exist when the Mac was there. Replace Windows with Mac and Mac with Amiga and you’re in my teenage passion years! Although I had the same feeling of “this is the future” when I saw a demonstration of the original Mac in 1984. But I just remember thinking, “no color?”

jandrese 5y ago
Steve Jobs had a bug up his butt about machines that could play games being "toys for kids" and he did everything he could to have the Mac treated like a "serious business" machine, part of that included sticking with boring corporate monochrome graphics. I think he was mostly trying to avoid comparisons to the 8 bit Apples. The other reason being of course that VRAM was breathtakingly expensive at the time and you could save some money by going with 1 bit per pixel. All in all the Mac with its 512x342 monochrome display tended to come out looking nicer than the contemporary 320x200 16 color EGA graphics.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I was never an Amiga guy. I remember seeing one at an acquaintances house and being bothered by the bad "iconography". In case I missed something, I recently checked out a few web pages that captured images of the original Amiga "desktop" and it confirmed to me that the UI truly was, IMHO, rather poor. That still is remarkable to me. Susan Kare deserves the accolades, but I'm surprised there no one on the Amiga team that could make as good a UI. For that matter, the Raspbian OS I've been playing with on the Raspberry Pi has some pretty ugly stuff. Just to use an obvious example, is Thonny's icon for real? I'll stop ranting about stuff I know nothing about now.
- lproven 5y ago
  It is one of those things, yes. Not just an "everyone's tastes are different", which of course they are... but sometimes I see GUIs and think "yikes, how can you bear to look at that all day?" For me, while KDE 1 was OK, KDE 2, 3 and 4 got progressively uglier and uglier. Finally KDE 5 (call it "plasma" or whatever you like) went all flat and it's at least bearable to look at, although not pleasant. GNOME 3, OTOH, while I've never liked it at all as a desktop, looks immaculate. I think this is largely credit to Jakub Steiner's work on its graphical design (https://jimmac.eu/ https://jimmac.eu/). He is really good. As far as the Amiga goes, yes, I agree. The weird colours of AmigaOS 1.x (blue, white, bright orange, black) were so that it would display with decent contrast on a TV set rather than a monitor – specifically, an analogue CRT TV using US NTSC modulation. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos10 When the Amiga got a bit more mature and more people used monitors, AmigaOS 2.x got a slightly more toned-down blues-and-greys palette. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/amigaos204 But to my eyes the design was always crude and blocky and not appealing, whereas classic MacOS always looked great, either in monochrome on a tiny screen, or greyscale on a medium-sized one, or thousands of colours on several huge screens.

zabzonk 5y ago

> There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. Oh, come on: - tiny screen - one-button mouse - little memory - expense - poor tools - closed architecture - yada yada I remember when the Mac first came out, the guy in the next room had one. I asked him "How do I write some C code on this?" Blank looks.

parenthesis 5y ago
On the one hand, I can't disagree with you, but on the other, it's like saying that Fred Astaire isn't good looking enough to be a movie star.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  But he could dance a little. The original Macs were not really useful at all.
  - wwweston 5y ago
    News to me as someone who used them to do things as a kid (music sequencing, sound design, software experiments, vector/bitmap art). Modern machines are incredible and do so much more but these were useful in their time.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      My comment was on the original Macs - those with almost no memory, one floppy drive, and huge expense.
      - technothrasher 5y ago
        For me at least, WYSIWYG word processing was the killer app on the original Mac. The 8-bit machines and current DOS machines at the time just couldn’t compare, although windows PCs caught up pretty quickly.

walrus01 5y ago

> When Steve Jobs saw the Xerox Alto, he thought "well, obviously all personal computers are going to be like this" a good idea in theory until you see that the original Lisa sold for what would be the inflation-adjusted price of $24,000 USD today.

earleybird 5y ago
Got one of those Lisa's on my own dime so I could run Smalltalk-80. It was years before anything else caught up :-)