4 ms·

> There is just something perfect about the original Mac series. Oh, come on: - tiny screen - one-button mouse - little memory - expense - poor tools - c

> 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.
        flenserboy 5y ago
        They really didn't catch up until much later, and much of that had to do with printing. Macs produced decent output out of the box — fonts were a focus, and it showed.
        desiarnezjr 5y ago
        I remember it took years for Windows to catch on - not until Windows 3.0 I'd say, so really a 5+ year gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0 There were other graphical desktops like Amiga and Atari ST around that time but nothing on either platforms had the finesse of the early Mac programs (as flawed as they could be).
      - JKCalhoun 5y ago
        I came in on Team Mac Plus and 1 megabyte was adequate. My sense was the 128K Mac and 512 ("FatMac") were rather brief footnotes. Still, college friend got a 128K Mac when they came out (Carnegie Mellon gave them to all the Freshmen?) and MacPaint + ImageWriter had us making our own cassette tape labels.
eweise 5y ago
Really? I had a mac plus. Loaded Think C on it. Worked fine.
- goosedragons 5y ago
  Key bit is first came out. I don't think in 1984 there was any dev tools for the Mac or very little (MS Basic I guess?). Think C was released sometime in 1986. Mac software production at the time was done on Lisas in a kinda similar fashion to iOS and the Mac today.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    The Mac first came out in January 1984. C barely existed on microcomputers in 1984. Microsoft's first C compiler came out in 1983. The first question out of a knowledgeable user's mouth would not have been "Can I write C on it?" You would rightly have deserved hostile stares rather than blank looks.
  - robterrell 5y ago
    Aztec C was the first C compiler for the Mac I remember... I think it was 1985? It was self-hosted too, no Lisa required. But Think C (and Think Pascal) were the real game-changers for me.
    - whartung 5y ago
      The Mac 128K came out in, pretty sure, September of '84. I bought mine in November of '84. (School discount.) The first development tool I had access to was a port of UCSD Pascal. This was old school, original, UCSD Pascal v2. Simply imagine UCSD Pascal with a Quickdraw extension (that is if you can actually imagine UCSD Pascal at all...). I spent an entire evening making a button. Next, we managed to get the next generation of UCSD. A much more "Mac native" dev environment, full access to the toolbox. We tried to build a sample program on a single drive machine. After about 30+ floppy swaps, the build failed. We didn't try it after that. I don't know if I ever really got access to MS-BASIC. To be honest, at this point I was too busy having fun building Car Wars design spreadsheets in Multiplan -- which was AMAZING. If you weren't there, it's hard to imagine the impact of the mouse on a spreadsheet. It was cool enough in a word processor, but on a spreadsheet? Whoo boy. In short order, I bumped the machine up to 512K in a back alley in Pasadena, and got my hands on a 400K external drive. Now, my friends, we're cooking with gas. Indeed, Aztec C was the first compiler I bought. It provided a "unix like" dev environment with a unixy shell with an assortment of utilities, vi for the editor. It was completely competent for writing C on the Mac, you had full access to the toolbox. You need the 512K and external drive to pull it off, but it worked fine. Honestly, you needed that configuration for most anything. In those days, you rebooted -- a lot. (Programmers switch ftw!) I had the "Phone Book" Inside Macintosh as a reference. Later we drove up to a computer show in San Francisco, and Addison-Wesley had just released the hard cover version. $80!! I still bought it (this was a lot of money for me). I also bought a very cool multi-tasking Forth, who's name escapes me. Appreciate that C development on, well, any contemporary micro computer was a nightmare. Everything was slow, everything was small. Hard drives were rare. The Mac was no speed demon, but it was faster than a PC. It was faster than a Z80. Most anyone doing any real work for any of these machines, was doing it on something else. I think Microsoft did everything on VAXes (obviously not everything, but core development). I got the Apple Smalltalk in late '85. This was THE Smalltalk. Blue book Smalltalk. The Xerox image on an Apple VM. This is where Squeak came from. But it wasn't very usable on a 512K machine. Think Pascal was the real game changer. A full boat "IDE" self hosted on the Mac. This was, effectively, the "Turbo Pascal" of the Macintosh. It was dreamy. The Interwebz says it came out in '86. Nobody I knew was using the Lisa. Nobody had access to one. We were all Mac geeks, making do. It's hard to imagine doing anything with a 9" screen, but we did. Just adapted. Wrote code on it, wrote (and laid out) the user group newsletter on it. I did database work on a Mac Plus, using 4th Dimension. Made some very nice reports for a survey system. Bonus of a 9" screen? We all took our Macs with us. We all had those padded Mac bags. I bungied mine to the back of my scooter. When our user group met in a pizza joint, it was invaded with Macs, and we still had room for the pizza. Oh, and can you say...AppleTalk?
deltarholamda 5y ago
It's hard to quantify, but sitting at one of these upright Macs is a joy. The B&W screen was great for writing. It had this friendly-face look about it, and it took up so little desk space. A laptop is sort of similar, but you sit hunched over at those. The classic Mac allowed you to sit like a human instead of a caveman. I get that it's not great for everything we do today that requires acres of screen real estate, but if you want to concentrate on a single task like writing (or programming) with little distraction, it's really nice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
majormajor 5y ago
It's interesting how similar these complaints are to the ones about the original iPhone. Many are literally the same. The Mac became more open than the iPhone ever did - then started getting closed down more and more again - but they were both basically perfect MVP/proof of concept launches for a basic form factor and interface that got extended over the years to do so much more.

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.
      - flenserboy 5y ago
        They really didn't catch up until much later, and much of that had to do with printing. Macs produced decent output out of the box — fonts were a focus, and it showed.
      - desiarnezjr 5y ago
        I remember it took years for Windows to catch on - not until Windows 3.0 I'd say, so really a 5+ year gap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0 There were other graphical desktops like Amiga and Atari ST around that time but nothing on either platforms had the finesse of the early Mac programs (as flawed as they could be).
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I came in on Team Mac Plus and 1 megabyte was adequate. My sense was the 128K Mac and 512 ("FatMac") were rather brief footnotes. Still, college friend got a 128K Mac when they came out (Carnegie Mellon gave them to all the Freshmen?) and MacPaint + ImageWriter had us making our own cassette tape labels.

eweise 5y ago

Really? I had a mac plus. Loaded Think C on it. Worked fine.

goosedragons 5y ago
Key bit is first came out. I don't think in 1984 there was any dev tools for the Mac or very little (MS Basic I guess?). Think C was released sometime in 1986. Mac software production at the time was done on Lisas in a kinda similar fashion to iOS and the Mac today.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  The Mac first came out in January 1984. C barely existed on microcomputers in 1984. Microsoft's first C compiler came out in 1983. The first question out of a knowledgeable user's mouth would not have been "Can I write C on it?" You would rightly have deserved hostile stares rather than blank looks.
- robterrell 5y ago
  Aztec C was the first C compiler for the Mac I remember... I think it was 1985? It was self-hosted too, no Lisa required. But Think C (and Think Pascal) were the real game-changers for me.
  - whartung 5y ago
    The Mac 128K came out in, pretty sure, September of '84. I bought mine in November of '84. (School discount.) The first development tool I had access to was a port of UCSD Pascal. This was old school, original, UCSD Pascal v2. Simply imagine UCSD Pascal with a Quickdraw extension (that is if you can actually imagine UCSD Pascal at all...). I spent an entire evening making a button. Next, we managed to get the next generation of UCSD. A much more "Mac native" dev environment, full access to the toolbox. We tried to build a sample program on a single drive machine. After about 30+ floppy swaps, the build failed. We didn't try it after that. I don't know if I ever really got access to MS-BASIC. To be honest, at this point I was too busy having fun building Car Wars design spreadsheets in Multiplan -- which was AMAZING. If you weren't there, it's hard to imagine the impact of the mouse on a spreadsheet. It was cool enough in a word processor, but on a spreadsheet? Whoo boy. In short order, I bumped the machine up to 512K in a back alley in Pasadena, and got my hands on a 400K external drive. Now, my friends, we're cooking with gas. Indeed, Aztec C was the first compiler I bought. It provided a "unix like" dev environment with a unixy shell with an assortment of utilities, vi for the editor. It was completely competent for writing C on the Mac, you had full access to the toolbox. You need the 512K and external drive to pull it off, but it worked fine. Honestly, you needed that configuration for most anything. In those days, you rebooted -- a lot. (Programmers switch ftw!) I had the "Phone Book" Inside Macintosh as a reference. Later we drove up to a computer show in San Francisco, and Addison-Wesley had just released the hard cover version. $80!! I still bought it (this was a lot of money for me). I also bought a very cool multi-tasking Forth, who's name escapes me. Appreciate that C development on, well, any contemporary micro computer was a nightmare. Everything was slow, everything was small. Hard drives were rare. The Mac was no speed demon, but it was faster than a PC. It was faster than a Z80. Most anyone doing any real work for any of these machines, was doing it on something else. I think Microsoft did everything on VAXes (obviously not everything, but core development). I got the Apple Smalltalk in late '85. This was THE Smalltalk. Blue book Smalltalk. The Xerox image on an Apple VM. This is where Squeak came from. But it wasn't very usable on a 512K machine. Think Pascal was the real game changer. A full boat "IDE" self hosted on the Mac. This was, effectively, the "Turbo Pascal" of the Macintosh. It was dreamy. The Interwebz says it came out in '86. Nobody I knew was using the Lisa. Nobody had access to one. We were all Mac geeks, making do. It's hard to imagine doing anything with a 9" screen, but we did. Just adapted. Wrote code on it, wrote (and laid out) the user group newsletter on it. I did database work on a Mac Plus, using 4th Dimension. Made some very nice reports for a survey system. Bonus of a 9" screen? We all took our Macs with us. We all had those padded Mac bags. I bungied mine to the back of my scooter. When our user group met in a pizza joint, it was invaded with Macs, and we still had room for the pizza. Oh, and can you say...AppleTalk?

deltarholamda 5y ago

It's hard to quantify, but sitting at one of these upright Macs is a joy. The B&W screen was great for writing. It had this friendly-face look about it, and it took up so little desk space. A laptop is sort of similar, but you sit hunched over at those. The classic Mac allowed you to sit like a human instead of a caveman. I get that it's not great for everything we do today that requires acres of screen real estate, but if you want to concentrate on a single task like writing (or programming) with little distraction, it's really nice.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

majormajor 5y ago

It's interesting how similar these complaints are to the ones about the original iPhone. Many are literally the same. The Mac became more open than the iPhone ever did - then started getting closed down more and more again - but they were both basically perfect MVP/proof of concept launches for a basic form factor and interface that got extended over the years to do so much more.