5 ms·

To those who used this computer and software, was it as easy as the ad claims to create these outputs?

tppiotrowski 4y ago
Not really. Bitmaps were very rare at the time and without internet access it was very hard to source clip art for visually appealing documents like the ones shown in the ads.
- JeremyReimer 4y ago
  I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist. But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional. A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.
  - Taniwha 4y ago
    "Professional" is relative - compared with PC state of the art the Imagewriter was OK - laserprinters weren't really a thing yet for anyone
    - scarface74 4y ago
      LaserWriters came out in 1985
  - User23 4y ago
    On the software side MacDraw was already there though.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The first Apple LaserWriter came out in 1985 - one year after the Mac came out. It was a Postscript printer that supported vector graphics.
  - desiarnezjr 4y ago
    The Laserwriter was one of the first accessible laser printers. And also the first with Postscript. It was super expensive (easily more than the Macintosh needed to print to it) but it was revolutionary. The only other common option was the early HP laser printers, but no Postscript.
- zerohp 4y ago
  Clip art collections were sold on floppy disk for every platform with a graphic printer. The Print Shop came out the same year as the Macintosh and was ported to most platforms.
erickhill 4y ago
If you had some talent/training - absolutely. In the 80s my high school journalism class used an ancient typesetting machine in order to make our newspaper. We would print things out and put things on giant white poster board with glue sticks that would later get photographed and converted to printed pages. After one summer we returned to school and entered class. My journalism teacher, Mrs. Forehand, beamed and beckoned us to a back room. The typesetting machine had been replaced with 2 Macintosh computers, one equipped with a MASSIVE 20MB hard drive. Inspired by Alien, we called that machine "Mother". We also had a laser printer for test prints. Suddenly we could print out pages that were 100% perfect, without any x-acto blades or glue. It was stunning. At home I had a Commodore 64 (with WAY better sound and color graphics). But I could see instantly at school I was dealing with a "professional" machine that was way out of my family's league budget-wise. There was no game scene from what I could tell, but I knew deep down it was a game changer. And I knew the ground had shifted under my feet.
deleted 4y ago
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desiarnezjr 4y ago
Yes. Bits and pieces were pretty rough. But it was better than what existed before (Wordstar, XYWrite and embedding typesetting codes, etc.) but workable. By the time Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator and the Laserwriter arrived, it was revolutionary.
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scarface74 4y ago
This reminds me of the parody Apple ad from SNL. “The Power to Crush the other kids” https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/bq4ucw/mcintosh_jr_vintage_apple_parody/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/bq4ucw/mcinto...
kmos17 4y ago
It was revolutionary, I remember at first feeling like I was really missing the command line and oddly feeling constrained by the ui, but for graphic design it opened up a world of possibilities. Things like a mouse and pointer with copy/cut/paste and the ability to select pixels and move them around was ground breaking to me. As others have noted it needed the launch of the laserwriter printer to make it a full desktop publishing solution. It also came with instruction booklets similar to these ads and the overall feel of it was an advertising/branding stroke of genius in my opinion. It was the first time I felt a computer had real potential as a creative tool. As a creative it felt like it opened up a world of possibilities, a bit like a digital version of walking in an art supply store.
jameshart 4y ago
Yes, with one possible exception: it’s not clear how a typical user would have gotten a scanned photograph of a baby onto a Mac in 1984. The example output other than that though consists of images easily produced in MacDraw or MacPaint, copy-pasted into MacWrite documents for layout. All the fonts used are built-in Mac system fonts. And the big game changers that made that possible for a user with minimal training were WYSIWYG onscreen graphics, universal copy/paste (plus the ‘scrapbook’), and consistent availability of ‘undo’. Also not to understate the value of the Finder, with folders and documents that you could see, and the clever undoable ‘wastebasket’ metaphor that also gave users confidence about what files were there, what files they were operating on, and what files they were deleting. It was completely gamechanging.
- DerekL 4y ago
  > … it’s not clear how a typical user would have gotten a scanned photograph of a baby onto a Mac in 1984. Image digitizer existed for Macintosh and other computers. Some examples: • MicronEye, from Micron Technology, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld8409SeptemberOctober1984/page/n93/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld8409SeptemberOctober1984... • MacVision, from Koala Technologies Corp. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n117/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page... • MAGIC, from New Image Technology, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n173/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page... • Micro-Imager, from Servidyne Systems, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n187/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page...

Not really. Bitmaps were very rare at the time and without internet access it was very hard to source clip art for visually appealing documents like the ones shown in the ads.

JeremyReimer 4y ago
I think the bitmap being shown in MacPaint implied that you were supposed to create your own clip art from scratch. Which would technically be possible, if you were already a good artist. But the real weakness, at the time, was in the final step--printing. Apple only had its Imagewriter series of dot matrix printers, and there was no support for vector graphics in any case. So you could print things, but they wouldn't look very professional. A few years later, when Apple licensed Adobe's vector font software and built their first laser printer, that's when everything changed.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  "Professional" is relative - compared with PC state of the art the Imagewriter was OK - laserprinters weren't really a thing yet for anyone
  - scarface74 4y ago
    LaserWriters came out in 1985
- User23 4y ago
  On the software side MacDraw was already there though.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The first Apple LaserWriter came out in 1985 - one year after the Mac came out. It was a Postscript printer that supported vector graphics.
- desiarnezjr 4y ago
  The Laserwriter was one of the first accessible laser printers. And also the first with Postscript. It was super expensive (easily more than the Macintosh needed to print to it) but it was revolutionary. The only other common option was the early HP laser printers, but no Postscript.
zerohp 4y ago
Clip art collections were sold on floppy disk for every platform with a graphic printer. The Print Shop came out the same year as the Macintosh and was ported to most platforms.

erickhill 4y ago

If you had some talent/training - absolutely. In the 80s my high school journalism class used an ancient typesetting machine in order to make our newspaper. We would print things out and put things on giant white poster board with glue sticks that would later get photographed and converted to printed pages. After one summer we returned to school and entered class. My journalism teacher, Mrs. Forehand, beamed and beckoned us to a back room. The typesetting machine had been replaced with 2 Macintosh computers, one equipped with a MASSIVE 20MB hard drive. Inspired by Alien, we called that machine "Mother". We also had a laser printer for test prints. Suddenly we could print out pages that were 100% perfect, without any x-acto blades or glue. It was stunning. At home I had a Commodore 64 (with WAY better sound and color graphics). But I could see instantly at school I was dealing with a "professional" machine that was way out of my family's league budget-wise. There was no game scene from what I could tell, but I knew deep down it was a game changer. And I knew the ground had shifted under my feet.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

desiarnezjr 4y ago

Yes. Bits and pieces were pretty rough. But it was better than what existed before (Wordstar, XYWrite and embedding typesetting codes, etc.) but workable. By the time Pagemaker, Adobe Illustrator and the Laserwriter arrived, it was revolutionary.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

scarface74 4y ago

This reminds me of the parody Apple ad from SNL. “The Power to Crush the other kids” https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/bq4ucw/mcintosh_jr_vintage_apple_parody/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/bq4ucw/mcinto...

kmos17 4y ago

It was revolutionary, I remember at first feeling like I was really missing the command line and oddly feeling constrained by the ui, but for graphic design it opened up a world of possibilities. Things like a mouse and pointer with copy/cut/paste and the ability to select pixels and move them around was ground breaking to me. As others have noted it needed the launch of the laserwriter printer to make it a full desktop publishing solution. It also came with instruction booklets similar to these ads and the overall feel of it was an advertising/branding stroke of genius in my opinion. It was the first time I felt a computer had real potential as a creative tool. As a creative it felt like it opened up a world of possibilities, a bit like a digital version of walking in an art supply store.

jameshart 4y ago

Yes, with one possible exception: it’s not clear how a typical user would have gotten a scanned photograph of a baby onto a Mac in 1984. The example output other than that though consists of images easily produced in MacDraw or MacPaint, copy-pasted into MacWrite documents for layout. All the fonts used are built-in Mac system fonts. And the big game changers that made that possible for a user with minimal training were WYSIWYG onscreen graphics, universal copy/paste (plus the ‘scrapbook’), and consistent availability of ‘undo’. Also not to understate the value of the Finder, with folders and documents that you could see, and the clever undoable ‘wastebasket’ metaphor that also gave users confidence about what files were there, what files they were operating on, and what files they were deleting. It was completely gamechanging.

DerekL 4y ago
> … it’s not clear how a typical user would have gotten a scanned photograph of a baby onto a Mac in 1984. Image digitizer existed for Macintosh and other computers. Some examples: • MicronEye, from Micron Technology, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld8409SeptemberOctober1984/page/n93/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld8409SeptemberOctober1984... • MacVision, from Koala Technologies Corp. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n117/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page... • MAGIC, from New Image Technology, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n173/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page... • Micro-Imager, from Servidyne Systems, Inc. https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page/n187/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8412_December_1984/page...