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And price, and gobs of network effects. Macs were much more expensive than PCs, and if you were working in an office with multiple computers, being the only on

And price, and gobs of network effects. Macs were much more expensive than PCs, and if you were working in an office with multiple computers, being the only one with a mac was a huge pain in ways that don't matter today. The main way to transfer files in the 80s was floppy disks. Most PCs in the 80s had only 5.25" floppies, and Macs had 3.5". Even if you had a 3.5" drive though on your PC, the Mac had a much different format. There was some software that let you read Mac disks on a PC, but it was somewhat flakey, and then you were left with the fact that the base file format on the Mac with resource and data forks was much different, and then of course you were probably using different spreadsheet and word processing software. Overall it was just barely possible to share files if you really worked at it. What you tended to see was that most everyone used PCs except certain industries/jobs that needed the graphical capabilities of the Mac. For example, if you were in a newsroom, everyone would be using Macs because there really wasn't good desktop publishing software for the PC until about the early nineties. The Amiga had a niche in video production because there really wasn't anything comparable to the video toaster for the Mac or PC until much later. You'd also see various types of workstations used for CAD, and in the nineties, SGI was the only game in town for high end 3D graphics. Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software.

Paul-Craft 3y ago
> Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software. Famously, id Software also developed Doom on NeXTSTEP. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Also the original web browser, WorldWideWeb was on NeXT, but hardly anyone used it because hardly anyone had a NeXT.
chasil 3y ago
Xerox Ventura Publisher was popular before the 90's and ran on the GEM graphical desktop from Digital Research (the CP/M people). It was introduced in 1986. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura Aldus PageMaker also had a very early Windows Port (1987). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker One easy way to transfer files between early Macs & PCs was a null modem cable and terminal software that implemented Xmodem. Very long ago, I once pulled a DBase2 database off a CP/M system with 8" diskettes over a null modem cable by printing it to the serial port, and then I captured the output on a PC with Procomm. There was a later "Laplink" program with a cable for parallel printer ports that ran faster than the 115kb max of the serial port.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Yeah or, if both of the computers had modems, you could even upload a file to a BBS and download it with the other computer. This was one area where some cross-microcomputer standards were actually coming together. You had: 1. RS-232 2. V.22 and V.22bis modems (higher speed wouldn't standardize for a number of years later) 3. Bell System Telephone lines 4. VT-100/ANSI escape sequences 5. XMODEM, then YMODEM and ZMODEM 6. ASCII character set and plain text files All of which come together to allow a lot of interoperability on this level. This type of standardization didn't really exist for: 1. Floppy drives 2. Hard drives 3. Monitors 4. Keyboards 5. Mice 6. Printers (beyond plain text over a parallel port, and even that wasn't the standard interface on many printers) Pretty much everything you could attach to a computer except a modem was nonstandard and different between different microcomputers.
alwillis 3y ago
I was pretty involved with the NeXT community back in the day. If you recall, NeXT started as a workstation for higher ed. I worked at MIT in the 90s and compared to the Sun and SGI workstations departments routinely bought, NeXT was less expensive. And since it ran Unix, people could use most of the software they were used to. The premier spreadsheet for NeXT was Lotus Improv, which introduced many features that we take for granted today, like pivot tables. For that period of time, the display was so much better than anything comparable. Even the original greyscale display was stunning. Steve Jobs only wanted the best software anyway; he never wanted lowest common denominator software. Thanks to Display Postscript, it became worth it to buy a NeXT to use FreeHand or Illustrator that could do things other platforms couldn’t when it came to desktop publishing and graphic design.

Paul-Craft 3y ago

> Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of them for internally developed software. Famously, id Software also developed Doom on NeXTSTEP. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP

cameldrv 3y ago
Also the original web browser, WorldWideWeb was on NeXT, but hardly anyone used it because hardly anyone had a NeXT.

chasil 3y ago

Xerox Ventura Publisher was popular before the 90's and ran on the GEM graphical desktop from Digital Research (the CP/M people). It was introduced in 1986. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Ventura Aldus PageMaker also had a very early Windows Port (1987). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMaker One easy way to transfer files between early Macs & PCs was a null modem cable and terminal software that implemented Xmodem. Very long ago, I once pulled a DBase2 database off a CP/M system with 8" diskettes over a null modem cable by printing it to the serial port, and then I captured the output on a PC with Procomm. There was a later "Laplink" program with a cable for parallel printer ports that ran faster than the 115kb max of the serial port.

cameldrv 3y ago
Yeah or, if both of the computers had modems, you could even upload a file to a BBS and download it with the other computer. This was one area where some cross-microcomputer standards were actually coming together. You had: 1. RS-232 2. V.22 and V.22bis modems (higher speed wouldn't standardize for a number of years later) 3. Bell System Telephone lines 4. VT-100/ANSI escape sequences 5. XMODEM, then YMODEM and ZMODEM 6. ASCII character set and plain text files All of which come together to allow a lot of interoperability on this level. This type of standardization didn't really exist for: 1. Floppy drives 2. Hard drives 3. Monitors 4. Keyboards 5. Mice 6. Printers (beyond plain text over a parallel port, and even that wasn't the standard interface on many printers) Pretty much everything you could attach to a computer except a modem was nonstandard and different between different microcomputers.

alwillis 3y ago

I was pretty involved with the NeXT community back in the day. If you recall, NeXT started as a workstation for higher ed. I worked at MIT in the 90s and compared to the Sun and SGI workstations departments routinely bought, NeXT was less expensive. And since it ran Unix, people could use most of the software they were used to. The premier spreadsheet for NeXT was Lotus Improv, which introduced many features that we take for granted today, like pivot tables. For that period of time, the display was so much better than anything comparable. Even the original greyscale display was stunning. Steve Jobs only wanted the best software anyway; he never wanted lowest common denominator software. Thanks to Display Postscript, it became worth it to buy a NeXT to use FreeHand or Illustrator that could do things other platforms couldn’t when it came to desktop publishing and graphic design.