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Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. The user experience of most pre-Mac computers was "

Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. The user experience of most pre-Mac computers was "black screen with glowing green bracket". If you typed something, the computer would respond "SYNTAX ERROR", which was even more intimidating. You in your ignorance had committed not just an error, but a syntax error, whatever that was. Seeing a Mac for the first time, from the smiling icon at bootup to the way the pointer moved over things, and the way you could click to make things appear on the screen, was a transformative moment similar to the first time people a generation later encountered an image-capable web browser. It was one of those moments (like seeing VisiCalc in action) that made large numbers of people realize that a world was coming when computers might be usable by, and useful to, regular mortals. I was nine years old when I saw my first Mac in 1984, and my only previous experience with computers was teaching an IBM PC to print 'BUTT' in an infinite loop using BASIC. I'd love to hear the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI.

comboy 3y ago
I came later, but wasn't there e.g. something like quattro already which had some form of GUI (even though it was drawn using ascii characters)?
- postmodest 3y ago
  A bitmapped GUI is a different beast. You can use WordPerfect with a mouse but it's not a GUI. Borland's Turbo Vision, which had a TUI windowing system, didn't come out until 1990. GEM was 1984, after the Lisa and during the lead-up to the first Mac sales. (And, honestly, how many Atari ST's ever sold?)
  - Stratoscope 3y ago
    There were definitely TUIs of various sorts well before 1990, although they tended to be application-specific rather than "operating system" level stuff. Here's one I shipped in 1983: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan/page/n199/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan/pag... A better-known system from the time was Framework, developed by Robert Carr and team and released in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)
    - postmodest 3y ago
      I had never heard of Framework. Here's a link with examples of a later version: https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/xe https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/xe I had only ever seen "embedded" TUIs like on word processors, but even then, I only saw them after the Mac came out, and they were being dumped at thrift stores and flea markets. ...one time in '96, I came across someone selling a complete Xerox Daybreak at a flea market.
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
It’s funny, my father was quite dismissive of GUIs. He thought they were just toys, I don’t think he even used Windows until he was forced to around ‘98. (the iPhone transformed him into the biggest Apple fan on the planet, somehow)
- forinti 3y ago
  I remember the transition to GUIs and, although they looked nice, they didn't feel so productive. By the time the GUI had started up and you had found what you were looking for, you'd have been well into your task on DOS and Wordstar or Turbo C or whatever. The very first GUI I ever used was a thing called Fleet Street Editor on a BBC Micro. It was slow, but since the task at hand was about graphics, it made sense to use it. All other things you could do on a micro were a lot faster on the CLI.
  - deanCommie 3y ago
    It's interesting that this is always the shot against Apple, in every generation. And I'm not judging, I was myself like this since a young geek in the 90s to a greybeard in the early 2010s, before something finally clicked in my head. While us geeks were criticizing the productivity/effectiveness of the Mac, the iMac, the iPhone (and presumably soon the VisionPro), Apple was casually changing computing for everyone (literally for all of humanity) and forever. What cemented it for me was re-watching 10-20 year old videos of Jobs at All Things D: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-all-things-digital-conference-video/id529997900 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al... I had no idea how patient and prescient he was about how the various pieces of technology Apple was working on would change the world. How revolutionary something like iTunes truly was. The intersection of technology, usability, and BUSINESS (Only Nixon could've gone to China; Only Jobs could've convinced the Music Industry to digitize all their music to sell on iTunes) is truly astounding. In our industry of frivolously inflated startup unicorns, it somehow seems just that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. And I say that as someone who spent most of my career criticizing them.
    - 3y ago
postmodest 3y ago
Same here. We had a VIC-20, which couldn't even display 80col. Then I got to go on a trip to the local uni over Xmas break and play with the first Macs. Everything changed. It was what computers were supposed to be, a kind of 2d VR where what you created could be printed IRL. The next closest watershed moment to that would probably be getting to uni and being able to telnet around the world. Then after that, probably getting to use an SGI Onyx to do "military grade" flight sims. It cannot be understated what the Mac did to the computing industry. Yeah, the Star did it first, and the Mother of All Demos showed it off in 1968, but those things were never in people's living rooms. Thr Mac was.
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GoofballJones 3y ago
I saw the Mac and was intrigued, but never touched one at the time. I hadn't played with one yet. BUT, about a year later, I DID check out an Amiga. Same CPU inside of it, but this one was in color. And had a GUI also, but also a CLI if you wanted to use that. AND it pre-emptive multitasked out of the box (no protected memory though, so it did crash). I got involved with the Amiga before the Mac...and I couldn't understand why people liked the Mac so much with how limited it was comparatively. Just shows the power of presentation and a company behind a product that could launch it to bigger things. Commodore never really understood what it had with the Amiga, but Apple did...which is why the Mac has stuck around and the Amiga is just a footnote now.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  I had access to both Macs and Amigas, and the Mac was simply way more polished. It was a complete product that did useful things. It didn’t have a command line because it didn’t need^ one. The Amiga was very flashy but, ultimately, it felt like a toy to me. It was more fun to hack on than the Mac, but most people don’t care about that. ^ I’m so happy it has one today.
  - nevster 3y ago
    Agree about the polish. The UI of the Amiga always looked kinda gross. And the Amiga mouse buttons felt horrible. Almost as bad as the iMac hockey puck mouse!
    - foobarian 3y ago
      What about the boxy hand holding the floppy when you turned it on! Heh.
      - doctor_eval 3y ago
        I remember the sales pitch one guy gave me for Amiga, where he got all the images on the screen to cycle through all the colours of the rainbow. And then they had this weird printer that printed colour images on quarter sized thermal rolls? Am I remembering right? I suppose it was supposed to be an impressive demo, but even though I was in my early 20s I was like, wtf? Why would anyone want this?! Especially when I had a laser printer in my office!
sircastor 3y ago
My computers were always Macs at home. It’s no wonder I saw IBM compatibles and even Apple IIs and thought of them as ridiculous. I think it probably pushed me into thinking of computers as tools for accomplishing a task instead of as a hobby, as many of my peers did. It took me a long time to appreciate what early hobby computers were.
detourdog 3y ago
I can remember in 7th grade reading about the Lisa and the claim a computer so easy to use that 2 year old could use seemed non-sensical to my experience. My Mom english major (who made a “living” as a potter saw I a Mac 128K at the mall and went on a frenzy to buy and experienced the birth of desktop publishing at the age of 46.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI I wrote a whole book about it: Inventing the Future (starts end of 1976) The PARC people already had several independent efforts (Bravo, Markup, Draw) and Smalltalk to build them with. Our task was to unify all the functionality into a single GUI. (and by the way, Jobs and his minions didn't sneak in and steal it, contrary to what you've read.) Not everyone was sold on it, a fact which some people would love to forget now. "We'll just slap a GUI on all this great functionality" was something marketing-droids actually did say. The book is written with a strict "no hindsight" rule, but a friend and I did reconsider it all, with hindsight definitely allowed: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
jdkee 3y ago
First used a GUI on my Amiga 500 back in 1987. The interface was relatively fast and responsive with simple window animations. I mostly used it to play videogames due to the graphics and S T E R E O sound (which was amazing). In fact, the graphics capability was much more impressive than the novelty of the GUI, and this was coming from a ZX-81 and an Atari 800.
- timbit42 3y ago
  Nice! You went from one Jay Miner system (Atari 800) to another (Amiga 500).
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foobarian 3y ago
I was in a funny in-between generation where I had a mix of GUIs and command lines first, through Atari/Amiga, and PC DOS and Windows (early 2.0, 3.x versions). The common thing about these machines were the unholy hacks one had to resort to to do more than one thing concurrently. The DOS TSRs or hooking things up to interrupt handlers on the Atari... heh. Anyway one day I watched someone type a command followed by an ampersand on some university Unix system. And again a few times. And they all actually executed concurrently, without any tricks like all but one got suspended. I still don't think I ever experienced the same feeling of awe as that day :)
- notRobot 3y ago
  That sounds like a really cool experience! They probably executed consecutively and not concurrently though, right?
  - somenewaccount1 3y ago
    If you use double ampersand, yes. One amp will kick them off consecutively, but they will run concurrently.
    - notRobot 3y ago
      Ah, makes sense!
- samastur 3y ago
  What unholy hacks? AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking and I often ran more than one thing at the same time.
whartung 3y ago
> Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. Indeed. When the Mac came out, my friend and I went to a local computer store to look at one. My friend sat there for several minutes, mostly just playing with the menu bar, watching the menus come and go, flickering as he went from one to another with the mouse. He just sat there slack jawed going “Wow!”. Folks have to appreciate the simple marvel of having that beautiful, crisp display with square pixels. This was not routine. It was amazing. We both bought one with the student discount. $1480 for a 128k Mac. Over $4300 inflation adjusted today. At the time a box of floppies were $40. Man did we blow vast amounts of money on computer hardware back then. And, yes, a 128k, single floppy Mac was borderline useless. We got back alley RAM upgrades and external floppy drives. There went another $800. But with that we could develop in C on the machine.
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  MPW C? It was my first usable C compiler with the awesome MPW Shell. I was developing commercially and had a hard disk :-) Luxury! I’ve been a commercial Mac coder ever since, going via NeXT which turned out to be lucrative a few years later.
  - raywu 3y ago
    Can you share any story on Mac OS 9.x vs Mac OSX transition? How big of a leap was it under the hood? Why?
    - OnlyMortal 3y ago
      OSX has absolutely nothing in common with what’s now called Classic. I’m sure you’re aware that OSX and, indeed, the current macOS is a UNIX like operating system. Hence, it’s more BSD and Linux like. To aid legacy Macintosh applications, such as Photoshop and MS Office to run on OSX, an emulator was provided in early OSX releases that would detect old apps and run them in the emulator. These apps were later modified to use a Classic (mostly) compatible set of libraries known as “Carbon”. This allowed them to run native but still have their older codebases. The Carbon UIs were often written with a framework called “PowerPlant”, part of the Metrowerks C++ IDE. Essentially, it gave large old codebases time to rework their code to the NeXTStep frameworks called “AppKit” and “FoundationKit” (rebadged as “Cocoa” by Apple). Carbon APIs have now mostly been deprecated or removed as nowadays applications are written in Objective-C, the preferred NeXT language, and mixed with C++. Or, if they’re trivial Mac only apps, they might be written in “Swift”. I do recall at Agfa in Belgium we had an effort to get the existing Mac products out of CodeWarrior’s compiler and into the g++ tool chain. It was non-trivial as the compiler Apple had provided for C++ wasn’t up to date. We had an Apple tech guy on site and he relayed the issue back to Apple and fixes to the compiler we’re made. Still, the code was PowerPlant based so looked old fashioned. At another gig, Macromedia ported Flash from “CFM” to “mach-o” format (Classic Carbon to g++) and it failed to run. It turned out the g++ linker couldn’t handle code segments more than 32mb. Flash was a single blob of a binary. Apple released a new linker. I think much if the reason why Apple moved off g++ to clang was due to the difficulty in maintaining g++ on their fork.
analog31 3y ago
I'm older. But I also saw my first Mac in 1984. ;-) My first exposure to a computer was in 1981, when I took a high school programming class. So I was certainly not intimidated by text entry or errors. While in college, someone came through and demonstrated an Apple Lisa in the big lecture hall, and of course the Mac came out soon thereafter. What I can say is that complete familiarity with text based systems didn't make me any less impressed with the GUI. It might have made me in less of a rush to go out and get one of my own, but my bank account had its own opinion about that too.
stoolpigeon 3y ago
The first time I saw a personal computer was at the home of a friend. His father was an engineer for Ping and they had a computer at their house. We weren't allowed to touch it but we watched his dad play a Star Trek game on it for a little while. A couple years later I'd get my hands on a TRS-80 at school. I loved it. When I went to high school in 1983 we had the Apple IIe in our lab. I spent hours on them doing basic and later Pascal. By then I had a vic-20 at home. I was a part of a nerdy group that hung out in the computer lab any time we could and we had a pretty good relationship with the head of the match department. When they go their first Mac, that was the first time I saw gui in person. We were given a few minutes to play with it and I really liked it. I don't think it was so shocking though. While the command line was my normal initial interface, I was used to playing games that provided a GUI of their own to interact with the game. The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS. After high school I didn't have a pc of my own for years. When I did get one is was a Packard Bell sx386 running DOS. I had that for a decent amount of time before I got my first copy of windows. For me it all just fit together and I would say to this day I think of a computer and it's operating system as the CLI it provides. The GUI is an abstraction that runs on top. I like a nice desktop ( KDE is my favorite ) but I get very frustrated any time I can't get underneath it and do what I want. My first instinct any time I hit a problem that feels difficult, is to drop to the shell.
- mjhagen 3y ago
  > The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS. I presume you speak metaphorically, but just in case. Macintosh wasn't like that, the GUI was the OS, which is what made it so different from Microsoft's attempts, no DOS to drop down to.
dhosek 3y ago
Not to mention that until the Apple //e was released in 1983, there weren’t even arrow keys on the Apple ][ keyboard. Even in the Apple //e era, word-processing was not only not WYSIWYG, but you had to insert printer-specific control sequences in your output which meant that on some printers, if you had a line break in the middle of an underlined phrase, the underline would continue from the left margin on the second line.
- dmolony 3y ago
  The Apple ][+ (which I bought in 1981) had left and right arrow keys, but no up/down arrow keys.
  - dhosek 3y ago
    It’s been so long since I used a ][+, I forgot that there was a right arrow key. I thought there was only a backspace ley, but there was, along with a “rept” key which I’d completely forgotten (not to mention that horribly-placed reset key).
GeekyBear 3y ago
> Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. The next time I experienced that same feeling was during Jeff Han's TED talk where he gave his multitouch demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU
adrian_b 3y ago
The first time when I have used a GUI was with Windows 3.0, but it did not impress me much, because at that time it was just a useless toy. On the same computer I was using many MS-DOS programs which not only were much more useful than anything that existed for Windows at that time (1990), but they also had much more clever user interfaces, some of which have never been completely matched by the later GUI programs, e.g. Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, XTree, the Brief text editor and many others. While it is said that in GUI programs it should be easier for the user to discover the available commands and their behavior, that was not really a problem for the good MS-DOS programs, because they all came with huge well-written user manuals, where the user could find everything that was needed to know about the user interface, so even when the UI consisted of obscure keyboard shortcuts, learning it was not difficult. The only thing that I really liked in the Windows 3.0 GUI were the included fonts (Times, Helvetica and Courier), which were much nicer than the SuperVGA bitmap fonts that were used by the MS-DOS programs. Later, Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups were still not competitive with MS-DOS or DR-DOS. Only IBM OS/2 2.0 looked like a real improvement over the operating systems with a text-based UI, but it lacked useful applications. Everything changed with the launch of Windows 95, together with the availability of cheap 486 CPU clones, which finally enabled a decent speed for GUIs, which previously had been annoyingly slow for any professional use. Only with Windows 95, both myself and everybody I knew have switched to using GUIs.
timbit42 3y ago
I wasn't that impressed with the Mac GUI the first time I saw it. There was no color, it could barely do more than beep, and there wasn't much software available yet so it seemed pretty useless compared to my Commodore 64. I had Magic Desk on the C64 in 1983 and while it wasn't a bitmapped desktop, it was a desktop with many similarities to the Mac. It even had a pointer. When the Amiga came out, there was no way I was choosing a Mac over the powerful Amiga with 4096 colors, stereo sound, multi-tasking and amazing games. While I had it I was able to digitize and edit images, record and edit audio, built and used a MIDI interface with it, and even went online with it even before the web was a thing. I also ran a BBS on it and was still able to use the Amiga for all these other things at the same time. The Mac was the first commercially available bitmapped GUI but the Amiga was the first system with a bitmapped GUI that was like modern OSes with color, sound, and multi-tasking. The Mac didn't have those things until later.

comboy 3y ago

I came later, but wasn't there e.g. something like quattro already which had some form of GUI (even though it was drawn using ascii characters)?

postmodest 3y ago
A bitmapped GUI is a different beast. You can use WordPerfect with a mouse but it's not a GUI. Borland's Turbo Vision, which had a TUI windowing system, didn't come out until 1990. GEM was 1984, after the Lisa and during the lead-up to the first Mac sales. (And, honestly, how many Atari ST's ever sold?)
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  There were definitely TUIs of various sorts well before 1990, although they tended to be application-specific rather than "operating system" level stuff. Here's one I shipped in 1983: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan/page/n199/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-11-rescan/pag... A better-known system from the time was Framework, developed by Robert Carr and team and released in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_(office_suite)
  - postmodest 3y ago
    I had never heard of Framework. Here's a link with examples of a later version: https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/xe https://winworldpc.com/product/framework/xe I had only ever seen "embedded" TUIs like on word processors, but even then, I only saw them after the Mac came out, and they were being dumped at thrift stores and flea markets. ...one time in '96, I came across someone selling a complete Xerox Daybreak at a flea market.

Eric_WVGG 3y ago

It’s funny, my father was quite dismissive of GUIs. He thought they were just toys, I don’t think he even used Windows until he was forced to around ‘98. (the iPhone transformed him into the biggest Apple fan on the planet, somehow)

forinti 3y ago
I remember the transition to GUIs and, although they looked nice, they didn't feel so productive. By the time the GUI had started up and you had found what you were looking for, you'd have been well into your task on DOS and Wordstar or Turbo C or whatever. The very first GUI I ever used was a thing called Fleet Street Editor on a BBC Micro. It was slow, but since the task at hand was about graphics, it made sense to use it. All other things you could do on a micro were a lot faster on the CLI.
- deanCommie 3y ago
  It's interesting that this is always the shot against Apple, in every generation. And I'm not judging, I was myself like this since a young geek in the 90s to a greybeard in the early 2010s, before something finally clicked in my head. While us geeks were criticizing the productivity/effectiveness of the Mac, the iMac, the iPhone (and presumably soon the VisionPro), Apple was casually changing computing for everyone (literally for all of humanity) and forever. What cemented it for me was re-watching 10-20 year old videos of Jobs at All Things D: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-all-things-digital-conference-video/id529997900 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al... I had no idea how patient and prescient he was about how the various pieces of technology Apple was working on would change the world. How revolutionary something like iTunes truly was. The intersection of technology, usability, and BUSINESS (Only Nixon could've gone to China; Only Jobs could've convinced the Music Industry to digitize all their music to sell on iTunes) is truly astounding. In our industry of frivolously inflated startup unicorns, it somehow seems just that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. And I say that as someone who spent most of my career criticizing them.
  - 3y ago

postmodest 3y ago

Same here. We had a VIC-20, which couldn't even display 80col. Then I got to go on a trip to the local uni over Xmas break and play with the first Macs. Everything changed. It was what computers were supposed to be, a kind of 2d VR where what you created could be printed IRL. The next closest watershed moment to that would probably be getting to uni and being able to telnet around the world. Then after that, probably getting to use an SGI Onyx to do "military grade" flight sims. It cannot be understated what the Mac did to the computing industry. Yeah, the Star did it first, and the Mother of All Demos showed it off in 1968, but those things were never in people's living rooms. Thr Mac was.

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GoofballJones 3y ago

I saw the Mac and was intrigued, but never touched one at the time. I hadn't played with one yet. BUT, about a year later, I DID check out an Amiga. Same CPU inside of it, but this one was in color. And had a GUI also, but also a CLI if you wanted to use that. AND it pre-emptive multitasked out of the box (no protected memory though, so it did crash). I got involved with the Amiga before the Mac...and I couldn't understand why people liked the Mac so much with how limited it was comparatively. Just shows the power of presentation and a company behind a product that could launch it to bigger things. Commodore never really understood what it had with the Amiga, but Apple did...which is why the Mac has stuck around and the Amiga is just a footnote now.

doctor_eval 3y ago
I had access to both Macs and Amigas, and the Mac was simply way more polished. It was a complete product that did useful things. It didn’t have a command line because it didn’t need^ one. The Amiga was very flashy but, ultimately, it felt like a toy to me. It was more fun to hack on than the Mac, but most people don’t care about that. ^ I’m so happy it has one today.
- nevster 3y ago
  Agree about the polish. The UI of the Amiga always looked kinda gross. And the Amiga mouse buttons felt horrible. Almost as bad as the iMac hockey puck mouse!
  - foobarian 3y ago
    What about the boxy hand holding the floppy when you turned it on! Heh.
    - doctor_eval 3y ago
      I remember the sales pitch one guy gave me for Amiga, where he got all the images on the screen to cycle through all the colours of the rainbow. And then they had this weird printer that printed colour images on quarter sized thermal rolls? Am I remembering right? I suppose it was supposed to be an impressive demo, but even though I was in my early 20s I was like, wtf? Why would anyone want this?! Especially when I had a laser printer in my office!

sircastor 3y ago

My computers were always Macs at home. It’s no wonder I saw IBM compatibles and even Apple IIs and thought of them as ridiculous. I think it probably pushed me into thinking of computers as tools for accomplishing a task instead of as a hobby, as many of my peers did. It took me a long time to appreciate what early hobby computers were.

detourdog 3y ago

I can remember in 7th grade reading about the Lisa and the claim a computer so easy to use that 2 year old could use seemed non-sensical to my experience. My Mom english major (who made a “living” as a potter saw I a Mac 128K at the mall and went on a frenzy to buy and experienced the birth of desktop publishing at the age of 46.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> the impressions people older than me got the first time they used a GUI I wrote a whole book about it: Inventing the Future (starts end of 1976) The PARC people already had several independent efforts (Bravo, Markup, Draw) and Smalltalk to build them with. Our task was to unify all the functionality into a single GUI. (and by the way, Jobs and his minions didn't sneak in and steal it, contrary to what you've read.) Not everyone was sold on it, a fact which some people would love to forget now. "We'll just slap a GUI on all this great functionality" was something marketing-droids actually did say. The book is written with a strict "no hindsight" rule, but a friend and I did reconsider it all, with hindsight definitely allowed: https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight

jdkee 3y ago

First used a GUI on my Amiga 500 back in 1987. The interface was relatively fast and responsive with simple window animations. I mostly used it to play videogames due to the graphics and S T E R E O sound (which was amazing). In fact, the graphics capability was much more impressive than the novelty of the GUI, and this was coming from a ZX-81 and an Atari 800.

timbit42 3y ago
Nice! You went from one Jay Miner system (Atari 800) to another (Amiga 500).

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foobarian 3y ago

I was in a funny in-between generation where I had a mix of GUIs and command lines first, through Atari/Amiga, and PC DOS and Windows (early 2.0, 3.x versions). The common thing about these machines were the unholy hacks one had to resort to to do more than one thing concurrently. The DOS TSRs or hooking things up to interrupt handlers on the Atari... heh. Anyway one day I watched someone type a command followed by an ampersand on some university Unix system. And again a few times. And they all actually executed concurrently, without any tricks like all but one got suspended. I still don't think I ever experienced the same feeling of awe as that day :)

notRobot 3y ago
That sounds like a really cool experience! They probably executed consecutively and not concurrently though, right?
- somenewaccount1 3y ago
  If you use double ampersand, yes. One amp will kick them off consecutively, but they will run concurrently.
  - notRobot 3y ago
    Ah, makes sense!
samastur 3y ago
What unholy hacks? AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking and I often ran more than one thing at the same time.

whartung 3y ago

> Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. Indeed. When the Mac came out, my friend and I went to a local computer store to look at one. My friend sat there for several minutes, mostly just playing with the menu bar, watching the menus come and go, flickering as he went from one to another with the mouse. He just sat there slack jawed going “Wow!”. Folks have to appreciate the simple marvel of having that beautiful, crisp display with square pixels. This was not routine. It was amazing. We both bought one with the student discount. $1480 for a 128k Mac. Over $4300 inflation adjusted today. At the time a box of floppies were $40. Man did we blow vast amounts of money on computer hardware back then. And, yes, a 128k, single floppy Mac was borderline useless. We got back alley RAM upgrades and external floppy drives. There went another $800. But with that we could develop in C on the machine.

OnlyMortal 3y ago
MPW C? It was my first usable C compiler with the awesome MPW Shell. I was developing commercially and had a hard disk :-) Luxury! I’ve been a commercial Mac coder ever since, going via NeXT which turned out to be lucrative a few years later.
- raywu 3y ago
  Can you share any story on Mac OS 9.x vs Mac OSX transition? How big of a leap was it under the hood? Why?
  - OnlyMortal 3y ago
    OSX has absolutely nothing in common with what’s now called Classic. I’m sure you’re aware that OSX and, indeed, the current macOS is a UNIX like operating system. Hence, it’s more BSD and Linux like. To aid legacy Macintosh applications, such as Photoshop and MS Office to run on OSX, an emulator was provided in early OSX releases that would detect old apps and run them in the emulator. These apps were later modified to use a Classic (mostly) compatible set of libraries known as “Carbon”. This allowed them to run native but still have their older codebases. The Carbon UIs were often written with a framework called “PowerPlant”, part of the Metrowerks C++ IDE. Essentially, it gave large old codebases time to rework their code to the NeXTStep frameworks called “AppKit” and “FoundationKit” (rebadged as “Cocoa” by Apple). Carbon APIs have now mostly been deprecated or removed as nowadays applications are written in Objective-C, the preferred NeXT language, and mixed with C++. Or, if they’re trivial Mac only apps, they might be written in “Swift”. I do recall at Agfa in Belgium we had an effort to get the existing Mac products out of CodeWarrior’s compiler and into the g++ tool chain. It was non-trivial as the compiler Apple had provided for C++ wasn’t up to date. We had an Apple tech guy on site and he relayed the issue back to Apple and fixes to the compiler we’re made. Still, the code was PowerPlant based so looked old fashioned. At another gig, Macromedia ported Flash from “CFM” to “mach-o” format (Classic Carbon to g++) and it failed to run. It turned out the g++ linker couldn’t handle code segments more than 32mb. Flash was a single blob of a binary. Apple released a new linker. I think much if the reason why Apple moved off g++ to clang was due to the difficulty in maintaining g++ on their fork.

analog31 3y ago

I'm older. But I also saw my first Mac in 1984. ;-) My first exposure to a computer was in 1981, when I took a high school programming class. So I was certainly not intimidated by text entry or errors. While in college, someone came through and demonstrated an Apple Lisa in the big lecture hall, and of course the Mac came out soon thereafter. What I can say is that complete familiarity with text based systems didn't make me any less impressed with the GUI. It might have made me in less of a rush to go out and get one of my own, but my bank account had its own opinion about that too.

stoolpigeon 3y ago

The first time I saw a personal computer was at the home of a friend. His father was an engineer for Ping and they had a computer at their house. We weren't allowed to touch it but we watched his dad play a Star Trek game on it for a little while. A couple years later I'd get my hands on a TRS-80 at school. I loved it. When I went to high school in 1983 we had the Apple IIe in our lab. I spent hours on them doing basic and later Pascal. By then I had a vic-20 at home. I was a part of a nerdy group that hung out in the computer lab any time we could and we had a pretty good relationship with the head of the match department. When they go their first Mac, that was the first time I saw gui in person. We were given a few minutes to play with it and I really liked it. I don't think it was so shocking though. While the command line was my normal initial interface, I was used to playing games that provided a GUI of their own to interact with the game. The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS. After high school I didn't have a pc of my own for years. When I did get one is was a Packard Bell sx386 running DOS. I had that for a decent amount of time before I got my first copy of windows. For me it all just fit together and I would say to this day I think of a computer and it's operating system as the CLI it provides. The GUI is an abstraction that runs on top. I like a nice desktop ( KDE is my favorite ) but I get very frustrated any time I can't get underneath it and do what I want. My first instinct any time I hit a problem that feels difficult, is to drop to the shell.

mjhagen 3y ago
> The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS. I presume you speak metaphorically, but just in case. Macintosh wasn't like that, the GUI was the OS, which is what made it so different from Microsoft's attempts, no DOS to drop down to.

dhosek 3y ago

Not to mention that until the Apple //e was released in 1983, there weren’t even arrow keys on the Apple ][ keyboard. Even in the Apple //e era, word-processing was not only not WYSIWYG, but you had to insert printer-specific control sequences in your output which meant that on some printers, if you had a line break in the middle of an underlined phrase, the underline would continue from the left margin on the second line.

dmolony 3y ago
The Apple ][+ (which I bought in 1981) had left and right arrow keys, but no up/down arrow keys.
- dhosek 3y ago
  It’s been so long since I used a ][+, I forgot that there was a right arrow key. I thought there was only a backspace ley, but there was, along with a “rept” key which I’d completely forgotten (not to mention that horribly-placed reset key).

GeekyBear 3y ago

> Younger people on here may not realize what a mindbending experience it was to see a GUI for the first time. The next time I experienced that same feeling was during Jeff Han's TED talk where he gave his multitouch demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU

adrian_b 3y ago

The first time when I have used a GUI was with Windows 3.0, but it did not impress me much, because at that time it was just a useless toy. On the same computer I was using many MS-DOS programs which not only were much more useful than anything that existed for Windows at that time (1990), but they also had much more clever user interfaces, some of which have never been completely matched by the later GUI programs, e.g. Lotus 1-2-3, AutoCAD, XTree, the Brief text editor and many others. While it is said that in GUI programs it should be easier for the user to discover the available commands and their behavior, that was not really a problem for the good MS-DOS programs, because they all came with huge well-written user manuals, where the user could find everything that was needed to know about the user interface, so even when the UI consisted of obscure keyboard shortcuts, learning it was not difficult. The only thing that I really liked in the Windows 3.0 GUI were the included fonts (Times, Helvetica and Courier), which were much nicer than the SuperVGA bitmap fonts that were used by the MS-DOS programs. Later, Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups were still not competitive with MS-DOS or DR-DOS. Only IBM OS/2 2.0 looked like a real improvement over the operating systems with a text-based UI, but it lacked useful applications. Everything changed with the launch of Windows 95, together with the availability of cheap 486 CPU clones, which finally enabled a decent speed for GUIs, which previously had been annoyingly slow for any professional use. Only with Windows 95, both myself and everybody I knew have switched to using GUIs.

timbit42 3y ago

I wasn't that impressed with the Mac GUI the first time I saw it. There was no color, it could barely do more than beep, and there wasn't much software available yet so it seemed pretty useless compared to my Commodore 64. I had Magic Desk on the C64 in 1983 and while it wasn't a bitmapped desktop, it was a desktop with many similarities to the Mac. It even had a pointer. When the Amiga came out, there was no way I was choosing a Mac over the powerful Amiga with 4096 colors, stereo sound, multi-tasking and amazing games. While I had it I was able to digitize and edit images, record and edit audio, built and used a MIDI interface with it, and even went online with it even before the web was a thing. I also ran a BBS on it and was still able to use the Amiga for all these other things at the same time. The Mac was the first commercially available bitmapped GUI but the Amiga was the first system with a bitmapped GUI that was like modern OSes with color, sound, and multi-tasking. The Mac didn't have those things until later.