4 ms·

Vintage Apple

77 points by freediver 3y ago

glimshe 3y ago
My dad bought an Apple II back in the day, and I remember a lot of fun times playing games such as Choplifter and Conan. Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning; but the Apple II wasn't anything like the Macintosh, it was a geek computer built by an engineering genius (Wozniak) which was successful due to its vast and diverse software library rather than its looks. I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac. There was quite a bit of pre-Jobs snobbery. RISC-vs-CISC was one, "pro designers and artists [aka people with taste] use these!" was another common one, "have fun with DOS and viruses" was one... It was born out of badly losing on marketshare for years. It was also somewhat invisible if you weren't an avid Mac user or Mac hater since at 3% marketshare or whatever, most people didn't know many people to hear it from in the first place! From what I saw, the iMac/Aqua ("Fisher Price" if you weren't a fan) era didn't even turn around the cool factor for the general public nearly as much as the Intel Macs - "now I can just boot Windows if I have to, at least" to get a lot more curious people to give Macs a shot. Then they were cool for a while. Now they're common enough that I don't think "cool" is the right word vs just "pricey/status-y".
  - appleiigs 3y ago
    The pre-iMac snobbery was when Mac were considered to be the BMW of computers - “it just works”. When the iMac came out the snobbery change when color iMacs showed up on TV shows. The snobbery become more younger, urban and hipster with the iPod.
- nemo 3y ago
  Steve Jobs at the start of Apple was inspired by Sony and wanted to market Apple's consumer electronics as high-quality consumer electronics. Jobs was always very keenly interested in marketing and for Apple a central part of marketing and ads is building a story around people rather than technology which is something Apple's held to from the start, though their approach did evolve. The "premium" marketing was a seed planted from the beginning, but later it became a response to becoming a minority player in personal computing, Apple had to differentiate to survive and that was the way to do it, though it was always nascent, since Jobs wanted Apple to be like Sony from the beginning, a premium consumer electronics company.
  - amelius 3y ago
    Meanwhile Samsung has learned to play the premium game and is beating Apple in innovation, with their $1800 flip phone, Z Fold 5.
    - astrange 3y ago
      I think flip phones are a pretty mature product category actually. Although a flip smartphone is more like a Nintendo DS.
  - pcdoodle 3y ago
    I think jobs said on stage back in 97' when he returned something like: "I don't care if we're different, we want want to be much better". Folklore.org is a blast to read learning about the people who put the Macintosh together.
- pvg 3y ago
  I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. They very much did, just like lots of buyers of different competing consumer products. As to the image, Apple cultivated it almost from the start. If anything, old Apple required more suspension of disbelief than current Apple - you bought something that was sold to you as a luxury item but wasn't built like one.
- Someone 3y ago
  > Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning I don’t think so. They wanted to be better, but not more expensive. Certainly, a lot of Woz’s hardware was dirt cheap for what it did and sacrificed programmability. For example, the Apple 2 graphics modes “were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_of_graphics_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_...), and Personal Computer World wrote “no-one has colour graphics like this at this sort of price” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception) Similarly, WOZ’s disk controller cut corners to be cheap relative to the competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview: “The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations.”)
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    What corners did he cut, exactly? The only engineering screwup I can think of with regard to the Disk ][ system was that the original DOS could have been several times faster if the tracks had been laid out in the opposite order. That was a software problem, fixed later with ProDOS and with numerous third-party utilities. Hardware-wise, it was basically unassailable.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    They were more expensive for the consumers. Apple's engineering acumen allowed them to keep a higher profit margin.
    - Someone 3y ago
      > They were more expensive for the consumers The claim I replied to isn’t that Apple always was more expensive, but that it always wanted to be more expensive, even back in the beginning. Who doesn’t want to sell their product for more money? I also think that, certainly in the beginning, they wanted to build better products and accepted higher costs. Also, what computer with comparable features could people buy “even back in the beginning” for less? One could argue there were none when the Apple II debuted. The PET and TRS-80 were a lot cheaper ($1298 vs $795 respectively $599,95) and shipped with displays but didn’t do colour. The PET and, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard, also the TRS-80 had an inferior keyboard.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
user3939382 3y ago
I owe my whole career to learning BASIC on my Apple IIc as a kid. My first program was an implementation of Mad Libs. I loved playing Lemonade Stand.
- trentnix 3y ago
  LOVED Lemonade Stand. It was Economics 101 for a second grader.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cramjabsyn 3y ago
Whats hilarious is Apple support considers an i7/16GB/1TB mbp “vintage” too
wilkystyle 3y ago
I've always loved that serif font they used on marketing material, e.g. from the "Insanely Great" book thumbnail on this page. It seems like an 80s/90s font, but yet still classy and aesthetically pleasing to me today.
- js2 3y ago
  Apple Garamond? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple_Garamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple...
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  That is a lovely typeface. It's called Apple Garamond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple_Garamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple...
  - astrange 3y ago
    It's also used on the signs in Half Price Books.
cglong 3y ago
It makes me sad that the last post was a swan song from a year ago
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  I wonder what ever happened with that. Here is the most recent eBay listing that I found: https://web.archive.org/web/20230126110359/https://www.ebay.com/itm/195567683122 https://web.archive.org/web/20230126110359/https://www.ebay.... I hope the author got some money for this; it is well deserved.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Just browsing the Mac Programming book's took me back in time. So many books I recognized by the cover, books I had forgotten that I had once owned and learned from. This was pre-Internet (well, pre-Web) and my copies of the books became well worn.
- Stratoscope 3y ago
  My dear friend Caroline Rose wrote those! (And edited the parts that her colleagues wrote.) Here is a story from when she joined Apple: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Inside_Macintosh.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Inside_Macintosh... One of my favorite parts is The Mathematical Foundation of QuickDraw, where it explains that X/Y coordinates are not pixel coordinates. They represent a grid of infinitely thin lines between the pixels. If that seems like a subtle distinction, it helped me understand a few things, like "why would it matter if we call a single pixel at the top left (0,0)-(0,0) or (0,0)-(1,1)?" This starts at page I-138 (PDF page 150) in the original edition: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volume_I_1985.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum... and page I-9 (PDF page 35) in the newer edition: https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Imaging_With_QuickDraw_1994.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Imaging_With_QuickDraw...
sys_64738 3y ago
Apple was largely overshadowed by Commodore until the mid-80s. The Apple 2 kept Apple afloat until they were pretty much bankrupt in the 90s. Then Steve returned. That's the real history of Apple that they don't want you to remember. Only those who survive longest get to rewrite their version of history.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  Not sure who the "they" you reference are, but the fact that Apple hung onto the II (and its many variants) for too many years while they tried to swing for the fences is not some secret. That Steve Jobs returned and saved the company on the cusp is known by just about everyone. I mean, there have been multiple major motion pictures on this...
  - rplst8 3y ago
    With a HUGE infusion of cash from Microsoft.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      Also known as a lawsuit settlement. it wasn’t that large, much less huge. The big commitment to was to providing Office.
      - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
        Which probably had something to do with that anti-trust battle Microsoft fought right around then, no?
        detourdog 3y ago
        Definitely. They supported office on the Mac to prove that Windows wasn't a monopoly and paid Apple $150 million dollars in a cross-licensing deal give each company complete access to current IP. The thought was that Apple would use the windows IP to provide Redbox access to the new MacOS. See Apple and Red, Yellow, and Blue boxes.
jrnichols 3y ago
I continue to find joy in seeing that others are passionate about the old Mac era. It's a lot of fun to see people cataloging Apple history on their own and restoring old machines.

77 points by freediver 3y ago

My dad bought an Apple II back in the day, and I remember a lot of fun times playing games such as Choplifter and Conan. Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning; but the Apple II wasn't anything like the Macintosh, it was a geek computer built by an engineering genius (Wozniak) which was successful due to its vast and diverse software library rather than its looks. I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac.

majormajor 3y ago
> I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. I think this was an evolution in the image that happened after the "second coming" of Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iMac. There was quite a bit of pre-Jobs snobbery. RISC-vs-CISC was one, "pro designers and artists [aka people with taste] use these!" was another common one, "have fun with DOS and viruses" was one... It was born out of badly losing on marketshare for years. It was also somewhat invisible if you weren't an avid Mac user or Mac hater since at 3% marketshare or whatever, most people didn't know many people to hear it from in the first place! From what I saw, the iMac/Aqua ("Fisher Price" if you weren't a fan) era didn't even turn around the cool factor for the general public nearly as much as the Intel Macs - "now I can just boot Windows if I have to, at least" to get a lot more curious people to give Macs a shot. Then they were cool for a while. Now they're common enough that I don't think "cool" is the right word vs just "pricey/status-y".
- appleiigs 3y ago
  The pre-iMac snobbery was when Mac were considered to be the BMW of computers - “it just works”. When the iMac came out the snobbery change when color iMacs showed up on TV shows. The snobbery become more younger, urban and hipster with the iPod.
nemo 3y ago
Steve Jobs at the start of Apple was inspired by Sony and wanted to market Apple's consumer electronics as high-quality consumer electronics. Jobs was always very keenly interested in marketing and for Apple a central part of marketing and ads is building a story around people rather than technology which is something Apple's held to from the start, though their approach did evolve. The "premium" marketing was a seed planted from the beginning, but later it became a response to becoming a minority player in personal computing, Apple had to differentiate to survive and that was the way to do it, though it was always nascent, since Jobs wanted Apple to be like Sony from the beginning, a premium consumer electronics company.
- amelius 3y ago
  Meanwhile Samsung has learned to play the premium game and is beating Apple in innovation, with their $1800 flip phone, Z Fold 5.
  - astrange 3y ago
    I think flip phones are a pretty mature product category actually. Although a flip smartphone is more like a Nintendo DS.
- pcdoodle 3y ago
  I think jobs said on stage back in 97' when he returned something like: "I don't care if we're different, we want want to be much better". Folklore.org is a blast to read learning about the people who put the Macintosh together.
pvg 3y ago
I don't remember people thinking they were cooler or had better taste because they owned an Apple II. They very much did, just like lots of buyers of different competing consumer products. As to the image, Apple cultivated it almost from the start. If anything, old Apple required more suspension of disbelief than current Apple - you bought something that was sold to you as a luxury item but wasn't built like one.
Someone 3y ago
> Apple always wanted to be better, more expensive and in a sense more "premium" than the competition, even back in the beginning I don’t think so. They wanted to be better, but not more expensive. Certainly, a lot of Woz’s hardware was dirt cheap for what it did and sacrificed programmability. For example, the Apple 2 graphics modes “were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_of_graphics_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_graphics#Peculiarity_...), and Personal Computer World wrote “no-one has colour graphics like this at this sort of price” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Reception) Similarly, WOZ’s disk controller cut corners to be cheap relative to the competition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#Overview: “The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM (programmable read-only memory), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations.”)
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  What corners did he cut, exactly? The only engineering screwup I can think of with regard to the Disk ][ system was that the original DOS could have been several times faster if the tracks had been laid out in the opposite order. That was a software problem, fixed later with ProDOS and with numerous third-party utilities. Hardware-wise, it was basically unassailable.
- glimshe 3y ago
  They were more expensive for the consumers. Apple's engineering acumen allowed them to keep a higher profit margin.
  - Someone 3y ago
    > They were more expensive for the consumers The claim I replied to isn’t that Apple always was more expensive, but that it always wanted to be more expensive, even back in the beginning. Who doesn’t want to sell their product for more money? I also think that, certainly in the beginning, they wanted to build better products and accepted higher costs. Also, what computer with comparable features could people buy “even back in the beginning” for less? One could argue there were none when the Apple II debuted. The PET and TRS-80 were a lot cheaper ($1298 vs $795 respectively $599,95) and shipped with displays but didn’t do colour. The PET and, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#Keyboard, also the TRS-80 had an inferior keyboard.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

user3939382 3y ago

I owe my whole career to learning BASIC on my Apple IIc as a kid. My first program was an implementation of Mad Libs. I loved playing Lemonade Stand.

trentnix 3y ago
LOVED Lemonade Stand. It was Economics 101 for a second grader.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cramjabsyn 3y ago

Whats hilarious is Apple support considers an i7/16GB/1TB mbp “vintage” too

wilkystyle 3y ago

I've always loved that serif font they used on marketing material, e.g. from the "Insanely Great" book thumbnail on this page. It seems like an 80s/90s font, but yet still classy and aesthetically pleasing to me today.

js2 3y ago
Apple Garamond? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple_Garamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple...
Stratoscope 3y ago
That is a lovely typeface. It's called Apple Garamond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple_Garamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typography_of_Apple_Inc.#Apple...
- astrange 3y ago
  It's also used on the signs in Half Price Books.

cglong 3y ago

It makes me sad that the last post was a swan song from a year ago

Stratoscope 3y ago
I wonder what ever happened with that. Here is the most recent eBay listing that I found: https://web.archive.org/web/20230126110359/https://www.ebay.com/itm/195567683122 https://web.archive.org/web/20230126110359/https://www.ebay.... I hope the author got some money for this; it is well deserved.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Just browsing the Mac Programming book's took me back in time. So many books I recognized by the cover, books I had forgotten that I had once owned and learned from. This was pre-Internet (well, pre-Web) and my copies of the books became well worn.

Stratoscope 3y ago
My dear friend Caroline Rose wrote those! (And edited the parts that her colleagues wrote.) Here is a story from when she joined Apple: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Inside_Macintosh.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Inside_Macintosh... One of my favorite parts is The Mathematical Foundation of QuickDraw, where it explains that X/Y coordinates are not pixel coordinates. They represent a grid of infinitely thin lines between the pixels. If that seems like a subtle distinction, it helped me understand a few things, like "why would it matter if we call a single pixel at the top left (0,0)-(0,0) or (0,0)-(1,1)?" This starts at page I-138 (PDF page 150) in the original edition: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volume_I_1985.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum... and page I-9 (PDF page 35) in the newer edition: https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Imaging_With_QuickDraw_1994.pdf https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Imaging_With_QuickDraw...

sys_64738 3y ago

Apple was largely overshadowed by Commodore until the mid-80s. The Apple 2 kept Apple afloat until they were pretty much bankrupt in the 90s. Then Steve returned. That's the real history of Apple that they don't want you to remember. Only those who survive longest get to rewrite their version of history.

llm_nerd 3y ago
Not sure who the "they" you reference are, but the fact that Apple hung onto the II (and its many variants) for too many years while they tried to swing for the fences is not some secret. That Steve Jobs returned and saved the company on the cusp is known by just about everyone. I mean, there have been multiple major motion pictures on this...
- rplst8 3y ago
  With a HUGE infusion of cash from Microsoft.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Also known as a lawsuit settlement. it wasn’t that large, much less huge. The big commitment to was to providing Office.
    - scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
      Which probably had something to do with that anti-trust battle Microsoft fought right around then, no?
      - detourdog 3y ago
        Definitely. They supported office on the Mac to prove that Windows wasn't a monopoly and paid Apple $150 million dollars in a cross-licensing deal give each company complete access to current IP. The thought was that Apple would use the windows IP to provide Redbox access to the new MacOS. See Apple and Red, Yellow, and Blue boxes.

jrnichols 3y ago

I continue to find joy in seeing that others are passionate about the old Mac era. It's a lot of fun to see people cataloging Apple history on their own and restoring old machines.