5 ms·

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a p

History is written by the victors. In this case it’s completely fine, as Raskin’s “corrections” don’t really amount to much, and certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. Perhaps in this alternate universe, a substantially reworked “Lisa II” might have been Apple’s long-lived computing platform.

II2II 5mo ago
The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place. Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.) I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.
  - simondotau 5mo ago
    And perhaps most critically, other semi-GUI platforms made lesser attempts to demand consistency.
    - II2II 5mo ago
      Early on, sure. I seem to recall Apple having their Human Interface Guidelines early on, which helped, yet there were developers who were either unaware of them or experimenting with different ideas. Other platforms tried to improve consistency later on though. For example: there was CUA for IBM. Of course, most of that went out the windows in the late 1990's and early 2000's when companies figured out that the easiest way to differentiate their products to consumers was visually, rather than technically.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
    The mandatory graphic GUI - and MacPaint - made the point that the Mac was primarily a visual design tool that happened to handle text. That was absolutely revolutionary. S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics. The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based. Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.
    - michaelcampbell 5mo ago
      > The mandatory graphic GUI... What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- getpost 5mo ago
  > While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars). "It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985." https://apple-history.com/aiii https://apple-history.com/aiii
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
musicale 5mo ago
Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.
- II2II 5mo ago
  Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision. Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
  - musicale 5mo ago
    Apple doesn't seem to have leveraged or combined work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, ...) as successfully as they might have. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects (Pink/Taligent, Copland/NuKernel, etc.) Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection. Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.
asveikau 5mo ago
> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?
- simondotau 5mo ago
  I'm saying that being designed around the singular task of word processing would have made it a platform/ecosystem failure, even if was a nominally successful one-off product. The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.
  - rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
    Even the 128k was reasonably successful commercially. Hundreds of thousands of units sold, which was quite good for the time. Inflation-adjusted, it cost quite a bit more than the Vision Pro. They sold the same model with very minor revisions (512, then 512e) into mid-1987. The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change things much.
    - simondotau 4mo ago
      I agree with you about the Plus/SE, but the very existence of these products was a direct result of it being a successful ecosystem. As you correctly point out, the 128k/512k sold impressively well considering its high price. This was possible because it was an ambitious product, which Raskintosh was not. Let's be clear, Raskintosh isn't the Macintosh that history eventually proved successful. What Raskin wanted was a significantly simpler and cheaper machine, more squarely pitted against offerings from Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore. Not to mention Apple's own array of ecosystem failures, such as Apple III, Lisa, IIGS, or indeed Newton. Based on the raw odds, plus hindsight, I contend it would have been an ecosystem failure even if it saw some sales success. By not reaching for the stars, it would have been yet another in a long line of quirky mid-eighties, commercially successful, but short-lived platforms.

II2II 5mo ago

The corrections may not amount to much, but there is no reason to believe that his version would be a failed experiment like the Apple III or the Lisa would have taken it's place. Part of the magic of the Macintosh was the simplicity of the hardware. In that respect, it was much closer to the Apple II than the Apple III or Lisa. Consumers may not think much about what's inside the case, but it matters when it comes to manufacturing costs and that translates into the cost for consumers. While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III and a quarter of the cost of the Lisa. Heck, even the adoption of the Macintosh was slow because of its price. Maybe a less expensive 6809 based Macintosh would have had more success in the market, at least early on. It's also too easy to read too much into the failure of the Canon Cat. The Canon Cat was introduced years later. User expectations were starting to solidify around the GUI at that point. (Then again, success was not guaranteed. Lacking compatibility with the Apple II would have held it back. Especially so after the introduction of the IBM PC since the IBM PC had IBM backing it.) I also think the adoption of the GUI for consumer computers would have been delayed considerably without the Macintosh 128k. Early machines that supported a GUI tended to be expensive. Early versions of Windows were crude. The only real outliers in that respect were the Atari and the Amiga. Would they have supported a GUI without Apple taking that first step? It's hard to tell.

bombcar 5mo ago
The defining aspect of the Macintosh for me will always be the mandatory GUI - most everything else had it as either an entire afterthought, or at least as a “program started later”.
- simondotau 5mo ago
  And perhaps most critically, other semi-GUI platforms made lesser attempts to demand consistency.
  - II2II 5mo ago
    Early on, sure. I seem to recall Apple having their Human Interface Guidelines early on, which helped, yet there were developers who were either unaware of them or experimenting with different ideas. Other platforms tried to improve consistency later on though. For example: there was CUA for IBM. Of course, most of that went out the windows in the late 1990's and early 2000's when companies figured out that the easiest way to differentiate their products to consumers was visually, rather than technically.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  The mandatory graphic GUI - and MacPaint - made the point that the Mac was primarily a visual design tool that happened to handle text. That was absolutely revolutionary. S-100 systems and the early PCs were primarily text systems that sometimes happened to do crude graphics. The original Apple II tried to do graphics but the tech to do it properly just didn't exist. And the underlying UI was still text based. Raskin's Mac vision didn't make that leap. It wasn't just about the mouse, it was about the philosophy of the product. Raskin wanted text-but-cheaper-and-better, Jobs wanted pictures and art.
  - michaelcampbell 5mo ago
    > The mandatory graphic GUI... What do you reckon the "G" in GUI stands for, out of curiosity?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
getpost 5mo ago
> While the original Macintosh was by no means cheap, it was about half the cost of the Apple III Made me look it up! I was developing Apple ][/III/Lisa/Mac software at the time. I used the Apple III to write Apple Pascal for the Apple ][, and the Lisa to develop for the Mac. I'd completely forgotten the initial pricing of the Apple III, which was stratospheric. The $7,800 config was 256K I think (~$31K in today's dollars). "It sold initially for between $4,340 and $7,800, depending on the configuration. The original Apple III had many problems, and was replaced by a revised model in mid 1981, which featured 256K RAM, updated system software, and a lower price ($3495). A 5 MB external hard disk was also made available. The Apple /// sold very poorly and was replaced by the Apple ///+ ($2995) in Late 1983. The Apple ///+ was discontinued in 1985." https://apple-history.com/aiii https://apple-history.com/aiii
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

musicale 5mo ago

Lisa 2 was cheaper than many later Macs, but the Mac folks seemed to have little interest in convergent evolution for the platforms or in integrating Lisa features like memory protection into the Mac. The result was that Lisa died as the Macintosh XL (ex-Lisa), with a Mac compatibility environment (MacWorks, which looked terrible with the stock Lisa rectangular pixels but better with a "Screen Kit" square pixel upgrade) as a consolation prize, while Mac users had to wait until Mac OS X for memory protection. Ultimately the Lisa hardware was able to run 68K versions of Mac OS through 7.6.1 in 1997.

II2II 5mo ago
Assuming the Mac folks had no interest in converging the platform in favour of the Lisa is somewhat unfair. While it sounds like some code was shared between the two platforms, the Lisa's operating system was quite different. It would have been difficult to make Lisa software operate under the Macintosh System Software. To my knowledge, there was virtually no software for the Lisa anyhow. Breaking software compatibility on the Macintosh to get the benefits of Lisa would have been a terrible business decision. Aside from that, the MMU in the Lisa would have been a custom solution which Apple would have to support. When Motorola introduced an MMU, it was for 68020 generation machines. Apple should have been able to introduce memory protection at that point, but didn't. One of the reasons was that Apple struggled to make that next generation operating system while retaining compatibility with existing software (albeit, memory protection may have been only one of many problems). This was by no means a problem exclusive to Apple. Other platforms ran into similar issues.
- musicale 5mo ago
  Apple doesn't seem to have leveraged or combined work on (Lisa, Lisa Smalltalk, Lisa Xenix, Mac OS, A/UX, ...) as successfully as they might have. As you note, protected memory was deferred to multiple failed Mac OS successor projects (Pink/Taligent, Copland/NuKernel, etc.) Ultimately Apple gave up, acquired Steve Jobs and NeXT, and eventually successfully migrated the Mac platform to an OS with memory protection. Since then however Apple's OS and hardware strategy has been much more coherent, with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS etc. sharing code, and sharing SoC technology as well. Ironically this is similar to Microsoft's "Windows [NT] everywhere" strategy.

asveikau 5mo ago

> certainly would have led to a path where Macintosh was just another abandoned experiment like the Apple III. This seems really extreme. You're saying a trackpad would have made the whole thing a failure?

simondotau 5mo ago
I'm saying that being designed around the singular task of word processing would have made it a platform/ecosystem failure, even if was a nominally successful one-off product. The Macintosh (specifically the original 128k version) was a dismal market failure too. What succeeded (relatively speaking) was the platform/ecosystem.
- rjrjrjrj 5mo ago
  Even the 128k was reasonably successful commercially. Hundreds of thousands of units sold, which was quite good for the time. Inflation-adjusted, it cost quite a bit more than the Vision Pro. They sold the same model with very minor revisions (512, then 512e) into mid-1987. The 1986 Macintosh Plus was a huge market success and it is only modestly different from the original. Even the SE and Classic didn't change things much.
  - simondotau 4mo ago
    I agree with you about the Plus/SE, but the very existence of these products was a direct result of it being a successful ecosystem. As you correctly point out, the 128k/512k sold impressively well considering its high price. This was possible because it was an ambitious product, which Raskintosh was not. Let's be clear, Raskintosh isn't the Macintosh that history eventually proved successful. What Raskin wanted was a significantly simpler and cheaper machine, more squarely pitted against offerings from Amstrad, Atari, and Commodore. Not to mention Apple's own array of ecosystem failures, such as Apple III, Lisa, IIGS, or indeed Newton. Based on the raw odds, plus hindsight, I contend it would have been an ecosystem failure even if it saw some sales success. By not reaching for the stars, it would have been yet another in a long line of quirky mid-eighties, commercially successful, but short-lived platforms.