- Warhol was so impressed by how usable the Amiga was he thereafter ignored it and all other computers for the rest of his life.
- KODust 461 days agoDon't get me wrong -- a lot of cool stuff got done with the Amiga. But Warhol was an interesting footnote at best.
- bmonkey325 461 days agoIt just legitimized computer art even if it was ever fleeting. Shows he could excel in any medium. Just as nobody really talks about the sculptures of Picasso or a Jackson Pollock still life
- KODust 457 days agoYou didn't need an Amiga for that; many artists did 1-bit art on early Macs: https://www.macpaint.org/historical_gallery.html
- bmonkey325 457 days agoFYI that site isn’t safe. It has a cert for a different domain.
- Wendell Sanders — Apple III engineer — is on record saying this was due to corrosion on the memory board connectors, not to heat. Dropping or moving the computer with force would cause the contacts to rub together and clear the corrosion temporarily. The problem went away when they upgraded the connectors.
- Can't reach the site at the moment, but people interested in this subject need to read "The Pentium Chronicles".
- It probably has something to do with Woz choosing to become irrelevant to Apple after approximately 1980. His last interesting project for Apple was the Disk II controller, as far as I can tell.
If it were me, I’d still celebrate him & the Apple II, but it’s Tim Cook’s call.
- > Apple had largely been imitating Xerox
can we please stop with this canard
The development of the Mac UI is documented at https://www.folklore.org/ (with polaroids!). It was influenced by Xerox — with Xerox’s permission — but “largely imitating” is completely false.
- Author here: Would it not be fair to say that black and white WIMP with an emphasis on desktop publishing is an imitation of Xerox, especially when they were paying for the privilege?
- "influenced by" is fair. "imitation" is pejorative; it implies no -- or substantially inferior -- original work, which is certainly not the case. Don't take my word for it; use an Alto simulator and a Mac 128k. Those are very different experiences!
- Despite my strong apple tendencies - I really like the piece and critique of the period and what GEM had and what could have been. I thought GEM was going to bring something in the PC and Atari ST world but it never happened. Sigh. Instead we got a sea of bland and inspired windows PCs.
- I am probably going to get myself in trouble as English is my second language. I would not want to put words speaking for someone else. Imitation suggests a copy of or substitute of the original that is not as good like. coffee mate vs cream or nutra sweet vs sugar. I had the same negative excitement as the Op.
Apple was definitely inspired by what they saw at Xerox. The essence was certainly there, but constraints made it a unique experience. It didn’t need a file server. It had a tiny ram footprint 128k vs 384k as the base model. And the single button mouse required a different approach to the UI/UX that the two button of the star didn’t even try to solve.
And yes. I bleed six colors …
For what it's worth, this has been corroborated by people I know who worked on the GS. Apple wanted to make more and faster IIgs's, but was stymied by 65816 supply issues to the very end of the IIgs' lifespan.