- Possibly the color when printed is slightly different from the color on the spools? Because the color on the spools looks like the previous cream/yellow/beige color used for the original Mac. Either that or they made the mistake of sampling a slightly yellowed Mac.
The gray Apple used when they decided to modernize was indeed a light gray color.
- Interesting. We, the OS engineers, first heard of him inside Apple when Mac OS X was in development. The rumor at the time was that he’d been cold-emailing Steve Jobs designs and Steve liked them and told the HI group to hire him.
- Tangent: Fred Brooks held that the only consistent way to determine the number of bits classifying the machine was to use the user-visible parts, i.e. registers, not the implementation. Therefore, 68000-based computers are 32-bit CPUs.
- I find it useful to discount heavily for hyperbole when reading stuff written by Amiga people, including the otherwise essential Bagnall books. I think the shock of being able to do multimedia-ish stuff in the mid 1980’s somehow causes reality to distort when considering the stunning mediocrity (or worse) of much of the AmigaOS software stack.
(I can write some choice words on the Mac’s software stack too. None of the 80’s 32-bit platforms were without significant and avoidable problems.)
edit: misplaced punctuation
- I dunno, I thought the PSP was just ill-conceived and pointless at the time. Sony was at the peak of their NIH syndrome, and just not caring what the market actually might want.
- I object to the premise.
> Configuration options and user empowerment was increasingly considered confusing or dangerous
This, in particular, is nonsense, but it’s a long-festering strain of nonsense. A particular subset of PC users truly believe that Apple decided, with the original Mac, to take away “user empowerment” and “dumb things down” because users might hurt themselves. That was never the motivation.
No, the point was to empower users in ways that actually mattered. Steve Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind” rhetoric was trying to communicate this. You can disagree with the selection of what, exactly, matters, but the underlying motivation was _never_ to “protect users from themselves.” That’s a canard.
- Well, look at the critique when Gnome3 came out to replace Gnome2. What pissed people off was exactly that it: 1. Set a certain amount of choices on how the gui should work and 2. Removed a lot of settings, especially those that would have allowed people to reset the things in point 1 to what they liked from Gnome 1&2.
It's one thing for a GUI maker to move the task bar from side to top/bottom for instance, but another to also not allow you to have it back where you "need" it to be. Even when you do want to move defaults (like tmux changing hotkey from screens ctrl-a to ctrl-b) it still is a good idea to allow people to set it back, even if only for a transitional period. Muscle memory takes a while to change for some, and GUIs are not except from that, so if you always had the trashcan to the right, moving it to the left will piss someone off, but not as much as preventing that someone from moving it back again, if that is their preference, perhaps even a preference that your previous versions of the GUIs made for them.
- But that passage doesn't refer to the original Mac. It describes notions that started becoming commonplace around 2000, and the end of that paragraph specifically differentiates them from the Mac Classic era.
About the argument in general, the false premise would be that the set of things which "actually matter" applies universally. It's not a question of what exactly matters, but _to whom_. There are different types of users, and the pretense of always knowing what's good for all of them better than those users themselves is certainly not unique to one person's approach... even if Jobs' personality could make it appear as if he had it worse than most others in the industry.
- I’ve lived the dongle life for 40 years because Steve jobs didn’t want people tinkering with the insides of the Mac. My ProFile and HD20 is testament to that.
- The BeFS book mentioned referenced in the article is still a terrific read.
- I think it would be swell if we could avoid fascist-adjacent slogans for retrocomputing projects.
- Apple Pascal supported > 64k of RAM on suitable machines, so it probably already did?
- Apple Pascal on the Apple II was restricted to 64 K memory; this limitation was due to the 6502's 16-bit address bus. The Apple III with it's 6502A could address 256 K, but only by bank switching; pointers remained 16-bit. The later Pascal versions (after Apple III) did no longer use P-code, but compiled to native code.
- There was a 128k version of Apple Pascal available on the Apple II. My question, applicable to both this and the Apple III version, is: Was the bank switching managed by the developer or by the Pascal runtime? If it's managed by the runtime, the addresses must have been encodable with >16 bits.
- All versions of Apple Pascal use 16-bit pointers, so data was always limited to a 64 KB address space. On the 128K Apple II, p-code was located in aux memory, and data was located in main memory.
Apple III Pascal had similar limitations, with separate 64K address spaces for p-code and data. On machines with more than 128 KB of RAM, there were assembly routines available for allocating additional memory and swapping data memory.
- I would only add that the iPod is what saved Apple, not the Mac. NeXT’s software didn’t really have anything to do with it. Most Mac users stayed with Mac OS 9 until 2003-2004, because OS X wasn’t ready for prime time until then.
In terms of Apple’s long term survival, everything Apple did between 1997 and the iPod introduction was just treading water. Steve had stopped the bleeding, but the Mac was still not setting the world on fire in terms of market share or profitability. It was on shaky ground until the Intel transition, coupled with the iPod halo effect, allowed people to feel safe buying Macs again.
- > I would only add that the iPod is what saved Apple
Yes, I agree. I just didn't want to get into a lot of detail in what was basically an aside to address that Apple's Mac platform did (sort of) survive. But as you observed, it was on very shaky ground and hardly a resounding success. Even today, the Mac business isn't as significant to Apple as iOS or services.
- iPod was a halo effect. it gave people a reason to buy a mac. Just like Microsoft sold things to bundle together. Outlook is best when you buy it and use it with Exchange.
- More
sony makes beautiful hardware, some of the best. but they destroy it with bad practices like cd players that can't read cd-rs. digital music players that weren't mp3. they became about protecting their copyright and not doing what their customers wanted.
For a while, I had a SONY CD Changer in my car. You ever see the scratched up CDs often sold at flea markets for a buck each or less?
Many computers and players won't read them.
But that SONY does. And not only does it read them, the thing takes a bit longer to buffer due to all the scratches and massive error correction it has to do while buffering...
But once it does all that, it will play the disc flawlessly! Bumpy roads, too cold, too hot, disc too scratched?
All pretty much no problem.
I would gladly buy another. Was that good, but it won't read ANY recordable format.
Bummer.
It went with the car when I sold it. I put some of the very worst discs I had ever seen in it for demo purposes too.
Dude that bought the car loved it like I did. I did not mention CD-R largely because the player was going with the car no matter what.