It was 25 years ago today that Apple released the first Macintosh on sale to the public and in terms of human interaction with computers it was a big leap forward with it's Graphical User Interface, mouse and one 3.5” floppy drive. Note for younger readers, back in those days a PC might come with a 10Mb hard drive if you had the funds or more likely a pair of 5.25” floppy drives where the disks were floppy!
At that time on a PC everything was driven from a Command Line Interface where the user had to know the name of the program that they wanted to run and any parameters that it required. It would take Microsoft another 6 years before they could produce a usable version of Windows in 3.x, however the first truly stable version of the operating system was Windows 2000 Professional which I used for 5 years without once experiencing the “Blue Screen of Death”.
Back in '84 I bought an Apricot F1 which came with a GUI, trackball mouse and 2 3.5” floppy disk drives, a cutting edge product for the time from a UK company. For that reason the Apple never really crossed my event horizon and to this day I have never had to use one, I know people who swear by them but Apple's closed system approach has always raised my hackles – see especially the iphone.
It would be curmudgeonly however not to offer Apple congratulations on sparking the revolution in consumer human/computer interaction that has brought us to where we are today. While I am happiest in front of a UNIX command prompt it is not the place for the average computer user who just wants to use them to perform other tasks.
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5 comments:
I remember when they came out a few lucky classmates had them. It was all way over my head. I didn't have my first personal computer until 11 years ago. A former professor had a Mac and gave it to me when she bought a new one. (Used to dogsit for her for free, so it was kind of a gift for it.)
If I mention the acronyms TOS and GEM you should be able to work out my first puter, if you don't count the Spectrum that is!
rt, Cool and a much easer introduction to computers than a Windows machine of a similar vintage.
Noddy, Sounds like an Atari ST to me loon - very handy in a recording studio I remember.
STe to be precise.
Noddy, Mair info than I was looking for loon :)
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