{"id":2839,"date":"2014-01-26T15:09:24","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T18:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/?p=2839"},"modified":"2014-02-23T12:56:16","modified_gmt":"2014-02-23T15:56:16","slug":"the-mac-turns-30-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2014\/01\/26\/the-mac-turns-30-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mac Turns 30 (part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

30 years ago, when the first issue of MacWorld Magazine<\/a> came out – the classic cover with Steve Jobs and 3 Macs on the front – I already could look back at some years as an Apple user. In the early days of personal computers, the middle 1970’s, the first computer magazines appeared: Byte<\/a>, Creative Computing<\/a>, and several others. I read the debates about the first machines: the Altair and, later, the Apple II; the TRS80; the Commodore PET, and so forth.<\/p>\n

It was immediately clear to me that I would need one of those early machines. I’d already been working with mainframes like the IBM\/360<\/a> and Burroughs B6700<\/a>, but those new microcomputers already had as much capacity as the first IBMs I’d programmed for, just 8 years later.<\/p>\n

So as soon as possible I asked someone who knew someone who could bring in electronics from the USA. Importing these things was prohibited but there was a lively gray market and customs officials might conveniently look the other way at certain times. Anyway, sometime in 1979 I was the proud owner of an Apple II+<\/a> with 48K of RAM, a Phillips cassette recorder, and a small color TV with a hacked-together video input. (The TV didn’t really like having its inputs externally exposed and ultimately needed an isolating power transformer.)<\/p>\n

The Apple II+ later grew to accomodate several accessory boards, dual floppy drives, a Z80 CPU board to run CP\/M-80, as well as a switchable character generator ROM to show lower-case ASCII as well as accents and the special characters used by Gutenberg<\/a>, one of the first word processors that used SGML markup – a predecessor of today’s XML and HTML. I also became a member of several local computer clubs and, together, we amassed a huge library of Apple II software; quite a feat, since you couldn’t directly import software or even send money to the USA for payment!<\/p>\n

Hacking the Apple II’s hardware and software was fun and educative. There were few compilers and the OS was primitive compared the mainframe software I’d learned, but it was obvious that here was the future of computing.
\nThere were two influential developments in the early 1980s: first, there was the Smalltalk issue of Byte Magazine in 1981<\/a>; and then the introduction of the Apple Lisa<\/a> in early 1983. Common to both was the black-on-white pixel-oriented display, which I later learned came from the Xerox Star, together with the use of a mouse, pull-down menus, and the flexible typography now familiar to everybody.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I read both of those magazines (and their follow-ups) uncounted times and analysed the screen pictures with great care. (I also bought as many of the classic Smalltalk books as I could get, though I never actually suceeded in getting a workable Smalltalk system running.)<\/p>\n

So I can say I was thoroughly prepared when the first Mac 128K came out in early 1984. I practically memorized all articles written about it and in May 1984 I was in a store in Los Angeles – my first trip to the US! – buying a Mac 128K with all the optionals: external floppy, 3 boxes of 3.5″, 400K Sony diskettes and a 80-column Imagewriter printer. (The 132-column model wouldn’t fit into my suitcase.) Thanks to my reading I was able to operate it immediately, to the amazement of the store salesman.<\/p>\n

More about this in the soon-to-follow second part<\/a> of this post. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 years ago, when the first issue of MacWorld Magazine came out – the classic cover with Steve Jobs and 3 Macs on the front – I already could look back at some years as an Apple user. In the early days of personal computers, the middle 1970’s, the first computer magazines appeared: Byte, Creative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16],"tags":[36,23],"class_list":["post-2839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-hardware","tag-history","tag-mac"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-JN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}