To the public it was groundbreaking, but it is worth noting the ideas in both MacDraw and MacWrite were already approaching a decade old by that point, having first been on the Alto (Bravo and Markup) and later in house on the Lisa (LisaDraw, LisaSketch, and LisaWrite).
One thing the Mac really had going for it was that these ideas had a long time to gestate and refine because everything was still quite experimental and nobody else was rushing to commercialize the research. Definitely not 'I built a prototype in 9 weeks and I happened to nail it on v1'.
Agree with the sentiment though, they got a lot right on the first version, and it paved the way for a lot more.
I wasn’t aware of them. What was the business model problem from your point of view?
Both the speed and weight were a deal breaker, from what I saw in the video. In the 90’s, if it took that long for text input on that thick heavy thing, I’m bringing my PowerBook instead.
Go read Jerry Kaplan's book "startup" about the issues or "The barbarians led by bill gates"
Price, supply, competition, software availability - all the classic problems that plagues all the "might have beens"; from the Atari Jaguar, the BeBox, Amiga, etc.
There's plenty of brilliant ideas that are in penpoint that have been abandoned.
The stars aligned for Apple but they could have easily aligned for GRiD or Visi On or Digital Research as well. Heck, the Japanese MSX system could have achieved in the mid 1980s what the USCD p-system also failed at and we technically didn't get until the Java phones of the early 2000s of true cross system compatibility.
So much of this is merely the whims and fancy of lady luck
These are some very smooth presenters. I can learn a thing or two here.
Simple, straight forward and unambiguous software. 40 years ago. Today I feel like we either add a lot of stuff just for the sake of it or we remove too much in an attempt to make it clean and lean. I crave for the sweet spot. I prefer to many features and ignore most of them to create my personal sweetspot. But in the end it is personal preference, I guess.
Agreed. I use some Adobe products on a daily basis. The features I use within the applications have been consistent for years, but the bloat of the software has been significant year after year. I don't need any of the bloat or extra features just stable consistent software.
Sometimes I think I'd be happier buying a legacy suite rather than paying the monthly subscription...
The beauty of this is that everyone in that room recognized the utility and the accessibility that the Mac provided. Contrast that to today’s demonstrations; many of today’s advancements are so technical and specialized that most users feel like they need to be experts to access those features. When I see MacPaint, I know how things work. I don’t have to lookup what Gaussian blur is.
When the early Macs came out, Apple had a program for students to buy them at low(er) cost through their college. I worked summers for my dad, a home builder. It was hot, boring, hard work. After my first year of college, I told Dad to hang on to my money until the end of the summer, and bought a Mac 512e with it. It really was revolutionary.
It may be hard for people who weren't using computers back then to understand what a leap this was, why it was worth applause. I never had a Mac, but I appreciate what it did to drive the industry toward usability.
When my Mac arrived in 1984 as a freshman at CMU, I unpacked it and plugged it in around 5pm and myself and several friends played with MacPaint and MacWrite until dawn the next day.
A friend brought his Macintosh home from CMU (the summer of '84 or '85?). We spent a good part of the summer making our own cassette tape labels using MacPaint and an ImageWriter printer. It should have been obvious then that Desktop Publishing was chomping at the bit, not even waiting for an affordable LaserWriter.
The thing is, you didn't need to learn anything "computery" to operate the Mac. No special languages or commands, nothing. You could literally walk into a computer store, sit down at the demo machine and use the thing. And it was pervasively graphical - that was completely new. Sure, that was old hat to the folks at Xerox PARC, but for the average person it was like going from a bicycle to an X-wing fighter. Nothing else was even remotely comparable.
Apple created a Macintosh Basic, but Microsoft threatened not to renew Apple's license for the basic included with the Apple II computers that were the companies bread and butter at that time unless they killed it.
I remember using a Macintosh (a Plus?) for the first time in approx 1988 and being confused about you created a file. Being a serious command-line user, it took me several minutes to a realise that you had to launch an app first.
I’d say the MacPaint demo was bigger. We had touch screen devices before the iPhone and several failed attempts at tablets (then called “slates”). The iPhone interface felt like a big leap but still an evolutionary one that we all know someone was eventually going to nail. Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it. Sure it drew a lot from Lisa and Xerox but at that stage most people weren’t familiar with those and that had certainly never believed it would end up in an affordable device any time soon. I remember Amiga invoked similar responses for me too. Then first time I saw an Amiga in the flesh it seemed almost magical.
I don’t think we will ever have breakthroughs like that again because of the way how tech is often previewed in public (to drive up hype) and the laws of diminishing returns with regards to computational upgrades. Plus I think people are more used to seeing hardware breakthroughs so expect more these days.
What's weird is that I was working on prototype handsets for Nokia in 2004 and I have never seen that handset until today. WTF. (Note: the prototypes I was working on were all designed around stealing Apple's iPod mojo and baking it into their phones)
I had a 7710 for a few weeks, interesting concepts, but half-baked implementation and so slow you couldn’t really use it. Gave it back. It was more of a strange tech demo, than a usable phone. You can’t compare it to the iPhone.
Mind that direct manipulation of bitmap images and the mouse were new to consumers. (That is, there had been the Xerox Star and the PERQ, but these were no systems for the mere mortal.) Lisa did have a mouse, but no square pixels and came with a drawing program, which was essentially about placing layered shapes. So, what was revealed by the use of the eraser was that this was actually manipulating a composition on a digital canvas, on a per pixel basis, under manual control. (Just like the fat pixels / pencil demo and the option+feature drag demo at the very end, which enjoyed a similar reaction.)
I guess, that this became more obvious by eating the image away, rather than by adding strokes or shapes, is because the latter could have been accomplished by other means, as well, like in a drawing program. The eraser, however, gave it away, unambiguously.
I was a participant at a mathematics summer school at the local atomic research centre in Sydney in 1980. The focus was on mathematical modelling and using computers to realise those models. (The theme was looking at predicting fuel demand especially oil). It was great fun learning to program FORTRAN on a mainframe, BASIC on a minicomputer and see other computers including an analog computer in actual use. One really striking display was them showing a light-pen input with a vector graphic display. I distinctly recall how out-of-the-future it seemed when the demonstrator used the rubber banding effect of drawing shapes by stretching their dimensions, and then selecting tools from a palette on the edge with the pen and manipulating the diagram he was building. It certainly seemed mind-blowing to this 17 year old at the time.
People were used to computers where a green cursor blinks on the screen, and in a separate printed manual you find the necessary incantations for how to make it do something: “To enter replace mode, press the Q key and type the line number to be modified.”
On the Mac, these actions and objects and modes were on-screen physical metaphors that you could simply “reach out and grab” (with the indirection layer of the mouse, of course). Draw with a pencil, and if you don’t like the result, take it out with the eraser. No manual to read, no keys to remember.
Even files used this strong visual metaphor: each floppy disk was represented as basically a 2D space containing the files exactly where you left them. Drag your files into a circle formation if you want, and they’ll be in the same arrangement when you put in the floppy next week. To delete something, you’d drag it into the trash can (a feature on which Apple held such strong IP that it didn’t appear in Windows until 1995).
Great explanation, but I think the commenter was alluding to the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and the overarching theme of an entity selectively censoring speech.
Ah. Well, computers seen as tools of centralized oppression was a pretty old theme by then. If anything, personal computers were understood as tools of liberation because for the first time you could have it all just to yourself: your data and software tools on your own hardware. (The famous “1984” Apple ad by Ridley Scott builds on these fears and hopes.)
You realize that virtually every system ran off a command line interface - and the idea of virtually drawing so simply was very novel to start - to erase so simply actually implied a change of art entirely over to the digital era.
I can’t understand what wasn’t significant about it.
Owen is a brilliant programmer and "User Interface Flower Child", who led the "Print Shop" group at Apple that created the printing architecture for Apple's Lisa and Macintosh hardware, working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers on the LaserWriter.
MacPaint and MacWrite popularized "Desktop Publishing", but they wouldn't have had nearly as much impact as they did without the PostScript LaserWriter, which let you create and edit WYSIWYG text and graphics on the screen with a mouse and keyboard, then print the exact same content on paper.
>Steve Jobs of Apple Computer had seen the LPB-CX while negotiating for supplies of 3.5" floppy disk drives for the upcoming Apple Macintosh computer. Meanwhile, John Warnock had left Xerox to found Adobe Systems to commercialize PostScript and AppleTalk in a laser printer they intended to market. Jobs was aware of Warnock's efforts, and upon his return to California he began convincing Warnock to allow Apple to license PostScript for a new printer that Apple would sell. Negotiations between Apple and Adobe over the use of PostScript began in 1983 and an agreement was reached in December 1983, one month before Macintosh was announced. Jobs eventually arranged for Apple to buy $2.5 million in Adobe stock.
>At about the same time, Jonathan Seybold (John W. Seybold's son) introduced Paul Brainerd to Apple, where he learned of Apple's laser printer efforts and saw the potential for a new program using the Mac's GUI to produce PostScript output for the new printer. Arranging his own funding through a venture capital firm, Brainerd formed Aldus and began development of what would become PageMaker. The VC coined the term "desktop publishing" during this time.
Owen went on to Sun, where he invented object.ps for NeWS, implementing its object system in PostScript, and using it to write numerous GUI toolkits and apps. NeWS user interface toolkits and applications were all based on his PostScript object oriented programming system, which efficiently and flexibly uses the PostScript dictionary stack for dynamic scoping.
It's like Smalltalk classes, with multiple inheritance, and the ability to dynamically promote class methods and variables into object instance methods and variables (to support prototype based specialization of objects with properties and callbacks, which is so useful for constructing user interfaces, like HyperCard and HyperLook do).
PizzaTool is a thoroughly commented example of object oriented user interface programming in NeWS (and printing and faxing pictures of pizzas with PostScript):
>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
I've written about Owen's wonderful work and John Warnock's vision for PostScript before:
DonHopkins on March 1, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...
>Owen Densmore recounted John Warnock's idea that PostScript was actually a "linguistic motherboard".
>(This was part of a discussion with Owen about NeFS, which was a proposal for the next version of NFS to run a PostScript interpreter in the kernel. More about that here:)
>Window System? ..NeWS ain' no stinkin' Window System!
>-or-
>Swiss Army NeWS: A Programmable Network Facility
>Introduction
>NeWS is difficult to understand simply because it is not just a window system. It is a "Swiss Army Knife" containing several components, some of which contribute to its use as a window system, others which provide the networking facilities for implementing the client-server model, all embedded in a programmable substrate allowing extremely flexible and creative combination of these elements.
>During the initial implementation phase of the Macintosh LaserWriter software, I temporarily transfered from Apple to Adobe working closely with John Warnock and other Adobe engineers. At lunch one day, I asked: "John, what do you plan to do after LaserWriter?" His answer was interesting:
PostScript is a linguistic "mother board", which has "slots"
for several "cards". The first card we (Adobe) built was a
graphics card. We're considering other cards. In particular,
we've thought about other network services, such as a file
server card.
>He went on to say how a programmable network was really his goal, and that the printing work was just the first component. His mentioning using PostScript for a file server is particularly interesting: Sun's next version of NFS is going to use PostScript with file extentions as the client-server protocol!
>This paper explores NeWS in this light: as a Programmable Network Facility, a major part of Sun's future networking strategy.
DonHopkins on March 1, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...
>[...] In October 1986, before I ever used NeWS or learned of Owen Densmore's Smalltalk-like PostScript object system, I had just used PostScript on the LaserWriter and invented my own simple object system like Lisp Machine Flavors (which was quite easy and obvious) for drawing pie menus, I wrote the following to Mitch Bradley comparing Forth and PostScript. (Mitch was the Forth guru at Sun who developed ForthMacs / Sun Forth / CForth / Open Firmware / etc -- I worked with him at Sun on Forth as his summer intern, then later with James Gosling at Sun on NeWS as a full time employee):
>[...] PostScript makes it easy to efficiently implement a flexible dynamic object oriented programming system like Smalltalk's, with multiple inheritance, and prototype objects that you can dynamically promote both methods and instance variables from classes to instances. Tom Stambaugh described how Smalltalk inspired Owen Densmore's PostScript object oriented system in NeWS:
>Tom Stambaugh described how Smalltalk inspired Owen Densmore's PostScript object oriented system in NeWS.
>A point he didn't mention is that PostScript is directly descendent from Interpress, which was developed at Xerox PARC and reincarnated as PostScript at Adobe by Chuck Geschke and John Warnock: [...]
>Tom Stambaugh wrote:
>It seems to me that Forth is to stacks what LispLanguage is to lists. Forth demonstrated the advantages of a stack-centric paradigm in which each pushed or popped item could be evaluated as an expression or a primitive. Postscript reflects the application of that paradigm to the world of typography, 2-d graphics, and page layout. My own recollection is that Postscript's primary contribution was the use of splines to describe character glyphs, allowing them to be effectively rendered at virtually any resolution desired. If anything, Postscript owes more to TexLanguage and DonaldKnuth than to Forth. I view the stack-based language paradigm as a convenient afterthought rather than a central organizing principle.
>I also think we should note the contribution that OwenDensmore, at Sun, made in demonstrating how to use Postscript dictionaries to create a dynamically-bound object-oriented runtime environment. This was the fundamental premise of the Sun window server that ultimately became the NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem. Owen and I discussed his "crazy" idea at a poolside table at the now-demolished Hyatt Palo Alto, on El Camino. I told him that it made sense to me, we scribbled furiously on napkins, and I helped him see how he might adopt some learnings from Smalltalk. It was one of those afternoons that could only have happened at that time in that place in that culture. -- TomStambaugh
>I've extracted Owen Densmore's paper from the news.tape.tar (marked PD), "Object Oriented programming in NeWS", and uploaded it:
