Macintosh is turning 30

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Shooshie
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Macintosh is turning 30

Post by Shooshie »

In a few days (January 24) the Macintosh Computer will officially turn 30 years old. Over the next few years, we'll also cross the 30th anniversary of the GUI-based (WYSIWYG) score engraving (MOTU's Professional Composer), as well as many kinds of music and MIDI sequencers including Performer. It's been a long, long ride, and now it's almost hard for me to remember when these things DIDN'T exist, even though the first half of my life was spent as a traditional musician without any sort of electronics.

I've still got my 128K Macintosh whose case is engraved inside with the names of the engineers and developers who created it, including Steve Jobs. At least, I THINK I do. My warehouse was broken into sometime recently, and while it didn't appear that they stole anything, I didn't actually put my hand on that. (it's buried)

For over 25 of those years, I worked professionally in MIDI, then later in MIDI and audio as well. I'd trained as a recording engineer long ago, but had not used that training professionally until DP came around. I've always credited the Mac and Steve Jobs with opening up doorways for me which either did not exist before, or which might have been closed to me in traditional permutations of such skills as arranging MIDI, directing concerts and shows that include MIDI, creating detailed and carefully crafted lighting plots and sequences, and then the amazing coming of age of the In-The-Box recording studio.

Outside of music, there was also the fascinating development of Photoshop and Illustrator — the ultimate bitmaps and vector apps of their time. That led to CAD programs, computer-controlled manufacturing, and a host of related applications. I dabbled in all the above, except for the manufacturing part, but I hung out with people who did, and I got to watch the development of that art, too.

Almost overshadowed by all this was the WYSIWYG word processor that blew into the world with MacWrite on the first Macintosh. Thus, this is also the 30th birthday of desktop publishing. After the initial phase of going wild with San Francisco Font (which looked like a ransom note), I settled into MacWrite, then later Microsoft Word and several other word processors as useful tools that I've used daily for decades. My old typewriters have not seen the light of day since then.

Then there was the spreadsheet. That was one of my first awe-stricken computer experiences. Watching a page of figures update with every change you make was simply outside our ability to imagine before seeing Microsoft's Multiplan, and later Excel. It was one of those one-way experiences. Once you had seen it, you couldn't go back to a calculator and paper ever again. It literally transformed businesses, and it was one of the first apps to cause the loss of massive numbers of jobs in the workplace. Corporations used to have rooms full of people who were called "calculators." They sat there and rang up figures. Even when those figures were computerized, it still took a room full of data-entry people who prepared the data for calculating. With the advent of the spreadsheet, one person could do more, faster, than that entire room full of people. Of course, the Mac was not the first to have a spreadsheet. Lotus and others had already been around for years before the Mac was born. That revolution had already taken place. Still, the Mac brought hi-res GUI to the spreadsheet, as well as a mouse. You could get around faster with both the mouse AND the keyboard, and you could see more of your spreadsheet, scrolling around to different parts of it with ease.

Not long after the first Mac, people started connecting Macs to online services through modems. Throughout the Mac/PC wars, this capability was developing. Anyone who started out on Compuserve or Genie soon learned about that vast and mysterious (and expensive) electronic universe called The Internet. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the high priests of network programmers developed the point-to-point protocol (ppp) which enabled the splitting of a single node on the internet into thousands of nodes for end users who basically shared large internet connections via an Internet Service Provider. Dividing a $10,000/month connection among so many people made it affordable to everyone, and by 1991 or so, the early adopters were flocking to the Internet on both the Mac and the PC. This led to the development of the World Wide Web and the first browser, Mosaic, then Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, and so forth. Over the next decade, the world joined the online universe, and now it's hard to imagine a world without it. The World Wide Web and the Internet on which it runs represents a change in the evolution of human societies, probably the biggest and most profound change since the birth of cities.

So, a lot has happened in the 30 years since the little Macintosh was born. Steve Jobs' vision has remained with us and has guided Apple and its Mac customers to the brave new world of iPods, iPhones, iPads, and whatever is yet to come. Now, we talk to our devices with Siri, and she talks back. She can tell us useful information far faster than we could look it up or calculate it even with a calculator. This Star-Trek sci-fi future feature has arrived! Back in the 1960s, we always figured that such capability would occupy computers the size of a railroad car, some electronic overlord that was scary and powerful. Instead, we have devices not much larger than a pack of gum, up to devices the size of a tablet, and they seem much more powerful than those sci-fi monster computers of old, yet they have remained very much an extension of ourselves, not an electronic alien overlord.

Thirty years! No, it really doesn't seem like a long time. It seems to have happened overnight. Anyone watching our society from an alien planet would probably believe that we just made an overnight evolutionary leap — and that's probably not far from the truth. This has happened in an eye blink of time. How did all this happen in just 30 years? One can only wonder what the next thirty years will bring. The world will surely be a very different place, and while there are many doomsday scenarios, having watched the unbelievable advances since the Macintosh was born, and the radical changes it brought to my own life, I have confidence that the next 30 years will NOT bring doom, but solutions to complicated global problems which currently we cannot imagine. When someone exhibits fear of the future, think of the old fear of computers, then the birth of the Macintosh. I think it likely that the future will be a wonderful place. One thing for sure, the future arrives every day, day at a time. There is no escaping that. We WILL see many things come and go, but we will take it day at a time, as well, and we'll adapt and change as does our technology.

It's been quite a journey. 30 years with the Mac, MOTU, and all you great people who have each contributed to the development, usage, and acceptance of the most massive change in music since the birth of recorded sound. We're a community, now, not just loners playing around with expensive toys. The world has some idea of what we do, even if you have to mention "Pro Tools" to trigger some recognition. Years ago, it was impossible to explain.

So, Happy 30th Birthday Macintosh! May the journey continue in its scope and depth as before.

Shooshie
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Luke
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by Luke »

Very well said Shooshie.

As I reflect on the immensity of our accelerated advancement within such a short window of time, I believe that we will be astounded at our upcoming creations and innovations.

A renaissance awaits us all.

Onward.
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HCMarkus
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by HCMarkus »

Great post Shooshie. Thank you for a pleasant walk down Memory Lane... nice how you took me right to the intersection with Futura Drive. :D
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buzzsmith
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by buzzsmith »

What HC and Luke said!

Bought my first (obviously) June 20,1984. Over $2,000.


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Shooshie
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by Shooshie »

Of course there have been hundreds of books written about this subject, I suppose, and I doubt that they've said it all yet, so I didn't even scratch the surface. One important thing I skipped over was the iMac/iBook series, which were made to be connected to the internet, turning the internet into more of a commodity for the "the rest of us," where previously those of us who explored the internet were the more technically oriented type. The Macintosh became the equalizer, and soon other computers followed the lead. Now it's a given that you're going to be on the net; you can't even update apps or the OS without it. The Mac was sometimes first, sometimes not, but always a great user experience.

Glad you all enjoyed the missive. Funny; I didn't plan on writing that. It just kinda jumped out when I realized that it was 2014, soon to be the 30th anniversary.

Shoosh
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by mikehalloran »

Although my first was a Mac+ system two years later, my first encounter was the Lisa, a $10,000 predecessor to the the Macintosh. My buddy Jerry said, "The first time you lay out a newsletter on a Lisa, you know why they are cheap."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

Shoosjie touched on desktop publishing. It was the 'killer app' that made the Lisa/Mac desirable. MacWrite, Illustrator, Type1 Fonts with kerning, WYSIWYG and the HP Laser printer... those not old enough to know have no idea how big this was. Even the ImageWriter was able to do kerning with screen fonts. This was huge.

Pcs, in the generic sense were sold as word processors - glorified typewriters, actually - and places to keep your recipes (yes, really). It took the first killer app, VisiCalc, to change all that - now they could actually do something. Lotus and Excel followed for the IBM PC. Yes, the pc had been around for awhile before Dan Bricklin invented the spread sheet and finally made it useful. I'm pretty certain that there would be no Macintosh had it not been developed for the Apple II.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

Word processing was done using such programs as WordStar and many others that made you type in formatting characters to create paragraphs and the like. I remember when the Apple II could finally do upper and lower case letters, later lower case that went below the base line - still with the formatting if you wanted paragraphs, indentation etc. The Lisa/Mac changed all that.
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by BKK-OZ »

Article here from a guy claiming 'I used a Mac before you did'.
In the fall of 1983 I was a programmer in Princeton, NJ working at the now-long-defunct DeskTop Software Corp. We wrote database management systems in Pascal and had a relationship with Apple already, having written our first product for the Apple II. This history made us perfect candidates to write code for the new, then-secret Mac.
Cheers,
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…string theory says that all subatomic particles of the universe are nothing but musical notes. A, B-flat, C-sharp, correspond to electrons, neutrinos, quarks, and what have you. Therefore, physics is nothing but the laws of harmony of these strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies we can play on these strings. The universe is a symphony of strings and the mind of God… it is cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.
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Shooshie
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by Shooshie »

BKK-OZ wrote:Article here from a guy claiming 'I used a Mac before you did'.
In the fall of 1983 I was a programmer in Princeton, NJ working at the now-long-defunct DeskTop Software Corp. We wrote database management systems in Pascal and had a relationship with Apple already, having written our first product for the Apple II. This history made us perfect candidates to write code for the new, then-secret Mac.
He said that you could add memory to the original 128K Mac. Of course, most of us did upgrade it to the 512K Mac in December of 1984, less than a year after we bought it. But I went a step further. I found the first company to offer 3rd party memory upgrades, and I was their first customer. It cost around $2000 for 2 Megabytes of RAM. I did it. Plus, I got a "Hyperdrive" hard-wired inside it. That was a 10 Megabyte hard disk. For a few months I had what was probably the most powerful Macintosh in existence outside of Apple.

Larry Seltzer, who wrote that article quoted above, said that he used the Mac a few times in his life, but never really "got" it. There were PC people who were sentimentally attached to computers that made you work harder. There were also people for whom it was hard to imagine uses for computers outside of the computer industry. That is, they were programmers or network builders, and the idea of drawing a picture with a mouse was just a silly side-note to a machine that was made to crunch numbers. And yet it was the rest of us — people who tried drawing a picture with a mouse, or sequencing a song in Musicworks, or later in Composer or Performer — who realized that computers were finally of value, and we shelled out a lot of money for those things. I think my original 128K Macintosh, with external floppy, 2MB RAM, 10MB hard drive, and its Imagewriter, cost me over $7500 by the time it finally died, and I bought a Macintosh SE. That was equivalent to about 3 times that much money, today, and yet today's prices are actually far LESS than they were back then.

The Macintosh was more expensive than a PC, but it was pointing the direction for the future. It was, in fact, the model on which all computers would be based within a decade, and it continues to serve in that role. That was what most rankled people like Larry Seltzer. Why couldn't computers just continue to be cheap number crunchers running DOS? The Macintosh was stealing their pride in their esoteric knowledge which was required to run those DOS-based computers, and they refused to admit that it was precisely THAT which hindered widespread adoption of the personal computer.

There was a period in the mid-1990s during which I needed to make extra money when I wasn't on tour. At the urging of a neighbor, I took a job with her employer, doing what she and her husband both did: teleprompting. That means, of course, running a computer which displays a document on a monitor visible to someone on camera or in front of an audience, so that they can read it aloud as if they were speaking freely. The person running it has to be responsible for loading the document into the teleprompter application, then formatting it, then rehearsing (if necessary) and making changes (editing within the teleprompter app). The "skill" involved is scrolling the document at the speed that is most natural for the speaker to read and speak. If you get ahead, then he's unable to keep up, unable to go back and read what he's missed, and you've just cost your employer a client. Get behind, and there are long pauses as the speaker tries to look natural while waiting for the prompter to catch up.

Ok, now that I've established what is required of a teleprompter, you can see that it's pretty simple stuff. Basically it's a word processor with specific formatting, which scrolls. My employer ONLY used PC laptops for this. In fact, they were almost universally used. The apps were recalcitrant, the computers often failed or crashed, and the most basic of formatting required opening a list of characters and codes, remembering the code, then going back and inserting that code where you wanted the formatting to occur. If you were doing this in Spanish (and in Dallas, a lot of our film work included translations) the substitution characters could take hours to put into a long script, thanks to having to look up all the codes, etc. To sum up my point, the PC made the whole business VERY difficult. I began looking for Mac teleprompters; it just seemed natural that some people would be doing this on Macs, and that it would be easy as pie.

Sure enough, I found teleprompter apps for the Mac, and sure enough, they were easy as pie. Everything was WYSIWYG, no codes required, and no arcane sequences of steps to make it work right. It was as simple as typing in MacWrite, then hitting a button to send it to the monitor, then scroll. Timing was adjustable with a trim, and you could always see what you were doing on the computer's monitor. (The PC apps required you to use two prompters: one for the speaker and one for you)

When I suggested that we try a Mac, the guy threw a fit. I mean, he literally blew his stack that I'd suggest using a TOY for this SERIOUS JOB! After listening to this for about 30 minutes (we were driving home from a gig), I had two words for him when we arrived: "I quit." Anyone who felt such a need for his computer to be difficult, arcane, slow, unreliable, and scary to use in real time, and whose self image depended on being able to tell you how his knowledge, experience, and skill precluded the possibility of ever trying the easy, reliable way, was not someone for whom I needed to be working. While I never went back to tele prompting, I did find some people who used Macs for it, and they confirmed my suspicions: the Macintosh app made it possible for anyone to do this job with ease, with complete reliability, and no guessing. It could recognize any format of text.

I think you could find similar stories in every industry. When I'd train PC people to use Macs, the biggest problem was getting past their assumption that there was a problem. They almost needed for things to be arcane, just to comprehend them. In other words, they kept shaking their heads and staring at the Mac, because they couldn't figure out the catch. They couldn't figure out where it got difficult. Where was all the uncertainty? Where were the strange codes? I would tell them they were over-thinking it, that there was no uncertainty, no codes, and nothing strange. Everything you needed to know was right there in the menus. Then they'd resent using the mouse. The PC had biased them into thinking that they weren't doing anything of value if it didn't involve a lot of unrelated effort and a certain amount of "danger" that you'd do the wrong thing and destroy it. (remember the registry file on PCs?)

That strange bias evolved into something which emerged on the internet as "Apple hate." In fact, there was a site called "ihateapple.com" Today it continues against the iPhone and iPad, which are surely inferior to those made by Microsoft. Look up "Siri," and you'll find sites devoted to proving that the feature is useless, incapable of helping with real information, and nothing but a toy that you talk to and it misunderstands you. Well, as one who uses Siri to reduce my own workload, daily, I can assure them that they are wrong beyond belief. Either they are idiots or trolls. Or maybe both.

Anyway, the DOS that they loved so much is now a bad memory, relegated to the trash heap of history. The Macintosh way that they called a toy, and which they hated so much, is now the interface to pretty much everything. I had experienced the Macintosh all of about 5 minutes when I realized that this was the future of computers. This would be the way all computers worked someday. That was in the spring of 1984, and now, 30 years later, we've come so far that I feel no need to say "I told you so," but what the heck? Why not? History has a way of vindicating those who follow the better path. And did it ever!

Shooshie
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Re: Macintosh is turning 30

Post by mikehalloran »

"What computer should I buy?"

Back in the day, anyone who understood would say, find the software that does what you need and buy the hardware that runs it.

For me, I had just started a business for when I wasn't on the road. I shopped and finally went to a demonstration of FileMaker. It could do everything that I needed; it ran only on a Mac+. That settled it. This was 1986. I needed the ImageWriter II to print the 3-part invoices on the built-in tractor feed. I leased it for 5 years with a $1 pay off at the end. The nominal price for the whole system: Mac+, printer, 20mB external SCSI drive, 25mB tape backup, FileMaker+ was $6,600. At MacWorld, I bought Deluxe Music Construction Set and a scanner that replaced the print head of my ImageWriter.
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