151–160 of 186 posts
I'm trying to imagine most readers of a 1983 Newsweek magazine would read this and be turned off from computers for life
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coincidentally I just looked these up the other day: Apple Lisa 1983 $9,995 ($25,143 in 2018 dollars) Apple Macintosh 128k 1/24/84 $2,495 ($6,000 in 2018 dollars) Macintosh II 3/2/87 $5,498 ($12,125 in 2018) Next Cube 9/18/90 $10,000 ($19,177 in 2018 dollars)
Now do SGI workstations!
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The Mac II was released in 1987. On the PC side, VGA cards were introduced a year earlier and could do those resolutions.
VGA 640x480 was 16 colors, wasn’t it? The Mac II did 256 colors at that resolution. The software side also helped. Windows (¿mostly?) ran a fixed palette, while the Palette Manager on the Mac made it easy for applications to pick whatever color (out of 16M) they wanted. On the hardware side, most PCs still had monochrome monitors, and even those with color monitors didn’t typically have ones as good as the Trinitrons…
You're right though on the color palette. I never understood why Windows nor its applications didn't change it to something less garish than the default CGA palette.
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Apple wasn't visible at all in Europe during those days, Atari, Amiga and IBM PC ruled this side of the Atlantic. Now had Compaq not been so lucky, then the PCs might have indeed gone nowhere.
Certainly in the UK (special case?), that's not the case . We certainly had Apple ][s at school and 6th form in the UK as the main machines - later replaced by BBC model Bs and back then there were summer camps doing computing for enthusiastic youngsters. Apple was again the computer of choice in the early days, to be replaced later by the ZX Spectrum.
Of course these were after the Apple 2 so maybe you're correct but I don't think even I saw my first Apple computer until 1989, and that wasn't even in the UK (I emigrated to the US for a short while that year).
My secondary school had a bunch of Research Machines, until they were replaced by BBC micros.
The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously. There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on th…
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Again anecdotal, but my experience was that state schools had BBC Micros but private schools and many technology-focused colleges had AppleIIs. Apples were very expensive. I remember helping out at a technology college night class where people were being taught Logo programming (and later Pascal). It was the first time I'd seen more than one ApppleII in a room at a time (this class had a doze or so, two people to mac…
I went to a private school (1986-89) and we had nothing but BBC Micros. Don't think I saw an Apple until well into my job career (~2000ish).
The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously. There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on th…
Wow, I wonder why Apple kept using their processors, it seemed it was more trouble than it was worth
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The IBM PC in 1981 cost $4,500 to $8,500 in today's money. The original Mac would cost $6,000 if released today. Computers have become a great deal cheaper in the ensuing decades.
My Apple II cost around $1k in 1978, about $4k today. That was without a disk drive. Today, a Rasbpi costs $5. Holy freakin' cow.
When I was in college in the mid 2000s my senior project needed a single board computer. We spent $500 on a small PC104 board with a 100MHz National Instruments Geode (x86 compatible) process. That didn't include any RAM or storage. I really wish the Raspberry PI would have been available back then. Especially the Raspberry PI ecosystem, makes interfacing with stuff so much easier. We interfaced a small LCD I found at a surplus shop and it took us weeks to get it working. No you can buy a touch screen LCD for $30 and there are libraries to get it working in about 20 minutes.
The Lisa was a good machine, but there was one big problem. Motorola had come out with the M68000, but not the MMU for it. 680x0 MMUs were years late, and the first one was terrible. The Lisa had a real OS, and needed an MMU. That had to be built out of smaller parts, which increased the cost enormously. There was also a major bug in the M68000 - instruction backout didn't work. That was fixed in the 68010. But on th…
Wow, I wonder why Apple kept using their processors, it seemed it was more trouble than it was worth
At the time though, the 68K was regarded as the best general purpose CPU you could get and was sort of a "default choice" for building any reasonably high performance systems. Unix workstation manufacturers like Sun and SGI originally built their systems on the M68K platforms before their respective RISC architectures developed and matured.
With that said, it's totally reasonable to make the hindsight argument that Apple should have developed the IIgs line further, with its 16-bit 65C816, and then reevaluated the CPU landscape in the mid 1980s, where you had more mature 68K chips, 32bit x86 CPUs, and a plethora of RISC options. In that world, I could very easily see the Macintosh make its debute on a RISC or 386/486 platform.
Speaking of the IIgs: It's rumored that Steve Jobs requested they downclock the CPU (it only ran at 2.8mhz) to prevent it from seeming faster than the Macintosh.