11–20 of 26 posts
EDIT: Wow! I guess it's a known thing (glad I didn't imagine it): https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/10/26/a...
Pixels on the Lisa were not square. Tall rectangular pixels made for better font rendering.
The Lisa had virtual memory? Not sure about that, but there was a neat feature that trapped stack overflows. The OS could expand the stack with the overflow trap was triggered.
I remember the well deserved Lisa hype. But $10,000! I saw one in my professor's office a few years later shortly after the mac had been introduced. I was in awe.
I get the impression that Steve Jobs had no sense for what people were willing to pay for products. Macs were overwhelmingly present in schools, but I doubt many could afford them even if they wanted to. $2495 was an insane amount of money in 1984
It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
One past thread: Busy Being Born - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10188952 - Sept 2015 (8 comments) 2004 is the earliest year that this article exists at archive.org. Obviously that's just an upper bound for it. If anyone knows a more accurate year, we can change it again.
EDIT: "The initial version of this site was written in the fall of 2003, running on a single server in my basement". I guess my memory is faulty.
I remember the well deserved Lisa hype. But $10,000! I saw one in my professor's office a few years later shortly after the mac had been introduced. I was in awe.
I’m always amazed at the price of early computers. My dad made $12,000 a year back then. Even the original Macintosh was an outlandish $2,499. The IBM PC AT was $6,000 and the first Compaq 386 was $12,000!
But we kids never had a Nintendo or XBox but we always had the latest computer hardware at home. I can still remember that my dad showed us the cd-rom drive in the 80s it was massive.
Wow those Polaroids are going on 42 years old. Wonder how they're preserved/archived. Incredible part of early Apple history, a lot of which was destroyed around the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in the late 90s.
I'm curious why you think this! Apple donated their museum and historical collections to Stanford in late 1997, and given the comprehensive nature of the gift I'd be very surprised to hear of a Jobs-driven "purge" before that happened.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/12/source-code-for-appl...
"...into a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure."
Considering the amount of work it would take for a single person building a text-based computer prototype to switch to a WIMP-based computer prototype in the late 1970's, I think that Bill is being modest. People used to be that way.
I've been through much of folklore.org in the past, but I missed this part the other times: "...into a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the win…
Even more so, look at this Smalltalk 74 interface here: https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Small...
I'm still not clear on what the Apple team saw at PARC that day, but it seems like it made a huge impression at least to start.
