Exploring the Macintosh ROM (2019)

Exploring the Macintosh ROM (2019)
macgui.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20231106024332/https://macgui.co...

I've been reading and enjoying systemtalk.org's examination of each month's MacUser from this era. It's striking how much sheer support, in terms of new hardware and software, the Mac received right out of the gate despite being, well, almost completely useless given the limited RAM (the "Fat Mac" appeared very quickly for a reason), no Apple hard drive, and not even a second floppy drive available at launch; the endless disk-swapping was enough to cause insanity. Nonetheless, it was good enough to make the 128K Mac the first $2500 impulse buy. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-cincinnati-enquirer/3...> Although Amiga and Atari ST followed within 18 months later with far superior hardware, it's clear in retrospect (and, I suspect, to anyone at the time comparing Macworld/MacUser/MacWeek to the corresponding Amiga/ST publications) that Apple had completely sucked up the air in the "not PC" segment of the market.

Apple had the credibility to do so in the first place, of course, because of its success with the Apple II. In turn, Mac's share of the market was minuscule compared to what the IBM PC had built around itself since 1981, as any comparison of PC/PC World/InfoWorld to the above Mac publications would have shown. But it was enough to survive for the long term. Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990, but it is a niche, and a reasonably defendable one; Amiga's desktop video niche was correspondingly much smaller, and ST never found one at all outside maybe music.[1]

I wrote "superior hardware", not "superior hardware and software". Not enough attention has been given to just how good classic Mac OS was from the beginning. I would say je ne sais quoi, but that's not accurate because the care given to both the UI (in the form of the Toolbox burnt into the ROM discussed in this post) and underlying architecture is obvious as opposed to being indefinable/ineffable. Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows. Yes, Amiga has out-of-the-box true preemptive multitasking.[2] But what good is it if the OS doesn't have quality libraries, toolkits, and primitives? As baroque and obscure as Inside Macintosh was for the Mac developer c. 1985, at least he had it as a resource, and at least the OS is sophisticated enough to justify such a baroque and obscure tome in the first place. And Atari TOS? Don't make me laugh; that it was tolerable to so many in Europe just shows how low a bar the ZX Spectrum had set for the masses there.

[1] Yes, yes, Europeans, I know that Amiga and ST were much more successful across the Atlantic. That only meant that the PC takeover of the entire market skipped the first half of the DOS era in Europe, as opposed to not happening at all. (And yes, I know about the Amstrad clones.)

[2] I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place

For better or for worse, though, compact Macs never increased from the original 512x342; for the price, I think successor Amigas easily ate the Macintosh's lunch in terms of graphical capabilities.

(Disclaimer: I know much, much more about early Macintoshes than Amigas, since it's what I col]leect.)

This is a blessing in disguise (and part of what I was alluding to regarding the quality of Apple's toolkit for developers). That targeting, and the B/W limitation, forced Susan Kare and other Apple UI people to produce very high-quality icons and widgets that were and are suitable for professional use. Amiga's widgets, designed for a TV set, are garish, low-resolution, and pretty awful; the ST's are overall better (thanks to the GEM heritage) but still not as good as Apple's.

MacOS today looks more like System 1 than System 7 looks like either; that's how good Apple's UI design c. 1984 is.