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Thirty Years of Mac [video]

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Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#111

Post by jacobwcarlson »

taliesinb wrote: post #107
gaius wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is certainly interesting to compare the full colour, hardware accelerated graphic, multitasking, large memory Amigas of the mid 80s with contemporary Macs... The future could have been very, very different (and arguably computing would be 5-10 years ahead of where it is now, as that was the lead Commodore had back then). Or the Acorn Archimedes of the time, which was turning in floating point benchmarks 10x faster…

What was responsible for the Amiga ultimately failing, if it was superior in all those ways?

It's complicated: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#112

Post by peterkelly »

ksk wrote: post #108
peterkelly wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is incredibly hampered by the desire to maintain backwards compatibility. There's a ton of ugly stuff that could have been jettisoned by now if it wasn't for the need to support some program written in 1990 for the windows 2.0 API. I agree there are many benefits to backwards compatibility, and in some cases it is warranted (though these days you can use virtual machines to achieve much the same goals). Apple…

Do you have any specific examples of how its "incredibly hampered"?

The most extreme I can think of was one reported by Raymond Chen on his "The Old New Thing" blog which I can't find the specific link for, but is discussed in an article by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

To quote:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#113

Post by alextgordon »

cristianpascu wrote: post #104
itafroma wrote: post #48

Here's the list of people and things featured: - 1984, original Macintosh - 1985, Jon Appleton, pioneer in electro-acoustical music and key figure in the development of the digital synthesizer - 1986, April Greiman, seminal figure in the New Wave graphic design movement - 1987, Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research - 1988, Ahn Sang-soo, pioneer in Korean typography - 1989, John Knoll, co-inventor of Photoshop…

25 men. 3 women. 2 machines.

You think that's bad? Try counting Fields medalists!

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#115

Post by mamcx »

csmithuk wrote: post #29
shootinputin wrote: post #13

How come people talk about 30 years of Mac but no one talks about 25+ years of Windows or Linux for that matter. I saw numerous blog posts of parroting this advertisement, even in my morning daily commute news paper.

This is normal. They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ( "you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their cl…

> Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974.

Ergo, mac?

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#117

Post by zemanel »

Back in August 2010, coughed 80% of my cash on a 15" MBP when i started to freelance because a) had the cash at the moment b) wanted a reliable machine and a motivation boost for the rough times ahead, which i eventually upgraded to 8GB non-Apple memory and SSD disk (replacing Superdrive with the old HD).

It's Jan 2014, still my power horse and going rock solid, i'm quite happy.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#118

Post by scelerat »

josefresco wrote: post #80

More 30 like years of personal computing...just dub "Mac" for "PC" and it's wouldn't be inaccurate except for the smiley faces. Just because these artists and engineers are talking about a Mac does not make their functions exclusive to the platform. Also, going back 30 years you have to endure some turd-Macs along the way (some brilliant ones too). Many jokes were had at the expense of our Mac brothers in the late mi…

> switch to Intel changed that

The turnaround started with Mac OS X, in 2001. That's what really started turning heads. The intel macs five years later helped, but it really was the wow factor of having a great Mac- or Mac-like (considering Aqua was the most radical departure Apple had made from the System 6/7/8/9 UI lineage up until that point) interface on top of real Unix, with all of its tools. It put to bed all sorts of concerns with architecture, open source/free software, macho "real programmers" insecurities, etc.

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#119

Post by jarjoura »

This video seemed to celebrate the software that ran on the machines more than the actual hardware itself. I get that they are trying to market the emotion behind the experience but I almost feel as if the emotion they are conveying is misplaced here.

The actual photos and stories following the video are MUCH better and I enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane. :-)

Re: Thirty Years of Mac [video]

#120

Post by csmithuk »

mamcx wrote: post #115
csmithuk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is normal. They are the poster boy for a corporation despite having screwed up incredibly so many times over the years, nearly fallen off a cliff and treating their customers like crap ( "you're holding it wrong" for example) and still only maintaining a minority market share on the desktop and handset market. Also they have several system architectures and complete API rewrites over the years that mean their cl…

> Unix is 45 years old. Stuff still compiles and runs from circa 1974. Ergo, mac?

No. OS X is a bastardisation of Mach, FreeBSD and OpenStep. A completely new Frankenstein's monster.
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