Advent of Computing - Episode 3 - Mythic Macintosh

Episode Date: May 5, 2019

The original Apple Macintosh, later rebranded the Macintosh 128k, is inarguably one of the most recognizable vintage computers. Even it's design has become iconic: a single 3 ½ inch floppy drive and 9 inch black-and-white CRT built into one small rounded beige box. Even on its release in 1984 it was heralded as a visionary and groundbreaking machine that could even rival the success of the IBM PC. Today, we are going to look at the enduring legacy of the Macintosh and answer the questions: what did Apple invent and what did they borrow, and are all interfaces that follow clones of the Macintosh.

In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, a computer that would define the user experience for decades to come. The original Mac showcased just how visionary and ahead-of-the-times Apple and Steve Jobs were. Later products, such as Microsoft Windows, were simply cheap knockoffs of what was invented and perfected at Apple. Or at least, that's one story. Did the Macintosh really make the computer personal for the first time? Did Apple really change computing from the ground up? Or is it more complicated and subtle than that? It turns out that the history and the legacy of the Macintosh is much more complicated and clandestine than you would expect.

Welcome back to Advent of Computing. This is Episode 3, The Mythic Macintosh. I'm your host, Sean Haas. I'm your host, Sean Haas. The original Macintosh, later rebranded the Mac 128K once more models started coming out, is inarguably one of the most recognized vintage computers. Even its design has become an icon. A single 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and a 9-inch black-and-white CRT all built into one small, rounded, beige rectangle.

Even on its release in 1984, it was heralded as visionary and groundbreaking, and it was thought that it may even be able to rival the success of the IBM PC. Today, we are going to look at the enduring legacy of the Macintosh and answer the questions, what did Apple invent and what did they borrow? And also, see if all interfaces that follow the Mac are simply clones of Apple's designs. Just as a heads up, this isn't really a part two for the last episode. More so, it's a corollary topic. In episode two, I discussed the origins of the graphical user interface. Some of this history will come up later in the episode, so if you want more context for the discussion, you should go back and check the show's archive.

So first, let's talk about the tech specs of the Macintosh. Under its beige hood, the Mac sports a Motorola 68000 CPU, a 32-bit processor. This is paired with 128 kilobytes of internal RAM, a single 3.5-inch floppy drive, and no space for internal expansion. Spec-wise, this isn't really a departure from other contemporary machines. Many PC clones had similar, if not better, specs, often outmatching the Macs simply by offering a hard drive and internal expansion options. In fact, IBM's flagship computer at the time, the PC-AT, came with twice as much RAM, a faster 32-bit processor, and a hard drive as standard. It's pretty clear that Apple wasn't really innovating or even competing on the hardware side. The software had to be where the Mac made a name for itself.

So, what made the Macintosh such a big deal in 1984? At the time, most popular computers were PC-compatibles and ran DOS. Users could only really interact with these systems via a text interface. And while many programs had complex graphics, there wasn't any one unified graphical interface. We're now pretty used to the idea of programs running in its own windows, but in DOS and many earlier home computer systems, a single program would take control of the entire screen and system, so each program had to be able to handle making and running some kind of user interface. In the early 80s, nearly all of these programs could only use a keyboard.

MICE did exist for the PC, but at this point, very few programs really used them. exist for the PC, but at this point, very few programs really used them. Microsoft Word, for instance, was one of the first programs for DOS that made much use of a mouse. In fact, in its 1983 release, it came bundled with one of the first mice that was compatible with the PC. So when the Mac debuted, users were shocked, and rightly so, to see a graphics interface, in this case the Macintosh Finder, as the standard. But also they were shocked that it was controlled almost exclusively with a mouse. In the place of DOS's text-only interface and varying program-specific controls, the Macintosh offered something completely different. Programs ran in windows that could be moved, resized, and could overlap one another.

Programs were launched and interacted with with the click of a mouse instead of typing out commands or remembering control sequences. And each program presented a unified interface in the drop-down menus that ran across the top bar of the screen at all times. This is called a WIMP interface, which stands for Windows, Icons, Menus, and a Pointer. All of these features should be sounding very familiar to you, since this is the current way that we interact with computers today. The other part of this new paradigm that the Mac brought into fashion was the idea of a desktop metaphor. This is where a computer interface is designed around the idea of a real-life desktop. The most obvious part of this

is the actual desktop, the bottom layer of the interface. On your desktop, you can have folders, files, and programs that you can open. This also dictates a lot of the choices for icons in the system, such as a blank page as the icon to start a new file. Once again, this is such a ubiquitous design in the modern day that we often don't even think about it. One of the other important pieces of the Macintosh interface was how it was able to unify user interfaces between programs, something that no system had really done before. A large part of this was done using its signature menu bar. No matter what program was running, a strip at the top of the screen

was dedicated to control menus for that program. This may seem like a small point today, but at the time, this was a pretty big departure. No longer did a user have to remember the correct commands or key combos to save or edit a file. Instead, you could just navigate to the File menu and just choose Save. The other side of creating a unified experience for the end user had to do with how developers made new software on the Mac. If you've ever used a classic Mac, you'd have noticed that most, if not all, programs have a really similar look and feel. Things like buttons, scroll bars, fonts, and pop-up menus look the same in each different program. To make this possible, Apple provided a set of programming tools called the Macintosh

Toolbox, which was used by software developers to create and control user interfaces. Software such as the Mac Toolbox is often called an application programming interface, or an API, and are an important part of any modern computing system, at least as far as developers are concerned. In this case, Toolbox allowed Apple to retain control of how the Mac interface looked in third-party software while also making it easier for programmers to program for the Mac. So, for the most part, the Mac 128 really sounds close to what we've come to expect from a computer. We have a desktop with icons, windows, and menus that are all controlled with a pointer.

And at the time, the Mac was certainly received as an innovation and a huge step towards a truly personal computing experience. Just after the release, the New York Times said that the Mac presages a revolution in personal computing. And really, they were correct. In the coming years, computers with interfaces similar to the Mac would flood the market more and more, making computers more accessible than ever. So that's the top level of the story. But there's still a lot of questions unanswered. Just how influential was the Macintosh? Was Apple's new GUI a totally original work, or was it built on stolen ideas? To answer these questions, we're going to need to look at the creation of the Mac. But you see, the story of the development of the Macintosh turns out to have a lot more layers to it than you would think. I'm going to do my best to unwrap some of this, but

the more I read about the early years of the Mac, the more complicated the story becomes. So to start off with, you need to know that there was one that came before the Macintosh. And I don't just mean computers or personal computers or even graphical computers in general. I mean there was a predecessor to the Mac within Apple. That computer was the Apple Lisa. You'd be forgiven for not hearing about it, since sales-wise, it was a total failure, selling as few as 100,000 units. First hitting the market in 1983, less than a year before the Macintosh,

the history of these two machines is tied together in a deep and confusing way. The Lisa was Apple's first attempt at bringing a graphical interface to the masses. a graphical interface to the masses. Lisa ran with the same 68,000 processors as the Mac, but past that, the hardware specs diverge massively. Models sold with 1MB of RAM, four times that of the later Macintosh. This was expandable up to toolhole megabytes,

which, for the time, was a whole lot of system RAM. The first model of the Lisa came with two 5.25-inch floppy drives and an external hard drive, while the later second revision came with an internal hard drive and a single 3.5-inch floppy. The 12-inch display was also considerably larger than the Mac's 9-inch screen. Software-wise, the machine could run LisaOS, Apple's first graphical operating system. But beyond that, it could also run a version of Unix, as well as LisaWorkshop, a separate operating system meant for software development. This sounds amazing. So far as the hardware goes, at least, the Lisa sounds like a much more advanced and capable macintosh and software wise on the operating system options alone there's just a lot more it could do and a

lot of ways this is a completely true and accurate way to look at the lisa the lisa was intended to be a powerful business class workstation and as such it came with a powerful price. It costs around $10,000. Some quick math shows that in 2019 money, that's just above $25,000. Compare that to the max initial price of $2,500 or $6,000 adjusted for inflation, and you start to see some of the first reasons that the Lisa was a flop in the marketplace. So what about Lisa's operating system? The magic pre-Macintosh GUI software. Surprisingly it looks almost identical to the Mac's Finder interface. You have a desktop with icons and a menu bar at the top of the screen, overlapping windows, a mouse cursor, and icons.

Except for a few tweaks such as adding an Apple logo to the menu, the Lisa interface is basically the same as the later Finder. However, Lisa OS did have some features tucked away that outclassed the first few releases of Mac OS. The primary edge was in multitasking. Due to the fact that the Mac had such a small amount of RAM and no hard drive to speak of, or any secondary storage for that matter, Mac OS could only ever run one application at a time. In contrast, Lisa was able to multitask programs with ease.

Another more technical feature is that Lisa offered virtual memory. That's the ability to supplement system RAM by using disk storage for memory. One way to think of the Lisa is kind of as a soft launch for the later Mac 128K. But this wouldn't encompass the whole story. More so, the Macintosh was a scaled-down Lisa. I mean, just look at what Lisa OS could do. It's easy to see that it's much more in line with computers we use today, and the Macintosh, in that regard, is a major downgrade. The shocking part for me is that the Lisa and the Macintosh were developed in somewhat tandem,

and that Apple's business plan was to release them a year apart, going as far back as 1981. So, this leads to the question, how did Apple start down the GUI path, and why did the superior Lisa go by the wayside? I think I can answer that in three words. Xerox and Jobs. You may be thinking at this point, how on earth is Xerox, a copier and printer company, relevant to the story of the adoption of the GUI?

Well, it may surprise you to find out that in the 70s, Xerox was essentially the only company to design computers with graphical interfaces. The machine I'm alluding to here is the legendary Xerox Alto, the first mass-produced computer designed to use a graphical user interface. This computer was designed at Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, California. And the team that designed the Alto really had an impressive pedigree. Most of the developers held PhDs in computer science or had years and years of experience in the field. But what really made the Alto team impressive was their connection to an earlier

graphical system, that being NLS. Created by Doug Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center, NLS was the first computer system in the world to use a graphical user interface, full stop. use a graphical user interface. Full stop. If you want to hear the whole story of NLS, then episode 2 of this podcast covers it in depth. Essentially, Doug and his team created the cornerstone of the modern computering experience using technology from the 1960s. This is all to say that the crew behind the Alto was at the very forefront of computer research. And the Alto project really lived up to expectations. Once completed in 1973, the machine was a powerhouse to say the least. The Alto, of course, had a mouse.

We are, after all, talking about another graphical computer, so it's going to need some way to point. The other piece to any graphical-oriented system is a monitor. In this case, the Alto used a black-and-white 606x808 pixel monitor oriented in portrait. A vertical monitor may seem strange today, but there's a few good reasons for it to show up in the Alto. One is the simple fact that there really wasn't a standard for graphical systems, or even for personal computers, so Xerox had to discover their own standards. The other reason is that, while Xerox was a printer and copier company, the vertical display had the same aspect ratio of a piece of

paper, so any page displayed on the screen would look identical to a printout of the same page. On the screen was where the real magic of the Alto happened. The machine was used primarily via the mouse, which displayed a movable pointer on screen. The most well-known environment used, Smalltalk, had a desktop with windows, menus, and icons. At this point, this should be sounding like beating a dead horse, but the Alto also had a WIMP interface with a desktop. And this all happened prior to 1980. The only reason we aren't all using Xerox machines

is because the Alto was, first and foremost, a research computer. It was mass-produced, but it was almost exclusively used internally by Xerox, even though they did loan out some systems, but that was mainly to universities and labs on a really small basis. So why the sidetracking to Xerox? Well, believe it or not, this is going to answer one of our earlier questions. That is, what did Apple invent, and what did they instead borrow? I think the best way to explain what Xerox did for Apple is to start with how Steve Jobs described it himself. is to start with how Steve Jobs described it himself.

And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, etc., etc. I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They'd done a bunch of things wrong, but we didn't know that at the time.

It's still, though, they had the germ of the idea was there, and they'd done it very well. And within, you know, 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. The clip you just heard was from a 1996 interview in the documentary Triumph of the Nerds. What Jobs tells us here is that he and Apple got both the idea and the groundwork for future GUIs from Xerox. I don't know how much more clearly I can make that point. know how much more clearly I can make that point. The actual trip to Xerox, however, was a lot more complicated than Jobs lets on. The deal worked something like this. Apple offered Xerox the chance to invest in them prior to going public in exchange for two demos of their Alto computer. Xerox took the deal and showed Jobs and a team of Apple

engineers the Alto. However, this isn't as clear-cut as just that. Any story about Apple and Steve Jobs is rarely clear-cut. The fact of the matter is the Alto project wasn't a secret. Xerox had been showing off their technology to many companies and researchers in the Palo Alto area. And on top of that, a good number of Apple employees had come into contact with the Alto before Jobs ever saw the machine. The Lisa and the Mac had been in development before the Xerox demo, and the Lisa, at least, had been planned to have some kind of new user-friendly interface from early development. So let's not think that this is a single interaction that gave Jobs a bolt-from-the-blue kind of inspiration. Instead, it seems to me like the Alto's graphical

interface had been floating around in the collective consciousness of Silicon Valley, and this was just the first time Jobs became a devotee of that idea. But that still leaves the quote-unquote incomplete and wrong parts of the Alto that Jobs mentioned. And this is where Apple did innovate. One of the key parts of this innovation was the uniform design language that Apple brought to the table. The Alto, while very impressive, didn't have any one uniform interface. The Smalltalk program had a desktop with Windows, that's true, but its text editor used a totally different graphical system. So did the file manager. The power of Apple's Macintosh Toolbox and Lisa's equivalent Lisa Toolkit was something that Xerox lacked. I can't underline

this enough. Having a uniform user experience is a cornerstone of the modern computer experience. Most of the other changes, like adding a top menu bar, were stylistic, but did add to the final user experience. After seeing the future at Xerox, Jobs wanted to be more and more involved with Lisa, eventually trying to take over as project manager. When the current team wouldn't let him take total control, he left the Lisa project entirely, and instead found his way into managing the other big project at Apple for the time. That is, of course, the Macintosh. So, now we've established that Apple didn't spin the Mac entirely out of whole cloth,

but they didn't exactly create a clone of the Alto either. Now, let's try to answer this other question that we mentioned earlier. Were other systems that came after the Lisa knockoffs of Apple? Obviously, I'm talking about Microsoft Windows. This question is actually pretty confusing to answer. Part of this is an issue of the timeline. Microsoft demoed the beta for what would become Windows 1 in 1983, which had already been in development since 1981. 83 is the same year that Apple's first graphical interface and the Lisa were released. That fact, coupled with Apple's notorious secrecy around internal projects, means that Microsoft couldn't have copied the Lisa. But when Windows 1 was

released in November of 85, to the public it could easily look like Microsoft was just following in the footsteps of Apple. This gets muddled, though, by the fact that Microsoft had licensed the rights to some of Macintosh's look and feel from Apple. Just prior to the release of Windows 1, Microsoft agreed to hold off on releasing Word and Multiplan, a spreadsheet program, on Windows for two years. Apple wanted this because Microsoft was one of the larger developers in the early days of the Mac, and their Office software helped sales immensely. In exchange for this two years of exclusivity, Apple gave Microsoft the license to create Mac-like user interfaces.

This happened in early 1985. By that time, Windows 1 had been basically ready to ship. So, did Microsoft really pull all the ideas for Windows from Lisa and the Mac? Well, the timeline says no, but the idea of Bill Gates asking to use the Mac interface design seems to hint at something more complicated. interface design seems to hint at something more complicated. Surprisingly, this question does have an authoritative and legally binding answer.

According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, to quote, Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface or the idea of a desktop metaphor. graphical user interface or the idea of a desktop metaphor. This was the result of a later 1994 ruling on Apple versus Microsoft over the claim that Microsoft was infringing on Apple's intellectual property in creating Windows. This means that in the strictest definition, Microsoft did not steal from Apple and neither did any other companies that created later graphical interfaces. So if Microsoft didn't steal from Apple then where did they get the idea for Windows? If you've been playing along at home

I bet you can guess. That's right, old Stevie J wasn't the only one visiting Palo Alto late at night. When asked if Microsoft pulled ideas from Apple in a recent Reddit Ask Me Anything, Bill replied, The main copying that went on relative to Steve Jobs and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox PARC did in creating the graphical interface. The whole story of Windows deserves its own episode,

so I won't go too much more into depth with it here. But essentially, both Apple and Microsoft's GUI software ended up being similar because it came from a common ancestor, that being Xerox. That being Xerox. So, after all that, let's see where our initial questions stand. First, did Apple really invent the GUI? That is a resounding no. The idea of a graphical computer goes back well to the 1960s.

That's decades before Apple or the Macintosh ever hit the scene. But Apple did make strides towards the interfaces that we see today, mainly in their work on uniform interfaces with software like Mac Toolbox. Second question, is software like Windows just a ripoff of the Macintosh? Once again, that's a myth. The real question is more along the lines of how much software we use today was stolen or influenced by Xerox. Now, all of this isn't to say that the Mac wasn't revolutionary. It brought a lot of new people into the fold as far as computing goes. The bottom line, however, is that Apple wasn't the only company working towards this end. Thanks for listening to Advent of Computing.

I'll be back again in two weeks. And I know the last two episodes have been really focused on graphical interfaces, so I'm going to try to depart from that a little bit. Just as a hint, we're going to be talking about Berkeley and AT&T. If you like the show, please take the time to subscribe, rate, and review wherever you can. Thank you, and have a good day.