Regarded initially as a "toy," it's obvious today that the Mac changed the direction of computing for the better
Tom Thompson
This month marks the tenth anniversary of the Apple Macintosh line. Although few took it seriously during the early years, in many ways the Mac defined what a desktop computer should be. Apple pioneered many concepts that users now take for granted.
The ideas of cut-and-paste, undo, point-and-shoot menu selection, picking the best typeface for a document, dropping a graphic into a page, and other common operations were first promoted by the Mac 10 years ago. While many of these ideas drew on work done at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Apple refined and popularized them. The Mac also ushered in new technologies and new expectations that go beyond ease of use, such as plug-and-p
lay expansion boards and networks, remote access, and 24-bit color editing and printing.
The Mac's trendsetting days are not over. Today, the AV-series Macs are the first mainstream desktop systems to offer video capability and voice control as standard equipment. The PowerBook line of notebooks brings a new level of usability to portable computing. And Apple continues to be a driving innovative force in building systems for the graphic arts.
Today Apple is at a crossroads. It is in the process of moving the Mac from its traditional Motorola 680x0 processor to the new PowerPC that the company codeveloped with IBM and Motorola. Apple is also a pioneer in the emerging PDA (personal digital assistant) category with its Newton line. So now is a good time to look back at the Macintosh milestones and place their significance in perspective.
Descended from Lisa
In 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa, its successor to the company's aging Apple II line. The Lisa's most innovative aspect was its GU
I-based operating system, with windows, icons, and menus. The system's consistent interface with data-as-a-concrete-object metaphor promised ease of use for the office worker. However, its hefty price tag of $10,000 was hard to handle.
A year later, Apple brought out the Macintosh. It was smaller, faster, and--most important--cost $2495. It borrowed a lot from the Lisa, including the GUI and mouse. The Lisa was discontinued in 1985, but its influence lives on inside the Mac, which has gone from a small closed system to a variety of forms: tower systems, small desktop units, and notebooks. Most PCs sold today offer a mouse and run Windows--a tacit approval of the concept of a consistent, user-friendly interface that the Lisa and the Mac pioneered.
Compared with other personal computers of its time, the original Mac was a bit anemic in some ways while excelling in others. For example, few personal computers offered even one built-in serial port, yet the Mac had two of them. More significant was h
ow Apple made use of the system ROMs. The Mac's ROMs were downright massive compared to those of other personal computers. While the IBM XT had 48-KB ROMs, they contained mostly BASIC. Much of the Mac ROM code came from the Lisa and was distilled down into tight assembly code by Bill Atkinson (who wrote the Lisa's graphics engine) and Andy Hertzfeld.
These ROMs supplied an array of routines known as the Mac Toolbox. Related Toolbox routines were collected into groups called Managers, such as QuickDraw (the graphics engine), the Device Manager (which dealt with hardware at a high level), the Window Manager, the Menu Manager, and the Font Manager. These Managers supplied hardware-independent functions that programmers used to communicate with devices, create windows, handle a menu selection, change a font, or establish a network session.
In short, the Mac Toolbox defined an API years before the term was coined. Nowadays, programmers are familiar with an army of competing APIs: Windows, NextStep, a
nd Motif. However, the Mac does a better job of integrating the various services, such as memory and printers, and it places most of the API in ROM. There the Mac API makes fewer demands on memory and disk space. However, its entry points are located in RAM, so that RAM patches can fix bugs or enhance certain services in the API.
In retrospect, the 128 KB of RAM was inadequate for the memory-intensive GUI. It was assumed that since Mac applications would be making heavy use of the ROM-based Toolbox, less RAM would be needed for actual user code. To make the best use of the limited memory, a Memory Manager could load or purge sections of program code on demand. This had important consequences for both programmers and users.
For the Mac programmer, it meant that code had to be written using PC-relative addresses. That's because the Memory Manager might reload the code into different areas of RAM. On the 68000 processor, PC-relative displacements were restricted to 15 bits (the 16th bit was a sign
bit, used to determine the direction of the jump), so these chunks of code--called code segments--were limited to 32 KB. The Memory Manager might also shuffle crucial data structures around in memory to make an opening for a code segment.
The proper way to address these structures was through handles. Programmers who, for performance reasons, used these handles just to set up pointers to these data structures got a rude surprise when the Memory Manager, going about its duties, rendered the pointer useless by relocating the data structure elsewhere. For programmers used to the absolute addressing schemes of earlier personal computers, this sort of behavior was maddening. It didn't help that you had to learn about an event-driven interface that let the user do anything in any order, or that you needed a Lisa to develop code.
The use of PC-relative code design was prescient, since it allows applications to function in a multitasking or virtual memory environment. The 15-bit branch displacement limi
t was expanded to 32 bits in the 680x0 processors; this simplifies code design unless the application has to run on the older 68000 Macs. And the Mac has a wide variety of native development tools, with languages from BASIC to C to Forth. Several vendors offer tools with visual programming interfaces, such as Mainstay's Visual C, Zedcor's Future Basic, and Prograph Internationals' Prograph.
Users eventually saw a silver lining, too. The combination of the Memory Manager and PC-relative code enables the Mac environment to run efficiently in far less memory than Windows needs.
One side note on the original design is that Apple used the top 2 bits of the 68000 processor's 24-bit address lines as chip selects for RAM, ROM, I/O, and the floppy drive subsystems. This trick partitioned the Mac's 16-MB address space into four sections: The lower 4 MB was for RAM addresses, the next 4 MB was for ROM addresses, the next 4 MB was for I/O hardware, and so on. Therefore, the ROMs were located just above 4 MB
. This location blocked memory expansion beyond 4 MB in the Mac Plus and Mac SE. However, for roughly the same reasons, the PC design suffered the same problem. The PC's ROM, I/O, and video memory were mapped into the upper 384 KB of the Intel 8088's 1-MB address space, so that available RAM topped out at 640 KB. This created the "640-KB barrier" that plagued PC software design for years.
Networking
In January 1985, Apple introduced the Macintosh Office. This consisted of a low-cost LAN and a LaserWriter laser printer. At $6995, the LaserWriter cost more than several Macs, but its price was a lot better than the $50,000 commanded by commercial laser printers at the time. The AppleTalk LAN allowed you to justify such a printer because you could easily share it among several Macs.
This 203.4-Kbps LAN was later renamed LocalTalk, and its strength was that it used low-cost components and featured a plug-and-play setup--necessary since the Mac was a closed system. You simply plugged the network co
nnectors into each Mac's printer port and into a LaserWriter, ran cable between the connectors, and you were done. LocalTalk used a CSMA/CA scheme to attach and map the computers into the network. The network connectors were self-terminating, so you could add or remove Macs from the setup without bringing the network down.
Apple further refined the plug-and-play network concept in 1991 with the introduction of self-terminating Ethernet modules for thick, thin, and 10Base-T cables. In many cases, you could set up a high-speed Ethernet network for an office of Macs in minutes, without getting involved with hardware configuration or IP addresses. Also, System 7's built-in peer-to-peer networking services meant you could create workgroups instantly by setting passwords and access privileges with a few clicks in a Control Panel on each Mac.
While plug-and-play is touted as the Next Big Thing in the PC world, the Mac embraced the concept as its basic design philosophy and has been providing it to user
s for years. This is evident in the Mac's networking services and in other areas.
The Genesis of Desktop Publishing
In early 1985, many people considered the Mac a curiosity. It was easy to use, but otherwise it offered no compelling advantage over a faster, if arcane, PC. That attitude changed in the summer with the arrival of Aldus PageMaker. It was the first successful page-layout program, and it let you quickly flow text and add graphics to "virtual pasteboards" for designing a newsletter. Furthermore, it let you do this without rocket science or knowing too much of the conventional production details.
The troika of PageMaker, an easy-to-connect LAN, and a shareable laser printer that could churn out camera-ready copy suitable for newsletters and other low-cost publications gave the Mac a unique capability. There were workstations that could manage the same feat, but not with the Mac's ease of use and penchant for visual fidelity between the screen and output.
The Mac was hardly tw
o years old when it gave birth to desktop publishing. Today, DTP is a huge, multimillion-dollar industry, no longer limited to newsletters. Newspapers rely on it to add late-breaking news to their front pages. Magazines use DTP to expedite the creation of the magazine, dropping in text, artwork, and scanned images from a medley of sources.
A SCSI Pioneer
The Mac Plus, introduced in January 1986, was the first personal computer to provide embedded SCSI. However, Apple goofed in its SCSI driver implementation. In a SCSI transaction, an initiator (usually the computer) issues a request to a target SCSI device. The target then issues subsequent SCSI commands to the initiator, completing the initiator's request. In other words, the target drives the transaction. Apple got it backward, having the initiator drive the transaction. This caused problems with early SCSI peripherals, but Apple can be excused as a pioneer here: SCSI itself wasn't formally adopted as an ANSI standard until June 1986. It didn't he
lp that third-party vendors had different interpretations of the standard.
SCSI's high-speed interface and simple-to-configure design made it a natural fit to Apple's plug-and-play philosophy. Despite initial problems during 1986, the Mac's SCSI capability fostered development of easy-to-connect SCSI peripherals, such as third-party hard drives and scanners. The Mac is responsible for the wide acceptance of SCSI in the computer industry today, in part because it proved SCSI's versatility as a low-cost peripheral expansion bus, but also because other computer vendors wanted to tap into the ready-made market of Mac SCSI peripherals. Today, SCSI pervades the industry, serving as a peripheral bus for PCs and workstations. Many hard drives and CD-ROM drives use SCSI because it allows them to connect to any hardware platform.
Bringing Color to the Desktop
In 1987, Apple both boosted the power of the Mac and discarded the closed-system concept with the introduction of the Mac II and Mac SE. The Mac
II featured 256-KB ROMs that added more text-handling capabilities, plug-and-play configuration software for the NuBus boards called the Slot Manager, and Color QuickDraw. Suddenly, the Mac became respectable: Storage problems were a nonissue due to internal or external SCSI drives; you could expand the systems easily using plug-in boards; and the Mac II's color capabilities easily blew away those of existing PCs.
The Mac II fostered the growth of color-output devices, since many users wanted to get on paper what they saw on their screens. Within a year, QMS provided a desktop solution with the ColorScript 100, a PostScript-clone thermal-wax color printer. It was a tad pricey, but for some companies the printer could pay for itself in a year by eliminating the costly errors that occurred when complex color files were sent to a typesetting service.
The stampede of color printers that followed--ranging from high-end PostScript printers to low-cost ink-jets--expanded the Mac's ability to supply col
or in DTP output and helped make the Mac a serious replacement for the artist's traditional palette and paint. It helped that the Mac's plug-and-play Slot Manager made adding expansion boards a snap. Most professional artists liked the Mac's set-up-and-go design, since they would rather start drawing than try to figure out how to set up a high-resolution board's jumpers for a PC. And if their monitor proved too small for their work, they could expand the total screen size by simply plugging in another display board and monitor.
Software Strides
The original Mac could use 128 KB of RAM because as the software engineers moved Lisa software components to the Mac, they stripped out the multitasking features. Only one application ran at a time on the Mac, except for Desk Accessories, small "applets" that ran concurrently because they masqueraded as drivers. However, as memory became more plentiful, the multitasking issue resurfaced.
The answer was MultiFinder, written by Erich Ringewald and Phil G
oldman. This ingenious bit of software provided cooperative multitasking by patching certain Toolbox routines in the Mac OS, and the MultiFinder application managed loading and context switching of applications.
The reasons MultiFinder worked at all are several-fold: First, because Mac applications frequently called the Toolbox event handlers, these handlers served as doorways by which the thread of execution could be passed to other applications. Second, as execution moved to another application via the modified event handler, MultiFinder took notice of this and preserved certain non-reentrant system globals used to maintain the application's environment. These values were restored when control returned to the application. Finally, the same PC-relative code that initially gave programmers fits meant an application could be loaded anywhere in memory and still run.
The icing on the cake was that MultiFinder retrofitted this capability on existing Macs back to the Mac Plus--no additional hardware
was required other than a minimum of 2 MB of RAM. While numerous GUIs for PCs and workstations have appeared since then, none offers the seamless level of integration for copying information between applications and the easy ability to select system resources such as networked printers.
HyperCard: GUI Programming for the Masses
The Mac was hard to program. Bill Atkinson crafted HyperCard, which he called "a software erector set," to eliminate this hurdle. It implemented a card-stack metaphor that enabled users to browse through and manipulate information. HyperCard provided a set of built-in editing tools and a natural-language programming script called HyperTalk. With these tools and HyperTalk, the average user could collect, organize, and store information in HyperCard stacks in any fashion.
HyperCard and MultiFinder were introduced in August 1987 and were bundled with every Mac shipped. In a demonstration of its robust design, HyperCard was used to operate information kiosks that supplied
show information. It introduced ease-of-programming to the average Mac user and promoted to computer users the concept of hypertext links. Nowadays, computer users understand that phrases that stand out in a document (perhaps by being in a different color or underlined) serve as a hypertext link to additional information. HyperCard educated the user on this "intuitive" concept.
32-Bit QuickDraw Arrives
For folks doing serious image and graphics work, the 256 colors displayed by Color QuickDraw's 8-bit color were simply inadequate. Clever display-board vendors such as SuperMac Technologies managed to coerce 24-bit data onto the screen by successively assembling an image's three-color components in a display board's frame buffer.
Apple came out with a revised version of Color QuickDraw in April 1989. Called 32-Bit QuickDraw, it was a patch file that retroactively implemented 24-bit color capabilities on existing color Macs. (The 32-Bit term in the name came about because pixel data was stored a
s 32 bits even though only 24 of them actually contained color information.) It also let you switch on the fly between 24-bit color (millions of hues), which is suitable for photo-realistic editing, to 16-bit color (thousands of hues), suitable for handling digital video for multimedia. This lets you pick the screen depth that is suitable for the job at hand.
This support of high-resolution color accelerated the Mac's use as a digital-image editor. Now, not only could the Mac lay out the text of magazine pages, it could also edit the high-quality images that went into them. It also let the Mac function as a data visualization tool in scientific and engineering applications.
Again, 24-bit color manipulation wasn't a new concept, but the custom high-end workstations with similar capabilities cost $30,000 or more. The Mac's new capability raised expectations in the PC world: At that time, you typically had only 16 or possibly 256 colors on the screen; today, you can shop for a PC display board that
supports thousands or millions of colors.
Portable Lessons and Power
One of the glaring deficiencies in the Mac product line was the lack of a notebook computer. In September 1989, the company introduced the Mac Portable to plug this gap. Unfortunately, the computer barely earned the label "portable," weighing 17 pounds and being the size of a small briefcase. Three things in its favor were the sharp active-matrix display, an integrated trackball, and an 8-hour battery life, thanks to the heavy lead-acid battery.
The Mac Portable turned out to be a dud, sales-wise. However, Apple learned a valuable lesson from it. Two years later, in October 1990, the PowerBooks showed that Apple could pack a Mac into a light, 7-pound notebook form factor. These systems came equipped with a practical set of features, such as a 25-MHz 68030 processor (in the PowerBook 170) and fax and remote-access software.
Nor was the Mac Portable's design effort a total waste: Much of its power conservation software
, and hardware tricks such as slowing the processor clock and switching off idle subsystems, found their way into the PowerBook designs. The Apple Remote Access software bundled with PowerBooks let users connect as a remote node to the AppleTalk network in their office. This let them transfer files, print documents, and access databases or schedules the same way they did in the office. The PowerBooks let the on-the-go office worker contact anyone by E-mail, fax, or remote access.
Today, many PC notebook computers imitate the PowerBooks' physical layout, including the integrated trackball. Still, most of them can't match the PowerBooks in the level of software integration.
New Software, New Processors
At the May 1988 Developer's Conference, Apple talked about System 7, the successor to System 6.0.x. It would be a 32-bit operating system offering significant features, such as a new SCSI driver, drag-and-drop printing, a new graphics engine, and built-in cooperative multitasking.
Apple ha
d hoped to introduce System 7 about two years after its announcement in 1988. It didn't turn out that way; it arrived in May 1991--a year late. System 7 improved the user interface in several subtle and effective ways, such as by providing a built-in find function that locates a file on your hard drive or on a network. And while multitasking under System 6.0.x was something of a kludge, a Process Manager in System 7 managed the multitasking environment by handling the creation of memory partitions and loading the applications.
A 7.1 revision of the operating system consolidated fonts into a separate folder, where you installed or removed them by simply clicking on and dragging files. System 7.1 also introduced the concept of a System Enabler--a small file of hardware-specific code--that at boot time sets up the low-level environment so System 7.1 can operate. This lets System 7.1 function without modification even if the hardware changes. This seems like a minor point unless you've tried to install Win
dows on different machines with different hardware. Whereas a new Mac simply requires a new System Enabler, a Windows user can spend hours trying to massage Windows and DOS drivers to get a combination that works.
Video Killed the Radio Star
Introduced with System 7 was QuickTime, which gave the Mac the ability to control time-based data. For example, QuickTime handled the display of digital video clips and sound, ensuring that both the pixels and sound were synchronized and delivered to the screen at the constant rate demanded by such media. An important point is that QuickTime is a cross-platform technology: A Windows version is available, and Silicon Graphics has adopted QuickTime as a digital format. This lets multimedia applications developers store digital video and sound as QuickTime movies and count on them to function as expected on any platform.
Digital movies, however, require tons of storage. In anticipation of these storage demands, Apple has heavily promoted the adoption of CD-
ROM as a storage medium by offering built-in CD-ROM drives in many of its systems. These drives are dual-speed, multisession drives, unlike the single-speed, single-session drives found in most MPC systems. Apple also supports Kodak's Photo CD digital-image standard and provides a driver that transparently reads Photo CD files. Consumers might not be enamored of digital photography, but businesses that do a lot of image work (e.g., making and printing catalogs) find Photo CDs to be the ideal storage/retrieval format.
Due to the Mac's push on color technology and the availability of dual-speed CD-ROM drives, today you have a choice of interactive CD-ROM titles that can play 16-bit digital video clips. With low-cost MPEG encoders from C-Cube and others appearing, you can expect to see full-screen (640 by 480 pixels), full-motion (30 frames per second) digital movies on CD-ROM soon.
With its AV line of Macs, Apple blurs the boundaries between TV and the computer. Out of the box, AV Macs can drop NT
SC, PAL, or SECAM live video into a window on the desktop. Furthermore, with the appropriate software you can snatch a frame of video, or capture video into a QuickTime clip. You can also easily "print" a screen or a running demonstration to a VCR tape. While these capabilities don't come close to those offered by professional equipment, it's the start of the Mac breaking traditional boundaries, transforming itself from a simple personal computer into a communications device. This will accelerate the integration of TV and information services into the desktop computer.
While the original Mac was touted as an "information appliance," after a decade it's clear that the Mac has yet to reach that lofty goal. However, it's well on its way.
The Future
Where does Apple go in the future? It continues to push the boundary on technical innovation. In 1991 it forged strategic alliances with Motorola and IBM to share various hardware and software technologies. The first result of this alliance is the Pow
erPC RISC processor. RISC systems, though powerful, were simply too expensive for the personal computer market until the PowerPC arrived. The PowerPC bucks this trend with low fabrication costs combined with RISC's high performance.
Apple is basing a line of Macs on the processor. A low-cost PowerPC Mac, combined with IBM PowerPC offerings, could push RISC into the mainstream of personal computing. With the proper System Enabler and a 680x0 emulator, System 7.1 actually runs on a PowerPC-based system.
Apple also continues to work toward replacing its low-level single-threaded operating-system services with a microkernel. The microkernel would provide memory protection, multiple threads, reentrant drivers, and preemptive multitasking. This makes for a more robust environment and lets the operating system manage its resources more effectively. Apple is attempting to do this while simultaneously preserving the existing software base by adding portions of the microkernel piecemeal.
For examp
le, the Quadra 840AV uses a new SCSI Manager 4.3 that not only implements SCSI correctly but is a reentrant driver. Likewise, the ROMs in the PowerPC Mac implement Toolbox routines as DLLs; this will allow multiple threads. Will Mac users be able to use such an operating system on existing hardware? It's possible: Since the Mac SE/30, all 68030-/68040-based Macs have a SIMM ROM socket at the ready. Although most of these Macs have 1 MB of ROM or less, they can address 8 MB (except for the Mac SE/30, which can address only 2 MB). Apple isn't talking about its plans in this area.
Apple has also attempted to jump-start the PDA industry with the MessagePad, the first implementation of its Newton Technology. Newton Technology is a multitasking, object-based operating system. Apple has licensed it to a number of vendors for use in different products, dispelling the technology's proprietary label.
More important, Newton Technology is an information-centric, not document-centric, operating system. Put a
nother way, with Newton Technology you simply deal with information; you don't get caught in the mechanics of handling the information. For example, with the proper application on a MessagePad, you can jot, "Cab $10." The Newton operating system interprets the command, starts an Expense Report application, and drops the value of $10 into a travel expense cell dated for today. On a desktop system, you'd have to launch the appropriate application, locate the proper cell, enter the value, and then attach a date to the value.
Whether or not the MessagePad succeeds, Newton Technology will be a success because it shows us an even better way to work with our computers. That's something that the Mac did only 10 years before.
Famous Mac Firsts
The Apple Macintosh pioneered the use of many features on desktop and portable computers that people now take for granted.
-- Cut-and-paste
-- Undo
-- Point-and-shoot menu selection
-- Built-in video
-- Voice control
-- The API
-- Built-
in networking capability
-- Built-in SCSI
-- Plug-and-play design philosophy
-- Dynamic memory allocation
-- Hypertext
-- 24-bit color capability
Photograph: The original Macintosh design team. Left to right: Andy Hertzfeld, Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crowe, Bill Atkinson, and Jerry Manock. The Mac's high-quality WYSIWYG output was possible because everything on-screen--including text--was a bit-mapped graphic.
Photograph: 1984: The first Macintosh borrows the Lisa's mouse and GUI. Other features included a 7.83-MHz 68000 processor, a single-sided 3 1/2-inch floppy drive that could hold 400 KB of data, 64-KB ROMs, and 128 KB of RAM. Price was $2495.
Photograph: Chris Espinosa: "Apple would have been caught in a bruising price war in 1987 instead of in 1992 if we'd have licensed the ROMs freely. We would have had to cut our margins and expenses earlier and wouldn't have been able to fund a lot of development that brought us to w
here we are today--such as System 7, the Powerbooks, and the AV technology."
Photograph: 1987: The Mac II used an internal SCSI hard drive, a 16-MHz 68020 processor, and a 68881 FPU as standard equipment. It had eight SIMM sockets that allowed RAM expansion to 128 MB. It also had six NuBus slots for expansion boards. A Mac II with a 40-MB hard drive cost $5498. The Mac SE kept the compact form of the original Mac but added a SCSI hard drive and an expansion slot called the Processor Direct Slot (PDS). A Mac SE with a 20-MB hard drive cost $3698.
Photograph: 1988: Apple migrated the Mac to the 68030 processor, by introducing first the Mac IIx ($7769) and then, in January 1989, the Mac SE/30 ($4369). These computers featured the SuperDrive, a high-density (1.44-MB) floppy drive that could read and write DOS or OS/2 floppy disks, and a 68882 FPU. Owners of Mac IIs and SEs could upgrade to the new machines with a floppy drive and main logic board swap.
P
hotograph: 1989: The Mac SE/30 was the first high-performance compact Mac design. It had a 16-MHz 68030 processor and a 68882 FPU. Because the screen display used separate VRAM rather than main memory as in the original design, better bus throughput was achieved.
Photograph: 1989: The Mac IIci, Apple's first 25-MHz 68030-based computer, featured built-in video. It cost $6969 with a 40-MB hard drive and used 512-KB ROMs that were "32-bit clean" (i.e., the code was designed to operate in a new 32-bit address space, although it could also operate in the old 24-bit address mode for software compatibility). This ROM code has become the "universal ROM" code used in every 68030-/68040-based Mac since then.
Photograph: 1990: Apple changed its direction and introduced the "cheap Macs": the Mac Classic (basically a revised Mac SE), the Mac LC (a Mac II in a svelte housing), and the 20-MHz 68030-based Mac IIsi. These machines represented Apple's intent to expand market share by p
roducing systems priced competitively with PCs. The Mac Classic cost $999, the Mac LC cost $2499 with a 40-MB hard drive, and a similarly equipped Mac IIsi cost $3769.
Photograph: 1991: Along with the PowerBooks, Apple also presented its first 68040-based Macs--the Quadra line. The Quadras started out as 25-MHz 68040-based systems with 1-MB ROMs, 24-bit on-board video, and built-in Ethernet capabilities. The Quadra 700 used a IIci-style form factor, and the Quadra 900 used a tower design. A Quadra 700 with 4 MB of RAM and an 80-MB hard drive cost $6399, while a Quadra 900 with 4 MB of RAM and a 160-MB hard drive was priced at $8499. The latest offering is the 25-MHz Quadra 605, which comes in a slim pizza-box housing and costs up to $1269.
Photograph: "We used HyperCard to design the Newton interface. We'd sit down with HyperCard and use the drawing tools to sketch out something. We'd tinker with it until we got what we wanted."
-- Steve Capps, Distinguished Engineer
Photograph: 1993: The video Macs arrive. The Quadra 840AV comes in a short tower design and has 2-MB ROMs and a 68040 processor clocked at 40 MHz. A Quadra 840AV with 8 MB of RAM and a 230-MB hard drive costs $4069. It has built-in live video capture and presentation hardware, and a DSP (digital signal processor) that handles voice recognition and CD-quality stereo sound, plus fax and modem functions.
Tom Thompson is a BYTE senior technical editor at large, a long-time Mac user, and a certified Apple developer. You can reach him on the Internet or on BIX at
tom_thompson@bix.com
.
The Macintosh at 10
