Macintosh is 40

Macintosh is 40. It’s not about the cult of Mac.

It’s about a personal computer revolution, and how I it was part of my life.

The Macintosh for me represent a key element of my life. First and foremost it brought me to the use of computers outside of gaming or purely business or scientific. Computer as a tool to get things done. In my high-school years it peeked my interest into desktop publishing.

And of course writing software. I started with QuickBASIC (Microsoft), and also did some Pascal, then later HyperCard, and finally C and C++. I also played Myst.

The Macintosh was a personal computer as a whole. It was intimately tied hardware and software and you didn’t buy a Mac for any other reason. Its original all-in-one design still transpire today: the PowerBook pioneered the shape of all the laptops we see today, with the keyboard pushed back and the palm rest at the front, with a trackpad (previously a trackball). The MacBook design over the last decad has set trends for the better (size, weight, screen, performance) to the worse (non upgradability, non repairability, stripped of all connectivity, touch bar).

In university I was kind of an oddball for using a Mac and not a PC with DOS or Windows (or Linux, but the years were 1993 to 1995). However I took interest into UNIX and then discovered software freedom, Open Source Software of FLOSS as some might call it, and that changed my path again.

Even on the Macintosh there was some FLOSS, and not only related to UNIX like NCSA Telnet or Perl.

I was also convinced we could make UNIX more user friendly, and if anything we are there. It already took to 1995 for Microsoft to reach it, 11 years after the Mac. Today most of the computer Human-Machine Interface paradigm come from the one popularised by the Macintosh and confirmed with Windows 95. Unmistakenly what Apple did is to bring to market the fruits of PARC research into GUI. Xerox dreamt it, Apple, did it. In 1999, Eazel, founded by members of the original Mac team, brought a lot to the effort of making UNIX more user friendly. While as a company it failed, Eazel product was FLOSS and has left a visible foundation in GNOME with Nautilus, where it is living on for over 2 decades.

Ars Technica has list of Wild Apples: The 12 weirdest and rarest Macs ever made:

In honor of this birthday, we thought it would be fun to comb through history and pull out the rarest and most unusual production Mac models ever made—including one from another company.

This list relate a few models that were either unique, or weird variants of existing one. From the Macintosh XL that was an upcycling of the Lisa, used for software development on the Mac as the original model was underpowered, the “Trashcan” Mac Pro that clearly was unfit to fullfill the market it was aimed at, the G4 Cube, a “misunderstood” design nurtured by Steve Jobs, the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, an overpriced laptop for the desktop, that was barely luggable (Seinfeld had one in his office), to the Macintosh Portable, a 7 kg suitcase sized Macintosh that cost as much as a small car with a fraction of the power. All a testimony to Apple own failures (they had more).

There is probably a lot to be published for this anniversary. All I wanted is to just look back as I realise this has been going for a while, while I’m writing this from my Linux workstation (and laptop).