The Little Mac with the Big Bite - Computerphile
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ก.พ. 2014
- Whether you are a Mac-o-phile or a Mac-o-phobe it is hard to deny the impact of the original Mac. As Mac turns 30, Professor David Brailsford takes us through what the original Mac was like and how it helped people learn to love computers.
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Note: please excuse the flickering on the Mac's CRT monitor, unfortunately we were unable to remove it completely.
To read more stories about the personalities, and the environment within Apple at the time of the Macintosh, you can visit: www.bit.ly/30mac30
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. See the full list of Brady's video projects at: bit.ly/bradychannels
So I'm looking at the folders behind him...
"XML, PPML, Buffy the Vampire Slay... wait, what?"
I thought the same thing maybe he's is a fan. lol
Professor Brailsford is great! I love hearing his stories of computing back in the old days. More please!
I'm not a fan of Apple and Apple products, but they took part in the revolution of computing. It's amazing how far things have come since this Apple gem.
I also must add; I love how Professor Brailsford talks about these things. I imagine he could make the most dull subject pretty interesting to listen to!
I like the fact that Pr. Brailsford has a "Buffy the vampire slayer" binder on his shelf!
I have to say these are like bed stories for nerds... Grandfatherly voice explaining base of the world we live in and the tools I work with.
I like those bedtime stories best. :D
I like this bloke's presentation! He gives you a reason at the end to keep checking back for updates
I remember i used to literally sit and watch pre-98 screensavers for ages when i was young. They were, back then, amazing. It might have even been the little things like that which made me want to go into Computer Science... Not WHY something does it or WHAT it's for... But HOW does it work.
I could listen to Professor Brailsford all day!
Wonderful stuff! NB Bit-mapped displays were not unusual in 1984. They were the norm in small home computers. Text-only video hardware was more common in IBM mainframe terminals. As a kid I used to design my own icons on the ZX Spectrum in 1983, copying from articles about the Apple Lisa in Byte magazine!
6:24 "Hello World" ahhh the first code of any computer science student :D
Although I was never a fan of Macs, or Apple products in general, I can appreciate that this machine helped to revolutionise the computing industry.
It was actually the Xerox Alto the first PC that came with a GUI for the OS. It was released 10 years before this Mac.
omfgroflma0 The revolutionary feature is that people could afford these for their private use.
s3vster The Xerox Star, the successor of the Xerox Alto, was an accesible PC, with the same price tag as the Mac 128k, and was released 3 years before the aforementioned Mac.
Xerox was the original revolutionary company. Apple and Windows came later, inpired by the Xerox Alto, adding their own touch to the 'Desktop, folders and applications' scene.
omfgroflma0 While I agree with all your points on timing and price, I see the largest difference the Apple made is that is was much more readily available. Not many "regular" folks knew of the Xerox PCs, so it just didn't seem as available. Apple did much better with advertisement to make their PCs seem available to the masses. Xerox is still the king of innovation, but they were pretty miserable at advertisement for the masses, instead of those already heavily into the personal computer scene.
omfgroflma0 From what I can find, the cheapest the Xerox Star sold for was $6000 in 1985, a year after the Mac was introduced. While it was introduced before the Mac, at that point the Xerox Star cost upwards of $16,000, which I would not consider accessible.
Love this series of videos you are making. Please keep them coming, thoroughly enjoyable.
I'm loving these stories about the halcyon days of computing from Prof Brailsford. More please, Computerphile!
I could listen to this guy talk about computers all day long.
I remember when we got our Macintosh at school in 1984. We all spent five minutes going "Wow!", spent five minutes playing with Macdraw and then realised that with 128k there was nothing else you could really do with the damn thing and went back to our BBC's. Which only had 32k but if you learned assembly language you could make it dance.
I really really really really like this video and the extra, I could listen to him all day!
This was a major flashback for me. I had a Mac Plus in high school around 1988 and I loved it. It was my only computer for a number of years. I still have it in my garage, and I imagine it would still work if I plugged it in and turned it on, but the hard drive might be dead at this point, and I don't know if I have any boot disks.
4:05 "Kmart"
Wow, what an amazing relic from the past.
Why do I find these old stories told by this charming old man so incredibly relaxing, interesting and nice...
Because there's no annoying 'background' music, and he doesn't grimace and yell and gesticulate frantically like some I could name.
Your Buffy folder reminds me of the bag my dad bought for his video camera with "Take That" on it!
Well, the Commodore folks had Geos as an answer. Sure, only 320x200 versus 512x368(or so) but for only around 600 Deutsche Mark IIRC back then when the complete package (C64-II, 1541-II and 64 KByte REU) came around. And it had color. :)
And 1985 came the Amiga 1000 with Workbench, a multitasking(!) window based GUI, completly obliberating any chance for Apple to make a huge impact over here in central Europe.
After working with our Bell and Howell Apple II, the Instructional Media Lab in the Department of Education at Montana State University-Bozeman was delighted to get a Macintosh 128K. They may have called it a toy, but it was our workhorse back then. Much more practical than the early versions of Microsoft Windows.
2:59 Buffy the vampire slayer :))
X Window, the graphic for UNIXs, was out and popular by the time the Mac came out.
But the price for a Unix workstation was at least five times that of a Mac. And, X-Windows weren't as nice looking and functional as MacOS
That's true, The Macintosh wasn't the first computer with a GUI and a desktop metaphor. The Xerox Alto and later the Xerox Star had that in 1979 and 1981. So to say these aspects made the Macintosh revolutionary is giving it way too much credit.
My dad still has one of these at our house! I used it a couple times when I was a kid, it still works!
The idea of Professor Brailsford and his daughter playing that Puzzle Game together makes so happy.
I love this guy (the professor). These videos are probably the most interesting out of all Brady's content for me - not to say that others aren't interesting. Can't wait for new stuff from him! PS: If you're going to film more computer screens, get a more appropriate camera, that was mildly annoying :)
This man is the David Attenborough of the history of computers. I want a full length TV show on Netflix and Hulu about the history of computers and I want it to be narrated by this guy, because I would *PAY MONEY* to watch that.
Steve Wozniak has HUGE respect from me - he's such a genuine, lovely man and SO kind. Steve Jobs? I think he was arrogant and controlling, manipulative and greedy. Apple are still greedy now, and of course, they've got all their "justifications" well rehearsed and lined up for deployment for anyone who questions them. Jobs even tried to fleece Woz on a few occasions I hear... some friend.
People I respect from Apple and Microsoft - Woz and Bill Gates (another very nice, caring person).
I loved the sound of that keyboard when typing :D felt so damn heavy & rugged :D
Early versions of Turbo Pascal had an option for recovering your source if you had exited without saving. You just started the program again from the command prompt with an asterix. The source was still in memory because DOS did not initialise memory and did not have virtual adresses.
What an awesome video!
Did anyone notice the books and folders on his shelf? Java, XPath 2.0, PHD Supervision, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I love this guy
Aldus Pagemaker quickly became the "killer app" for the Macintosh. Especially once the Apple Laserwriter was released (if I recall correctly, that was early 1986 or so? Just about 2 years after the Mcintosh first came out?)
Had Aldus Pagemaker and the Apple Laserwriter both been released at the same time as the original Mac, I think it would've been a larger commercial success. As it was, the initial sales of the original Mac were pretty slow. But by 1986, you could buy a Mac SE, a Laserwriter, and Aldus Pagemaker all together, and it became a raging success compared to the earlier sales.
Imagine being able to actually CREATE and PUBLISH things right from your DESKTOP!! It was truly spectacular!! A *gigantic* leap from what was available before -- and even though it was all quite expensive when compared to other computers on the market then, it was still FAR cheaper than the equipment and expertise that were needed to publish things before this stuff was available.
This is a prime example of what I was talking about in my comment on the 202 Jailbreak video. One step leads inexorably to the next, and suddenly things that were only available to an elite few are available to nearly anyone.
I'm really enjoying these trips down memory lane with Prof. Brailsford. Reminds me of why I got into the Computer Science field in the first place -- all of these things were taking place while I was in high school and college, and I really loved being a part of it. Thanks so much for making these videos!
Great video! As people say, Xerox was of course before Mac, but Macintosh OS really was so much more refined and user friendly than any other Graphical UI, at the time. It really is like the iPhone of computers.
At the time the major drawback I saw for the Mac was that there wasn't an easy way to get your files from the Apple IIe transferred to the Mac format. The user base for the IIe was huge and there was quite a lot of business apps and therefore data. If they had simply offered a port for and options to purchase a 5.25" drive, I believe this would be a different world today. Does anyone remember when DOS machines had both a 5.25" and a 3.5" drive? Jobs never learned his lesson even with the Next computer which featured the ill-conceived magneto-optical drive.
Data transfer-ability is the key for adoption of new platforms.
A friend of mine had one of these; I thought it was pretty primitive, with the monochrome screen, but I sure was intrigued by that new-fangled slide-pointy-clicky input device it had. ;)
mmm amazing sound of that keyboard! REAL KEYS!
it's so cool to see such an old machine at work, i love the older electronics ;D
I love this professor!
Never owned a Mac but i used one of these at work, loved it.
Bought a Comodore Vic in 1982 for $300, it already had the Mac beat.
I got one of these at home, never booted it but I'm sure it still works. Got it back in 1999, some one was going to through it out and I saved it. Happy I did :). It's stored away with some C64's, Amstrad 1512 and a few other gems.
As cool as it is to have an original Mac ( and it is ) - it's 10x rarer to have an original Rodime 20 Meg Hard Drive that still works!!!
This guy does the best computerphile vids
Writing my thesis the university recommended mass11 on vax/vms, on the pcs there were word perfect. And one professor had aquired a Macintosh II fx (x for the numerical coprosessor), including chemintosh and ms word. Worked like a dream.
And they never added the x when the Macintosh SE got the coprosessor upgrade.
Prof. Brailsford has a knack for storytelling. I'd like to hear more from him.
I don't want to argue against the role the Macintosh played in popularizing WIMP interfaces and the desktop metaphor. But asking "are you sure" is perfectly possible in a text-mode editor as well and it surely wasn't anything new to play graphic games. Heck, the NES had been released a year before and that was the 8-bit era already.
I did not have a Mac, but I did have a Tandy 1000. I used to play king's quest by floppy disk. I believe it was 4 to 5 disks long. I miss those games...
I want to hear the "other story".
Mr. Heron, please make it happen.
Thank you!
Nice video. I also watched the extra bits. I'm wondering if there are any videos about Microsoft. I would like to see that.
I'm still happy typing in on the command line.
I remember the hilarity of working in a floppy based environment on the Amiga 1200 and its nightmare of disc swapping, a right pain when you only had one drive, back then it was a case of rebooting and swapping if you wanted to run a different app that wasn't on the Workbench disk, I'd have loved a hard disk back then!
Oh man, this brings back memories. I used one of these for games (Beyond Dark Castle) and typing up essays for middle/high school. Sadly, I don't know what happened to it. Either dad took it with him when when my parents divorced, or mom tossed it out at some point.
I briefly owned one that looked not too unlike this very briefly. The only Mac could ever say that I actually enjoyed using. Never knew they made harddrives for it!
Wow. We used to use these at our newspaper in 1996. Always at the forefront we were...
I've played with one before when i was in group home ;) believe it or not there still around!
my favorite game for it was risk!
Happy that XEROX PARC got a mention
I have one it's over 15 years old and it still works
@Norbert Harrer you're so right. GEM was about 12 months after this and just as capable as the Mac OS. The Amiga had graphics capability that would blow the Mac away while the Atari ST had a revolutionary MIDI interface still used today by artists like Norman Cook. Again we see revisionist history at work. I'm not saying the Mac doesn't have a place in history, it just has an elevated position due to modern day revisionism and fanboy romanticism - don't believe the hype
I think one of the weirdest things about the original Mac and several generations afterward was that to eject your floppy disk, you had to drag the disk icon into the trash can. Intuitively, I would think that would erase the disk, not eject it.
What's with the *Buffy: The Vampire Slayer* binder in the background?
If you look carefully you'll find there's all sorts of historical SF and computer geekery hiding in the video… And I don't just mean DFB :)
I was wondering that same thing throughout the whole video
I remember using one of these when I was very young... maybe five or six or so.
I like his narration.
Lol...did you saw the full specification of that thing.....they had to optimise those programs relentlessly in order to make them usable with such a low computing power.....Kudos. Cant imagine this happening today
Definitely -- there's some fascinating stories over on www.folklore.org about the creation of the mac.
The source code to QuickDraw (its graphics library) and MacPaint are also available over at the Computer History Museum to download (if you like reading 68000 machine code :))
And then the Amiga came out in 1985 and blew it away, at least in functionality if not in marketshare.
Yep, did what the Mac did ...in COLOUR
And apparently for a time the fastest Mac in the world wasn't actually a Mac, it was an Amiga 2000 emulating a Mac!
Apparently the Amigas did have a high market share in the visual effects market in the 1990s
SirReptitious As much as I like the Amiga (I still have my 2000) it didn't have a high res mode for serious work, which I think seriously hurt sales in the business segment. It just had interlaced mode, which nobody could stand for more than a few minutes.
THOMASSU63
From what I remember there was a specially designed high resolutiion A2024 monitor (which was monochrome and I've never actually seen one anywhere, I just know the name from video drivers on the Workbench 3.0 Extras Disk) and I'm not sure if it was ECS or AGA that brought in Productivity, MultiScan and DoublePAL and DoubleNTSC modes. I know I successfully managed to hook up my A1200 to a VGA monitor and get it working (but only with Wokbench and apps, not games) can't remember how I did it though.
GeoNeilUK My 2000 has a flicker fixer card which allows it to be connected to a VGA monitor. And it works with games too.
Ah the old 1000 model, classic... Not my favourite though, beaten to release by a month by my trusty Atari ST :) (No hate please folks, I loves all the 68K machines, all of them, end of).
I remember playing Dark Castle on my mother's Mac. What a well done game for the time.
The programmer for Dark Castle went on to create Flash.
According to the books, Steve Jobs and Wozniak's book lack of software for it was also it's downfall.
I feel like I got a new cool grandpa.
No seriously, these stories are amazing.
thank you sir
At the end, I was completely distracted by the sreensaver in the background! :D
i remember playing that game, that was some time ago
3:54
This explains a lot about the Mac PC designs...
I would love to take my today's PC equipment, step into a time machine and travel back to the early times of computing. Would be quite a show I guess^^
I'm not sure what year it was, but Philadelphia's Drexel University made the original Macintosh a requirement for students. The even had a school-wide network to link them. You could not open a Mac with out a custom extra long screwdriver. They were very popular items at computer flea markets and ham radio fairs.
CRT flicker is unavoidable. You will never see a CRT screen without it, either on camera or in person.
Apple considered their one-button mouse to be an improvement over the original, three-button Xerox design! Their thinking was that they squeezed all the same functionality into one button, via improvements for the interface such as the ever-present menu bar, double-clicking, and highlighting.
This was a genuine accomplishment. But the pride in it was perhaps too intense - leading to Apple stubbornly holding onto the one-button design for the next 20-plus years. Nowadays, though, their gesture-based touchpads present the best PC interface on the market for general purposes.
My dad had one of these, I remember them! :)
The description asumes everyone of us viewers have already and conclusive decided where to love or hate this brand products for the rest of our lives. In my case I analyze the product's features and price regardless of the brand. I don't think it would be a good strategy of life to commit oneself to or to reject forever a single brand.
I was looking at his shelf and it hit me a Buffy binder.
he's better at computers than my grandparents.
My dad had a Macintosh SE I used to play with. Eventually it broke, sadly.
I spy an old Atari ST magazine binder put to new use on the shelf there. The name of the magazine escapes me, I actually have the same binder myself, but my point in mentioning it is that the ST was released not that long after this machine ('85). Interestingly there was a lawsuit made against its graphical user interface (GEM) for being very similar to the Macintosh's so they beat Gates by a year or so (Windows 2 being their first OS with overlapping windows as mentioned in the follow up video.) A possible topic for a future video perhaps?
You might want to pay attention to what's on the desk behind the Mac :)
I think the binder is from ST User…
It's so friendly!
And nowadays, they're literally doorstops around here. How times change.
What's in the Buffy binder? WHAT'S IN THE BUFFY BINDER!?
We have to know.
A copy of the university postgrad quality procedures from 2000, handwritten notes on writing a PDF parser, a copy of various Troff manuals and various PDF tech notes from Adobe…
DrSteveBagley The truth is boring. I wanted it to be full of pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar.
So... what's in the Buffy binder?
I had one of these as a kid. Was not allowed to use it until I was 6 or so.
My old school in 2005 had cupboard full of those damn things. Was actually allowed to take as many as I pleased but then I realised it couldn't do anything useful I never bothered.
i like the books behind him
The first computer I ever used.
Wow.
Yep. It was all about that printer. Applewriters are (STILL) great printers. Old applewriters from way back then are still out there in perfect working order. They where built to last , and they had to work for that price too. But even the earliest macs coupled with a lazer printer turned the pair into a full blown desk top publishing system that could be used for commercial publishing, and they dominated that field, and for good reason, the combo made fantastic looking output, even by modern standards. They still do dominate the publishing and graphic arts field really.
This, reminds me of the Amiga days and Deluxe Paint ;)
Thumbs Up for the Amiga and Atari but not for Apple
By 1986 we had one of these in our house, my Dad was given one so he could work from home, it was state of the ark and very much had the 'Wo factor' :-)
Steve Jobs didn't like networking either. He said it was an "un-pure way of computing" - He believe in saving work on a disk and handing the disk to the next person. :-)
Toby Whaymand He'd later change his tune, though: shortly after the release of the original Mac, he came up with his Big Mac concept which heavily involved networking. He was only able to realize it during the development of the NeXT Cube.
9:10 And it had a screensaver too!
Can't stop reading Buffy Vampire Slayer on the background
This guys sounds exactly like the Crestfallen warrior...
That explains alot of the philosophy behind MACs. Not to touch the beautiful design. No upgrading or modding.
Still stands to this day.
And that philosophy still sucks
TheDiggster13 Depends on how you look at it, the old "it just works" when it comes to macs is because of this closed environment which makes them superior work computers.
Hey I remember those macs in 88 maybe 90,... by 95 IBM had taken the net chatting up on yahoo color, html, and docs are common. html the good old days.
I noticed the XML and XPath books, I didn't spot any Python books though! ;)