

Original Macintosh Business Plan: July 12, 1981 - gatsby
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/2009/102712692.05.01acc.pdf

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smanek
_One would expect serious business customers will move up to Band 4 [$3K+] and
the job of Macintosh and VLC is to migrate the remaining Band 3 [$1500-$3K]
customers down to Band 2 [ <$1500], leaving Band 3 manufacturers out in the
cold!!_

Prescient. Most server are at $3K+, and most personal machines are sub-$1.5K
these days. Relatively little exists in the $1.5K-$3K market these days
(besides what I'd guess to be a small quantity of high end work stations and
low end servers).

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stcredzero
Smalltalk is mentioned on the last line of the software evaluation. (One below
"Sesame Street". It was originally designed to be used by kids. It is used by
grade school kids, even today.)

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tibbon
Anyone else notice the 'No Xerox' sign on the pages?

Seems to have a double meaning of "don't copy this" and "don't send this to
Xerox".

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rogercosseboom
I love how the product line pages look almost exactly like the current product
line pages at store.apple.com

Consistency consistency consistency.

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cosmicray
Several things that jump out at me..

The repetitive emphasis on MacBasic (which never really shipped from Apple,
but did from Microsoft)

No mention what so ever of the internet (which was very nascent and pretty
much non-existent in 1981). I doubt they saw it coming.

Brief mention of RS-232 Mac Net (which became AppleBus, then AppleTalk and
LocalTalk on RS-422)

Mac screen size resolution was smaller than what finally shipped.

They had not yet made the leap to the 3.5" floppy (other than possibly on the
Lisa)

Retail Outlets and Direct Sponsors ... They wanted to encourage sales via
Fuller Brush ? I remember when the iMac G3 was briefly sold via Sears, with
modest (at best) results.

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epc
The shift to 3.5" disks occurred in 1983-1984. I recall the very initial Lisas
shipped with a 5¼ disk, but switched to 3.5 later in 1983, the Mac shipped
with 3.5 disks (but possibly only single-sided/400k). The Apple 2 line shifted
to 3.5 disks with the 2gs around 1985-1986.

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ek
Interesting! I'm curious as to what the "VLC" referred to in the plan is.

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krevis
"Very Low Cost" is my guess. Maybe it's the Apple IIc, which was released in
1984 for $1295.

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dshankar
You're correct. VLC was one of many codenames for the Apple IIc, source:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=mXnw5tM8QRwC&lpg=PA46&#...</a>

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smallegan
I like "The advantage of a product line is that each individual product does
not have to do everything"

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stupidquestions
Looking at this was just worth the last page. :)

