
Apple's First Public Demonstration of the Mac, Unseen Since 1984 [video] - technologizer
http://techland.time.com/2014/01/25/steve-jobs-mac/
======
yeukhon
This is a full-length, 1 hour 36 minute demo.

Paint demo is around 42 minute. At one point when Paint was demonstrated I
heard a background noise "that's incredible". That's how incredible and how
shocking people found when computer was no longer a terminal, but with a mouse
and a control menu.

The Mac Writer (around 51 minute) was also very simple yet efficient. For
example, once the writer entered the format mode, the options for line space
is right on the top and easy to click. Then I thought "geesh, we can't even
fit anything on the screen with all the buttons in Word unless we hide them
into a drop-down list." I always have trouble locating the line space option
in OpenOffice or Word. Having used Word 2003, I rather go back to 2003 and
stay that way.

What have we done to our software? The tools we use are becoming so complex.

History note: being the first Macintosh, this is an expensive equipment. The
sale didn't go very well because it was very expensive...

Here is the teardown of the 128K Mac;
[http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Macintosh+128K+Teardown/21422](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Macintosh+128K+Teardown/21422)

~~~
m_mueller
Whenever I see those classic demos like Engelbart's in the 60ies or the first
Mac, I feel a bit ashamed for our profession. Computer Software really doesn't
seem to have developed much in the last 50 years. We have turned working
academic prototypes and concepts from back then into products, not even to the
full extent they were perceived. Other than that everything seems to have
turned in circles. The minicomputer, the PC, the LAN, the Web, mobile devices
- it all brought cool new hardware capabilities, but when it comes to software
it was just reinventing the wheel again. The hardware has usually dictated the
way the device is to be operated instead of the other way round. Mac and
iPhone have been notable exceptions to this.

~~~
yeukhon
While I agree with you, we should view it this way: we started out with
nothing and so any progress we made back then would been incredible. Now we
have so much progress we are just looking at how to fine tune things and so
there aren't much surprising, revolutionary ideas out there. And because there
are so many tools to turn people's idea into reality (which increases
competitions), there is little room for surprise. The truly surprising
technology that we start utilizing and making big progress would be 3D
printing. It has been around for many years but now we finally start using
it...

------
sillysaurus2
At the ~3 minute mark, Jobs says, "Apple and IBM emerge as the industry's
strongest competitors. [...] It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived
to be the only hope. Dealers initially welcoming to IBM now fear an IBM-
dominated future. They're increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force
that can ensure their future freedom."

It's interesting how the future played out: users have rejected the notion
that freedom is valuable. Perhaps something else was meant by "freedom" in
those days, but it's hard to imagine something less free than the app store.

~~~
sambeau
_" it's hard to imagine something less free than the app store"_

I would argue that if you are not safe you are not free.

The vast majority of App Store users are non-technical and therefore open to
scams, viruses and malware. The walled garden may take some freedoms away from
the highly-technical but it pays back freedom in spades to 'normal' people.
(plus the highly technical can always choose to leave the walled garden if the
want to either by jailbreaking or by buying an open device).

We geeks have only ourselves to blame — if we won't police ourselves someone
else will have to police us. We gave these freedoms away by using our talents
to cheat and scam our customers.

We're not the first to need it of course, if it wan't for Victorian scammers
using suspect weights & measures and adulterating flour with dust and the like
there's be no need for Trading Standards Officers.

Trading Standards Officers give us all the freedom to buy food & drink safely
and I don't believe anyone would truly see us return to a world without them.

~~~
JackC
> I would argue that if you are not safe you are not free. The vast majority
> of App Store users are non-technical and therefore open to scams, viruses
> and malware.

That would make great sense, if there was a way for technical users to opt out
of the walled garden. But it's the very opposite -- Apple spends a lot of time
and money making it harder to jailbreak the phone, in ways that have nothing
to do with defending against malware. If they do their best to make it
impossible to opt out, then it's not about protecting your safety. It's about
protecting the business model.

There's an argument for protecting the business model, of course -- making
jailbreaking more difficult also makes piracy more difficult. The App Store
has funneled a ton of money to developers, which in turn makes for better apps
for everyone. But the notion that Apple has gone to absurd lengths to prevent
jailbreaking because ... "We [developers] gave these freedoms away by using
our talents to cheat and scam our customers"? No. That's not how freedom
works. This is about money, plain and simple.

~~~
avar
To play devil's advocate, do you think in an alternative universe where Apple
products have built-in easy to use native support for jailbreaking with the
push of a button that some large malware outbreak that only affects those
devices jailbroken devices won't be blamed on them anyway?

Apple has other motivations to maintain their walled garden, but their goals
of controlling the whole experience also extend to things like that. They want
there to be no question that any Apple device is "safe", regardless of
legitimate user configuration.

And as long as users at large aren't demanding general purpose computers who
can really blame them?

~~~
Shamanmuni
Well, we have millions and millions of people using Windows, and in my
experience when viruses and malware affect them, they usually blame themselves
more than Microsoft. So, no, I don't think they'd put the blame in Apple.

And if that would have been the case, remember the Antennagate? First they
told their customers to hold the phone differently, then they said it was a
software problem, and finally they said the problem was the antenna, but that
all smartphones had a similar problem (which was a lie). So, in that case I
would have expected Steve Jobs' reality distortion field in full power blaming
everyone except Apple.

~~~
avar

        > they usually blame themselves more than Microsoft.
    

Did you not see how back with the Mac/PC ads Apple very much played on the
whole aspect of Windows PCs being vulnerable to viruses?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Z386vXrt4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Z386vXrt4)

    
    
        > remember the Antennagate
    

I'm not saying Apple isn't capable of PR bullshit. I'm just saying that I can
see why they don't see the benefit of allowing any kind of fragmentation on
their platform.

------
NAFV_P
Might as well work out what $2495.00 in 1984 equates to today...

I used this site:

[http://www.usinflationcalculator.com](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com)

$2495 in 1984 inflates to a hard to swallow $5,594.11, an increase of 124.2%.

Being a limey this this is hard for me to comprehend. So I looked at this
page:

[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/EXUSUK.txt](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/EXUSUK.txt)

There were $1.4076 per £1 in January 1984, which roughly equates as £0.71 per
$1. So if I wanted to buy a brand new Mac 30 years ago, I would have had to
cough up around £3974 in today's money.

A quick browse for IMac prices, around £1300 (~$2135, the dollar had a higher
value compared to the pound in 1984 than today).

My father's IMac boasts a 2Ghz processor. How many of your vital organs would
you have to sell on Ebay to buy 2Ghz of kick in 1984?

Here is a picture of a Cray X-MP:

[http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/8c4/74c/8c474c54-...](http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/8c4/74c/8c474c54-5c11-43ed-840e-f7ecf617a5d4)

A Cray X-MP in 1984 would cost about $15,000,000 for 105Mhz, so I would
require 19 Crays, costing a total of $285,000,000. Taking into account
inflation, today that would be a bank-breaking $639,006,208.

I'm trying to remember the source, but I think the CDC 7600 packed 512Kb of
memory back in 1969. The Mac had a comparable amount but cost about a 1000
times less.

~~~
nly
The price of such a thing made my mind boggle as well. It makes me wonder what
equivalent devices exist today in the '10x what is affordable' price bracket
which we will all be enjoying and taking for granted in 30 years.

Any guesses?

~~~
NAFV_P
> _Any guesses?_

I'm guessing a small proportion of the Earth's population will be cyborgs, but
I am a _Ghost In The Shell_ fan.

Thought I'd work out how much mass in UK copper coins would be required to buy
19 Crays ...

just over 72,000 tons, you'd need about 10 _class 37_ freight trains to haul
that.

------
MattRogish
Steve demoing NeXTSTEP 3.0 in 1992.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk)

Fascinating to see the Mac heritage in NeXTSTEP carry through the acquisition
and transformation into OSX.

It's hard to remember, but in 1992 Microsoft had just released Windows 3.1 -
NeXT was light-years ahead of Microsoft.

~~~
mratzloff
The thing that amazes me about Jobs is how he could present in such a way that
it seemed so off-the-cuff and at the same time so polished. Anyone who has had
to do presentations like these can learn a lot from watching him at work.

In the NeXT video, for example, he's very good at tying everything together
into a cohesive whole, and speaking to his audience in terms they'll
understand. He uses practically no filler words ("uh", "um", "basically",
etc.).

Here's another presentation he did in 1980 that shows he had these skills
almost from the very beginning:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg)

~~~
Edmond
I think an advantage he had was time. Bill Gates does similarly well on his
presentations from that era.

Unfortunately we don't have the chance to do 35 minutes presentations anymore.
Now everyone has to squeeze their pitch into 30 seconds information-free
commercials :)

How do you get meaningful ideas across if no one has the time to listen? Only
the most superficial ideas can be put across in an elevator pitch.

------
kalleboo
My favorite part is Bill Atkinson's MacPaint demo at 42 minutes. I laughed
seeing him mention how everyone thinks the paint bucket tool looks like a
graduation cap - I always thought the same thing using it as a kid and never
saw it as a paint bucket.

~~~
raverbashing
My favorite part is the demo. In the stricter definition of Demo
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_%28computer_programming%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_%28computer_programming%29)

------
esusatyo
Questions that the audience asked:

\- Is there a version of BASIC?

\- Is there a version of SmallTalk?

\- After you become an expert, would the mouse became a feature or a handicap.

I really take the ability to write in almost any mainstream programming
language on my Mac for granted.

~~~
kalleboo
> I really take the ability to write in almost any mainstream programming
> language on my Mac for granted.

Thank Stallman

~~~
eropple
Why? NeXTSTEP was a Unix and had multiple programming languages available to
it--in 1989, without FSF-related anythings. Apple packs GCC with OS X, but
it's pretty jokey to think they wouldn't just have packed BSD's compiler
instead (and now Clang, which exists in no small part because Stallman and
company decided it was a great idea to make extending the compiler hard
because ideology).

~~~
asveikau
Stop trolling. NeXTSTEP's objc compiler was based on GCC.

------
raverbashing
This is very, very interesting.

The first 15min more or less are what (most of us) know. Skip that

After that, they will show the real stuff. The manufacture of the Macintosh,
and a lot of other things.

The deeper stuff. The laughable (now) things. A successful company yes, but
still very vulnerable. A less experienced Steve Jobs.

------
Beltiras
I still remember when my dad brought home a Mac. He got rid of it and lamented
that he had. I found him a Mac plus and gave him for his 64th birthday this
fall. Thing still works. Great machine.

------
NAFV_P
A few minutes in you see that famous tv commercial for the Mac. What I heard
was that they only had to show it once, during the ad break for a football
game.

~~~
Someone
It also was broadcast in 1983, in twin Falls, Idaho and was broadcast a few
times more after the 1984 Super Bowl
([http://mentalfloss.com/article/29867/how-apples-1984-ad-
was-...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/29867/how-apples-1984-ad-was-almost-
canceled), [http://mentalfloss.com/article/29911/true-story-
apples-1984-...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/29911/true-story-
apples-1984-ads-first-broadcastbefore-super-bowl))

~~~
NAFV_P
Thank you for correcting me.

------
wbhart
Steve Wozniak seems to have been omitted from the credits in the slideshow
that starts at about 20:40, and yet he appears in it at about 29:28. I wonder
why he wasn't listed.

~~~
harywilke
He wasn't on the Macintosh team.

------
bestham
FYI: If you don't do flash youtube-dl (in homebrew) will get this video
without problems.

------
frik
Woz is on stage starting at 1:04 in the video.

