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Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual (peterme.com)
187 points by tosh on Dec 16, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 84 comments



What a great article!

I liked the commentary about preppy white guys. I think this was deliberate (perhaps subconsciously so), but not for reasons why it might happen today.

First, back in the 80s there was still a big issue as to whether execs would use computers. Most could not type; that was at that time considered a female activity. Sounds absurd, but this was literally a topic not just in newspapers talking about computers but also in computer journals wondering if PCs could break into business. And most execs were (and still are :-( ) male.

Second, the Mac was quite a bit more expensive, really at the edge of what an individual could afford (Apple offered a finance plan, if not at launch then soon after). So they were making an affinity pitch to people who could afford it.

> Also, why is the keyboard in Chapter 3 positioned like that? Why on earth was it posed that way?

I suspect it was to show you could use the mouse and not be intimidated by that scary keyboard thing.

I was also struck by the Chapter 3 photo as it seemed to be the only one that could have been shot today (except for the Mac itself of course). All the others had hairstyles, color palette, and/or artifacts (desk phone, tape dispenser) that you'd never see today. Even the final shot of the Stanford Campus has bikes that look old fashioned.


not be intimidated by that scary keyboard thing.

I think it's more about showing you can use the computer with just the mouse. They went to great lengths to avoid having the series-of-menu-selections/commands-by-keystroke-and-arrow-keys type text mode UIs (which were the norm on other personal computers) replicated on Macs. The original Mac keyboard didn't even have arrow keys.


AFAIK there was no on-screen keyboard, so you would not have been able to do things like enter filenames and such with only a mouse.

(On the other hand, try using that Mac with only the keyboard, and you'll be disappointed at how much more difficult it is.)


things like enter filenames

Entering filenames is exactly what the interface is trying to avoid, doubly so for entering paths. And it worked - you could be a sophisticated classic Mac OS power user and not know what the HFS path separator was.


Unless you want everything named Untitled, Untitled(1), Copy of Untitled, Untitled(3), etc. you are going to have to enter a filename at some point.


Sure, at some point you will have to type. But the idea here is not that you never have to type, it's that most of the time, you can point. If anything, it's striking it's remained true for as long as it has.


The original Macintosh also came with a cassette tape in the box, with audio lessons on how to use the "mouse" to move the "cursor" around on the screen, and how to "click" and "double-click" it to make a "selection" -- new terms and new concepts for the vast majority of early users. And, of course, everybody had a cassette player.



In a similar vein, when Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in 1992 (much later than the 1984 Macintosh) they also included lessons on moving a mouse cursor on screen and double-clicking. However, they turned their lessons into a simple but effective interactive tutorial. Here's a screen recording of the entire tutorial - it still holds up as quite informative and well put-together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkM7mJrwcg


Once upon a time I needed to look something up on my home computer, so I phoned my mum from work and tried to talk her through clicking on a few icons. This was with Windows 3.11 and the task was far from rocket science. After getting nowhere for twenty minutes I discovered what was wrong. My mother - bless her - had the mouse held the wrong way up. She knew that mice - as in the sort that scurry around and work very hard in laboratories - had the tails at the back. Consequently she held the mouse upside down, with the cable coming out the back.

Before arriving at this simple mistake I had got her to close the blinds in the room where my computer was setup. In those days mice were opto-mechanical with the ball, and, under extreme bright light the sensors in the mouse were vulnerable to light coming through the plastic housing of the mouse. Connections had been checked too, plus I had managed to get her to reboot the machine with the reset button on the front. Yet all along it was operator error, I imagined everything that could be wrong up to 'it must be a stray neutrino' levels of implausible yet I overlooked the idea that my mum intuitively thought that a computer mouse was like a real mouse with the 'tail at the back'.

We got there in the end after I had the eureka moment and worked out my mum was holding the mouse wrong. I could talk her through the rest when that was resolved and got the snippet of information I needed - a telephone number - which I needed for work.

It was only when ecommerce and the Amazon Kindle came along that my mother was finally able to use a computer. All difficulties and fears mysteriously vanished when it came to buying stuff online, she became perfectly adept at using a computer then, much to my father's amusement.

If only I had known of this tutorial back then.


> She knew that mice - as in the sort that scurry around and work very hard in laboratories - had the tails at the back. Consequently she held the mouse upside down, with the cable coming out the back.

The original mouse did have the cable at the back. That’s why it was called a mouse.¹

1. https://stason.org/TULARC/languages/english-usage/51-mouses-...


I'd never heard of the audio cassette, but our 1990 Mac came with an interactive tutorial (built with an early version of Macromind Director). I remember having a lot of fun overfeeding the fish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgdFZD-N8k


The whole point of including minesweeper was to train people to use the mouse.


Solitaire too, iirc.


The cassette provided the audio track for the on screen tutorial that ran at the same time.

There was no way you were going to fit an audio track onto a 400 kilobyte floppy disk along with the demo software.

My favorite bit was the randomized maze generator that you used to develop your fine grained mousing skills.


I remember my dad telling me about how when he was in grad school in the mid-late eighties—for cognitive psychology with plans to go into Human Computer Interaction—they needed to give mouse training and proficiency tests to folks before they could participate in experiments.

Hearing that struck me as so strange since I have no recollection of ever learning to use a mouse—I had always assumed it was just completely intuitive.


When my nephew was 6 months old, I spent a week babysitting him during the days. We did a bunch of things, but the main thing that interested him was learning to put things in his mouth. Especially the bottles I was feeding him with.

He'd try over and over and over. Nipple on cheek. Nipple on chin. Nipple on neck. Drop bottle entirely. Nipple in eye. (Do not want!) And once in a great while, nipple in mouth. Then he'd suck for a while and start over again.

We learn so much that we forget even learning. If he could have talked and he'd asked me how to put something in his mouth, I couldn't really have told him. I just did it.

I think about that a lot when dealing with students, junior programmers, etc. It's so easy for me to think, "How could they not know that?!?" When the real question is how I managed to forget learning.


Agreed. My 3 year old daughter wants to play her PBS games on my computer, but is still frustrated by the mouse control. This could be a generational thing too, as the more intuitive option to her is to touch the screen where she wants (like the tablets and phones do). There's definitely a level of abstraction with the mouse that most of us have long forgotten.


Yeah, that old saw "the only intuitive interface ever devised is the nipple" kind of falls down when you see a newborn infant struggling with it. There's no such thing as an intuitive interface, only an interface which follows already-familiar conventions.


I recently found my copy of the 1991 Macintosh User's Guide. It has the superb line:

"Until you save your work, it exists only in the computer's memory - like thoughts that are lost unless you write them down."

This is almost as good as:

"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"


"Everything not saved will be lost."

-Nintendo "Quit Screen" message.


I was a beta tester for the original Mac, as well as in the first Mac Professional Developer Program, introduced at Harvard University as a summer session in '83. I still have my mimeographed partially typeset, partially typed version of Inside Macintosh. It is filled with hand written notes by the original developers, and was copied directly from their copies as they worked to complete the beta version that summer. I had it appraised around the time of Job's death, and the response was it's priceless and needs to be in a museum. It's still in a air sealed box at the moment.


Wow! I hope you can find a way to digitize it. I picked up the giant one-volume version of Inside Macintosh from an MIT Library sale, and even without the rich added character of yours it’s an extraordinary piece of technology history.


It would be awesome if you put this somewhere like archive.org!


Would love to see some pictures!


Compare the IBM PC/AT "Guide to Operations" of the same time:

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/IBM_5170_Guide_to_Op...

No colour, and of course a CLI doesn't need a lesson in how the UI works, but plenty of technical information.


"The scroll lock light comes on when you press the Scroll Lock key or when your program is in the scroll lock mode. The scroll lock light goes off when you press the Scroll lock again, or your program is no longer in the scroll lock mode."

"The System (Sys) key has its functions defined in your operating system or application program manual."

Heh, it's like it's written by my co-workers that simply can't do anything user friendly but like to make totally redundant "documentation." E.g.:

"The option --result-dir specifies the result directory"

"The function int getSize( int frob ) returns the size of the frob. The parameter is frob." (God forbid they inform you what the allowable range of input or output is, in which units they measure the size or what the frob in their program means or what is actually measured or counted, and they never include an example of using anything)."


I hate this kind of documentation so much. The kind I hate the very most is the application manual that is constructed by dumping out the menu tree and then have somebody write something about every menu function. 85% of the prose being what any idiot could guess from the words clicked on to get there.

My plea to everybody: user-test your documentation. Give the thing to a novice, have them do tasks, see if they can figure it out. If nobody looks at the docs, great, just throw them out. But if they do look, make sure it is useful to the person who is looking.


Don't forget that getSize(-1) looks up the default frob. Which they use liberally in the code but never document.


That is the worst and most useless type of documentation.

Also the most common.


I suspect the problem is often that engineers try their best to write objective documentation and it unconsciously goes to an absurd extreme — “I shouldn’t presume to tell them how they might want to use this function, let’s just stick to the facts.”

(Btw this is an illustrative example of why you can’t have “news that just states the facts.” That principle doesn’t even work for technical documentation! You need some degree of interpretation and empathy for writing to make sense.)


My suspicion is that it's documentation written by people who don't use, don't know how to use, and do not understand the product.

Fundamentally, technology is means and method, and both point to ends or goal.

Technology is the study of means. (John Stuart Mill's definition. He also gives science as "the study of causes".)

Which means that documentation should point you at what you might want to do and how the tool(s) available to you serve that end. Referencing only the internal state of the system itself (and worse, at the most trivial level, as in the example give, which is by no means unusual in the field) is ... perfectly useless.

It's actually worse than useless, because you've got to wade through so much goddamned mud soup trying to find information that's actually useful. I've long had this problem with various "documentation by the pound" publishers -- Que and "Learn Foo in 24 hours" type series -- where the books are so padded with cute comments and junk statements that you cannot find the real meat.

O'Reilly's "Nutshell" series often go too far in the other direction, but at least the information is (usually) there.

The O'Reilly UNIX Power Tools book, a cookbook of recipes and methods with specific ends and goals explicitly stated is, pound for pound, probably the most valuable reference book I've ever bought. It doesn't cover everything (though it touches on a lot of material), but it covers a vast range of useful information and best of all gives you the tools to find out more.


You nailed it. Not only the lack of "empathy", they somehow even detest the users of the stuff they produce. I never understood that attitude, but I see it on the web in some forums or similar too. Like when somebody asks "how to convert picture from x to y given z" and some smart-* posts the link to the following instead of giving any useful example:

https://imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#adap...

Where the option is "explained" as:

"The -adaptive-resize option defaults to data-dependent triangulation. Use the -filter to choose a different resampling algorithm. Offsets, if present in the geometry string, are ignored, and the -gravity option has no effect."

I bet they feel so smart every time they do that, when they give at the same time the technically correct and practically unusable answer (for anybody but the author of the program and two other friends of him). In my case they would reply, unsurprisingly, "see the documentation of getSize." And there would be of course also long getSize( long trunnion, int length )" and some 10 more.

Come to think about it, I've had a discussion here on HN just some days ago where some "programmers" stated that if I want to use a single click with the mouse on the scrollbar to get to the previous page:

- I should use PgUp and PgDown on the keyboard, har, har.

- is completely unnecessary in the time of wheels and touchpads

- that that means a PgDown button on the mouse is missing

- that I should remap the third mouse button (why should I need both Up and Down movement anyway?)

- Or a mouse gesture? FoxyGestures, a Firefox addon

- that what I wish is illogical and trying to use it so is being stubborn.

Anything but a single click. That worked before.

BTW Gnome is actively removing things that worked with such an attitude (trying to remove even the settings which allow the users to switch back to the saner behavior). Yay user friendliness. And when you check what they are doing themselves, they don't even use GUI, but live in the console the whole day. And to see the previous page in their terminal they press Control-PgUp (or was it Shift-PgUp) and believe that that is the most natural thing ever, needing both hands for such a task. But "they don't need it anyway."

Btw, I've spent enough time explaining "normal users" how to do "normal actions" that I really appreciate that the original Mac had a single button mouse:

You can explain it with "just click there" not every time with "click with the link button, no, click with the right button" etc.


  // Increment frob
  frob++;


And compare that to the corresponding IBM PCjr "Guide to Operations",

ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/misc/Hardware/IBM/IBM%20PCjr%20Guide%20To%20Operations.pdf

which combines the conventional IBM-style step-by-step troubleshooting guide with an extensive keyboard tutorial featuring full-color, cartoon-style artwork on nearly every page, illustrating...the fact that someone at IBM thought a bland and largely uninteresting tutorial could be made more approachable by adding full-color, cartoon-style artwork to nearly every page.

That, or else there's some connection I'm missing between the Ctrl key, say, and towing childhood pets around in an improbably stable two-wheeled trailer behind one's tricycle...


It's striking to see that there is a full section of Troubleshooting and test procedures, over 250 pages for the PC manual, as if it was supposed to fail by default.

Apple did the opposite, user-centered approach meaning it should work by default.

Opposite cultures, indeed.


Apple's approach is "send it back to us if something is wrong", and more recently, "buy a new one".


The solutions in the test segment are all "note the error and have your system unit serviced", so there's no difference there.


this is wonderful. it's especially interesting how dramatically different Apple's idea of what a computer user is and wants to do vs. how IBM viewed it. They are coming at it from two fundamentally different mindsets.

a full PDF can be found here: http://www.maccaps.com/MacCaps/DIY_Information_files/Macinto...


Ironic that one of the sentences in the introduction is "With Macintosh, you're in charge." and there's plenty of references to "your Macintosh". Ditto for the IBM PC/AT manual I linked to in another comment here, although the latter explicitly mentions near the very beginning that it has built-in BASIC (and the manual for that is also supplied) while the Mac manual never mentions programming until the very end where it briefly references the Programmer's Switch and warns users not to use it.

Apple makes it difficult from the beginning to do anything other than use the computer as an appliance, while IBM seemed to be the exact opposite.


It’s hard to over state how much easier to learn and use Macs were back then, compared to any other computer.

I used to teach computers in the early 1990s before Windows 3.1 was popular, and the main PC apps like Lotus 123 and WordPerfect were impossible to learn without the keyboard templates that had the key-presses printed in them you needed to do anything including edit, print and save. Each app had its own key presses and the publishers fiercely protected them to ensure competitors were NOT copying them. Then came the Mac and you learned to print in one app, you knew it for EVERY OTHER MAC APP.

At the time developers couldn’t understand why such functions (and appearance) were standardised and many considered it negatively, as in “Apple restricting my creativity and telling me what to do.”


It's not a bad observation. But for most people, computers are appliances. Apple's insight was to have computers serve people, rather than insisting that the people should serve their computers.

I write this from a Linux laptop, so obviously my preferences are different. But I recognize that I'm part of a relatively narrow niche. And I'll note that Apple is still making personal computers. If you include their phones (which I do) then they have hundreds of millions of daily users. Whereas IBM got out of the personal computer business long ago because they couldn't compete.


What's interesting is how much of a departure from the Apple II it was. The Apple II came with very technical documentation, such as the assembly listings of the ROM monitor.

Of course later the Mac started shipping with HyperCard which was an absolutely fantastic development environment for amateurs.


Doesn't hold a candle to the VIC-20 user manual:

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20User's...


This is neat! Doesn't just teach you how to use the computer, but it's a complete introduction to programming. (At the time, I suppose, there was not much difference :)


This was a delight, thank you.


"3583 BYTES FREE" :)


The basic nature of the instructions reminded me of talking to a guy I met in Charlotte who was mad about how young people today don't really know why editing text or photos is called "cut and paste." He was a professional photographer who took many iconic photos of stock car races from the 50s through the 80s or 90s, and was good friends with (for example) Bill France of NASCAR.

Anyway, he published a magazine (or maybe more than one, I can't remember) with photos and stories about racing. They had to be literally cut and pasted onto boards before printing. It was genuinely irritating to him that people could simply point and click at a scissors icon to edit their layout and still call themselves "editors."

Of course, I listened with great interest, since I'm still irritated that CLI isn't the standard any more.


> They had to be literally cut and pasted onto boards before printing.

Well resourced offices had a machine that you’d feed the photos into to put a thin layer of wax on the back. The wax remained tacky (like post-it note glue) to hold the photos and text elements in place but let them be easy to reposition.


I'm pretty sure this manual was written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Espinosa

Source: He was a highschool and college friend.


I prefer the rougher edges of the Apple II Red Book.

At times, the prose is a bit flowery: "Computers can perform marvelous feats of mathematical computation at well beyond the speed capable of most human minds. They are fast, cold and accurate; man on the other hand is slower, has emotion, and makes errors."

http://www.classiccmp.org/cini/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20(Redbo...


That quote echoes Steve Jobs’s comments about tools augmenting human capabilities.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-...


Ah, I understand the "scroll bar" now. Never put that name together until now.


It's interesting how that computer "fits" on a desk very nicely space wise.

I have a huge Ikea desk and some monitors. I never feel like it all "fits". I won't give up my big monitors... at the same time it irks me that it never feels it all fits on my desk.


I just hang my monitors on the wall behind the desk. I'm up to 5 now and there's still plenty of room.


I got monitor arms to lift mine off the desk. Really freed up space and I could never go back now.


> My favorite is scrolling. I can imagine the discussion: “Well, it’s called a scroll bar… I know, let’s use a drawing of a scroll!” Yes. Because people in the mid-80s were all about scrolls…

Uh... that's literally _why_ it's called a scroll bar in the first place...


What was really striking was the difference between manuals for the Apple II and Macs. The II manual was probably one of the finest user-friendly manuals for a computer ever created.

Of course it addressed a different audience ... the users, not the purchasers.

The same thing happened to the technical manuals; the II manual was transparent about the machine; while the Mac manual left out a lot of useful technical info and replaced it with the first incarnation of the software-prison. No PEEKs or POKEs or hardware insights, no friendly appeals to having fun and learning.

Eventually the rainbow logo became a blase grey ... same shape, but drained of color. Revealing a different personality.


This a great piece to come across. Written in 2007... nice to have a chance to see it. I was laughing at the part where he packed in a bag and started biking away with it. Like... wow that bike must have been front-heavy.


It is amazing how much the manual has to explain to a 1980s user, for a device that, for me at least, exuded a sense of magic, especially compared to the competition. The office at my first technical job had both an Apple Lisa and a Macintosh, as well as IBM PCs, XTs and ATs. The Macintosh really felt like a different sort of beast... and though I've had several Apple machines over the years, all of them far outperforming the original Mac, none of them ever felt quite as special for some reason. I suspect a lot of it might simply be the original industrial design, which still looks cool to me.



Am I the only one for whom every smaller photo (of the first 7, it turns out) goes to an enlarged version of the same photo #1, and clicking 'next' from there goes to a totally unrelated photostream item?


I love that people were (at least in Steve Jobs's vision) biking around the Stanford campus with macs in the 80's. Nothing ever really changes about that place...


I recall that my Apple II came with a booklet of handwritten notes about assembly code.


Also interesting that at least one picture is at Stanford University. They had right from the start the prestigious university student as a target demographic. :)


Is it just me, or do the pictures on chapter 3 and 4 look like prototypes with a 5.25” drive?


Those particular pictures don’t look like that to me, but some prototype Macintosh machines had a Twiggy drive. There’s a great story about how the mac designers had to hide their negotiations with Sony from Steve Jobs so he wouldn’t get mad on folklore.org.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_FileWare

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...


“The Finder is like a central hallway in the Macintosh house” - that works for me.


I like the appendix photo... The bicycle for your mind in a bicycle... at Stanford


I still have mine.


[flagged]


This is just the kind of lame ideological subthread that we've asked you repeatedly not to instigate here. If you do it again we will ban your account.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18694826 and marked it off-topic.


boom, upvote for you my jaded social observer. The weird white shame and identity politics being pushed by Americans is really tiresome. It's the first thing the author writes about, was it really the first thing he thought about? Because that perspective is just as shallow as facile as the idea that advertising from 40-50 years deliberately excluded minorities.

And is the OP really that proud to be broadcasting his SNAG status? Jeez. Rant over.


    The weird white shame and identity politics being pushed by 
    Americans is really tiresome. 
Your comment is more ideological than the author's throwaway sentence.

You're reading "white shame" into the author's essay. Does the author feel responsible for something other people did in the 1980s? Does he feel responsible for things other people do, just because he shares their skin-tone? Neither you, nor I, have any idea. He doesn't say.

    that perspective is just as shallow as facile as the idea 
    that advertising from 40-50 years deliberately excluded minorities.
You complain about Americans without knowing American history. Segregation wasn't fully illegal until the 1970s. Does that strike you as a country full of good-will to minorities?


This blog post was from 2007, before the topic became saturated like it is today. Not that there is anything wrong with that.


The commentary was relevant to the article, which was about the user guide and to whom it may have been targeted at the time.

RE your edit, see the guidelines [0] and consider the possibility that people think your comment doesn't contribute positively to the conversation.

[0] >Please don't comment about the voting on comments.


>The commentary was relevant to the article

The parent comment was also relevant to the article, as well as the commentary in this thread.


The commentary is on topic for a thread about product advertising. Consider what an Apple product page looks like today.


This website really should be free of all discussion of those matters. Unfortunately only one half of the people who make political remarks are silenced.


Case in point


Remember Flickr? >..<


Pretty cool how they got the computers to work w/o plugging them in.

That was a Jobs thing. For years, Mac ads didn't show cables. Then came the iDweeb earbuds.


it likely predated jobs by a long shot. i don’t know how far back it goes, but all add for electrical appliances (even lamps) don’t show cords. cords are ugly.

even ads for other things, say a desk, don’t show cords of the computer or lamp on the desk.


The very first photo on the page (Chapter 1) shows a plugged-in power cable.


What is “iDweeb?”




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