- Joined
- Mar 10, 2013
was done by who else but Apple. You gotta give 'em respect for a lot of things, and this is one. It worked so well, they're still trying to overcome the results.
There ain't nothing wrong with a Mac (besides Apple, but that's a philosophical thing and not what I'm talking about). They are gorgeous computers, and you can't say a bad thing about the design, support, or anything else except maybe the price. I'd love a Mac, if I could afford one and had some reason to need one. I hateth not ye Mac.
The Apple II personified everything that was right in the early days. Some hackers brewed up this thing that actually worked and could be made into an actual product. I've never met Steve Wozniak, but the dude is right up there next to Jesus, Mohammed, and Elvis in my book. Jobs was an asshole but had an absolutely killer instinct for design and marketing and all that goes with it. Can't fault that.
Before the Mac came out, Apple's flagship was the II gs, the machine that sat atop the gaming pyramid casting scorn on all the lesser machines. The II was the best gaming platform on the planet, bar none, and there was a huge pile of wildly innovative and wildly fun software people had cooked up for it. Anybody who belonged to the unknown undercurrent of people we call "gamers" either had or wanted one. The II gs was a great machine, back in the day.
And then computers started growing up. People realized that you could actually use them for something practical! CP/M machines like Bill Godbout's Compupro systems and Adam Osborne's Osborne One started getting noticed. Much beard-pulling started to happen in financial and business circles.
(I had two Osborne 1s, through a sort of strange circumstance I won't go into 'cause it'd take way too long to explain. I put an external hard drive on one of them: a bottomless pit into which you could pour data until your eyes bled. It was about the size of a shoebox and plugged into the wall. Installation was easy; you opened up the case, pried the Z-80 microprocessor out of its socket, inserted a jumper to a daughterboard into which you plugged the Z-80, screwed the whole thing back together, and you were the king of the world with eleven megabytes of storage for a mere $1400.)
Enter IBM and the original 5150 Personal Computer. It was a conservative design (to say the least) and wasn't all that exciting, but everyone including Jobs knew that no middle manager ever got called on the carpet for specifying IBM gear. (I had an honesttogod original PC also, for a while. More on that later.)
But know this: far, far below the delvings of the Dwarves, the Earth is gnawed by nameless things. There are sunless dungeons below Cupertino, CA, unknown by surface-dwellers, where strange rituals awaken things that are better left asleep, and rip off Xerox and everyone else in the process. In a cauldron hidden in those deeps there was brewed a thing called the Macintosh (the name was a mistake by someone who didn't know the actual fruit is "McIntosh" until it was too late to change) and on one day in 1984 it woke up.
Jobs knew damn well that IBM's offering was The Business Computer For Businessmen™, and wanted his new kid on the block to rattle IBM's cage in a way IBM had never been rattled. The decision came down from Above that the Mac was in no was going to be a gaming machine. Anyone who wanted to make software for it would do so only with Apple's blessing, or be sued into nonexistence. Only Approved Projects™ would be permitted, and their developers would only get the necessary tools and documentation after signing a contract with Apple. (I applied for a Mac programming job in 1985 - was offered the job, but decided flight simulators were more fun than financial applications, but they showed me their their contract signed by Steve Jobs hisself.)
Back in reality, and in 1984: this new Mac thing everybody was talking about sounded really hip. Visions of games danced in my head. I'd bought my aforementioned honesttogod IBM PC the year before, and on the day I bought it I also got the technical documentation, plus a C compiler and assembler. The IBM "Technical Reference" is about four feet from me as I type this -- it has the schematics, the BIOS listings, the pinouts, and every-freaking-else thing you'd ever need to know to do anything you wanted with it. [/i]The PC was open source.[/i] I'll see if I have a pic of it; the "purple book" goes for lots o' money on eBay these days.
I was in college ( or "university," for you blokes) and my apartment bordered on a park. Diagonally across the park was ye local Apple dealer. I counted my pennies, walked over there, and asked about buying one of these Mac things.
"I'll need the computer, technical documentation, a C compiler, and an assembler too, please. Can you work me up a price?"
And I got laughed at by the salesman.
If you wanted to program it in anything other than LISP or Forth (be still, my heart) you needed a contract with Apple. If you were thinking along game lines, you were not going to get a contract from Apple anytime this century. Apple (i.e. Jobs) wanted to shake the perception that they made gaming computers, so their policy was No Games, No Way. Game development for the Mac was flatly not allowed. NO GAMES!
Ok, keep your computer. IBM doesn't give a fuck what you do with the machine you just bought. You own it, do whatever you want. Apple's policy was "do whatever we want." You couldn't get the tools nor the docs to actually program the thing if you wanted to make a game, and if by chance somone managed to pirate the necessities a savage herd of lawyers would sharpen their knives and attack. NO GAMES ON THE MAC. THAT IS OUR POLICY AND YOU LIKE IT. YOU'RE WELCOME.
There were rare exceptions to the no-game thing. My first boss at Activision, Bill Volk, was an remains a Mac lover, and had a very successful game published for it (Mac Challenger.) But he was a big name in gaming and software in general before he tried to make a game for it, so his experience was wildly different from the gas-station-restroom-bacteria programmers like me who thought it'd be cool to hack around inside the Mac and maybe have fun.
What the hell, Apple's policy worked. Way, way better than they wanted it to. They changed their tune in the mid-late '90s when games started being wildly profitable, but in the meantime they'd pissed off a generation of programmers. The Mac's architecture became ever closer to the PCs (oh my god, a bus that you can plug cards into? A separate monitor? COLOR?!) at the same time the PC's software architecture got closer to the Mac's, so it was six of one and half a dozen etc. for a while -- but when the Voodoo card came out, there was no fuckin' way you were putting one in our holy Mac, heathen, until hmm, someone else is eating our lunch. WE WE JUST KIDDING ABOUT THE NO-GAMES THING. IT NEVER WAS THAT WAY REALLY, TRUST US. ARE YOU HIGH OR SOMETHING?
By the time the Voodoo 2 came out, Apple was using Intel's bus and you could set DIP switches on the card to work in either machine, but it was kind of too late. "Your PC has a garbage can icon -- ho ho, Apple had that ten years ago!" Yeah, and my PC has an Intel processor and a PCI bus and ports and all kinds of things just like your Mac does, only it had them fifteen years ago.
Apple's strategy worked. The Mac became the graphcs / audio / networking / etc. platform with a userbase wasn't interested in games, exactly what Jobs wanted. The "no games" policy has been mostly forgotten by everyone except old beardo programmers, but the Mac market is still largely non-gamers. There was a bunch of frantic backpedaling done, the pinnacle of which ended with John Carmack declaring the Mac to the the gaming platform of choice for anyone who was serious about games. In a typical dipshit Carmack move, he didn't realize that a) Apple doesn't give twenty-thousand dollar machines to pond scum like everyone else on the planet besides him, and b) there weren't any titles for it. No disrespect for Carmack, I've had beers with the dude and he's one of the half-dozen people I count in my league as a programmer, but he's a technologist, not a gamer, and doesn't understand how life works for the rest of the world. He pulled the same stunt with OpenGL back in the day -- "the only gaming platform anyone should even consider is OpenGL" -- but then, OpenGL cards were a mere $7,000, and (unlike him) nobody tried to give me one.
When Jobs was fired from Apple and the company drifted rudderless for a few years, PCs leapfrogged Macs in terms of sheer computing power. Jobs' "no cooling fan" policy was preserved, and as Intel architectures began to approach 100 MHz, Macs were stuck at 25. When he returned, the Motorola 680xxx processors were replace by the (IBM) Power PC series, and the Mac was back on top until the Pentium hit a month or two later.
In conclusion: there ain't nothing wrong with a Mac. Apple has made some truly beautiful computers, and nowadays you're allowed to program them and everything. I'd love to have one. In the early years, they made damn sure no gamer would buy one, so none did, and game development defaulted to the other dominant architecture, exactly like Jobs wanted. Success! Sort of.
There ain't nothing wrong with a Mac (besides Apple, but that's a philosophical thing and not what I'm talking about). They are gorgeous computers, and you can't say a bad thing about the design, support, or anything else except maybe the price. I'd love a Mac, if I could afford one and had some reason to need one. I hateth not ye Mac.
The Apple II personified everything that was right in the early days. Some hackers brewed up this thing that actually worked and could be made into an actual product. I've never met Steve Wozniak, but the dude is right up there next to Jesus, Mohammed, and Elvis in my book. Jobs was an asshole but had an absolutely killer instinct for design and marketing and all that goes with it. Can't fault that.
Before the Mac came out, Apple's flagship was the II gs, the machine that sat atop the gaming pyramid casting scorn on all the lesser machines. The II was the best gaming platform on the planet, bar none, and there was a huge pile of wildly innovative and wildly fun software people had cooked up for it. Anybody who belonged to the unknown undercurrent of people we call "gamers" either had or wanted one. The II gs was a great machine, back in the day.
And then computers started growing up. People realized that you could actually use them for something practical! CP/M machines like Bill Godbout's Compupro systems and Adam Osborne's Osborne One started getting noticed. Much beard-pulling started to happen in financial and business circles.
(I had two Osborne 1s, through a sort of strange circumstance I won't go into 'cause it'd take way too long to explain. I put an external hard drive on one of them: a bottomless pit into which you could pour data until your eyes bled. It was about the size of a shoebox and plugged into the wall. Installation was easy; you opened up the case, pried the Z-80 microprocessor out of its socket, inserted a jumper to a daughterboard into which you plugged the Z-80, screwed the whole thing back together, and you were the king of the world with eleven megabytes of storage for a mere $1400.)
Enter IBM and the original 5150 Personal Computer. It was a conservative design (to say the least) and wasn't all that exciting, but everyone including Jobs knew that no middle manager ever got called on the carpet for specifying IBM gear. (I had an honesttogod original PC also, for a while. More on that later.)
But know this: far, far below the delvings of the Dwarves, the Earth is gnawed by nameless things. There are sunless dungeons below Cupertino, CA, unknown by surface-dwellers, where strange rituals awaken things that are better left asleep, and rip off Xerox and everyone else in the process. In a cauldron hidden in those deeps there was brewed a thing called the Macintosh (the name was a mistake by someone who didn't know the actual fruit is "McIntosh" until it was too late to change) and on one day in 1984 it woke up.
Jobs knew damn well that IBM's offering was The Business Computer For Businessmen™, and wanted his new kid on the block to rattle IBM's cage in a way IBM had never been rattled. The decision came down from Above that the Mac was in no was going to be a gaming machine. Anyone who wanted to make software for it would do so only with Apple's blessing, or be sued into nonexistence. Only Approved Projects™ would be permitted, and their developers would only get the necessary tools and documentation after signing a contract with Apple. (I applied for a Mac programming job in 1985 - was offered the job, but decided flight simulators were more fun than financial applications, but they showed me their their contract signed by Steve Jobs hisself.)
Back in reality, and in 1984: this new Mac thing everybody was talking about sounded really hip. Visions of games danced in my head. I'd bought my aforementioned honesttogod IBM PC the year before, and on the day I bought it I also got the technical documentation, plus a C compiler and assembler. The IBM "Technical Reference" is about four feet from me as I type this -- it has the schematics, the BIOS listings, the pinouts, and every-freaking-else thing you'd ever need to know to do anything you wanted with it. [/i]The PC was open source.[/i] I'll see if I have a pic of it; the "purple book" goes for lots o' money on eBay these days.
I was in college ( or "university," for you blokes) and my apartment bordered on a park. Diagonally across the park was ye local Apple dealer. I counted my pennies, walked over there, and asked about buying one of these Mac things.
"I'll need the computer, technical documentation, a C compiler, and an assembler too, please. Can you work me up a price?"
And I got laughed at by the salesman.
If you wanted to program it in anything other than LISP or Forth (be still, my heart) you needed a contract with Apple. If you were thinking along game lines, you were not going to get a contract from Apple anytime this century. Apple (i.e. Jobs) wanted to shake the perception that they made gaming computers, so their policy was No Games, No Way. Game development for the Mac was flatly not allowed. NO GAMES!
Ok, keep your computer. IBM doesn't give a fuck what you do with the machine you just bought. You own it, do whatever you want. Apple's policy was "do whatever we want." You couldn't get the tools nor the docs to actually program the thing if you wanted to make a game, and if by chance somone managed to pirate the necessities a savage herd of lawyers would sharpen their knives and attack. NO GAMES ON THE MAC. THAT IS OUR POLICY AND YOU LIKE IT. YOU'RE WELCOME.
There were rare exceptions to the no-game thing. My first boss at Activision, Bill Volk, was an remains a Mac lover, and had a very successful game published for it (Mac Challenger.) But he was a big name in gaming and software in general before he tried to make a game for it, so his experience was wildly different from the gas-station-restroom-bacteria programmers like me who thought it'd be cool to hack around inside the Mac and maybe have fun.
What the hell, Apple's policy worked. Way, way better than they wanted it to. They changed their tune in the mid-late '90s when games started being wildly profitable, but in the meantime they'd pissed off a generation of programmers. The Mac's architecture became ever closer to the PCs (oh my god, a bus that you can plug cards into? A separate monitor? COLOR?!) at the same time the PC's software architecture got closer to the Mac's, so it was six of one and half a dozen etc. for a while -- but when the Voodoo card came out, there was no fuckin' way you were putting one in our holy Mac, heathen, until hmm, someone else is eating our lunch. WE WE JUST KIDDING ABOUT THE NO-GAMES THING. IT NEVER WAS THAT WAY REALLY, TRUST US. ARE YOU HIGH OR SOMETHING?
By the time the Voodoo 2 came out, Apple was using Intel's bus and you could set DIP switches on the card to work in either machine, but it was kind of too late. "Your PC has a garbage can icon -- ho ho, Apple had that ten years ago!" Yeah, and my PC has an Intel processor and a PCI bus and ports and all kinds of things just like your Mac does, only it had them fifteen years ago.
Apple's strategy worked. The Mac became the graphcs / audio / networking / etc. platform with a userbase wasn't interested in games, exactly what Jobs wanted. The "no games" policy has been mostly forgotten by everyone except old beardo programmers, but the Mac market is still largely non-gamers. There was a bunch of frantic backpedaling done, the pinnacle of which ended with John Carmack declaring the Mac to the the gaming platform of choice for anyone who was serious about games. In a typical dipshit Carmack move, he didn't realize that a) Apple doesn't give twenty-thousand dollar machines to pond scum like everyone else on the planet besides him, and b) there weren't any titles for it. No disrespect for Carmack, I've had beers with the dude and he's one of the half-dozen people I count in my league as a programmer, but he's a technologist, not a gamer, and doesn't understand how life works for the rest of the world. He pulled the same stunt with OpenGL back in the day -- "the only gaming platform anyone should even consider is OpenGL" -- but then, OpenGL cards were a mere $7,000, and (unlike him) nobody tried to give me one.
When Jobs was fired from Apple and the company drifted rudderless for a few years, PCs leapfrogged Macs in terms of sheer computing power. Jobs' "no cooling fan" policy was preserved, and as Intel architectures began to approach 100 MHz, Macs were stuck at 25. When he returned, the Motorola 680xxx processors were replace by the (IBM) Power PC series, and the Mac was back on top until the Pentium hit a month or two later.
In conclusion: there ain't nothing wrong with a Mac. Apple has made some truly beautiful computers, and nowadays you're allowed to program them and everything. I'd love to have one. In the early years, they made damn sure no gamer would buy one, so none did, and game development defaulted to the other dominant architecture, exactly like Jobs wanted. Success! Sort of.
