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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

a thing i am always thinking about is how there just aren't that many programs for the classic mac platform. no, like, really. go download the macgarden scrape from IA and flip through it - i've done this, and there's pretty much just a few categories of program:

  • word processor

  • drawing app

  • other desktop publishing (layout, etc.)

  • games (probably more numerous than anything else, but only after the low-cost color macs dropped in the 90s; prior to that, just dreary sliding-block puzzles and stuff)

  • terminal emulator

  • system utility (compression tool, 'add a clock to your titlebars', and other 'meta' software that just served to improve the host system in some way)

that's almost entirely it, throughout the eighties and first few years of the 90s. the PC on the other hand had countless tens of thousands of programs released in the same period, as well as a staggering variety of hardware addons. i ascribe a number of reasons:

  • bigger market share (obviously)

  • lower cost of entry for both user and devs

  • lower standards of quality lol

  • near-universal color graphics

  • gobs of expansion slots

those last two are really major elements imo, particularly because the first mac that solved either one wasn't sold until 1987 and cost as much as a midsize sedan.

seriously, the macintosh ii - the only mac that could deliver color graphics until the 90s, and the only one with more than a single expansion slot - was a unix workstation without the unix. it makes sense that apple intended to put unix on it, because it was an absolute beast that almost nobody needed. but it also was the only one that could do a bunch of stuff that every PC could do, and naturally that was "fine", in the sense that many people had no desire to expand their computers beyond what they bought them for, but I think that on the PC platform there was a lot more "oh, and,"

as in, you bought the machine to manage your budget and write letters, and it was fine for that, but when you saw an ad for some wacky gadget like a lightpen, or a color hires graphics card, or Kings Quest, or a rapid application development environment "no programming skills required!", or "Tax Filing Assistant For Delaware, Fiscal Year 1989" (this really existed, I have it somewhere) or any of a thousand other bizarre things that you probably didn't need, you could just go "oh, $200? i can scrape that up" and buy it. you didn't need to have literally the most powerful machine available, so it made sense that someone would bother to make these things. a return on investment was actually possible, whereas making any product for the mac without absolutely gargantuan mass appeal was likely to bankrupt you.

much has been said of the "no slots" practice of apple in re: the macintosh. i have a more nuanced take on it than some however: it was incredibly fucking stupid, one of the worst business decisions in history, nearly destroyed the company, and probably should have, the fact they survived was an accident. strong letter to follow


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

the way I heard it, they weren't even going to call it "Macintosh II". it was to be something else entirely - a dedicated workstation, or a network server; and Macintosh compatibility was incidental, because Steve Jobs would not permit the Macintosh name to be used on a color machine.

but I could be flat-out wrong, and I don't think anything on like, folklore.org or the many many well-documented insidey-bits of 80s apple biographies and bibliographies mentions anything of the sort.

and like, you'd think after Coke II and Dodge II the product department maybe would've gotten the hint

yeah he left in 85, the ii was in 87 - they had long enough to change any course he'd set them on.

but i don't think it can be entirely discounted. steven job was the only person who ever had a lick of vision there, all the crap they made between when he left and when he came back was perhaps technically impressive, checked some boxes, but was utterly bloodless, had no vision. that's how they ended up with 50 different models that even enthusiasts struggled (and continue to struggle) to differentiate.

it wouldn't surprise me if after he left, everyone just failed to imagine a better perspective than the last thing he'd said before bailing. "make a machine with slots" was not a particularly wild leap of reasoning; "make affordable machines with slots, while still making the high end system make sense" took a lot more brain thought.

"Oh, no, that's not a Performa 645 AV, that's a Performa 636 CD. It has a 68020 instead of the 68030. Of course, if you wanted PowerPC you should've gotten the Performa 6300, but make sure to avoid the Quadra 832, which is shaped like a Centris 540 (not a Centro 450), but has the much more powerful PPC470 chip, which always overheats and dies."

being a 90s mac collector fucking sucks dongs

I remember two things about the Color Classic. One is that it is consistent enough with the earlier designs of monolithic macintoshes that it is in my mind The Macintosh, as by the time I was old enough to regularly have long-term memory, it was the newest model and so is indelibly linked in my mind as the Macintosh, along with the Power Macintosh / Performa 5200/5300 LC several years later. The LC 500s are ugly, don't even try to convince me otherwise.

The other thing I remember is of using those 5300 LCs in a school computer lab, which had countless reminders in posters and banners to CHECK YOUR FINDER for the programs minimized but not actually closed out.

Also shout-out to the 20th Anniversary Mac for being the world's least useful laptop

it's funny because my experience is totally different. i've spent a lot of time crawling the macintosh garden and other (now gone) FTP sites downloading rando weird shit. ignoring the shareware, did you know all three abrahamic religions got really into hypercard?

sometimes that put me in weird situations where i'd boot up my iMac and the apple logo would inexplicably fall out of the menu bar and roll away, and i'd have no idea why, and it turns out at some point i'd installed an extension that did that on the dev's birthday or w/e

i don't doubt the selection of surviving weird shit is better for the PC though, but i can't look at a pre-1995 PC and be happy. they always feel like unfinished, hatefully designed machines

a macintosh of any age is my really comfortable spot, even if i only really need it to run the AAA software titles, the goofy menu bar eyes/after dark/wallace and gromit icon set shit makes it home for me