Great video, Terry! I first used a Mac in 1986. Hearing the keyboard and floppy drive, and seeing the tutorial software, brought back lots of memories! I wonder how well the Mac would have done if they’d had an external monitor and upgradable RAM from the start. I imagine the price would still have been against it.

@tezzaNZ

9 ай бұрын

Maybe. There was a selling advantage to having the screen and main computer in one case though. It was somewhat portable, especially in those black tote bags they sold with them.

Never Had an OG Mac.. Or any Apple for that Matter. Wizard!

@tezzaNZ

9 ай бұрын

Thanks.

It's not really my style, but I can see how a design and interface like this would be very attractive to an average family looking for a machine, especially at that time.

@tezzaNZ

8 ай бұрын

Yes, it was cute. Unfortunately, it was still a pricey machine for the average family in 1984, which is why it didn't make too many inroads there.

I have a Mac Plus with an external 24MB hard drive. The only complaint is how cumbersome using the mouse can be. Thanks for the video.

@tezzaNZ

9 ай бұрын

You're welcome!

Yes, why must it be ten thousand?

The hardware really struggles to push the pixels back in the day. The comparison against wordstar is a good one. Wordstar had an absolute pig of an interface in comparison. BUT wordstar got the job done and it was lightning fast compared to the mac. For those of us who came from DOS computers, it took ages for GUI based word processors to have the lightning response we were used to seeing in dos in mac or windows. This didn't matter when typing, but scroll, or page up, and anything with a GUI was outright painful. That said, I switched from WordPerfect 5.1 to Windows v2 as fast as everyone else when I could.....of course, to do that I also had to go from a 286 to a 486sx. Back in the day it felt like you had to upgrade your machine every second week to keep up.....

@dbranconnier1977

9 ай бұрын

It's due to the lack of memory. 128k and 512k RAM isn't enough for a GUI unless it's GEOS running on a Commodore 64/128. The Motorola 68000 in the Mac is a capable processor but needs at least 1 Mb of RAM to shine. Even Windows 3.1 on a 386 ran poorly with less than 1 Mb RAM.

@tezzaNZ

9 ай бұрын

I shudder to think what the experience would have been like with the original 128k. It took the Mac Plus, with an external hard drive to make the Mac GUI work at a comfortable speed. Still, I guess you have to start somewhere (-:

The Fat Mac is soooo overrated compared with the Amiga that came out the same year. Just felt like putting that out there. It wouldn't be until the 90s that the Mac eclipsed the Amiga technically. For multimedia you got an Amiga, for music an Atari ST. It's worth remembering that the original Mac had very basic sound capability, no midi, no colour display, and was very sluggish without the video acceleration features of the Amiga. There was only one feature that the Mac had that was better, and that was a reasonably high resolution display with square pixels. That made it the choice for desktop publishing. Only later did technical improvements and Apple's marketing machine transform it into the "artist's multimedia computer" of the 90s.

@tezzaNZ

9 ай бұрын

Yes, I make that very point towards the end of my Amiga 500 video. I'll be releasing a refresh on that one in the next few days.