> The prominent use of color no doubt stems from Steve Jobs obsessing over the smallest details.
Actually color in the history of Apple stems from Woz not Jobs, who added color to Apple II. Jobs in fact reverted to black and white in Macintosh/original NeXT and spent the compute/memory resources on other things (e.g. higher res).
A lot of the design of the Apple I stemmed from Woz’s experience in arcade videogame hardware. In particular he was famously great at taking other people’s designs and refactoring them to have equivalent functionality using fewer components. He also knew a lot about how to drive an NTSC signal on next to nothing. Thus, the high bang-for-buck color support of their first computer.
Interesting then how Romero/Carmack got so much of their start making Apple II shareware games before transitioning to DOS. The hardware really seems to have helped that enable that initial environment for them to grow.
I think when people learn of him, he is rated appropriately. I think what you want to convey is he doesn't get much attention for the amount of impact he had, and if this indeed what you want to convey, then I would suggest that the president's staff also do not get much attention for the amount of impact they have.
It is common for the leaders to get the attention, positive or negative, for the results of the groups they lead.
The memory resources must have been tight, because the original Mac had like a 512x342 pixel display, not even enough to display a full page width of text. I'm not sure it had gray scale.
An additional factor may have been speed, since it was doing things with graphics that may have been too slow if they had to manipulate larger blocks of data.
The original Macintosh was developed in 1983 and was released in 1984 with 128KB of RAM and 64 KB of ROM. In that, they packed a full windowing interface (menus, overlapping windows, multiple fonts, text edit fields, buttons, radio & check boxes, etc). Also a 2D graphics engine (including bitblit with modes), a file manager, a resource manager, a printer drivers, network support, etc, etc. All for the price of a higher end PC of the day. Most of what we consider a "real GUI" was included in the Mac's OS if a bit rudimentary.
To give you an idea how tight that is, 64KB (code in ROM) is just 12 paper pages (60 lines of 80 columns) of text. Yes, some of the code had to be stored on a boot floppy disk, but still. To say it was an amazing piece of software engineering is, IMO, an understatement.
When I saw my first Mac at the university store it was like seeing the future. That so many of my peers denigrated it as a "toy" left me mystified. Instead of buying a car with the money I saved up, I bought myself a Mac.
> To give you an idea how tight that is, 64KB (code in ROM) is just 12 paper pages (60 lines of 80 columns) of text
To be fair, this is machine code, so it's what, 4-10 bytes for an instruction and two or three of these per line of high level code? So it's probably comparable to a few thousand "pages" of C code.
> Instead of buying a car with the money I saved up, I bought myself a Mac.
Same here. I bought a Lisa too because you had to have a Lisa to write code for the Mac back then. My Lisa had a 5 MB hard drive (no I didn't omit any zeros).
Gave me a flashback to when Photoshop added the ability to undo more than just the last operation, up to as many undos as your RAM could support. That was life changing.
The mac did that with a 68000 CPU and a fairly large amount of ROM, there were 8 bitters that got to roughly the same level of functionality on half that much ram & rom, with 640x256.
In fact, there was a Mac emulator for that Amiga that, using the same CPU and hardware accelerated graphics, ran Mac software much faster than the Mac did.
...and the later Mac Classic had a copy of the OS burnt into ROM. You can boot that OS copy by holding cmd-opt-x-o after switching the machine on. Not only ballsy (unable to fix any bugs) but also a reinforcement as to how impressively compact the OS was.
Original Macs actually had 1 bit graphics. “Gray” was done by clever placement of the black and white dots in different patterns to look gray at a distance.
Wow, ages ago, one afternoon, I played around with "page swapping" on the Mac Plus. You could cordon off a chunk of RAM to act as a second screen buffer, render to it, and then toggle the screen buffer during screen retrace to get a very fast (60hz, er 30hz, I guess) "flip animation".
As I recall from my brief experiment, you could get a pseudo 50% gray where the corresponding pixels on the two buffers were opposites (one buffer with a black pixel, the other with white).
It's fascinating that today, I don't even know how many pixels my screen has, but I still remember doing the math to figure out how many columns a display could support. I sweated bullets over those numbers because I was buying my first computer in 1984 and wanted to be sure that I could really type a term paper on it. I had a chance to play with a Mac, but it was priced out of my league at the time.
The original Mac had 128 KiB RAM, and a 512x342 framebuffer takes 21 KiB. That’s not unreasonably tight, but 4-bit color would be 86 KiB.
The IBM EGA card came out in 1984, same year as the Mac, and supported 640x350 with 16 colors, but I think the cost of the monitor + card was somewhere around $1K, and the 640x350@4bpp mode was only supported if you also bought a RAM expansion daughterboard. The Mac’s launch price was $2,500, for comparison.
Adjusting for inflation, the EGA card was something around $2,500 in 2020 dollars, and the Mac was around $6,200.
You could have also opted for a Kaypro, or an Apple II with an 80 column card. I believe both were significantly cheaper than the Mac. Sounds like maybe you already had an IBM though, and so bought the EGA setup?
The Apple II was not capable of high-resolution color, with or without the 80-column card. You would have used the 80-column card with a monochrome monitor. I don't remember whether I ever used it personally.
I couldn't find any pictures of Kaypros with color screens. Was it uncommon?
Sorry, don't know if I replied to the wrong thread maybe, or maybe something got edited? I swear there was something there that had me thinking 80 column editing was the driver...matching the Mac's resolution. The Kaypro and the Mac used roughly the same monochrome CRT, in the same size. You can even swap them if you make the right cross connects.
Ahh, yes, the parent of your post..."The memory resources must have been tight, because the original Mac had like a 512x342 pixel display, not even enough to display a full page width of text."
Don’t worry about it, everyone’s following a different part of these threads.
My thought was, “Why didn’t the Mac have color?” and I was comparing it to color systems that had similar or better resolution than the Mac… and I think that’s only EGA, and maybe some workstations I don’t know about.
Indeed, in my case, I bought a Sanyo MBC-550 computer with MS-DOS, a Zenith monochrome display, and an incredibly slow daisywheel printer, for almost exactly 1000 bucks. My use case was pretty narrow -- word processing and programming.
The year before, someone demonstrated a Lisa at my college, and of course I was excited by what I was reading in Byte Magazine (though it was over my head), but the early Mac was just out of my reach. The Sanyo seemed like a step above my mom's Apple II.
> The IBM EGA card came out in 1984, same year as the Mac, and supported 640x350 with 16 colors,
The IBM PCjr also came out the same year as the Mac and the 128KB model supported 640x200 with 4 colors (and up to 320x200 with 16). A lot less expensive than a PC with EGA.
Actually color in the history of Apple stems from Woz not Jobs, who added color to Apple II. Jobs in fact reverted to black and white in Macintosh/original NeXT and spent the compute/memory resources on other things (e.g. higher res).