I've been reading and enjoying the author's examination of each month's MacUser. It's striking how much sheer support, in terms of new hardware and software, the Mac received right out of the gate. Although Amiga and Atari ST followed less than two years later with superior hardware, it's clear in retrospect (and, I suspect, to anyone at the time comparing Macworld/MacUser/MacWeek to the corresponding Amiga/ST publications) that Apple had completely sucked up the air in the "not PC" segment of the market.
Apple had the credibility to do so in the first place, of course, because of its success with the Apple II. In turn, Mac's share of the market was minuscule compared to what the IBM PC had built around itself since 1981, as any comparison of PC/PC World/InfoWorld to the above Mac publications would have shown. But it was enough to survive for the long term. Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990, but it is a niche, and a reasonably defendable one; Amiga's desktop video niche was correspondingly much smaller, and ST never found one at all outside maybe music.[1]
I wrote "superior hardware", not "superior hardware and software". Not enough attention has been given to just how good classic Mac OS was from the beginning. The care given to both the UI and underlying architecture is obvious. Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows. Yes, Amiga had out-of-the-box true preemptive multitasking.[2] But what good is it if the OS doesn't have quality libraries, toolkits, and primitives? As baroque and obscure as Inside Macintosh was for the Mac developer c. 1985, at least he had it as a resource, and at least the OS was sophisticated enough to justify such a baroque and obscure tome in the first place. And Atari TOS? Don't make me laugh.
[1] Yes, yes, Europeans, I know that Amiga and ST were much more successful across the Atlantic. That only meant that the PC takeover of the entire market just skipped the DOS era in Europe, as opposed to not happening at all.
[2] I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place
We surely had a DOS era in Europe, as the market was still big enough to have Amiga vs Atari vs PC.
What we skipped was a Mac's era in Europe, until Microsoft rescued Apple and OS X came to be.
In Portugal during the early 90's the only place I could touch a Mac was at the university campus and we had a single Apple reseller located in Lisbon for the whole country. Otherwise they were only present in foreign computer magazines.
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. It’s worth emphasising how vital Desktop Publishing was to the Mac’s early success. Before that, sales had struggled after the initial excitement of 1984.
> Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990
I was there and involved in that at Apple and elsewhere. It does not do justice to describe things this way, although the business people might be tempted to.
There are fundamental modes of communication between humans over millennia and more recently in the last 150 years. When voice was reproduced in a recording and passed further than the eye can see, you could say that was a "niche market".
more could be said, but in the environment of 1985-1990, print was the authoritative means of communication. The printing press including photo reproduction and printing techniques was being re-invented as a digital process.
> Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows.
AFAIK, the only part of AmigaOS that was "outsourced" was that they used TripOS as the base underlying DOS, but AFAIK Intuition and Workbench were all done in-house by Commodore engineers.
> I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place
AmigaOS is the entire package, AmigaDOS is the underlying DOS that everything else runs on top of. It doesn't really matter to anyone, however, except those actually doing low-level AmigaOS development
I consider myself a hardcore Amiga fan but I agree with you!
Even if Commodore hadn't killed the company through bad management alone they never would've survived selling computers with Workbench.
By the end they were selling machines that could pump out higher resolutions than before but still shipping them with fonts & a UI designed to look good on crappy television sets
I had been writing GEM applications on X86 before the Atari ST was released, the extra developer documentation for the ST wasn't up to the standard of Inside Macintosh but it was fine. You could also easily port command line UNIX applications to the ST as it had a flat address space.
Older Macs had a tight hardware-software integration, to the point of fuzzying RAM/ROM/HD/PRAM and System/firmware boundaries. User level routines where stored in the ROM, for example, and there was no real kernel to speak about.
I think Apple is coming back to that vey confusing model now with M1 macs needing their internal SSD to boot (effectively a part of the firmware) but a million times more complicated because of sheer code size and a giant security model
Yeah it was crazy, at one point in the mid-90's, they even had QuickTime burned into the ROM!
Eventually RAM was faster than ROM and starting with the first iMac they moved to having the classic MacOS ROM in a file that got loaded into RAM on boot.
> Instead of selling into the corporate offices of the Fortune 1000, Macintosh found a place among entrepreneurs, small business people, and people in the arts.
“I'm giving up on trying / to sell you things that you ain't buying.”
Apple had the credibility to do so in the first place, of course, because of its success with the Apple II. In turn, Mac's share of the market was minuscule compared to what the IBM PC had built around itself since 1981, as any comparison of PC/PC World/InfoWorld to the above Mac publications would have shown. But it was enough to survive for the long term. Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990, but it is a niche, and a reasonably defendable one; Amiga's desktop video niche was correspondingly much smaller, and ST never found one at all outside maybe music.[1]
I wrote "superior hardware", not "superior hardware and software". Not enough attention has been given to just how good classic Mac OS was from the beginning. The care given to both the UI and underlying architecture is obvious. Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows. Yes, Amiga had out-of-the-box true preemptive multitasking.[2] But what good is it if the OS doesn't have quality libraries, toolkits, and primitives? As baroque and obscure as Inside Macintosh was for the Mac developer c. 1985, at least he had it as a resource, and at least the OS was sophisticated enough to justify such a baroque and obscure tome in the first place. And Atari TOS? Don't make me laugh.
[1] Yes, yes, Europeans, I know that Amiga and ST were much more successful across the Atlantic. That only meant that the PC takeover of the entire market just skipped the DOS era in Europe, as opposed to not happening at all.
[2] I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place