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From: nabi@vax135.UUCP (Nabi Rafie)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Mac: The Past, The Present, and the Future
Message-ID: <1282@vax135.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Feb-86 01:59:06 EST
Article-I.D.: vax135.1282
Posted: Tue Feb  4 01:59:06 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Feb-86 01:56:59 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ
Lines: 67

I have been an Apple user eversince woz introduced his creation back in the
late 70's. There were times when I drank,ate and slept my Apple ][ (just
like some other people out there). I learned Basic, Pascal, C and Forth, all
on the ][. I did practically all of my computing work on it, not to mention
all those sleepness night playing games, figuring out tricks and so forth.
I enjoyed it a great deal. Everybody knew what was inside the ][, it had slots
so I could interface to whatever I pleased and it was a pretty reliable 
machine. Those were the days. I still have my ][, and will never sell it either.

Next came the first big flop, the Apple III. I never had one, but used one
quite regularly. I will not go into details, but to put it very mildly, it was
a bad design, disaster perhaps might be a more appropriate word !

You could by now tell that the company was being run by a bunch of screwball
businessmen that didn't know their head from a hole in the ground. It used to 
be that the company was built around a true dream. Two guys that wanted to
share something exciting with the rest of the world. I don't know what happened
to Apple around that time, but it was swinging towards IBM style of management;
a style that is quite evident in IBM's brilliant innovative product, namely
their PC, running the incredible operating system (MS-DOS). Talk about the
Stone Ages !

Anyhow, Apple's new directors (eggheads !) decided to go for the business end
of the market. Ok. So they go ahead and plan a five year project, spend a
hefty sum of about 5 million dollars (if I'm not mistaken) and they actually 
come up with a micro that is far ahead of its time. We all of course know
the price tag Apple put on their LISA's. With a price like $10,000, the only
people who would even be able to contemplate on a LISA would be
business people that had some extra cash they didn't know what to do with. 
The LISA idea was brilliant, the use of windows, menus, the mouse, desktop,
etc. etc. etc. is all brilliant, absolutely magnificent; if one could afford
it !  So now Apple had built machines, perhaps 5 to 10 years ahead of their 
time, that wouldn't sell. They eventually lowered the price a little bit but 
nowhere near affordable (for most of us). Meanwhile all the original and true
Apple owners and fans were eagerly waiting for some miracle to happen before
they were all forced to buy IBM's. Somehow, somewhere the microLISA was spawned
and thus we have the Mac. The Mac was an attempt to make all this new 
wonderful technology available to the rest of humanity ! A bold and successful
move not on Apple's part, but on the five guys' who still had the original
Apple vision clear in their minds. None of this business market bullshit. 

So now everybody is using a Mac. Apple (thanks god I hope) realized the 
futility of the LISA and tried saving it by introducing MacXL; a terrible
decision (whoever made it, if you are listening, were you smoking something
that day ? or are you like that everyday ?). The Mac is a good machine besides
its awfully large screen. Everything has been dandy so far until the intro of
the new Mac+ with a new file system. What I want to know is that how long
and how much time, money and effort will have to be spent trying to make
pre-Mac+ software to work on the Mac+. There are Macs out there with 4 meg
ram and very large capacity drives. Why should they bother upgrading ? and to 
what ? A newer and better file system ? that doesn't work with probably most
of the software already out there ? I perhaps appreciate Apple for trying to
revive the true Apple style, but I'm afraid there are a lot of very flaky
people at Apple making some very serious mistakes. What about all the
LISA owners. They will have to spend another $1500 to get a micro that is
supported or else die of loneliness out there. However, the Mac is slowly
growing towards a LISA type of configuration. I suspect (from the rumors) that
Apple's next intro will have color, FP coprocessor, faster & more capable 68020,
maybe some sort of a memory-management support.

All in all, Apple seems to be swinging back into shape again, as soon as they 
figure out how to deal with all the complaints about the new file system
headaches !