Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!kelvin
From: kelvin@cs.utexas.edu (Kelvin Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac pricing and the future of the Mac
Summary: it *was* a useful product
Message-ID: <5091@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 89 18:44:16 GMT
References: <12101@reed.UUCP> <1082@lts.UUCP> <11317@ut-emx.UUCP> <1084@lts.UUCP> <11346@ut-emx.UUCP>
Distribution: usa
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 45

In article <11346@ut-emx.UUCP>, mentat@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Robert Dorsett) writes:
| 
| >  The Macintosh was originally sold as a CONCEPT--with neither the
| >  software or hardware being adequate to support that concept.
| >
| >Bullshit.  Nothing is sold as a concept (aside, perhaps, from real
| >estate scams :-)).  The Mac was and is sold as a product.  There was
| >and is a concept behind the product, and that concept *still* isn't
| >fully realized, but that's a separate issue.
| 
| No, NOT bullshit, Amanda.  The TRUTH.  The Macintosh was marketed on its
| concept.  I have dozens of magazine articles, ranging from the Wall Street
| Journal to St. Mac, which make a great deal of the CONCEPT of the Macintosh.
| I must emphasize this point, since the architecture itself was not usable--
| certainly not by PC standards.  If Apple's own marketing figures are to be 
| believed, at least 100,000 users were stuck with using MacWrite, MultiPlan,
| Habadex, and MS-BASIC for at least nine months--and it actually took as long
| as a year and a half to get some good software.

Well, I was one of those 100,000 users and I found it "useable," whether
or not by "PC standards".  I used a Mac 128 with two floppy drives and an
an Imagewriter to do a 100-page, 20-figure Masters thesis.  True, I had
to partition the thesis into 7-page segments, I eventually had to
give up on merging graphics into MacWrite, and I had to do a lot of
floppy swapping and waiting on Finder....  It certainly would have been
nice to have done it a few years later on a Mac II with a hard disk and
MultiFinder, but I had an October 1984 deadline.  Given the constraints --
fall of 1984, writing a thesis (with figures), my spending power -- the
Mac 128 was the best thing around.  (Plus I had MacTerminal and a modem.)

Screw whatever "concepts" the ads had, the machine was worth the money.

| To this day, I have difficulty understanding why the Mac 128 was not
| released with at least a high-speed hard disk interface.

I have no difficulty:  Apple had to make some design and marketing 
compromises.  The same reason it had 128K instead of 512K of RAM.

| Robert Dorsett
| Internet: mentat@walt.cc.utexas.edu
| UUCP: ...cs.utexas.edu!walt.cc.utexas.edu!mentat

-- 
-- Kelvin Thompson, Lone Rider of the Apocalypse
   kelvin@cs.utexas.edu  {...,uunet}!cs.utexas.edu!kelvin