sauron@sciences.sdsu.edu (Dwayne Johnson) (07/10/90)
Hello,
I am working on a historiography project about the Macintosh. The idea is
to trace the how people thought about the machine from conceptualization to
its status today as the prefered machine of many people. What I am looking
for is:
A) Primary sources
Literature/Documents/memos/etc. outlining some of the ideas and
possible uses for the Mac. This would most likely have to come
from within Xerox or Apple, however if someone could point me
toward contacts, I'd be most appreciative.
B) Secondary sources
Any good books reviewing the Macintosh and its usefulness. I'm
aware that there there are thousands of articles in magazines on
the subject, and I'm currently wading through them. If you would
like to suggest places to look, this too would be helpful.
(Assume I just fell from the sky....take me to your Mac info...)
C) Thoughts/comments
I'm also interested in how the user community feels about the
Mac, its development, and its futur.
When I'm finished researching what the different philosophies of the mac
are, I'm hoping to write a short history on the subject. I must admit that
I was never a big fan of the Mac. Having made my living in systems
programming and communications, I used to regard the Mac as a "quaint
little toy" that I swore I'd never use. As you may have guessed, I'm typing
this message on a Mac. The Mac is my machine of preference whenever
I find myself writing, I wouldn't dream of using anything else.
I appreciate any and all replies, even those who just want to drop me
a line and say hi (variety, ya know!).
Thanks in Advance...
Dwayne
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dwayne Johnson | Hold on to the Great Image
Internet: sauron@sciences.sdsu.edu | and the world will come to you.
Bitnet: sauron@calstate.Bitnet | -- Lao Tzu
------------------------------------------------------------------------boris@world.std.com (Boris Levitin) (07/16/90)
sauron@sciences.sdsu.edu (Dwayne Johnson) writes: > I am working on a historiography project about the Macintosh. The idea is >to trace the how people thought about the machine from conceptualization to >its status today as the prefered machine of many people. What I am looking >for is: [...] > sources > thoughts/comments > I'm also interested in how the user community feels about the > Mac, its development, and its future. Dwayne: I am merely a user and the only "inside" stuff I know about the development of the Mac I read in the industry press (early copies of MacWorld and MacUser are particularly helpful; there you'll find things like complaints that the doctrinaire pro-mouse approach omitted cursor arrow keys from the original Mac's keyboard, forcing users to leave the keyboard every time they wanted to change their text entry point) and the following books, which I list in order of usefulness (all published within the last year and a half): * West of Eden, by Frank Rose (the _A Current Affair_ of Macdom) * The Macintosh Way, by Guy Kawasaki (his definition of a product which conforms to the Macintosh Way, i.e. a good product, although a tad elitist - because it assumes the user is wealthy and dumb and should not be forced to bear any responsibility for the maintenance of the product he buys - is in principle correct, and explains why DOS and DOS programs are the anti- theses of a good product) * The Third Apple, by Jean-Louis Gassee (curiously, although JLG has until recently been the main pusher at Apple of such neat stuff that they do do, this book is more about computers and their promise in general than about the Mac. Also keep in mind that while the Mac was being developed, Gassee was far away physically (France) and spiritually (head of Exxon Office Systems' French operation; they were a maker of truly clunky dedicated word-processors and similar useless junk). I'm going to volunteer my view of what makes the Mac great, for what it's worth. After all, regardless of the who and how of the Mac's birth, it's users like us who make the Mac a real force of progress and not just a forgotten toy for "true believers" like the Amiga. The point of a personal computer is to facilitate personal productivity. Writing and editing, keeping track of sales figures and graphing them neatly so your loan officer might be favorably impressed by your business's growing revenues, publishing a newsletter for your customers, etc. However, contemporary computers seem easy to use only when compared to their key-punch predecessors (in fact, the people who have mastered the complex and arcane ways these machines are run tend to feel that the ability to make their machines work gives them elder-priest status, and condescend to mere users). If you happen not to be one of those priests, using the average computer would almost detract from your productivity, unless you're doing something really massive or repetitive. I have used most major systems that are out there, from CMS on IBM 3090 mainframes to Unix on minis to CP/M on DEC Rainbows to DOS, and, though I have steeled myself to accept their complexity and learn their secrets (both because I had no choice and because I didn't want to admit failure) using them was never fun; they always left a bad taste in my mouth. And I say that as someone who is certainly not a computophobe (in fact, people who've never met real computer wizards frequently misapply that term to me). The Mac is great because it is the first mass-produced computer which is simple enough to use so that it significantly enhances the productivity of the *average* user. A friend of mine put it best: "The Mac is the first computer I did not want to throw out the window." I once watched on C-SPAN a hearing of Joe Biden's congressional subcommittee on narcotics; testifying was a guy who once was deputy head of the Medellin Cartel's Southwest U.S. distribution region; he was now in the Witness Protec- tion Program and speaking from inside a guarded booth. He said the U.S. anti-drug efforts failed because they were not all-encompassing, and the Colombians realized that: when the U.S. would stop cocaine-carrying boats, the shippers would start using planes. The interdiction would then shift to the air, and boats could once again get through. Every U.S. effort would be at the expense of another U.S. effort. Well, the Mac was great because it was born with all the ease-of-use qualities, not just one or two (which would have been ignored by the public): from the start, it was plug-and-play (real hackers who remember the bad old days of writing their own system software may sneer all they want, but the fact is that most people don't find the words CONFIG.SYS romantic and are unashamed of that fact). From the start, it was run by simple commands, which were right on the menus in front of you and not just in some 500-page manual that your cat probably has already eaten; you didn't have to deal with the command prompt, which to normal people seems like Alladin's lamp, which will be at your service if you can find the correct thing to do to it, of which you have no clue. From the start, you could perform simple file- management operations in an intuitive way. From the start, you could learn the basic functions of almost all programs by learning the basic functions of one. From the start, programs were expected to accept each other's data (via the clipboard). From the start, you could do a lot of useful stuff in a program without ever looking at the manual. From the start, what you saw was reasonably like what you got. From the start, the system looked and felt accessible (want to go from document 1 to document 2? Just click on the other document's window. Try figuring out how to switch between two documents in, say, a DOS word-processor - any one. Want to cut some text out of a document and paste it elsewhere? Select it with the mouse and choose the familiar CUT command from the familiar EDIT menu, the same in every program. Try attaching a mouse to an IBM PC, much less finding a program that would work with it...) The Mac had all those necessary innovations from the start, and it was the the only micro to have them. It became successful primarily because it was designed from the point of view of, with the understanding of, a real live user -- that lowest form of life in the computer world, that engineers and programmers rarely think about, and yet the one that all microcomputer makers count on to make their machines successful. I hate to sound exactly like Apple's advertising ("The Computer for the Rest of Us"), but it's true. I know, the original 128k machine was too weak to pick its own nose. I know, it had just two programs, neither very good. I know, you couldn't plug-and- play a letter-quality printer, and while the ImageWriter was the first printer in personal use which delivered WYSIWIG, its output looked amateurish and "computerlike." I know, all these things remained true for the first couple of years of the Mac's existence, especially the shortage of serious programs, and hence it earned the "toy" label. I know, it was ridiculously expensive. Some cranky DOS survivalists still think of the Mac as a toy (they remind me of these Japanese who only recently finally gave up on World War II, and surrendered in Malaysia). Well, the Mac has survived, and now has the best software (in fact, since Open Look and Motif systems now provide as much user-friendliness and more power, it is the large amount of software that doesn't just run but is "Mac-like", i.e. takes adavntage of the Mac's graphical interface, that keeps the Mac in play against GUI-running Unix boxes in the higher-end market). The fastest Mac, the IIfx, is faster than the fastest 486 machine. PostScript is affordable and as plug-and-play as everything else (try using PostScript on a DOS machine), many lower-cost alternatives exist and a second formal standard, cheaper than PS, is about to be introduced by Apple (TrueType). And the price of a Mac is now often under a thousand dollars more than that of a DOS machine with comparable power, and is about to plunge farther than ever when Apple releases the new low-cost models in October and January (although how do you compare a Mac, which the average person can use, to a DOS machine, which the average person can't make sense of? The Mac is far more useful, and cannot be evaluated on the same price scale. You don't measure Hamburger Helper on the same scale as smoked salmon). I am not the sort of person who gets sentimental towards things like computers. I will not cry when my current computer is replaced by a faster, better one, possibly even a Unix GUI system. I'm also willing to recognize that Apple, the corporate entity, is one of the least customer-friendly of major computer companies (the "back to the dealer" approach makes me want to strangle them), and that the original work was done by Xerox PARC, Apple merely bringing to market what Xerox, in its monumental incompetence, didn't. Still, the fact is the Mac was the first computer out there that users could use. The DOS world is just now beginning to catch up (and not doing too well). Unless someone rewrites history, in technology museums centuries from now the Mac will always have its rightful place as the microcomputer which started making computing accessible to all; not because of its volume (DOS machines still have nine times as large an installed base), but because computers will not become accessible to all until they incorporate the pro-user innovations introduced by the Mac. Guy Kawasaki in his book compares computing to driving. Both are difficult. Both make our lives easier. Driving has spread when the degree to which it makes our lives easier exceeded the extent of its difficulty (if you still had to walk out of your car and fire a shotgun in warning at every intersection, crank the car manually risking being run over, drive at a maximum of 10 mph, and pay several years' wages for the thing in the first place, I bet you wouldn't be driving your own car). So will computing. The Mac is the only computer that makes people addicted to it -- people who use it at work and change their workplace to a company where they don't get one often buy one. It's the only computer people really want (as opposed to feel that they need it). With good reason. In my job at the audience research department of a major national broadcaster, I collect information from many sources and analyze it many different ways. I use a wide variety of programs and have a large number of needs. The look of my output is critical, and so is the speed with which I produce it. The Mac is responsible for 75% of my efficiency -- I say that from experience. It makes assembling and manipulating the data easy enough (although not transparent, as it should be) to allow me to concentrate on doing what I'm paid for and what I like -- think about what these data mean. I owe the Mac the opportunity to be creative (I know, I sound like another Apple ad... "The Power to be Your Best." At least I've said nothing that is reminiscent of the helocar). While the Mac does need minding (I'd say increasingly so in recent years, although System 7 will do much to reverse this trend) and in that it's not ideal, it does reflect the belief that computers should serve people and not vice-versa. I do have spend probably almost a week a year "supporting" the Mac, time I'd rather spend in other ways, but when I sit down in front of it to do my work, I do not sense the millstone of ennui d'ordinateur around my neck that non-hacking users of other systems invariably feel. Remember, in Orwell's _1984_, Winston Smith's obsession with old artifacts made in England before it became Oceania? Well, the Mac is one such credit to the capitalist system: a deep, thoughtful, masterfully executed product. It is all the more appreciated because it competes almost exclusively with machines bearing the Victory brand name. I hope this has been helpful. Good luck in your writing. Boris Levitin WGBH Public Broadcasting boris@world.std.com Audience Research wgbh@harvarda.harvard.edu The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily coincide in whole or in part with those of my employer.