Thirty years ago, when we celebrated the Mac’s tenth birthday, I wrote an article for the long-dead magazine, The Mac, in which I recounted some of its early history, and looked ahead to what I expected it to be ten years later. Here it is.

Happy Birthday to the Mac, ten years young and ready to party. Howard Oakley breaks out the champagne.

1984: The year of Big Brother, the year of the first Mac. The first time you saw it, you knew it was special. While IBM’s PCs were ugly and angular, the Mac was small and rounded, its screen built-in. But it was how you used it and how it looked on screen that was astounding. No text on a green screen monster this, responding only to keyed in commands. Instead there was the mouse, used to navigate you around a graphical desktop, through the Finder’s icons, menus and windows. If you had been using DOS, or even CP/M, and had grown used to typing in commands like PIP and CHKDSK, the first time you copied a file from, or to, one of those neat 3.5in floppies just by picking it up and moving it, was amazing.

Inevitably, there were hardly any applications around – MacWrite and MacPaint were about it, and they arrived late and buggy. But compared to what had existed – early versions of IBM’s Displaywrite, for example – they were truly revolutionary. At last, it was possible to sit down and work your way through an illustrated document without typing a single command, or using weird key commands. And what you saw was very close to what you got from the Imagewriter dot-matrix printer, in different fonts, and with pictures where you wanted them.

Launched into a world where most desktop computers could not use graphics and were driven by function keys and commands with all the charm of Vinnie Jones, the upstart Mac was so radically different that reactions were mixed to say the least. Apple had been struggling to produce a successor to the enormously popular Apple II, which had long dominated all bar the corporate sector in the US. The stop-gap Apple III had been an outstanding failure in almost every respect, and Macintosh’s better-funded relative, Lisa, was too expensive to appeal to much of the market.

But Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple with Steve Wozniak, had been pursuing a personal vision which resulted in the 1984 launch of the Macintosh. At first, the Mac had been a small and feeble rival project to the ambitious and prodigiously expensive development of the Lisa. Whilst the Mac eventually succeeded, the Lisa ended its life as the Macintosh XL, later to become the bulk of many land-fill sites.

Jobs and other key Apple personnel had seen glimpses of the future in the work being undertaken at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs, pronounced ‘gooeys’) were being developed. Although Xerox’s work was offered commercially, in their Dandelion systems for example, it was clearly not being developed into the mass market products which Jobs felt were feasible.

Jobs had wanted to run the division responsible for developing the Lisa, but he was shut out and driven to the five-person Macintosh team hidden away in an annexe. There, he mutated the Lisa concept – a graphical computer which was easy to use – into that of the Mac, which was intended to be the computer ‘for the rest of us’. This was a personal mission for him, and proved to be one on which Apple’s future would depend.

After a stuttering start, the early Macs consolidated their position as the only affordable and usable computer with a graphical interface. Their initial woeful lack of memory, hard disks, applications and almost everything else that was essential, were gradually eased. The bugs in the System software were fixed, and maturity brought additional features like the Switcher, which enabled you to keep more than one application in memory at once, although it was still a far cry from Multifinder or System 7.

By then end of 1984, the Fat Mac had ensured Apple’s survival, as well as being the first really practical Macintosh model. As the XL faded sadly into history, the addition of the first LaserWriter printer coupled with Aldus PageMaker resulted in the coining of the term ‘desktop publishing’. The first compelling business reason for owning a Mac had appeared.

The first Mac owners were enthusiasts. They braved much pain in their pursuit of the Mac ideal – shuffling handfuls of disks through the single disk drive, dreaming of a 20Mb hard drive; repeatedly restarting the machine and salvaging damaged files when it crashed yet again; searching for suppliers of those unique Mac cables; endlessly waiting for products like Lotus 1-2-3, which, well, just never came. Little by little, the Mac reached professionals, students, the design world, publishing, even the corporates (although for years they were largely confined to maverick departments, such as design and publishing). Early applications tended to exploit graphics capabilities rather than following the mould of spread- sheets and accounts as on the IBM PC.

Mac developers grew reputations as radically individual as the machine, although they too faced unprecedented difficulties. At first, the only way to develop for the Mac was on the Lisa, but later Apple and third party suppliers started to offer rudimentary tools for the Mac itself. Documentation was very limited, and some built healthy businesses on programs which enabled developers to look through the ROM, to discover new facilities which were there for them to use.

As IBM PCs became more deeply embedded in the accounts departments of major corporates, Mac users assumed the role of a revolutionary opposition, wooing those in the PC-based ‘establishment’ to join them as if it were a political or even religious act.

Even the strongest of Apple’s critics were forced to admit that the Mac was changing the face of computing.

Future Perfect

What do the next ten years offer, asks Howard Oakley.

Although today’s Mac is much more accessible than the first 128K machine, Steve Jobs’ vision of the computer ‘for the rest of us’ is still not fully realised. Even the latest Duos are unwieldy compared to the new technology embodied in the MessagePad. The Mac of the future will combine the best of both.

The first area to see substantial change is that of input devices and control. Although speech recognition will be standard (and of much better performance than is currently available), it will always have limitations in many environments such as an open-plan office with a great deal of background noise.

Similarly, the mouse is unlikely to vanish altogether. Instead there will be a ‘virtual mouse’ in which hand movements and gestures within a local electromagnetic field will control the Mac. Such systems are already being used in labs, eliminating the mechanical restrictions of the mouse, but retaining its excellent level of control.

It’s also tempting to suggest that keyboards will be unusual. However, in Western languages at least, written communication remains essential for many purposes, and keyboards are the most efficient means of entering large quantities of text. Neither is it likely that more fanciful systems, such as those driven by brain waves, will have reached maturity in the next ten years, although they will come much closer. The pen, thanks to Newton, will be an alternative means of entering text and graphics.

Output systems are also going to change considerably. The trend will be towards A4 and larger, flat (and thin) high-resolution-colour liquid crystal displays, which can be stood up on a desk rather as you might place a framed family photograph. Expect resolutions to reach the 120 dots per inch mark, and quality to surpass the excellence of today’s PowerBook 180c.

Hard copy will be much less important – most information will be transmitted electronically and viewed on screen. The few laser printers left will be very compact and offer 600 dpi colour at low cost.

Most difficult to foresee are trends in the human interface. Greater integration of communications, more use of direct manipulation and the universal use of semi-intelligent ‘agents’ are all likely, although the basics of windows, icons and menus will probably not be surpassed. Agents and intuitive scripting systems will combine to make the customisation of applications much easier – the sort of integration that would now require several days or weeks of a professional programmer’s time should be open to all users.

Lessons learned in the Newton and subsequent projects will result in ‘component’ Macs, in which the main system box is smaller than the MessagePad, and contains a built-in colour screen. This will be used on its own when travelling, but can then be connected to the flat colour screen, virtual mouse, keyboard and storage as desired.

Integrated communications are also inevitable, so that wireless telephone, fax and electronic mail connections will be the norm for those travelling with the central computer module.

Given the much greater processor power, and all these wonderful facilities, traditional applications will grow new capabilities. And semi-intelligent ‘agents’ will be able to second-guess what you want to do next, preparing your Macintosh for it. They will also enable you to indicate goals which they will then help you achieve. For instance, you might say that you want to update some figures, reformat the table in which they appear, put that into a letter, and mail it electronically to your colleagues. Rather than having to work through this step by step, or write a script, you will sketch out a flow chart, and then leave the agent to get on with the work. A true personal assistant.

First published in The Mac, January 1994. Launched in June 1993, this was a sister to the British MacUser magazine. Together with its editor Eugene Lacey, I was responsible for writing much of its early issues. It sadly failed to capture sufficient market, and died quietly after its first glorious year. You can see the whole of this feature here on the Internet Archive.