The “Fat” Mac
On September 1984 Apple released the follow-up to the Macintosh, addressing one of the major complaints of potential buyers.
Sold for USD 3,300 (or 3200, according to some sources), the Macintosh 512K was nicknamed “Fat Mac” for its increased (four-fold) RAM memory but was otherwise identical to the original Macintosh, as one can see from the dual-purpose motherboards.
In an 1984 interview in Byte with three of the original designers of the Macintosh, Jef Raskin actually revealed that the expansion was planned since the beginning and wasn’t an afterthought.
At the question
You started with 64K bytes and it was released with 128K bytes, and there is constant talk of a half-megabyte Mac. When did a half megabyte creep into the design philosophy?
Raskin answered:
Very early on Burrell [Smith, the motherboard designer, nda] pointed out that it’s very easy to make a design, once you had the 68000 in place, where you could just take out 64K-bit chips and put in 256K-bit chips. I’ve always believed that you just simply take the largest chip that is economically feasible to use in terms of the memory, and if they’re bit-wide chips and you use 8 or 16 of them, then that should be the size of your memory. [...] Burrell loves designing for it, software part portion had no trouble handling that, and it was was very clean. When the 256K-bit chips come you just plug in all those and everything runs just about the same.
And things ran just about the same, but better: the 512k greatly improved application usage and even some operations helping avoid issues such as the “Disk Swapper’s Elbow”.
It was discontinued in April 1986, replaced by the 512Ke which had bigger ROMs (128K instead of 64) and used more capacious 800KB floppy disks.
The motherboard in the picture was gently provided by Maurizio Buso
Dylan sues Apple
In the summer of 1994 folk singer Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement.
The musician was seeking to bar the company from using his name in conjunction with any new software product.
Apple had in fact been developing a programming language derived from Scheme and Lisp and had called it ‘Dylan’.
It was created in the early 1990s and was originally intended for use with the Newton platform. Unfortunately the implementation did not reach sufficient maturity in time, and the development of the platform was instead done with a combination of C and NewtonScript, invented by Walter Smith.
The Dylan language internally was code-named Ralph and only later adopted its name, chosen by James Joaquin. It supposedly stood for “DYnamic LANguage”.
After Bob Dylan took legal action Apple was forced to reach a confidential out-of-court settlement to obtain the rights to trademark Dylan. The Cupertino company briefly released the language for 68k-based Macs in the fall of 1995, with a “technology release” version available (“Apple Dylan TR1″) that included an advanced IDE.
The same year Apple promptly abandoned the effort.
Fortunately the language has survived and is actively maintained by a group of volunteers, the Gwydion Maintainers.
During the Nineties two other parties contributed to the design of Dylan and developed their implementations. One was a commercial IDE for Microsoft Windows, done by Harlequin and the second was an open source compiler for Unix systems, done by Carnegie Mellon University. Both of these implementations are now open source and available online -as Open Dylan and Gwydion Dylan- for a variety of platforms thanks to the aforementioned Gwydion Maintainers.
The image of Bob Dylan is from the Apple ‘Think Different’ campaign and is taken from Red Light Runner Store.
The 68k->PPC transition and Snow Leopard: comparing apples to oranges
In “Snow Leopard: Party like it’s 1998″ there’s an attempt to quell the outcry of Mac users for Apple dropping PowerPC support in Snow Leopard by recalling the late Nineties transition from the Motorola 68×00 to the PPC machines.
It is a good and praiseworthy idea but unfortunately, in the description there are a couple of major inaccuracies which undermine the effort.
In the post it is stated that
On October 17, 1998 Apple released Mac OS 8.5, the first operating system that ran solely on Macintoshes with PowerPC processors. As far as system software upgrades go, this was the end of the line for any Mac built before the Power Macintosh 6100, introduced in March 1994. Earlier Macs ran on some variation of 680×0 processors and were supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment. Emulation works, but it also slows things down. By 1998, Apple decided it just couldn’t support 680X0 emulation for a number of reasons, but chiefly among them was speed.
The Mac OS 8.5 was surely the end of Mac based on the 68k family of processors, but Apple kept on making and selling machines based on this hardware platform long after the release of the Power Mac 6100 in March 1994.
Macs such as the PowerBook 280 and the Quadra/LC 630 were launched during 1994 and even the following year, in the April and August of 1995 Cupertino introduced non-PowerPC models such as The Performa 580 and the PowerBook 190cs.
And those Macs were not “supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment”. It was the way around: Macintoshes based on the PowerPC chips had to use emulation to be compatible with the (operating) System (which was later called Mac OS), which was still full of 68×000 code.
During the late Nineties Apple kept on slowly cleaning up the Mac OS code by “a PowerPC native, multi-threaded Finder” (does this ring a bell?) in Mac OS 8.0 and transitioning away from the old CISC CPUs by first limiting support to 68040 Macs with release 8.1.
Image taken from www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~schaelss/vintage/index.htm
From 25 to 75 millions users
At the WWDC 2009 Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Product Marketing, announced thatthe Macintosh has experienced an explosive growth and even more did the number of OS X users.
While in 2007 the number of active users of Apple’s operating system was at 25 millions in 2009 it had suddenly risen to 75 million. How could this be?
The secret to Apple’s tripling its active user base in the past two years is the runaway success of the iPhone platform. During the keynote presentation Schiller produced a chart showing the number of actual active OS X users, not just of Mac OS X users. It’s very important to strike the difference between those two terms: OS X and Mac OS X.
The growth isn’t just about Macs but it ows a lot to the many iPhones and iPod touchs sold so far, to be exact around 40 millions of the devices. Both have a version of the former Mac OS X and of its technologies and have thus incremented the market share of Apple’s operating system and key programs such as the web browser Safari.
Apple’s subtle path to thinnovation
On the 10th of May 1999, during the WorldWide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced the PowerBook G3 Lombard and Mac OS 8.6.
Although both have been overshadowed by other products (the Pismo and Mac OS 9), they nonetheless represent important steps in Apple’s hardware and software evolution.
One could argue that the search for “thinnovation” which brought us the MacBook Air in 2008 started with the Lombard, which is more powerful than the 1998 Wallstreet and yet 20% thinner. Mac OS 8.6 offered a similar breakthrough in extending the battery life of old and new portables, up to an incredible 5 hours and -using two batteries- even 10 hours of mobile productivity.
This is why at the MacDay, the annual gathering of italian Mac users near Bologna, on the 10th of May 2009 Storie di Apple celebrated the two products with a short presentation called “La sottile innovazione di Apple”.
Since I believe the slideshow sums up nicely the key points of the importance of the PowerBook G3 Lombard and of Mac OS 8.6 (which even had the beginnings of multithreading and protected memory), I created a translated version of the slideshow.
You can find it in the Stories of Apple Documents Archive from where you can freely view and download it in PDF format.
It’s a small experiment which -if appreciated- can and will be repeated in sharing information about the history of Apple, so please send feedback and comments.