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Some responses re Lisa/Mac
by Thomas Haigh 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

What an interesting set of replies. Good job SIGCIS! I'll respond to many of these points, but group them into a single message to avoid spamming you. (People who like clean inboxes: remember there is a digest mode available!). First off, this whole question would probably amount to one or two paragraphs in the project I'm working on. Like many aspects of personal computer history, it seems like there ought to be a rich secondary literature to draw on by now, but instead we're still reliant on classic journalistic accounts like Mortiz, Cringely, and Levy. Paul is right: of course I meant Macintosh II, not Apple II. Even the most contrarian historian would have to admit that the Apple II was good for Apple, at least initially. Jobs as industrial designer/emulator of Land. Interest points. As Mahoney liked to say, including his article on the importance of historical metaphor to the rhetoric of software engineering, nothing is unprecedented. But the actor's choice of precedent has very important implications for their actions. Industrial design is important here, and perhaps he'd rather have a box that captures his ideas and doesn't sell than a clunky one that does sell. OTOH, he was a patron and abuser of industrial designers rather than a designer in his own right. Some of the responses remind me that there were many other 68000 based machines in the mid-1980s, beyond the Mac and Lisa. Early Sun and Apollo workstations created a viable niche for graphics workstations. They, IIRC, had similar specs to the Lisa and were if anything more expensive - but targeted technical computing niches. This also points out the importance of expectations and business models. Lisa is called a failure because it only sold 100,000 units in two years, as Apple was expected to sell large volumes for mainstream business use. If a workstation startup had sold 100,000 units it would have been seen as hugely successful. For example, in 3Q 1985 Apollo, then the leading workstation firm, had revenues of about $55 million. That would be about 5,500 Lisas at the $10K launch price. So I suspect that in 1983, $10K is what it a powerful 32-bit networked graphics workstation had to sell for, and the problem was that Apple (and Xerox with the Star) were targeting the markets that couldn't yet support that price tag. Also, in the case of Apple at least, it didn't have the culture or sales machine to effectively target the market it chose. Some companies made comparable hardware more cheaply - most notably Atari in the "power without the price" days of the Atari ST (launched 1985, as Mac-like hardware was getting cheaper to build). This was cheaper than the Mac, added color graphics, and even had the hard drive port that the Mac was missing. It didn't sell at all well in the US, except to musicians who liked the midi ports, but was fairly popular in Britain, particularly with enthusiasts. I had one, and as Morten pointed out Apple was just too expensive for personal users in Europe. In Germany it was widely used by small businesses. The biggest problem was probably the cheap and dirty operating system - a Mac knockoff called GEM with a version of CPM underneath. This points to the importance and difficulty of OS development. The workstations tended to use UNIX-derived systems, which reduced the burden of development. In terms of hardware, the Lisa was as I understand basically a Mac with a bigger screen, networking, and a hard drive. It's the focus of the OS on personal interaction that makes them more profoundly different. Also, as Hansen mentions, the success of Apple in gaining third party application support, including PageMaker, which Cringely used to define the concept of a "killer app" (i.e. something you'd buy a Mac Plus, a hard drive, and a LaserWriter just to run). Although that particular combo must have cost as much as a Lisa, and surely a successful Lisa would have been at least as well placed to win adoption for desktop publishing. It is, however, an example of an application that couldn't run effectively on a DOS PC. Another 68000 machine, the Amiga, found success in video production. That leads us to the importance, as Kimon suggested, of taking the "fan" side of Apple seriously, in as much as something in the design and personality of the Mac did inspire a loyal following. That's borne out by Justin's memory of the students loving the underpowered little Macs. So maybe Jobs deserves credit for that - hard to separate out the perversity and the brilliance of the original Mac. In the big picture it's clear that all these 68000 based GUI machines of the mid-1980s were looking for viable niches, in part because straight forward spreadsheet and word-processing still ran faster and more cheaply on IBM compatibles. The GUI added a lot of overhead. So maybe it's inevitable that the mainstream standard of the 1980s would be something like the PC. OTOH, people in the industry at the time expected GUIs and multitasking OSes to become mainstream sooner or later. If Apple could have successfully established the Lisa as a high end business platform and moved it down-market later that would probably have given it a better shot at taking on the dominance of the PC in the late 1980s than its actual course of establishing the Mac as with enthusiasts and education markets and trying to move it upwards into the business mainstream. Best wishes, Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] In Memory of Harry Huskey
by Brian L. Stuart 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

It is a sad day indeed. Dr. Huskey was one of the most influential, yet least known of the early pioneers. In addition to his work on the ENIAC, the Pilot ACE, the SWAC, and the Bendix G-15 were all designed or influenced by him. As mentioned in the memorial statement, one of his PhD students was Wirth. In addition, one of his master's students was Ken Thompson. If I'm not mistaken, Dr. Huskey was the last living member of any of the pre-industry computer development teams. I cannot help but feel that this marks the passing of the founding generation of our field and the end of an era. BLS -------------------------------------------- On Fri, 4/14/17, Brian Berg <brianberg(a)gmail.com> wrote: In Memory Of Harry Huskey COMPUTER PIONEER AND FOUNDING UC SANTA CRUZ FACULTY MEMBER ...

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History of computer advertising
by Enrico Natale 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Dear list members, For an article I’m writing I am interested in the history of computer adverts in newspapers (1955-1995), but I am having a hard time to find literature on the topic. Maybe some of you could suggest me some literature on computer advertising ? Also, I would be interested to find collections of computer adverts, possibly digitized and accessible online. Any suggestions ? Best, Enrico Natale

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Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
by Thomas Haigh 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Hello SIGCIS, I'm looking for your opinions. I'm currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I'm facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world's most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley's Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer - but tech wasn't ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs' "reality distortion field" to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn't get real multitasking and other "grown up" OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs' hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn't officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn't sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn't be compatible, and it's clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it's chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the "grown up" managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs' success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I'm still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
by Morten Bay 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

Tom, this is a great and underexplored subject. I would only add a couple of points to consider if you haven't already: - International markets. The Apple computers were far less succesful or subject to the same veneration in continental Europe as they were in the U.S. I think there are some interesting cultural differences to be considered there, including language and pride in locally developed products (Olivetti?) - Also consider the trajectory of micros. There was a generation who grew up with the micros in the 80s and the free flow of pirated games and software in that market. I'm part of that generation, and for many of us, the closed Apple ecosystem was not a natural successor when we left the C64s and the ZX Spectrums. The Commodore Amigas and Ataris that came out as a continuation of the microcomputer wave served as bridges to the PC platform, rather than to where Apple was at the time. Looking forward to reading what comes out of your research. Morten From: Thomas Haigh Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 1:18 PM Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple ashot at market leadership? To: members(a)sigcis.org Hello SIGCIS, I’m looking for your opinions. I’m currently working on a project that involves coming up with a coherent overall narrative of the development of the modern PC. One question I’m facing is how to treat the Mac, in particular whether its development was a huge blunder by Apple. This gets into some classic questions about the role of the individual in driving history. Steve Jobs left life prematurely, but having led the one of the greatest corporate comebacks in history. He snagged the Isaacson biography, and is going to be a fixture of high school textbooks, lists of great innovators and managers, etc. Apple is the world’s most profitable corporation. Back in the early 1990s he had a very different reputation having been fired by Apple, failed at NeXT, and seen Apple slide towards bankruptcy without him. The narrative in books such as Cringley’s Accidental Empires is that Jobs killed the Lisa division out of spite and jealously. Lisa, which shipped in 1983, was a big expensive ($10,000 incl. hard drive) business-oriented computer with GUI, mouse, etc., a hard disk, multitasking, built in networking, etc. Jobs was feverishly devoted to the idea of a small, cheap computer – but tech wasn’t ready to produce a cheap computer with a functional GUI. So the team finished up with a small, fairly expensive ($3,000 with a second floppy drive) computer from which expansion slots, a hard drive interface, networking capabilities, etc. were deliberately omitted. According to Cringely, even the ability to solder new chips to upgrade the RAM from 128K (useless) to 512K (skimpy) only made its way into the product by hiding it from Jobs. The Mac sold badly, only starting to take off after Jobs was fired and engineers could start to add the missing features. In 1986 Apple launched the Mac Plus two years later, which finally had 1MB of RAM and a hard drive interface. In 1987 the Apple II added expansion slots and networking, but cost around $7K for a full system. The counterfactual version of history would involve Apple sticking with Lisa, working to boost performance and gradually broaden its base from higher end niches to general business use, only pitching it for home use when costs came down enough to offer a 1MB machine for a few thousand dollars. That could presumably have yielded something like an Apple II long before 1987, during the crucial period in IBM compatible machines were locking up the market. This would have given Apple an installed user base earlier, and credibility in the mainstream business market that the Mac never had. (According to Wikipedia, early work on the Apple II was done in secret, because Jobs would have killed it if he knew). Mac fans may at this point towards the famous engineering work done by the original Mac team, under the influence of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” to make hand code the OS, BIOS, etc. in an incredibly efficient way, to make it run faster than Lisa and work at all on a computer with only 128KB of RAM. Which is true, but arguably a bad long term move since IIRC it was hard to port this code to larger processors, bigger screens, etc. Without the mandate to launch a 128KB GUI computer in the first place all that could have been avoided. The Mac didn’t get real multitasking and other “grown up” OS features until 2001, whereas Lisa already had them and its sluggishness would have dwindled with faster processors and code optimization. The other objection might be that Lisa was just so slow and flaky, that it earned Jobs’ hatred, and that Apple was right to abandon it (which didn’t officially happen until 1985). According to Wikipedia its OS struggled to run the bundled apps and it didn’t sell particularly well. But it also mentions Jobs telling potential customers not to buy Lisa because the Mac was the future and wouldn’t be compatible, and it’s clear that the disruptions inside Apple cause by his setting up of a rival group would have distracted people from efforts to improve Lisa. So should we conclude that Jobs and the Macintosh cost Apple it’s chance of being a dominant force in the late-1980s PC market? Early-1990s observers looking back on this era were more sympathetic to the “grown up” managers trying to run Apple like a real company, focused on business customers, etc. rather than the immature Jobs. Since Jobs’ success on his return to Apple put him in the pantheon of visionaries and great managers, more recent observers have been more sympathetic to his imposition of a strong, consumer focused vision in defiance of conventional opinion. It worked with the iPhone, but I’m still inclined to say that he nearly sank Apple with the Macintosh. Thoughts? Pointers to sources? Tom

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Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Counterfactual history: Did the Mac cost Apple a shot at market leadership?
by Brian L. Stuart 27 Apr '17

27 Apr '17

On Wed, 4/26/17, Hansen Hsu <hansnhsu(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I think the Lisa is really the wrong machine to imagine this > counterfactual. I tend to agree. It's always been an interesting question to me what would have happened had Raskin's original Mac vision had Jobs' support and marketing behind it. I tend to think it would have been a really interesting machine. Of course, we know it did see the light of day in a way in the form of the Canon Cat. But what would a Jobs supported version have looked like, and would it have been a good transition to a later, higher performance machine? Though, I should point out that my interest isn't so much about market share and sales volume. I'm thinking more from the perspective of an engineer and programmer who would have been interested in playing with and programming such a machine. BLS

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REMINDER: Computer History Museum Prize - Deadline May 15, 2017
by Jason Gallo 26 Apr '17

26 Apr '17

Dear Colleagues - This is a reminder that nominations for the Computer History Museum Book Prize is open. The postmark deadline is May 15. Details are below and at http://www.sigcis.org/chmprize. The Computer History Museum Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding book in the history of computing broadly conceived, published during the prior three years. The prize of $1,000 is awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society. SIGCIS is part of the Society for the History of Technology. In 2012 the prize was endowed in perpetuity through a generous bequest from the estate of Paul Baran, a legendary computer innovator and entrepreneur best known for his work to develop and promote the packet switching approach on which modern networks are built. Baran was a longtime supporter of work on the history of information technology and named the prize to celebrate the contributions of the Computer History Museum to that field. *2017 Call for Submission* Books published in 2014-2016 are eligible for the 2017 award. Books in translation are eligible for three years following the date of their publication in English. Publishers, authors, and other interested members of the computer history community are invited to nominate books. Please note that books nominated in previous years may be nominated again, provided they have been published in the timeframes specified above. Send one copy of the nominated title to each of the committee members listed below, with a postmark no later than May 15, 2017. For more information, please contact Jason Gallo <jgallo(a)ida.org>, SIGCIS Vice Chair for Operations. Current information about the prize, including the most recent call and a list of previous winners, always may be found at http://www.sigcis.org/chmprize. *2017 Prize Committee Members* Joy Rankin (2017 Chair) Lyman Briggs College Michigan State University 919 E. Shaw Ln. E-35 East Lansing, MI 48825 USA Janet Abbate Dept. of Science, Technology and Society Virginia Tech Northern Virginia Center 7054 Haycock Road Falls Church, VA 22043 USA Hallam Stevens Room 1705, 7/F Wenke Building China Center for Special Economic Zone Research, Shenzhen University Nanhai Avenue 3688, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, 518060

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Arguments in court re dismissal of "Inventor of Email" lawsuit
by Thomas Haigh 26 Apr '17

26 Apr '17

Hello SIGCIS, Here's your April update on email invention. After the filing of motions to dismiss and objections to those motions, lawyers for Techdirt and Ayyadurai recently swapped arguments before a judge. Full report at https://www.law360.com/articles/915722/libel-suit-by-email-inventor-belongs- in-trash-blog-says from a law blogger, Brian Amarai. According to the report the judge asked only one question: Judge Saylor, in his only comments from the bench, almost immediately questioned Ayyadurai's attorney: "To say he invented email requires we define email. How do we do that?" The judge continued: "If reasonable people could disagree about what is email, even assuming they agree he invented some piece of it, how is that a question of provable fact? If he didn't invent the @ symbol, a lot of people would say that is a big component of it. If he didn't invent sending texts from one computer to another, how can you say he invented email?" Mirell responded that they'd set out in their legal papers what their position was on what email is, and who its inventor was: Ayyadurai. "Isn't that an opinion? You say that's what constitutes email," Judge Saylor said. "Your honor," Mirell responded, "the question is ultimately a question for the jury." Like other reporters on the case, the blogger notes the importance of the issue of whether Ayyadurai is a "public figure." A public figure who wants to bring a libel claim - Ayyadurai calls himself a "world-renowned" inventor in the second sentence of his complaint but hasn't acknowledged that he's a public figure - has to show that the speaker acted with knowledge that something was wrong or with a reckless disregard for the truth, called actual malice. According to another blog post earlier this month, http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2017/04/18/techdirts-lawsuit-is-finding-support- in-d-c-politicos-and-techies/, Techdirt is picking up some support in DC as the Glen Echo Group hosted a fundraiser organized by "Facebook's Brooke Oberwetter, former Facebook employee Tim Sparapani, former Sen. Ron Wyden staffer Josh Lamel and PR pro Beau Phillips." Finally, Techdirt posted a story earlier this month which embeds its most recent legal filing, a reply to Ayyadurai's opposition to the dismissal of the case. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170413/13372937145/latest-filings-our-fi rst-amendment-fight-please-help-keep-true-independent-journalism-being-silen ced.shtml . One exhibit is a tweet from Ayyadruai, saying that "#FakeNewsMedia like TechShit need to be shutdown for their FAKE NEWS." It would be interesting if, as with Trump's executive orders on immigration, a judge uses tweets as evidence for motivations. Best wishes, Tom

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Institutions actively collecting historical programs/software for long-term preservation
by David C. Brock 26 Apr '17

26 Apr '17

Dear List: I wanted to compile a list of institutions and organizations that are today actively collecting historical programs/software (including games and art objects qua software) for long term preservation. Can you help? Best wishes, David +++++++++++++++ David C. Brock dcb(a)dcbrock.net Director Center for Software History Computer History Museum www.computerhistory.org 40 Russell Street, Greenfield, MA 01301 Mobile: 413-522-3578 Skype: dcbrock Twitter: @dcbrock

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Broadcast software in the UK
by Joly MacFie 22 Apr '17

22 Apr '17

Story today on the Pimania video game for ZX Spectrum https://theconversation.com/how-punk-and-thatcherism-came-together-in-the-s… leads to a more detailed one on the history of 'broadcast' software in the UK http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio -- --------------------------------------------------------------- Joly MacFie 218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast -------------------------------------------------------------- -

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