h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A520093

I know that volumes could be said on this subject. I have not been able to find any listings for Macs, Please add your commentary on what you would like to add to the entry

Hello,

Always an interesting topic (I've been a Mac user for over 10 years now), but I feel like you could expand the article to be much more than it is. Basically, I think you could fill out the history more (instead of a few sentences, make it a few sections like Prehistory, Early Years, Stagnation, Rebirth is what I think). Some discussion of its relation to the PC world and other GUIs (Windows, Amiga OS, X Windows) might be interesting (not all of these were invented after the Mac), especially if you talked about the connection to pioneering research at Xerox PARC.

I also think it would be neat to describe some of the things that made the early Mac "insanely great". It wasn't just the GUI, but other little and big things as well. The Mac was the first consumer computer to support WYSIWYG design, scalable fonts, cheap Desktop Publishing, built-in audio inputs and output standard, high-capacity SCSI storage, have laser printers, etc. Microsoft Word was basically created on the Mac first I believe. And what the hell, the GUI was great too. Not just because it was simpler for more users, but because it standardized the functionality of every application (eg, Quit was ALWAYS in the File menu and called by Alt-Q). Not many people remember how annoying it was to have to remember different key strokes for each application (like WordPerfect, etc).

Anyway, just my thoughts. I think you have a good start and I think it could be an excellent guide entry, but I want to know more. I know it may seem annoying, but it's always good when you get the readers like myself intrigued to learn more.

Yours,
Jake

No, acctually your comment was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks

I did some more work on the entry and there's more to come, what do you think?

This might get bad, but here goes. apple originally made the apple 1 computer at "the homebrew computer club". This was later replaced by the apple 2, which sold spectacularly well due to having the software "visicalc" (the first spreadsheet program) avaailable while still being affordable. accountants were buying apple 2's just for visicalc. These were 8bit home computers (using the 6502 central processor). Later, they moved to producing personal computers (16bit, 68000 based machines) and the macintosh was born. Personal computers were a major step up due to the change in word length (8bit to 16 bit), andwith that the massive increase in addressable memory (from 65536 bytes up to megabyte range). These new macintosh machines used a graphical user interface (GUI), which they (like everyone else) saw demonstrated at the xerox parc (palo alto research centre). This was running on $10,000 per terminal networked high resolution workstations runing the newly developed "X windows protocol" (now used on unix sytems everywhere as the standard GUI). This machine was a revelation at the time, completely outclassing everything else around at the time.
As time went on, the facilities that apple introduced into their machines were industry leaders. As you say, they introduced desktop publishing (on 24pin dot matrix printers)(unprecedented at the time), then laser printers, then quicktime movies, firewire and usb ports as standard, video editing as standard, etc.
This got them to the position that that they were in a few months ago, running "OS 9", or linux if you wished to install it as well. At the start of march, they announced a major rewrite of their operating system. They replaced the previous operating system kernel with a version of unix, and wrote a GUI front end that extended their existing user interface significantly. This they called "OS X", and it includes the ability to install on existing hardware, you can run all of your existing programs under it using the older os 9 calls, and as it has a unix shell, you should be able to run a lot of unix and GNU programs on it as well. This should include things like the gcc compiler, and lots of the other linux software. I don't know if the user interface is capable of running X windows programs, but as they have coded it for unix, I would be suprised if it couldn't run them. Being unix, it is a full multi-user multi-tasking operating system, so it is very powerfull, even in command line mode.

Some of the financial troubles they were having were due to an insistance that they produce everything in-house, so they made the operating systems, the main circuit boards, they assembled them, loaded the software on them, and if i remember correctly, the also built their own monitors.
well, you got slightly more than you asked for, didn't you
This should give you enough to cover both the macintosh, and the history of apple generally. I hope it helps.

No, no input like this is exactly what is useful. Can I use your material? If so I'd rather put a note in the beguinning that you were a contributer and put your text in the body where applicable and possably italicized or colored to indicate they are your words.

What do you say. . .

Maybe some one should write a guide entry on the history of Unix possibly delving into its technical and failsafe superiority over Win32 or MacOS 9 (Replaced very recently by OSX) by means of its kernel base and non-stacked virtual GUI. Xyroth? You up to it?

Maybe some one should write a guide entry on the history of Unix possibly delving into its technical and failsafe superiority over Win32 or MacOS 9 (Replaced very recently by OSX) by means of its kernel base and non-stacked virtual GUI. Xyroth? You up to it?

If you wish to use the info, wherever applicable, then feel free to do so. If I get a researcher credit, then so much the better.
As to doing a write-up of the history of unix/linux/bsd, that would be quite a big project, which I don't have time for this month.

Editorial Note: This conversation has been moved from 'The Writing Workshop' to 'The Flea Market'.

...as the author of this entry seems to have 'left the building'.

I'm a bum I have neglected my duties.

i hang my heads in shame.