I'd be interested in hearing from the Apple aficionados today what they think of Apple as it was in its beginnings (i.e. the Apple I and Apple ][) compared to how it is now.

I'm not an Apple person, but I can only wish that they would release their Apple silicon for non-Apple chassis (kinda like the original Apple I?). If I could jury-rig an Apple board into a 2010s Thinkpad I'd drop $1000 in a heartbeat. Instead they don't encourage tinkering with their hardware anymore. (The fact that they could lock it down even more is noted, but shouldn't really be praiseworthy.)

▲

joblessjunkie 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m a greybeard, I played Oregon trail on the II and remember the first Mac.

IMO Apple (well, Jobs) was always trying to create a sealed, perfect appliance for regular people, even in the very early days. Apple worked very hard to hide all implementation details. Hackers, on the contrary, want to see and tweak all those hidden details. The complaints today were the same in the 80s.

To his credit, Jobs finally got there. My mother is in her 70s and the iPad is the only computer she’s ever used.

▲

detourdog 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apple clicked with me when our middle school computer lab conisted of an Apple II+ and a TRS-80. The TRS-80 seemed unusable as it required a cassette tape to save and retrieve files and the Apple II+ had floppy disks. I remember reading about the Lisa being a computer so simple that a 2 year old could use one. I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard. I tried to imagine how that could be case. Years later my Mom (someone with a masters in english and made her living as a potter) happened upon a demo of the Mac 128k. She couldn't believe the experience and purchased one. Changed her career with desktop publishing.

My training was Industrial Design but I Have spent my whole career administrating Mac Networks. My first job involved networking a 30 person design firm. The computers were half Macs and half PCs. When System 7 was released the Macs we purchased Ascente ethernet card for them and they all worked. We needed to purchase ethernet cards for the PCs we had to move them off DOS, switch the from Word Perfect 5.1 (pissimg off the writers) and install Novell 3.11 to network the PCs and added a Mac NLM to the server to exchange files between the 2.

I love OS X but System 7 was better. I think the Mac lost it's simplicity when the Desktop was moved into the home directory. Everything became more complicated. I still think Apple caters to the founding spirit of simple computing tools for people. Computing has just become too complicated.

▲

mghackerlady 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the apple I was very much not that, being built from entirely off the shelf parts and having the source code available for the closest thing to an operating system as it had (wozmon)

the apple II was a slight bit of a setback but it was very much still an open platform, with a very good reference manual written by Woz himself. it even had fully commented ROM listings. I don't know enough about the III to comment on whether or not it was as good in this regard but I suspect it wasn't since it wasn't so close to the hardware like the IIs

then came the Lisa and while it wasn't as bad as the Mac it still wasn't great, and then the Mac killed any hope of hackability

	▲	detourdog 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, but to each their own. There was trend line towards usability. I would say the Mac was a big step towards where they were going. If you want hackability there were other choices. Usability was there focus. Having a floppy disk was a major advancement even though a cassette tape was technically usable.

▲

WillAdams 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For a summer program, I, along with some other kids and a teacher were supposed to build a robot --- since none of us know how to solder, we instead used the money to purchase a computer, modify a nice Rubbermaid trash can and a lazy susan and some drawer slides to hold it along w/ a few accessories (notably a Cognivox voice recognition unit), calling it CTC-1 (Computerized Trash Can mark 1) --- an Apple ][ was selected over the other options (a TRS-80 Model III and an Atari 800 were the other possibilities).

Bought a copy of _Apple Machine Language_ by Don and Kurt Inman, and did BASIC programming (having previously started w/ whatever BASIC was on the HP 3000 at the local college where a gifted and talented summer program allowed access.

Then, there were rumours in _Byte Magazine_ that Apple was making a new computer, and one day, in the copy of _Newsweek_ in the high school library there was a _16-page_ advertisement (which I pulled out and kept w/ my _MacWorld_ magazines --- had a full run of the first couple of years, but I'm getting ahead of myself....)

Graduated, enlisted, began training, then on leave at home that Christmas took out a huge loan and bought basically one of every Mac related thing in the store, including the bag to carry everything in (excepting the ImageWriter printer) --- used it for years, eventually getting HyperCard, playing _The Manhole_ (Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had HyperCard, a precursor to the game _Myst_) as well as buying a copy of _Through the Looking Glass_, the only game Apple ever made. Got out and went to college studying graphic design, using a variety of Windows computers (drove all the way to the state capitol to buy a copy of Adobe Type Manager for Windows 3.0), and then was gifted a NeXT Cube by my brother-in-law. Also bought a Newton MessagePad 110 and used it w/ the NeXT using a serial link to transfer data. And, I bought an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint, which had a Wacom EMR stylus which paired well w/ the Wacom ArtZ tablet connected to the Cube.

A copy of OPENSTEP 4.2 for the Cube was the last thing I bought from Apple until I bought a copy of Mac OS X Public Beta.

A thing which I hoped for, for a while was that they would use the NeXTBus and make a motherboard for the NeXT Cube which would run contemporary software....

A great way to vicariously experience all this is to read:

https://folklore.org/0-index.html

there's even a story on the game:

https://folklore.org/Alice.html