I tend to blog by picking a topic and subjecting it to some level of analysis or mockery. Another approach to blogging is finding excellent articles by others and sharing them with an audience. That’s today’s approach.
Yesterday saw two fascinating articles appear, essentially bookending the lifecycle of the Macintosh. The first, The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac, is by Aza Raskin and describes some of the notes he found about his father’s role in the creation of the Macintosh.
The second article is by former Apple engineering head Jean-Louis Gassée:What future for the Macintosh?
Both of these make great reads, but if you read them side-by-side, they’re even more interesting. I’ll give you a few choice bits, then send you on your way to do your reading.
Aza talks about his father’s assessment of the Apple II business in 1981 and what didn’t work. Here’s what he said back then:
It is impossible to write a program on the Apple II or III that will draw a high-resolution circle since the aspect ratio and linearity of the customer’s TV or monitor is unknown.
In designing the Mac, they came upon a solution they thought would work:
The secret of mass marketing of software is having a very large and extremely uniform hardware/software base.
Jean-Louis, yesterday, in 2011, said this about the future of the Mac:
There’s the promise of “regularity,” apps that only use published APIs. This is both a controversial topic and a way for Apple to redeem past sins.
The statements by Jef Raskin and Jean-Louis are 30 years apart, but they could have been written 30 days apart. Now you can see why I wanted to spotlight the two of them, together.
Go. Go read. Good stuff. The more things change, the more they stay the same.