32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

BMUG Lab in UCB Eshleman Hall

The Spring 1986 BMUG Newsletter showcases a plan to build a computer lab in Eshleman Hall, the Student Union on the UC Berkeley campus. I’ll reproduce the layout of the lab below, because I think it’s an interesting snapshot of what people thought a lab of Macs should look like at this early point in the computer’s development.

Some things to note:

1) This is a network-centric facility. Two UNIX machines with Ethernet, and a Kinetics AppleTalk Bridge, showed the importance of connecting the Mac’s own LocalTalk technology to the campus backbone. The author of the article, BMUG co-founder Reese Jones, would go on to start Farallon Networking at least in part on the strength of BMUG’s own PhoneNet technology, which replaced Apple’s expensive proprietary cables with cheap phone cabling.

2) There’s a BMUG Reference Library. Presumably this would contain the user group’s own newsletters, along with product manuals and third-party books. If you had a question about how to do something on a computer in 1986, you usually looked it up in a book.

3) Not only would books be stored in the computer lab, but they’d be produced there, too. BMUG specifies that the forthcoming lab will serve as a “resource center for document preparation.” By 1986, Aldus PageMaker had been out for a year, and Desktop Publishing was driving the Mac’s success. A networked Apple LaserWriter Plus (price: $7,000) was shared among all the computers in the lab, offering users output that would have been prohibitively expensive otherwise.

4) Centram’s TOPS (also a Berkeley company) was the file- and printer-sharing solution — because AppleShare didn’t exist yet. TOPS would be a great topic to cover in a future article — it was sort of like Personal File Sharing, and ran on both the Mac and PC (with a LocalTalk ISA card, as Reese’s Eshleman Hall layout specifies).

I’m not sure if this computer lab was ever built — Eshleman did host the Open Computer Facility for a number of years, but I don’t know if the BMUG lab grew into that. The building itself is slated to be demolished in the next few years.

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MacWorld Expo 1986 San Francisco

Dates: January 16-18, 1986
Cost: $
Attendees: ?
Exhibitors: ?

Keynote

CEO John Sculley introduced the Macintosh Plus together with a minor revision of Apple’s laser printer, the LaserWriter Plus.

Summary

Seminar Topics

• Macintosh in Film and TV Production [Transcript]

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FWB Disk Utility

Among those who worked with SCSI hard drives and Macs in the 1980s, one question always came up: Silverlining or FWB? The question was one of disk formatters — which utility did you use to erase new disks, set the interleave for the speed of the SCSI bus on your Mac, and otherwise work with mass storage?

Although by the time I used these programs I associated them with their respective hardware bundlers (FWB and LaCie), apparently at least the FWB utility had its origins in pure software. Or that’s the impression I get from this ad found in a December 1985 copy of MacUser:

Apparently in this stage of the game, the real market was for utilities to break disk-based copy-protection so that users could install programs on their serial hard drives.

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BMUG and MacRecorder

Audio Recording Hardware

We take recording audio on personal computers for granted nowadays. Without audio-in, we wouldn’t be able to use Skype, record a video for YouTube, or sing along with GarageBand. But before audio became a standard feature of the personal computer, there was a group of volunteers in Berkeley, California who figured out how to get sound into their Macs.

A graduate student in Math, Michael P. Lamoureux , is credited with the original design of the digitizer hardware. Plans were published in the Fall 1985 BMUG Newsletter, enabling anyone handy with basic electronics to construct the device. The box plugged into the serial port on the back of the Macintosh. The Fall 1985 Newsletter actually includes three articles about MacRecorder including the source code of a basic program to receive digitized audio from the device:

In the front matter of that 1985 BMUG newsletter, the user group announced that kits would be available for $45.

Farallon, a company that productized several BMUG inventions (including PhoneNET adapters), released a commercial version of the product in early 1988. MacWeek showed a preview in December 1987 :

Intriguingly the article mentions “SoundTrack, a sophisticated sound editor.” This is undoubtably SoundEdit, the famous software written by Steve Capps in 1986. Farallon was perhaps considering renaming it to differentiate their version, but it shipped (as near as I can tell) as SoundEdit, not SoundTrack.

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