32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

Macworld Expo 1987 San Francisco

Trade Show

Dates: January 8-10 1987
Cost: $40 Conference and Exhibits, $15 Exhibits only
Exhibitors: 250

Keynote

John Sculley on Intelligent Documents

Sculley made the claim that the industry was moving away from data and towards intelligent documents. He named what he called ‘second-generation’ DTP products such as Adobe Illustrator

Intelligent documents will have as much impact in changing the environment of the business world as the telephone had at the beginning of the century or the Xerox machine has had in the last two decades.

For the first time in our history, we know what our products will be, not just in 1987, but in 1988, 1989, and on into the 1900s. Our Cray is being used to simulate the products we will put into silicon and bring into the marketplace in the 1990s. We have a clear vision of where we want our company to go.

It’s not completely what Sculley meant by “intelligent documents,” but one is tempted to think about a feature which would ship in 1991 in System 7: Publish and Subscribe. At any rate, Sculley also mentions “Intelligent Documents” in his 1988 book Odyssey, which is a source I’ll read in the future for clues to this concept.

Summary

“MacWorld Expo had the enthusiasm we used to see at all the computer shows but now is only for the Macintosh, Atari and Amiga.” — Jerry Pournelle

Seminar Topics

• Business Applications of Macintosh Graphics
• Desktop Communications
• Maximizing Macs in the Office Environment

Apple

No major Apple hardware announcements, but the AppleShare software made its debut, together with the AppleTalk PC Card (really a LocalTalk hardware interface with a AppleTalk protocol stack). Rumors of the upcoming Apple File Server placed it at between $500 and $1000, and whispers placed its introduction at the Seybold Seminar in the coming weeks. (It never actually shipped, and was a major reason why the “Macintosh Office” concept was more vapor than reality.)

Word Processing

The line between word processing and DTP begins to blur as Word, FullWrite and WordPerfect adopt layout features such as hyphenation and wrapping text around irregular objects. (See, however, the continuing delays which plagued FullWrite after its promising introduction at this Expo.) The idea that word processors would expand into the DTP market was current at this time — in February, Computer Chronicles quoted no less a source than Steve Jobs as saying DTP would soon cease to exist as a distinct market.

Desktop Publishing

Despite the encroachment of word processors, dedicated DTP software maintained a presence at the Expo. ReadySetGo 3.0 beat out PageMaker 2.0 in terms of size and scale of demonstrations and public attention. According to some attendees, Aldus gave no public demo of their product, but was showing it to the press behind closed doors. I don’t know if the following video was the result of such a press briefing, or if it actually shows version 1.0 running:

The fact that PageMaker 2 would ship on the PC before the Mac heralded Adobe’s increasing cross-platform focus, much to the dismay of show attendees.

Spreadsheets

Excel 1.03 jumped on the bandwagon of larger-screen support, reflecting the reality of a marketplace where external displays from companies such as Radius had helped transform the reputation of the Mac from toy to serious tool.

Trapeze, from Data Tailor, got a lot of attention during this Expo as a kind of next-generation spreadsheet — I’ll try to write up a separate post on this app in the future. In the meantime, read this review of version 2, released 9 months later.

Graphics

Illustrator, the brand-new vector drawing tool from Adobe, made even sophisticated raster programs such as SuperPaint look like yesterday’s news. Yet people weren’t really sure how an object-oriented drawing system would work: there was as much emphasis on tracing an outline of scanned artwork as there was on creating drawings from whole cloth.

As seen in the above video, Adobe was showing off their new program at both their booth and at that of Radius — again showing the importance of that hardware company in the Mac marketplace.

Productivity

Living Videotext upgraded its MORE outliner to 1.1 — now with Undo! It’s striking to run across the Dave Winer of 24 years ago: he was then president of the company. MORE 1.1 also offered styled text and hierarchical outlining, two features we take for granted today. Also fascinating that there was a market for $300 outliners back in 1987. But MORE wasn’t even the only such product — Symmetry likewise showed off Acta 1.2 (now with printing!). And Borland showed off an their PIM product, SideKick.

Utilities

This might be a record for a product’s longevity: CE Software introduced DiskTop at this Expo, which as of 2011 was still for sale and working (at least in Classic and on PowerPC Macs). You can read a review of the modern version DiskTop from 2000 (when it was already considered a miracle of survival) from TidBits.

In keeping with the DTP theme of the show, Think Technologies was selling a $100 print spooler called LaserSpeed.

Peripherals

Supermac introduced both tape backup drives as well as external hard drives.

A company called Lodown (?) also showed off a 32-shade greyscale SCSI scanner for a mere $1,300.

Networking

In keeping with Macintosh Office fever, Kinetics showed off a SCSI/Ethernet adaptor for the Mac Plus. (Can you just imagine how slow that would be?) At least the price was reasonable, only $1,250. Reading these stories really makes you realize how much different the world was in ’87: getting a faster network to the slowest machine Apple sold was worth an investment of well over a thousand dollars. This tells you something about the costs of faster and more capable systems.

Think Technologies showed off Inbox for Mac, one of several LAN-based email systems that would briefly flourish, before dying off in the Internet era. Hard to believe the per-seat cost was $125.

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Sun LaserWriter

Re-Badged Printer

As a kid I remember seeing a white LaserWriter with the distinctive SUN logo on it in a university computer lab, probably around 1987. Thinking back on that memory recently, I started to wonder what this odd output device was. Would Canon and Apple really have allowed Sun to re-badge one of their most important products? Or had some prankster simply put a spare SUN badge on the side of a standard Apple peripheral?

This is one of these questions is which is hard to Google, because of the age of the products involved. But it turns out the truth is exactly what I remembered: Sun sold a version of Apple’s laser printer, even calling it the “LaserWriter,” for use with Sun3 workstations. We can find a few mentions of this product starting in InfoWorld, December 1986 and continuing on to an Australian Unix Users’ Group newsletter in early 1987. Finally, the Spring 1986 BMUG Newsletter confirms “the exact same specs as the original Apple LaserWriter. It is meant to be a printer for the Sun line of computer workstations and communicates over an RS-232 communication port.”

The original Apple LaserWriter also had this RS-232 port, in addition to the serial/LocalTalk 9-pin DIN connector, so it’s possible that the Sun variant had the Mac-centric port as well. Either way, the printer I saw in 1987 was connected to an IBM PS/2 Model 60 (long story) which was doing print serving for a whole lab of PS/2 Model 30’s, so it would have gotten along just fine with the traditional serial port.

An intriguing glimpse into the market positioning of this Sun LaserWriter was the mention in the Australian journal of a bundled software package from Adobe called “Transcript.” Transcript turns out to be very hard to dig up information about, but it seems to have been a commercial troff tool, and thus would have been useful on SunOS workstations to prepare documents to send to the laser printer.

Anyone with a Sun-badged LaserWriter should take a picture and send it in…

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SuperPaint

Graphics Program

Macworld had an aversion to reviewing pre-release software, but the launch of SuperPaint was too big to ignore. Reviewer Erfert Neilson accurately pegged the software’s game-changing new feature: a hybrid between bitmap painting and object-oriented drawing, it combined the freestyle creativity of MacPaint with the resolution independence of MacDraw.

Of course by late 1986 the gold standard of painting programs had become FullPaint, not MacPaint, so Silicon Beach Software’s new program would be measured against that. Macworld found that SuperPaint lived up to, and indeed surpassed, Ann Arbor Softwork’s painting program. It didn’t quite do the same to the standard set by MacDraw: reviewers were unanimous that hard-core technical illustrators were better off with a dedicated drawing program such as MacDraw or MacDraft. But the genius of SuperPaint was of the course the combination of an A+ painting program and a B- drawing program in one, with clever ways to hide and show the various layers so that artists could concentrate on a specific mode at a time.

An intriguing, if short-lived, innovation was an ultra-high-res take on FatBits, MacPaint’s magnified view that inflated individual pixels to a comically-large size to enable precise editing. LaserBits, SuperPaint’s take on this feature, increased the resolution of the magnified section to 300dpi, offering those artists committed to pixel-pushing an incredibly intricate (if no doubt tedious) way of extending pixel art to laser printer resolution. (The notion of extending pixel art into the domain of laser quality was eventually proved to be a “faster horse” notion as PostScript-native software such as Adobe Illustrated introduced sophisticated new forms of drawing, such as Bezier curves, better suited to the new world of 300 dots per inch.)

Influential journal Verbum put it best when they examined five graphics programs in the winter of 1987: “For the serious artist […] There is clearly only one choice: SuperPaint.”

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Radius Full Page Display

Two screens are better than one

We often remember March 1987 as the start of the era of external displays on the Macintosh. With the enormous size of the Mac II came expandability of six NuBus slots, as well as the software flexibility of System Software 2.0 (System 3.3/Finder 5.4) with the Monitors control panel.But large additional monitors actually predated the “open Mac” by a good half-year.

In October 1986, Macworld magazine heralded “The Two-Headed Macintosh” in a story that highlighted Apple veterans Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfield’s contributions to this new combination of hardware and software. The magazine was excited about two features: the near-match to the internal screen’s 72dpi, and the possibility of using both the new and the old screen simultaneously. Both the article itself and the caption to the accompanying press photograph (reproduced above) highlighted the ability to move windows freely between the two screens in a new kind of virtual two-dimensional space. All the standard software niceties that would become hallmarks of Radius’ premium experience make their debut here — detachable, “tear-off” menus that could be repositioned anywhere on the screen; a larger font size for those menus; a screen dimmer, and control over the size of the cursor to reduce the possibility of losing the mouse in such a large field of vision.

Enabling all this took a new Motorola 68000 processor — perhaps running at a higher clock frequency? — that completely replaced the Mac’s original CPU. A requirement of “the new Macintosh ROM” meant that this product was restricted to Mac Plus and 512kE models, which would have been clear to any Mac Pro in 1986. And the price? A mere $2,000 — two thirds as much as any Mac in which it could be installed. The November issue of MacUser gave the entire cover over to the new display, proclaiming “Bigger is Better!” Wikipedia goes so far as to call the Full Page Display the “first large screen available for any personal computer.”

Looking at this picture you probably have two questions: How could this possibly have made sense financially? How could this possibly have worked technically?

Hardware

The second question is easy enough to answer. Radius was made up of ex-Apple hardware engineers, and they pulled quite a few rabbits out of their collective hat. The FPD used the security slot, of all possible things, to route the cable for external video out of the case. Notice the small video connector in the photo to the right:

This was was routed through the small security slot on the back of the classic Mac case. The Full Page Display interface sat right on top of the 68000 central processor, with additional connections to the FB1 and C35 resistors. Originally this internal card originally had to be installed in the Sunnyvale factory, and the process took a week to complete. An easier clip-on installation method was released in Q2 1987.

Permanent changes to the motherboard were also made. These presumably included the Radius ROM, which obviated the need for a special boot-up disk – a requirement of other vendors’ solutions. The integration between the Radius ROM and the Apple motherboard was evidently pretty deep: as an example, the larger PRAM in a Mac Plus allowed the precise vertical alignment between the tops of the internal and external screens to be memorized, but the 512KE had to be set manually at every boot time.

The Economics of Desktop Publishing

The financial question is more interesting. Who was spending $2,000 to add an external monitor onto a Mac Plus — let alone a 512KE?

The portrait display as a form factor, though gone from the market today, actually was quite popular in the late 80s and early 90s. The reason was simple: as the name implied, it could display a full 8.5×11 page on the screen at one time with its 640×864 pixels. This was in an era of Aldus PageMaker: Desktop Publishing was saving the entire Mac ecosystem (and arguably Apple) from being a footnote in computing history.

There are two interesting things about this FPD ad from 1988:

The first is that the LaserWriter Plus flanks the monitor to the left: Radius envisioned the FPD as an essential part of a complete DTP setup. The second is that there’s a humble classic Mac to the right. Even in 1988, when the Mac II had been shipping for a while (notice the picture of that expandable machine lower in the ad copy), Radius still saw a market in upgrading Classic Macs with external displays for the Desktop Publishing market.

The Shock of Multiple Screens

At 15″ diagonally, the FPD had nearly the same 72 dpi pixel density as the Mac CRT, a big selling point. In fact, Radius was the only player in this nascent market who could actually use both screens at the same time. Other vendors, including E-Machines and Micrographic Images, shut down the internal screen completely. This simultaneous use of both workspaces, which we all take for granted today, was as revolutionary as capacitive touch was in 2007. “As the mouse reaches the right- hand edge of the Radius, the image suddenly appears on the Mac’s screen, jumping right across the gulf between the two machines,” gushed InfoWorld. “This behavior invariably startles people the first time they see it.” Here’s Stewart Cheifet being startled this feature during a demo by Radius co-founder Mike Boich on Computer Chronicles:

“That’s pretty impressive!”

Of course, application compatibility was hit-and-miss. Even an app as canonical and central to the Macintosh as MacPaint wasn’t written to take advantage of the greater screen space. Excel would crash if you made the window too large, and MacWrite wouldn’t properly redraw the screen after formatting changes which extended off the original 512×342 pixels. Updates fixed some of these problems, but there was a reason that Radius demo’d the screen with T/Maker’s WriteNow: it was written according to the guidelines in Inside Macintosh and worked well. Raines Cohen, co-founder of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, saw the display at MacWorld Boston 1986 and noted “The Finder doesn’t know about the Macscreen, but can use the entire Radius.  MacPaint doesn’t know about it, of course; FullPaint does, sort of, I think… SuperPaint will let you put your pallette at top of the screen to take advantage of MOST of the screen. ComicWorks is the best; it lets you put your tools onthe Mac screen & dedicate the whole page to graphics.”

Blazing a Trail with Software

The reason for all these problems was simple: the FPD shipped well before official support for multiple displays and the accompanying Monitors control panel (which wouldn’t have appeared on the Plus and previous models anyway). Thus Radius had to write their own software to manage this radical peripheral. Larger cursors, a screensaver, double-height menu bars, and other magnification features debuted here, to be further developed as Radius shipped countless color cards for NuBus in the years ahead. Radius even programmed an extension to add Zoom button to the top-right corner of Mac windows which lacked them. Cohen: “Andy’s software teaches most applications to have a ‘zoom box’ (like MacDraw), and cmd-zoom will zoom a window to the full Mac main screen.” The Mac’s screen capture feature also had to be re-written, and even Radius’ own feature only grabbed 90% of the large screen. This software consistently earned rave reviews, and probably explains the leadership position which the company had in the external display market into the 1990s.

The FPD cost $1,995 retail. And for all that money, you only got a 3-month limited warranty!

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