32by32 - Macintosh History from the 1980s

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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MacWorld Expo 1986 Boston

Attendance: 18,700

Placeholder for article to come. See the usenet post below for a good summary.

FullPaint made its public debut.

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Layout

Finder Customizer

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FullPaint

Graphics Program

With the introduction of the Macintosh Plus in January 1986, Apple de-bundled MacPaint from its newer, more-capable and higher-priced computer offering. This created a natural opportunity for third-party vendors to write programs that more fully exploited the potential of the Plus’s high RAM and storage capabilities — and didn’t have to compete with free. Ann Arbor Softworks sprung into the market gap with FullPaint, and the influential computer aesthetics journal Verbum declared that “[t]he second wave of personal computer graphics tools came in with a resounding crash when FullPaint was released.”

Macworld Expo Boston, held in August, was the public debut of the program. A full review arrived in September 1986, with Macworld’s Robert C. Eckhardt declaring Ann Arbor Softwork’s program to be the first fully-featured competitor to MacPaint — and a “significant improvement” to it. A feature as simple as multiple windows was enough to expose potential hiding in the idea of MacPaint, which was still limited to one, non-resizable canvas. But FullPaint also implemented an idea so good it’s still present in Photoshop today: a three-stage toggle for traditional windows, fullscreen-with-menubar/palettes, and completely fullscreen modes:

FullPaint’s Free Rotate, Perspective, Distort and Skew features are another aspect called out in the 1986 MacWorld review that will resonate to users of Photoshop: “FullPaint,” as graphics guru Deke McClelland would later write, “introduced these commands.”

About the only complaint MacWorld had with the program was its RAM requirements, which placed limitations on its use with 512k Macs. The review concluded by making the point that FullPaint was an obvious buy to new purchasers of the Mac Plus who did not inherit a free copy of MacPaint from earlier hardware ownership — and who wanted software to put their new machine through its paces. By December of 86 the painting program had reached the Macworld best-seller list , where it would remain for seven months.

In the first Macworld issue of 1987, Adrian Mello was able to collect five programs to vie for the title of “MacPaint’s Successors” , comparing FullPaint along with CheapPaint, MacBillboard, GraphicWorks and SuperPaint. Mello saw FullPaint as the most direct descendent of the Mac’s original painting program, saying it “might just as well have been labeled MacPaint version 5.0”. (Interestingly, the version Mello tested in January of 1987 was labeled “1.0 Enhanced”, the main change in which was the removal of copy protection and the addition of a color printing utility.)

Indeed, in an issue where Macworld reviewed several large-screen monitors, FullPaint had already become part of the standard testing suite to determine how a paint program with multiple, resizable windows worked on emerging big-screen hardware. In addition, mentions of FullPaint in other companies’ advertisements also increased steadily. From ThunderScan to color-separation utilities to clip-art collections, many ads named FullPaint as an expected part of users’ workflows as an option alongside MacPaint. And when editor Jerry Borrell previewed the Macintosh SE in April, FullPaint was among the first programs he loaded to test how compatible the new machine was.

The idea of an upsell from the Mac’s bundled graphics program was enticing to mail-order vendors. “If you like MacPaint, you’ll love FullPaint” wrote The Icon Review in the April 1986 issue of MacWorld. “This stand-alone painting program is 100% upwardly compatible with MacPaint yet offers a host of exciting new features.” Ann Arbor Softworks itself worked to develop the notion of their product as the natural evolution of MacPaint, asking cheekily “When is a two-year-old an antique?” in an advertisement. “The program that was the star of the industry only two years ago is now the highlight of the history books.”

The writers of Macworld named Fullpaint an Editor’s Choice that same issue, and by August FullPaint had hit the rental software listings for $11.11. (See this piece by Blake Patterson for more on the oddball, time-limited niche of the “software rental” industry.

Yet the monochrome focus of FullPaint caused problems once the Mac II finally began shipping by the middle of 1987. Although the program apparently worked fine with third-party hardware vendor’s proprietary extensions to enable big-screen support, it was not re-written to support the emerging world of NuBus video cards. Left off the official Apple list of Mac II compatibility, the president of Ann Arbor Softworks himself confirmed that the program would only use the original 9″ screen size — and that his company had “no immediate plans” to offer a fix.

And by the end of 1986, SuperPaint had shipped — Silicon Beach Software’s ground-breaking app which fused object-oriented (MacDraw) and bit-mapped (MacPaint) illustration models into one program. MacWeek’s survey of graphics program during the first week of July 1987 showed FullPaint slightly behind SuperPaint in terms of percentage who owned a copy, but much less often used than SuperPaint (roughly 15% versus 5%.)

By the middle of July infamous rumor-monger Mac the Knife made note of the fading fortunes of Ann Arbor’s cash cow: “with SuperPaint on the market and Pixel Paint and maybe even MacPaint 2.0 on the horizon, the cow may be running dry.” In August, FullPaint dropped off the Macworld Best-Seller list for the first time in six months — with SuperPaint taking its place. By November of 1987 overviews of graphics software had placed FullPaint in a humble, if respected, niche as a “basic enhancement to MacPaint.”

It was arch-competitor Charlie Jackson, president of Silicon Beach, who would write perhaps the best epitaph:

FullPaint has been out since last May, and it had months of initially strong sales. It had good distribution and was a big step forward when it was released[…] About three months after SuperPaint came out, FullPaint sales began to decline. After about six months it reached its current level of negligible sales[…] SuperPaint has been outselling FullPaint 20 to 1.

On February 9th news broke that PC software giant Ashton-Tate would acquire FullPaint’s owner, Ann Arbor Softworks. But the focus was on the forthcoming FullWrite (Ann Arbor’s long-delayed word processor) and Full Impact, a spreadsheet written by Mac legend Randy Wiggington designed to go head-to-head with Microsoft Excel. Nobody predicted a big re-write for FullPaint, least of all Ashton Tate, who confirmed to Macworld that “the company is not upgrading the product.”

Perhaps the cruelest cut came from Adrian Mello’s review of MacPaint 2.0, where he noted “As offered, MacPaint [2.0] reminds me most of FullPaint, a program introduced two years ago that was quickly discarded by most people in favor of SuperPaint.” That Mello had to explain to his readers what FullPaint was speaks volumes. Pulling together a round-up of graphics programs the next month in the September issue, Mello was even more blunt:

“FullPaint is sorely in need of an update. When it was first introduced, it corrected most of the major deficiencies of the original MacPaint, but now it is showing its age. […] its windows cannot grow larger than the Plus’s or the SE’s screen. In its current form, FullPaint is probably not the best paint program for your needs. FullPaint used to serve as an option for users who weren’t satisfied with MacPaint[…] Well the classic is back[…] MacPaint [2.0] is a much better choice for beginners and users who prefer simplicity in paint software.”

David Pogue, writing a similar roundup in December 1989 but focusing exclusively on black & white bitmap apps, was kinder to FullPaint, calling it “inexpensive” and an heir to the “innocent charm” of the original MacPaint. In a book published in 1989, Deke McClelland echoed the notion of bang for the buck :

“The application was released in 1985, and has received very little attention since. We wouldn’t even bother to cover it except for two things. First, amazing as it may seem, it continues to offer features that the newest version of MacPaint lacks. And it’s cheaper than MacPaint.

FullPaint was listed in mail-order catalogs as late as December 1989, over three and a half years after launched. (This may be also testimony to the way that the 9″ monochrome monitor defined the user experience of most Mac users until the Fall 1990 introduction of the LC.) FullPaint still appears in the ad copy of other companies’ promotions in September 1992 as a commonly-used graphics program. And sometimes the last trace of a program is its removal – DublClick updated a clipart package in June of 1993 to change image format from FullPaint — back to MacPaint.

McClelland’s March 1992 round-up of painting programs — both greyscale and color — may represent the last mention of FullPaint in an editorial context, lumping it in with “programs you may have heard offer that you may even own, that have since fallen by the wayside.”

Sample Artwork

Two full-screen bitmap paintings shipped with FullPaint in 1986:

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