It seems there have been a few nostalgia-oriented threads recently. I’m curious about people’s experiences in the 80s and 90s with other Mac-like systems.
I had a friend who was an Apple II guru, and he had a IIGS. I was impressed with how Mac-like it seemed, and it had color before the Macintosh II came out. It was tempting to think about buying one.
At the time, I was very curious about the Atari ST series. I think I personally saw one only once or twice in a computer store, though I have a dim memory that one of my college classmates had one. Are there any former Atari ST users in the TidBITS world?
I’d guess there are a few Amiga veterans in the crowd. I never used one, but I have friends who were big advocates of the systems.
I was a beta tester for the PC/DOS version of the AOL client, which ran on top of a GEOS graphical shell that neatly captured the experience of the graphical Mac AOL client. Later versions of GEOS were much more Windows-like, but the early ones did have a Mac’ish feel. For that matter, Windows 1.0 basically was a clunky cousin of the early Mac GUI, right down to the clones of MacWrite and MacPaint.
I won’t bring up historic UNIX GUIs, aside from Silicon Graphics IRIX, since they mostly used CDE or various early SUN GUIs. SGI’s IRIX wasn’t trying to be a Mac, but it was clearly the most well thought-out early UNIX GUI. Many workstations came with AppleTalk/AppleShare, and it also came with Easy Software’s CUPS print system before Apple acquired CUPS. It even ran Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Premiere, and other Adobe products. For a time, IRIX was seen as a “professional” grade alternative to Macs in digital media firms.
What kind of Mac-like alternatives have other TidBIT readers used?
Atari ST was my foundation. Loved it. So much opportunity to explore. I learned typing(!), mouse, gui, programming, pixel art, spreadsheets, word processing, dtp, databases, cad, raytracing, fractals, game design, and much much more.
My early personal computing was command-line based. A TRS-80 CoCo, an Apple //c (DOS 3.3 mostly) and then a PC running MS-DOS.
I saw the early Mac and thought it was cool, but far too expensive. I used Windows versions 1, 2 and 3, but wasn’t too impressed. I’d launch them to run a specific app and then quit afterward. I briefly played around with GEM, on which the Atari ST’s desktop was based, but it wasn’t particularly useful on a DOS PC.
The first time I started working with a GUI full-time, was using IBM OS/2. I used version 1.3 at work (in 1991) and when version 2.0 was released for a reasonable price, I started using it as my home computer’s operating system. I stuck with OS/2 until IBM stopped supporting it.
And after that, we got to the start of the modern era, with Windows 95 and NT.
CDE was very late to the game. You may remember SunView and its would-be successor, NeWS (a PostScript-based GUI). Before they later settled on OpenWindows, which could support apps based on SunView, NeWS and X-Windows.
But, for the most part, once X-Windows became popular every Unix GUI system was X-based, incorporating various “window mangers”, to provide window decorations and desktop capabilities. This is true even today in the Linux world (although there’s a lot of work today to eventually replace X with Wayland).
Back when the Amiga first came out, I had an original Macintosh, but lusted after the Amiga. I even wrote long posts to BBS forums explaining why the Amiga was so technically superior to the Macintosh II, which introduced color graphics. This was around 1987.
The basis of my argument was that what the Macintosh did in software, the Amiga did using custom hardware coprocessors. An example was the famous bouncing ball demo. I had a version of it for the Mac; it was in black and white but still would use so much CPU that you could almost smell the chips burning.
But on the Amiga it used 0% CPU. How? The ball is a sprite*; its position on the grid is just single X,Y coordinate. The spinning is really just palette changes. All this is in hardware, and it doesn’t take much CPU to change an x,y coordinate and update the palette.
I, of course, was dead wrong in my reasoning. The irony is that the Amiga’s hardware was its greatest strength, but also its weakness. While Apple could advance the capabilities of the Mac by just changing the software, the Amiga was locked to the resolutions and modes that were burned into those chips. That’s why it was so hard for later models to get better resolutions.
* Or at least like a sprite. It was an object that was layered by the hardware on top of the background image.
I had an Atari ST in the mid-1980s. Loved it. 1-bit screen but a decent C compiler. I wrote quite a few programs, including patching the OS. I wrote a few articles about it for Personal Computer World (UK edition) in 1987 and 88. It took about 10 minutes to recompile one app, and I used to pass the time doing weights. I had muscles, for the first and only time in my life. Happy days.
I co-owned a small software company which produced several very popular titles for the ST. If you or anyone else is interested in trying out old Atari software, I suggest the Hatari emulator.
I used the Atari 1040ST for a few years, including my first few years at Cornell, from about 1985 through 1988. At the time, it was technically superior to the Mac, at least in the sense of having a larger, color screen. It was a 68000-based machine with a windowing system (GEM) that was fine, if not up to the polish of the Mac’s Finder.
Sophomore year, I was thinking about taking CS100 as part of my College Scholar major in Hypertextual Fiction. It was advertised as an intro programming class that happened to use Lightspeed Pascal on the Mac. I wasn’t about to go to a computer room to do homework when I had a comparable machine in my room, so I signed up for the class. It took me about an hour to port the first assignment, which was just typing in the provided Lightspeed Pascal code, to whatever Pascal compiler I had on the 1040ST (totally can’t remember). That seemed problematic, so I went to talk to the professor, who admitted that the class was described badly and really did require that everyone use Lightspeed Pascal on the Mac, since the TAs wouldn’t be able to test or grade my code. Since I really didn’t need the class, I dropped it.
The 1040ST worked fine for writing papers and playing games, which was most of what I did. There must also have been a spreadsheet, though I didn’t need to do much calculation, being a humanities guy.
After sophomore year, it became clear that the Mac was the future, so Tonya and I bought a Macintosh SE, and the rest is history.
Funny - I had a very similar experience with my college introductory statistics course. In practice, it was a “Using SYSTAT software for basic statistical analysis” course, and the prof absolutely required the use of SYSTAT. I dropped the course after a few lectures once I realized there was nothing in the syllabus that I couldn’t do much more efficiently on my roommate’s Mac running Statview. Sure, there was a version of SYSTAT that ran on the Mac at the time, but it was a command-line environment.
To be fair, I guess the real intention of the course was for math and econ majors to learn to use SYSTAT on the university mainframe. From my perspective, the Mac already had made the course obsolete. I wanted to know why to run a particular analysis, not how to use a particular program to run it.
I was too young to be buying computers at the time, but I played with the ST at local computer stores.
I agree that the GEM desktop just didn’t feel very polished compared to a Mac desktop. But it also cost a lot less. At launch (1985), the 1040ST cost $1000 with a color display or $800 monochrome (source: Wikipedia). In comparison, a Mac 512K (the best model for 1985) sold for $3200 and a Mac Plus (1986) sold for $2600.
The thing that bothered me about the ST (and again, this is from playing with store models - I never used one for anything real) was that the monochrome monitor’s resolution of 640x400 was unavailable with color. Color users were forced to use either 320x200 with 16 colors or 640x200 with 4 colors (out of a palette of 512 colors). There was no way to get high resolution and color at the same time - the 640x400 resolution was not available on a color monitor, even though the video memory could have supported it with 2 colors (out of the 512 color palette).
So if you wanted color, the desktop’s low resolution made the whole system feel like a toy computer. It only felt professional with the monochrome display.
I realize now, that this was almost certainly due to hardware and cost restrictions. I assume their monitors were using TV-quality tubes and they couldn’t get a good 400-line picture from their color tubes. But PCs at the time were available with EGA cards, capable of rendering 640x350 with 16 colors (out of a palette of 64 colors). Atari should have sold a product with comparable capabilities, even if it would require a third model (2080ST?) and a more expensive monitor.
Where the ST really shone, however, was in the music business. As the first mass-market computer to have built-in MIDI, musicians and music software developers all flocked to the platform. It was very popular in that market long after everybody else lost interest.
Atari did eventually come out with the TT and Falcon, which used 68030 processors and had much better graphics. But by then they were already losing market share and name-recognition.
I was an Amiga evangelist here for as long as I could sustain it. The video and animation and color were so advanced compared to the rest. It was doing multimedia when no one was really looking for it commercially. I had our local TV station weather team come and visit. They ended up contracting with a company with an Acorn Archimedes platform, probably a hand coded system. I had to design a catalogue for an artist, sat down at a Mac… I could get work done and make money, it was hard to argue with.
Still have my A2000HD, 5Mb ram, 40Mb HD, to shut down you listened until the drive stopped whirring…
