John Gruber made a comment in the second episode of The Talk Show podcast to the effect that the iPhone merits comparison with the original Macintosh 128K. That got me thinking about the two products, and their introductions.
I was in college in 1984, and while there was some hype generated by the “1984″ Super Bowl commercial, I don’t recall knowing anyone who was looking forward to January 24 the way I was. On the big day I picked up that week’s copy of InfoWorld, with Steve Jobs on the cover, and the first issue of MacWorld, at Out-of-Town News in Harvard Square, and headed into the Harvard Coop to see the machines on display. They had a couple set up, running MacPaint and MacWrite, with ImageWriters you could use to print out your doodles. There was no hoopla, no crowd, and at $2,499 (without peripherals) certainly no worries about running out of stock. All the same, the machines were magical, utterly unlike the personal computer state of the art.
The two things that struck me most immediately about the Mac were the screen, and the mode of interaction. At a time when other computers used green (or amber)-on-black text, with big fuzzy pixels, the Mac 128K used sharp black-on-white. And while you communicated with other computers through a layer of abstract commands, typing “copy letter.txt b:” because you’d learned that command for backing up a file to a different disk, on a Mac you moved your hand to actually pick up that file, and drop it where you wanted it to go. It was the difference between typing directions and driving a car.
Of course these are also the two things that strike you first about an iPhone. The screen is so sharp that it has nearly as many pixels as the Mac 128K, squeezed into a space that fits in a pocket. And again, the interaction is direct: you flick photos, pinch maps, and tap on phone numbers, instead of pressing some button that’s arbitrarily labeled with the function you want.
A dozen years after the Mac 128K shipped virtually all personal computers worked like a Mac. I’m not sure that the iPhone will be as sweepingly successful a template: by 2019 we may have moved on to phones that we wear like glasses and interact with by voice command, or something similarly futuristic. But in the meantime I expect to see more and more iPhone-like phones, from Apple and others.
By the way, it is easy to forget how primitive the personal computers of 1984 were when the Mac debuted. For a look back, check out James Fallows’ excellent Living with a Computer. Originally published just 18 months before the Mac was released, it portrays a now almost unimaginable world. Tellingly, Apple is the only manufacturer mentioned that still makes personal computers. The rest — Tandy, Processor Technology, DEC, Heath, Atari, Commodore, Victor, Vector, Wang, Sinclair, North Star, Xerox, Osborne, and even IBM — either no longer exist or have fled the business.
