Are today's Macs related to the Mac Daddy?

The MacBook Air seems a long way off from the original Macintosh. But according to some, there remains some hereditary DNA from its 1984-era ancestor.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

What is a Macintosh?

After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.

But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.

The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, according to two experts interviewed for this article.

One half of an ad for the original 128K Macintosh from 1984.

(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)

"Very little, in terms of the hardware, remains," said Bruce Damer, co-founder of the Digibarn Computer Museum, "except for the fine-quality industrial design of the cases."

But there must be something linking the earliest Macs with today's models besides the name and company that produces them. Otherwise, the famous Macintosh community known by names like the "cult of Mac" or "MacHeads" wouldn't be such a powerful force.

"At its essence, you look at it where it (is) relative to what it was before," said Raines Cohen, the founder of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, and "there's a sense that it's still a machine that you turn on and you do things (easily) with it. It's an interface that stays out of your way."

Basically, Cohen said, the Mac is all about ease of use and simplicity--as well as the continuity of a low-maintenance user experience.

"Recently, I had a chance to go back and use the old Mac," Cohen said. "The essential consistency was still the same. You could take a Mac user who has been on ice for the last quarter century and put them on a modern Mac, and they'd be up and using it within a matter of moments."

Perhaps that's because of a few software elements that today's Macs have that first appeared in the first versions of the computer.

"On the software side, the primary elements left from the original Mac OS come through in the user interface," said Damer. "The single menu stripe--File, Special, etc.--is a vestige of the original limited screen real estate of the 128K Mac."

The original Mac was a simple machine that changed the way everyday people saw computers. The machine helped open up desktop publishing to a mainstream audience.

(Credit: Courtesy of the Digibarn Computer Museum)

Damer said there are a few other recognizable holdovers as well. For one, the arrow-cursor remains almost identical today to its origins, and window-handling also has stayed the same. In other words, he said, today, as in 1984, you can only resize a window from the lower right corner.

Today's Mac OS X got its beginnings at NeXT, the company Steve Jobs built during his years in exile from Apple. When Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back, first to consult and then run the company, the NeXT OS came along with him and formed the basis for the future generations of Macs.

But Apple knew that its fans had an idea of what the Mac OS was supposed to look like, Damer suggested, and as a result, it found a way to maintain some of the consistency to which Cohen referred.

"In some sense, to try to keep some of the original look and feel of the old Mac OS, the Apple team 'dumbed down' the NeXT GUI," Damer said, "which was in some ways more powerful and flexible."

But all along, Cohen said, the Mac operating system has kept the basic elements of menu navigation and windowing more or less the same.

And that, aside from the much more abstract notion that a computer built by what is seen by many to be a company obsessed with design and a somewhat pirate-like mentality, may be what really makes a Mac a Mac.

"Apple's UI guidelines have been there all along," Cohen said, "so that programs have to be consistent and have that (high) level of consistency in order to be successful on the platform."

See the rest of our Mac anniversary coverage here.

[kcotham]

They've made the OS X GUI a little more friendly to Windows users, to court them over to the Macintosh, and some of the NeXT UI has creeped in, but all in all, yes, the Mac OS is very similar to the System 6 and System 7 from my youth. Long live the Macintosh! Here's to another 25 years!

[Bill_I]

Amen

[Penguinisto]

...Just peek at the keyboard. If you do, you'll notice some bits that have been there all along :)

[Hep Cat]

That was my thought. Hardware architecture-wise, there's nothing left from the 32-bit Motorola machines, though.

[Kev_Orng]

Those are chip crumbs. You have to shake out it every five years or so.

[sandor_f]

The 68000 processor in the original Mac was only 24 bit.

[rcardona2k]

The MC68000 was a 32-bit processor trapped by a 24-bit address bus and a 16-bit data bus. It was leaps beyond the 8086 or 80186 processors which had segmented memory architecture, less and smaller registers

[imhodudes]

"You could take a Mac user who has been on ice for the last quarter century . . . "

That, it appears, is exactly where Raines has been if he thinks the current Mac is more closely related to the original than it is to a Windows computer.

[Kev_Orng]

I know Mac OS is related to Windows, but if you look at the history, Windows is like the ex who took off in the night with half the furniture and then badmouthed Mac to all their friends.

So yeah, related like that for sure.

[Daniel L Smith]

"The single menu stripe--File, Special, etc.--is a vestige of the original limited screen real estate of the 128K Mac."

I think Fitts's law -- it's easier to move the mouse to the top of the screen than to a menu strip in the middle of the screen -- was a much bigger factor in the original design, and is certainly what has kept that decision relevant. (And even if you want to claim its main purpose was to save screen real estate, there's still no reason to suggest that that's not still relevant.)

[contentcreator--2008]

Actually this is one of the top vestigial artifacts due for replacement in OS X. If you try using OS X with a 30" monitor, or maybe two, and several apps active at once, you'll understand why in under 5 minutes---as you are working away in one app, and suddenly realize the menu is a foot and a half away, or on a different monitor. The single menu strip is a reflection not only of the originally limited screen real estate, but that you could only run one app at a time. It is a UI design that scales very poorly to future desk-scale interfaces. Expect this one to go away soon if Apply has any sense.

[CanadianAvenger]

Let's not forget... after 25 years there is still only 1 mouse button. Though, technically, the 'mighty mouse' has multiple buttons, it is disguised as a single button.

[contentcreator--2008]

I think you meant "still only 1 USABLE mouse button" The hidden right-click button is perhaps the worst piece of industrial design to come out of apple, completely and utterly useless. Most people I know route the "mighty mouse" direct to the circular file --- Microsoft makes excellent mice. What's up with that?!!!

[IndyJeff]

Don't forget Carbon... that's probably the most direct carryover of the original Mac's DNA.

[sanenazok]

What's interesting is that the menu-driven interface, which was dictated by low-res b&w displays, has not been superseded. Programs can add icons to the menus to make them more usable, but the idea is dated and not that intuitive. Sure, we're used to them but menu driven interfaces are far from perfect.

I like the ribbon interface on Office 07 and apparently it will be in Win7 more. Hope it sees greater adoption across platforms, even if it means loosing the connection to legacy systems.

[Harknail]

Another holdover from the original Mac (now spread to all computers), square pixels. Before the Mac, most computers had pixels taller than they were wide.

[Renegade Knight]

The first Mac was a breakthrough in the PC world. Nothing really new as most of what it brought to the table had long since been researched or invented. However it was the first PC to pull it all together where it worked well and created fans. I liked the first Macs but their prices then were out of sight. Now they aren't too bad and I finally bought one. The Apple magic that went into the first Mac's may still be there but since everthing else has caught up they no longer really stand out. Now they are just an alternate if you are tired of windows or prefer the alternate way OS X does all the same things as Windows.

[jaxstephens]

I gained my passion for computers using the original Mac OS during the 1990s. While I think Apple is a great company overall, I was sad to see the original Mac OS replaced with a Unix derivative in the form of Mac OS X. For that reason alone, the original Mac and the current one are unrelated in all but very superficial means, at least from a software perspective.

The original Mac OS was designed from the ground up to be a GUI-based system, and it had some features and conventions to it that were superior to Mac OS X because--at it's core--Mac OS X is Unix. And what is Unix but a freaking ancient system--in terms of technology--from the 1960s. (!)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a total Unix/Linux hater, but I stand my ground on the fact that these systems carry baggage from a bygone era of computing, and they were never originally designed for GUI use.

Take the simple structure of the file hierarchy in Unix--/ (root), /etc, /bin, /var, /usr, etc. This is cryptic and not user friendly for the average person; it's suitable maybe for programmers and engineers. Wheres Microsoft can evolve the naming of its root C:\ directories from WINNT to Windows or Documents and Settings to Users over time to improve it for usability, who will ever step in and change the now obsolete structure of Unix? No one, because no one has true control over Unix (and by extension, Linux), and because doing so would break too many things that depend on this decades-old structure.

The reality is that, in the tech world, most technologies enjoy a lifespan of 5, 10, or perhaps 15 years, and then they become obsolete and are replaced. Who would want to run DOS as a primary OS now? Who would want to play an Atari 2600 as their main game console anymore? Who would want the original Palm Pilot as their PDA? But despite the odds, Unix stays around. I know the reasons why, but I don't have to like them, and I don't have to like it when a pure and elegant GUI-only system like the original Mac OS gets killed off by some crusty, command-line era remnant of 1960s programming.

There, I said it. :-)

[tm_anon]

Unfortunate that you think the file hierarchy in Unix isn't user friendly. Have you ever tried looking through the file architecture in Windows? I tried once and ended up with a headache. Unless it was a file I'd written and named myself, I had no idea what I was looking at. It made no sense to anyone who wasn't a programmer. I switched to Linux, been using it for 1 month, the file system makes sense right away. I know exactly where to look for anything I'm looking for and there are no cryptic folders. No headaches. The original Mac OS was far superior to Windows at the time do to its GUI based system, but with Unix, Mac has done wonderful things without losing what they had.

[tsumner]

If you don't like the traditional names in Unix-like systems you just add links with the names you like ( but don't delete/rename the originals so nothing breaks). Everybody can have the names they prefer but use the standard names when portability is an issue.

The standard names were chosen for brevity in command line typing and before you put that down show us the GUI that has the power, transparency, and flexibility of shell scripts.

[itsaspork]

I think it's a problem that Apple has retained the menu strip at the top - there are better ways to do this. A 3-D browser, to access online tools that you assemble for a task - no apps, Ted Nelson-style. If not Apple, who's going to try this?

[tm_anon]

If you really think it's better than anything else, why not do it yourself?

[siftnsand]

Would you believe my mother still has this original Mac computer from 25 years ago ... way before the internet came about !! Anyone want to buy it ?! (smile)

[Bill_I]

Go rent the movie 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'.