32by32 – Macintosh History from the 1980s(32by32.com)
32by32.com
32by32 – Macintosh History from the 1980s
https://32by32.com/
8 comments
If you like this kind of thing, check out folklore.org as well.
Link for Apple Macintosh before system 7 has moved:
It is now at https://www.earlymacintosh.org/
I highly recommend buying a compact mac, they are absolutely charming and a nice little air gapped machine for excel, word and cool games like risk and triple yahtzee.
Berkeley Macintosh User's Group ... those were the days!
I got my job at Farallon from attending BMUG -- it was transformational for me.
edit: and only now realized who I replied to. gotta love HN.
edit: and only now realized who I replied to. gotta love HN.
This looks like really interesting content, but the lack of anti-aliasing in the typeface (which is kind of the point, I guess) makes it very painful on the eyes.
It indeed is the point. See https://32by32.com/read-me/
From that page: “I was inspired by Stuart Brown‘s Retro MacOS Theme, and modified it for my use. Brown’s original design magnifies pixel elements 2x, for a post-modern take on the original look-and-feel. For this project, I wanted to see what the original artwork would look like on a 1:1 scale.”
I have to zoom in on this page to get the original Mac feel, so I see why one would go for a 2×2 version (the links to Stuart Brown’s setup are dead, unfortunately, so I can’t check them. https://themesinfo.com/retro-mac-os-wpcom-wordpress-blog-tem... points to http://fordstowel.com/, but that seems dead, too)
From that page: “I was inspired by Stuart Brown‘s Retro MacOS Theme, and modified it for my use. Brown’s original design magnifies pixel elements 2x, for a post-modern take on the original look-and-feel. For this project, I wanted to see what the original artwork would look like on a 1:1 scale.”
I have to zoom in on this page to get the original Mac feel, so I see why one would go for a 2×2 version (the links to Stuart Brown’s setup are dead, unfortunately, so I can’t check them. https://themesinfo.com/retro-mac-os-wpcom-wordpress-blog-tem... points to http://fordstowel.com/, but that seems dead, too)
That's how people used to work in the 80s, in particular the classic Macs. It was monochrome in the literal sense, a pixel could be either fully black or fully white. You could do dithering but that wouldn't happen here. An entire generation worked this way :).
We used fonts designed to work with the dot pitch of CRT displays that made it a little more bearable.
That's actually interesting. Having been used to it once, I find it now to be a refreshing experience. (This may be due to this reminding of times when things used to be more focused. I observe myself approaching this content with a quite different attitude than most things today.)
I’d be ok if the text-encoding errors weren’t so bad. In the BMUG articles, every apostrophe is transformed into like, €™ or something.
Weirdly -- I seem to remember seeing a lot of ,€“ on my old Macintosh ~25 years ago. I think this could be intentional reminder of the "old days", and not a mistake.
Did you hover over the image of the Macs?
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Man I miss WriteNow
One of my favourite programs, esp. on my NeXT Cube. My wife wrote her Master's Thesis in WriteNow v2 on a Mac SE which I somehow managed to get printed on an HP LaserJet (IV I think it was --- the nice 600dpi one) at the college.
WriteNow was ~100,000 lines of assembler code.
It had an interesting history --- it was developed under contract for Apple as a hedge against MacWrite not making it --- when it was ready, they allowed it to be sold separately, then when Steve Jobs left Apple, it wound up getting ported to NeXTstep and for a while was bundled w/ Cubes until that was given up as anti-competitive.
WriteNow was ~100,000 lines of assembler code.
It had an interesting history --- it was developed under contract for Apple as a hedge against MacWrite not making it --- when it was ready, they allowed it to be sold separately, then when Steve Jobs left Apple, it wound up getting ported to NeXTstep and for a while was bundled w/ Cubes until that was given up as anti-competitive.
On a giant Radius display. Ahhhhhh.
TFA probably came from being mentioned in this video from Adrian's Digital Basement: https://youtu.be/slY_F1MxGlk
It runs really well on my Q950.
I saw this 1986 dual screen Mac video which is crazy for the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slY_F1MxGlk
The website struggles on phone to align properly