32by32 – Macintosh History from the 1980s

by ecliptik • 3 years ago

71 22 3 years ago

duderific• 3 years ago

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.

glimshe• 3 years ago

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 :).

mgiampapa2• 3 years ago

We used fonts designed to work with the dot pitch of CRT displays that made it a little more bearable.

jdougan• 3 years ago

It is a lot easier to read on the CRT's of the day.

mgiampapa2• 3 years ago

It's apparently easier on not-Firefox as well. According to the readme for Chrome / Safari they used some CSS3 to disable font smoothing.

dylan604• 3 years ago

Did you hover over the image of the Macs?

xp84• 3 years ago

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.

wpearse• 3 years ago

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.

masswerk• 3 years ago

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.)

Someone• 3 years ago

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)

EricE• 3 years ago

Man I miss WriteNow

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

On a giant Radius display. Ahhhhhh.

speps• 3 years ago

TFA probably came from being mentioned in this video from Adrian's Digital Basement: https://youtu.be/slY_F1MxGlk

rjsw• 3 years ago

It runs really well on my Q950.

WillAdams• 3 years ago

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.

CharlesW2• 3 years ago

If you like this kind of thing, check out folklore.org as well.

pcdoodle• 3 years ago

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.

CliffStoll• 3 years ago

Berkeley Macintosh User's Group ... those were the days!

pstuart• 3 years ago

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.

ForOldHack• 3 years ago

Link for Apple Macintosh before system 7 has moved: It is now at https://www.earlymacintosh.org/

christkv• 3 years ago

I saw this 1986 dual screen Mac video which is crazy for the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slY_F1MxGlk

desi_ninja• 3 years ago

The website struggles on phone to align properly

32by32 – Macintosh History from the 1980s

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