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116 Comments
- AmyVernon, on 10/31/2009, -1/+134I loved this one:
"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new fangled devices." - Dweller99, on 10/31/2009, -0/+82Why am I not surprised that is a quote from Dvorak.
- jj101, on 11/01/2009, -0/+68Henry Ford (apparently) once said about his mass produced cars:
"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said faster horses." - kevinmoore, on 11/01/2009, -2/+45Dvorak is the Rush Limbaugh of the tech world. Mostly full of hot air.
- hbyrne, on 10/31/2009, -0/+41I had a review model of the first 128K Macs, and it was the most fascinating, useless machine ever. You couldn't do anything with it, nor could you take your hands off it.
- hascat, on 11/01/2009, -4/+30it's amazing to me that dvorak still has a job after all these years. he's so regularly wrong about so many things tech-related.
- majoris, on 11/01/2009, -2/+28Is there anyone in the world with less credibility than Dvorak when it comes to computers?
San Francisco Examiner, John C. Dvorak, 19 Feb. 1984
"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices."
This guy has beens striking out on computer reviews for 25 years. If I wanted such an opinion, maybe I'd ask my grandparents. - peestandingup, on 11/01/2009, -0/+24***** me, Dvorak has been around for THAT long? How does he continue to get work?? He's completely wrong a good 90% of the time. Gets to be wrong that much & still keep his job.
He's the weatherman of the tech world. - alpha88, on 10/31/2009, -2/+26If everyone thought like that, there would be no innovation, how ridiculous.
- Heiliger, on 11/01/2009, -0/+16Remember the little app that came boxed with the Mac, educating you on how to use a mouse? You were taught how to click, double-click, and drag by watching the directions on screen. Eventually, a maze appeared on screen, and you had to drag the little mouse through it to get to the cheese in the center.
I think the Plus had a new introduction to the mouse; an illustration of an urban setting, where you would click to look inside windows, or make birds fly around.
Amazing how foreign it seemed back then. Not much unlike this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzRziK-kZtQ - ilikejam, on 11/01/2009, -1/+16Dvorak: wrong since 1984.
- takamalak, on 11/01/2009, -2/+16One again Dvorak shows how completely and utterly wrong he was.
For me, the major things wrong with the original Mac 128K were these:
• Not enough RAM. Should have come standard with 256KB or more, pricing permitting.
• No SIMM slots. SIMM sots were introduced with the Plus but could have easily been in the first Mac. Jobs was adamant that the Mac stay a completely closed box with no upgrade path. Thankfully he was forced to go on a sabbatical.
• Dual floppy drives. It had the room. The power supply would have had to been a little bigger. But that's about it.
Sure, the monitor could have been bigger or in color but at that time the Mac was being positioned as a business computer. I don't think they could have found a high resolution (512 x 384, ha!) color monitor for a reasonable price. - Hercules, on 11/01/2009, -0/+14Dugg for Dvorak's comment.
It's about equal to what he writes now. - anonymous10, on 11/01/2009, -0/+12Looks like that reviewer has no idea what 'experimental' or 'new' means.
- fuzzynyanko, on 11/01/2009, -0/+12Though C64 didn't run with a GUI OS by default.
- kevinmoore, on 11/01/2009, -0/+10Ah yes, 1985. The year that Amiga's total dominance of the computing industry began.
I wonder what ever happened to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM? Where are they now? - AZTriGuy, on 11/01/2009, -0/+10Dvorak's been around a long time, but I had no idea that he was a curmudgeon even 25 years ago. GET OFF MY YARD!
- rolf, on 11/01/2009, -0/+10Whatever Dvorak says, just assume the opposite is true.
- takamalak, on 11/01/2009, -0/+9The GUI they created required a Mouse to interact with the computer system. It wasn't like a CLI with a mouse grafted on. The GUI needed a pointing device. That is what Dvorak and "others" don't seem to get.
- borez, on 11/01/2009, -2/+10I was video capturing my desktop this morning, in 720p high quality whilst running flex time in Logic Pro for a demo I'm making... then complaining because the frame rate was a little jumpy.
Kind of puts it in perspective just how far computers have evolved really. - kedohmen, on 11/01/2009, -0/+825 years later....and they're still bitching about the same things.
- supersonicjim, on 11/01/2009, -5/+13Want to win a medal? There's an app for that.
- Heiliger, on 11/01/2009, -0/+8Sweet. I just found screenshots of both mouse tours:
Mac:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/tutorials/mac1984/ ...
Mac Plus:
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/tutorials/macplus1 ... - BossKey, on 11/01/2009, -1/+9Let's not forget the classic Slashdot review of the iPod and why it could not succeed:
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
People talk about how "small" Apple's market share is but they forget that for three decades Apple has continually outlasted all the Commodores, Wangs, Ataris, and Osbornes that fell by the wayside. Remember Apple vs. IBM? Even IBM doesn't make personal computers anymore. - tomato1324, on 11/01/2009, -0/+7lols that mouse idea never took off i guess.
- thisthatwhat, on 11/01/2009, -1/+8There's someone defending Dvorak after someone starts to ridicule him. What's up with that?
Yes, at the time the CLI was most common to everyone. The concept of a UI and a pointing device was new. However, a good reviewer should keep his mind open and not jump to a quick conclusion and outright cast the mouse as a device that no one will ever use.
In my opinion he should eat his words. He was wrong 25 years ago because he is not open to new technology in a field that moves fast and is constantly evolving. - Khast, on 11/01/2009, -6/+13"Anybody who could write a good application on a 128K Mac deserves a medal."
I guess a lot of Commodore 64 application designers got medals all the way into the 90s. Commodore as most people are aware of only had 64K RAM (only 48K was available for user space.) And they made programs for it officially until 1992. - icexe, on 11/01/2009, -2/+9"I really don't like Apple's business model. It's like Bose; give people the impression that your stuff is better (even though it isn't) and charge them more for it. The sheep will pay."
Actually, that's what I call a brilliant business model.
Though I don't necessarily agree this applies to Apple. They have been quite innovative in their products over the last decade, they only now seem the same as everyone else because everyone else is finally catching up to them. - tofagerl, on 11/01/2009, -1/+7It's all about the apps.
- kreatre2007, on 11/01/2009, -2/+8Dvorak is an idiot. I bet he uses a mouse today, just like the rest of us. The original Mac was under powered, but then so were all other computers on the market. It's easy to sit back and criticize when you have no personal or financial investment in something, and when you're pissed off that you didn't release the product first.
- inactive, on 11/01/2009, -1/+7I like Jello.
- mrBitch, on 11/01/2009, -0/+5RE: ".. Why would you need one when you can just type in commands in a terminal?"
That's what the DOS fans were saying at the time. Now those very same people are using a GUI based OS for 80% of the time (Windows, OSX, or Linux), and the CLI environment far less than they used to in the days of DOS based PCs. - St0neman, on 11/01/2009, -1/+6Where is the Amiga review? A much superior machine in all ways.
- McDutchie, on 11/01/2009, -0/+5Very simple: he's good at trolling, and public outrage generates lots of ad views.
- TexMexRex, on 11/01/2009, -0/+5Wasn't the 25th anniversary of Jan 22, 2004, 8+ months ago?
- BlueStarr, on 11/01/2009, -0/+5John C was a crotchy old man even when he was young.
- antonymarceles, on 11/01/2009, -3/+7Bill Gates - "Anybody who could write a good application on a 128K Mac deserves a medal."
FUNNYYY - inactive, on 11/01/2009, -2/+6Actually, in BASIC, the C64 only had a little above 38K available.
- Joest23, on 11/01/2009, -7/+11Yeah. Why would anyone want one of these new-fangled 'mice'? Why would you need one when you can just type in commands in a terminal?
- reiggin, on 11/01/2009, -2/+6He was right about the original iBook. It really did look like a Hello Kitty toilet seat.
- thisthatwhat, on 11/01/2009, -2/+6X-Code is straight from Apple. They provide an excellent IDE for FREE.
It is built for developers with amazing tutorials and videos to get you started. I too am a Visual Studio user but I'd completely disagree that development on the PC is any easier.
As a developer I think every platform and OS has an excellent development environment as long as you're willing to give it a try.
It's all about experience. Linux/UNIX developers can do wonders developing with no more than VI and an assortment of command line utilities. - doshindude, on 11/01/2009, -0/+4holy *****, DVORAK said that? How long has this guy been around? I thought he was just some old fart who bitched about computers at PC World.
- aristotle0dude, on 11/02/2009, -0/+4You are full of *****. You just used a bunch of acronyms in the wrong context. Objective C is a language, not an IDE. Neither X-Code (IDE for OS X) or Visual Studio will write a webservice for you. But I have to ask you, why wouldn't you just use Java on OS X to implement the webservice rather than Objective C? That is the recommended method if you search developer.apple.com. They recommend using Java for cloud services and Objective C for the web service clients on the mac or you can just use Java for that too.
Yes, it is easier to write a web service in .NET using Visual Studio compared to Java but you are still full of it. I've written web service clients in Java, C# and Python. - rolf, on 11/01/2009, -1/+5If it's that painful for you, get another phone.
- ZeroCubed, on 11/01/2009, -0/+4I know. I usually have three adobe programs running at once - sometimes 4. Then when I work on a computer that won't let me even use two adobe programs at once I get bitchy.
- BullBearMS, on 11/01/2009, -0/+3Yea, but those GEOS guys were just freaking amazing for what they managed to pull off on a C64.
- tomato1324, on 11/01/2009, -3/+6not really, the only ones that apply to the iphone is expansion slots and multitasking. nice try though.
- Hermmunster, on 11/01/2009, -1/+4Some of the people commenting on Dvorak are a era out of place. What they all think is that "a mouse?, we all have one, how could anyone say that?"
Back at that time all applications were keyboard driven and a lot of people agreed with Dvorak. The goal, and criticism of, applications were to use the proper hotkeys to perform tasks to make those tasks go faster. To introduce a mouse was to slow down that process and to break your concentration because you had to look up at a menu instead of focusing on your editing (granted text selection and formatting was brilliant with a mouse).
If an application didn't have the right combination of hotkeys it was considered junk. Wordstar, for its' time was a great program because the hotkey combinations were right on. Word Perfect was the same way. In its' day WP was the premier word processor just as Wordstar was when it was released.
The cost of a mouse back then was incredibly high. Years later when wireless mice were invented the cost of them was sometimes over $100.00 just for the mouse. Today we take a mouse for granted and we can pick one up for next to nothing.
The combination of the cost of the mouse and the fact that a mouse interrupted your train of thought, especially since applications were generally used for text editing and numbers (almost nothing else), was the reason a lot of people agreed with Dvorak (at the time). It took a long time for the mouse to be come adopted as a standard peripheral.
That day and age had a hard core journalistic following, meaning journalists did honest write-ups on products and almost always considered them from their perspective, especially when one considered that journalists needed portability, which also meant another peripheral that needed to be lugged around (as that mouse was no light weight ergonomic device--it was a square box with a button on it--and it had a mouse ball and rollers which got dirty and made maintenance difficult).
Dvorak had the reputation of getting slightly more right in his predictions than he did wrong, at a time when most everyone else got most everything wrong in their predictions, that's why he's still around today...and if you haven't watched his video blog (over a period of time) then you probably won't understand his current reasoning, which is pretty accurate -- all things considered. - SpeedSteamBoat, on 11/01/2009, -0/+3What are you talking about? He was wrong because we're all using mice right now.
That comment displays a total lack of incite. If you are using anything remotely resembling a modern GUI OS then you NEED a mouse. It's not a matter of "wanting" one or not. Trying to use a GUI without a pointing device a complete chore and worse than just using a terminal. The Mac would have been horrible, if not entirely inconsequential, without the mouse.
At a time when personal computers were about to turn a corner for strict hobbiest and business fare to generally user friend machines for the average computer Dvorak missed the boat. He didn't see the direction the industry was heading, and this comment is proof of that. He was so wrong. - SPECOPS, on 11/01/2009, -0/+3Also the Mac 128K also had a 64K ROM to help with the GUI --- so almost 200K to play with ---- (C= 64 had ROM, but only 20K ... so ~90K total) --- of course, the ROM was also shared DMA space (as it was with the C= 64 and many others of its time). All of this (bot both of them) created some very good assembly coders --- the long lost art.
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