How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus
- Reference: 1654849810
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/06/10/on_call/
- Source link:
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Apple Macintosh Plus in the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia
Our story comes from a reader Regomized as "Mark", well into his fourth decade in the IT industry, and concerns the time when Apple was bringing its beige all-in-one Macs into the classroom for the very first time.
Being in computer customer support at an educational institution, Mark was very much at the sharp pointy end of Apple's thrust.
"The response to the Mac on our campus was amazing," he said, "the University built a lab full of just Mac Pluses to handle the demand."
While it might be 45 years since the Apple II put in an appearance, the impact of the Mac and its user interface continues to reverberate today. The Plus shipped with a mighty megabyte of RAM and rocked a [3]Motorola 68000 CPU. It also featured the iconic monochrome screen in its case and had a range of productivity tools. One of these was MacWrite, which had turned up alongside the first iteration.
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The graphical interface, while not wholly original, was a revelation for the time (even if modern users take such what-you-see-is-what-you-might-get marvels for granted today.) It was also subject to abuse.
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"One of the enthusiastic users believed that a document could be improved if you added as many different fonts as possible," explained Mark. We know just the type (and typeface.)
"One day he came to me saying that one of the Macs in the lab was broken," Mark went on. "He was writing a paper using MacWrite and it would no longer let him enter any more text."
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The MacWrite of the era was not noted for being particularly fragile, so Mark dug deeper.
"He could not edit or enter any text of any kind no matter the font," he went on, "Of course the first things that came to mind were fonts or perhaps the length of the document."
"You could create new documents but you could no longer work on his."
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Mark sat down before the stricken machine and created a new file. All was well. The user, however, insisted that Apple's finest was misbehaving. So Mark did what any good support engineer would do. No, not go for a long liquid lunch. He asked the user to demonstrate what he was doing.
"On every line, when he got to the edge of the screen," said Mark, "he TABBED to the next line. Just as you would hit return with a typewriter when you got to the edge of the page."
The document was nearing 30 pages, and the user had tabbed at the end of every text filled line. A paragraph was on the receiving end of two tabs.
We had a crack at recreating this problem ourselves, using one of the popular emulators, and we can confirm that after this sort of abuse, MacWrite occasionally stops accepting any new input (it also gets progressively less and less responsive, hinting at the problems to come.)
Mark speculated that MacWrite must have some sort of tab limit, where no more data could be entered. It didn't crash, it simply ignored further input.
"I told Apple about this," he said. "They were unaware of the limit."
[9]That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity
[10]Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode
[11]You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier
[12]We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?
"Of course," he conceded, "it could have been document size and the tabs made the document exceed it." However, he'd never hit this problem before or since.
The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future [13]READ MORE
Mark gently suggested that the user might remove the tabs and educated him in how MacWrite (and pretty the majority of modern word processors) worked. All was well.
"His document was still ugly with all those fonts."
It was the only time Mark ever needed to teach someone how to use the application. "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation."
"I was wrong."
There have been few greater catastrophes in computing than when users were given the ability to festoon their documents with poor font choices. And even with the most famously friendly of interfaces, a user can still be trusted to do something silly. Ever found yourself dispensing training when you assumed surely none was needed? Tell us, with an email to [14]On Call . ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/06/09/shutterstock_macintosh_plus.jpg
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/25/the_apple_mac_at_35/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YqMWSuun4NJ34-xzFY@ytAAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YqMWSuun4NJ34-xzFY@ytAAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YqMWSuun4NJ34-xzFY@ytAAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YqMWSuun4NJ34-xzFY@ytAAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YqMWSuun4NJ34-xzFY@ytAAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/03/on_call/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/29/on_call/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/15/on_call/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/on_call/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2019/01/25/the_apple_mac_at_35/
[14] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Ahh, the fun of documents from people new to word processing who feel it is a great idea to fill the document with Comic Sans and WordArt (shudder) to "show off their skills".
It reminds me of the early days of the internet with people creating homepages in FrontPage Express that featured gawdy, blinking/scrolling text, hideous tiled backgrounds and "under construction" gifs everywhere.
Back then I also remembered coming across a website that scrolled really slowly and unresponsively. After checking the page source, it transpired that instead of setting a solid colour background, they'd created a 1x1 pixel JPG which they had then tiled to create the solid colour background.
"the early days of the internet with people creating homepages in FrontPage Express"
Front Page was released in '95, the Express version in '97. The Internet is a couple decades older than that. The NCP version of the network started in late '69, Flag Day for the TCP/IP version was January 1st, 1980.
Under construction
I'm not going to be quite as much of a pedant about the meaning of "internet" as jake «grin» (although he's right: internet >> web), but, yeah, FrontPage was a latecomer to the web, which had been growing and thriving for a good number of years before then: those were carefully handcrafted "Under construction" web pages, doncha know! :-D
But Bill Gates invented the Internet and wrote the first web browser, didn't he?
And sadly, far too many people think "the web" is the Internet.
"I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"
There is no application that can't have a user too stupid to use it.
Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"
Ah, Photoshop and a really large canvas! That was a good one from a seasoned PS user!
Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"
Company I worked for sold a scanner with a PC when flatbed scanners had just started to come down in price, but before USB.
He couldn't scan. Reason: scanner could interpolate to give an output of 19200dpi. And this was the setting the user had decided to use, because why would we sell him a scanner you couldn't use at the maximum setting?
The resulting scan was larger then the HD fitted to the PC.
And what did he want to use this massive image for? He was going to fax it (via the internal modem) to a site.
I don't want to know how long, and much paper would be needed to print out a 19200dpi at 150dpi.
Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"
Reminds me of when I was a trainer at a call centre at a large utility company in the mid-90's.
One of my trainees came to me convinced the fax machine had broken. I asked them what was up and they said they did not know.
So I asked why they thought it was broken.
Well, I've just sent this fax [flapping a bit of paper in my face]
Yes, and...
Well, I still have the bit of paper so it's clearly not sent
Wait, so... No actually you genuinely think the fax machine shreds the paper into component atoms and fires the whole lot down the phone line to be reassembled the other end don't you
Well is that not how they work?
As a techie teenager (back in the very early days of home computers) I received a call from a neighbour who was having trouble with her brand new PC. She was using the word processor, but it would not let her save the file. I popped over and took a quick look. The Word Processor software she was using was MS-DOS!
"On every line, when he got to the edge of the screen," said Mark, "he TABBED to the next line. Just as you would hit return with a typewriter when you got to the edge of the page."
Could someone explain the typewriter link to me? Why would you tab your way across on a typewriter and then hit return?
If you were coming from a "typewriter" world, you're responsible for CR/LF.
And carriage return isn't simply 0x0D, it's a huge lever, on the left of the Carriage (the part of the typewriter that contains the platen [the roller that the paper is wrapped around]).
A typist might well look on the left hand side of the keyboard for the Carriage Return, see the tab, and decide that that's the right button. Which it was, right up until it wasn't.
The user had discovered that when one line was full, tabbing would move the cursor to a new line. Clever user.
Mechanical typewriters didn't automatically move to the next line. Users had to operate the carriage return lever to return the paper carriage to its start position, which was usually set to perform a line feed too.
There are demonstrations beginning [1]at approximately 1:46.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4nX0Xrn-wo
Some things never change
I'm pretty sure it's 2022 now, and that all the folk at one of my valued customers, a fairly technical business, are under 50, most of them under 40. But apparently some things never change.
Right now, I'm translating their terms and conditions into English. What program did they use to write the document? A word processor? Nope, they used PowerPoint. And how did they number the clauses in the agreement and created hanging indents if a clause spans more than one line? Did they click the handy Numbered list icon at the top of the screen? Nope, they numbered every clause by hand, then at the end of a line hit Enter, and indented the new line with spaces.
Am I enjoying translating this document? Nope.
Fortunately there's a remedy -->
A good weekend to all Commentards.
So Mark did what any good support engineer would do. No, not go for a long liquid lunch.
It sounds like Mark should have gone for a nice lunch pint on the user's tab....