I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay!). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
It’s been an intriguing read. It’s a remarkably handsome manual, beautifully typeset, which, considering par for the course at the time was probably Courier with few illustrations, is saying something.
Also, even back in 1984, there was no definite article. You get phrases like “With Macintosh, you’re in charge.” No “the”s or “a”s.
One of the more striking things was how every
Chapter is introduced with a full-color photo of Macintosh being used. Here they are (click on them to see bigger sizes):
The first thing I appreciated was how Macintosh is set within somewhat normal (and quite varied) contexts of use.
Then I noticed that, with the exception of
Chapter 5, every photo shows a preppy white male using the computer. Women and people of color need not apply! (The dude in
Chapter 4 even has a *sweater* around his shoulders!!!)
And
Chapter 5 exudes preppiness with the glass brick backdrop.
Also, why is the keyboard in
Chapter 3 positioned like that? Why on earth was it posed that way?
Anyway.
The thing you’ll notice in
Chapter 6 (and maybe you saw it in the Appendix) was the infamous Mac carrying case. There’s a page about it, which I photographed:
The introduction of the manual greets you with this image:
Introduction
Dig that reflection! Apple returned to the reflection as a visual element a few years ago…
Some of the best stuff, of course, is explaining how the thing works.
Clicking and Dragging (pretty straightforward)
My favorite is scrolling. I can imagine the discussion: “Well, it’s called a scroll bar… I know, let’s use a drawing of a scroll!” Yes. Because people in the mid-80s were all about scrolls…
And, hey, Where Does Your Information Go?
You’ll probably want to click for details
Oh! That’s where that metaphor comes from…
And perhaps the strangest sentence: “The Finder is like a central hallway in the Macintosh house.”
(And the disk is a… guest? Someone looking for the bathroom?
It’s been surprisingly delightful flipping through this little bit of computer history. The pace, and deliberateness, with which the system and its interface are explained are quite impressive.
Amazing pictures indeed, I just wished today documentation manuals actually had some of that care put into them.
Which manual is this one exactly?
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. This was the manual that came with the original 128k Macintosh, released in 1984.
Peter, a man after my own heart. Obviously, I need to get my hands on one of these.
Wonderful review Peter. These old manuals are great. Some time ago I dug up a //c manual and was caught by similar reactions. I only posted a few shots, but here too, I thought the illustration of scrolling was a favorite.
flickr set of //c manual pages
I think the hallway he is cycling through is Stanford University.
What amazes me is that half these guys could pose as the “I am a PC” in the current ads 🙂
As to the diversity issue, please not again. I worked for years for some evil US corporations and got sick of the need to add every minority to every photo, to me this was a natural thing to happen anyway, it is sad that people feel the need to have to enforce it.
> why is the keyboard in Chapter 3 positioned like that? Why on earth was it posed that way?
Because Macintosh was all about the mouse. It was a new world of moving stuff around on screen as if they were real things.
(That’s my impression, anyway. I was 3 years old at the time.)
I’m with pauldwaite. My immediate impression upon looking at chapter 3 was that the keyboard was pushed out of the way because it was “traditional” and could be ignored for so many Mac tasks.
(Which is a GUI design paradigm that continues today, to the obnoxious point of ignoring keyboard use patterns and forcing the user to drag hand to mouse.)
Another vintage Apple read I recommend is the interactive equivalent of the above — the Apple 2 introduction disk. If you can find it anywhere. I don’t remember what it was called. It even had a quick primer on user-friendliness for fledgling BASIC programmers.
Wow, I haven’t seen one of these manuals in ages. Thanks for excavating it.
You’re absolutely right about the size of the task before Apple: they had to explain, well, everything about using (a) Macintosh. It’s even more astonishing taken in a historical context: this manual turns out to be the set of stone tablets laying down the rules for all subsequent HCI. “Thou shalt click, and by clicking select; thou mayest then act upon the selection.”
[Note that the Macintosh Basics interactive demo (plus audio tape) served a similar function. Similarly, and much more recently, the iPhone guided tour guy is in the same boat: introducing (prospective and new) users to an almost entirely unfamiliar interaction model.]
One error in the photos, though, is that the guy who looks so engrossed by the display in Chapter 1 is staring at a dead screen — the power switch is off.
Ah, nostalgia. As to the question of the tossed-aside keyboard in the Chapter 5 title page, I think the other commenters have it right. Macintosh was the mouse and the mouse was Macintosh, particularly with a GUI element like the Finder.
Also, it seem so odd today, but so many of the GUI elements had to be explained in excruciating detail with less-than-perfect analogies as the vast majority of us just had never used an interface like this before.
I’m surprised nobody has noted this already, but judging from the photos, apparently they didn’t expect to have any female Mac users in 1984.
“My favorite is scrolling. I can imagine the discussion: “Well, it’s called a scroll bar… I know, let’s use a drawing of a scroll!†”
You’re a moron. It’s pretty ingenius that Apple invented this language. A scroll is a great metaphor and that’s where scrollbar comes from. It’s a great way of thinking about a permanent object that disappears on the screen.
It’s called a scrollbar because of the scroll metaphor — not the other way around.
When you look at the mouse on the second-last picture without looking at the larger version, it looks like a white iPod from afar. The mouse cord looks like the earbuds.
See? Apple’s always thinking ahead…
I blame John Scully for the ‘preppy’ look: it was his idea to slap an extra $500 on the price of the Mac (so I heard).
Vintage computing at it’s finest. I wish I had a MAC, instead I had a Timex Sinclair 1000 that my dad had to built by hand. I saved a copy of the user manual for sentimental reasons. I posted a picture of that manual here:
http://neilproctor.com/about/
Anyone else notice something wrong?? Only males are shown on the pictures.. how primal!
lol, no girls on teh intarbuttz
@Kristen Johansen
You’d rather have the cringe-worthy politically correct parade of skintones would you? Where someone has to sit there and think “OH we haven’t seen a black person for a while in this documentation/website better throw one in, oh lets make it a woman too BONUS!”, please thats actually far more offensive than just being honest that in the 80’s it would have been mostly white yuppie males using it.
You’re a moron. It’s pretty ingenius that Apple invented this language. A scroll is a great metaphor and that’s where scrollbar comes from. It’s a great way of thinking about a permanent object that disappears on the screen.
A little advice to Chris on the above comment: if you’re gonna call someone a moron have your facts straight. Apple didn’t invent the terms or the metaphor — Xerox did. At any rate, this kind of overly simplified illustration and analogy was needed. Maybe you’re not old enough to recall, but in 1984, the average person had little or no hands-on exposure to a computer. A GUI required this kind of explanation. Blessings on Apple for bringing it to the masses.
It’s difficult to find any black faces on apple.com. I don’t care what you say about how “boring” it is to have a bit of diversity – it is a valid discussion. Dismissing it is bullshit and typical of apple fan boys.
Thoughts on the preppy white guy pics:
Right on the heels of the disastrous Lisa platform, Apple needed to break the IBM-dominated corporate/business market, which even to that day was predominately male-driven. Apples and Macintoshes were generally seen as “toys” and “for the kids” at the time, with no supposed computing power or business use.
When you want to sell to rich white guys, you market to Wall Street business types which generally (even to this day) means rich white guys. Therefore you show picture after picture of said demographic using and enjoying the Macintosh platform.
This page has been added to the pile at addpile.com.
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1405/1254604650_0e20b8d7cc.jpg
Portable!
It’s very easy 30 years later in our supposedly more enlightened age to criticize the lack of black or female faces.
There were other components to the introductory manual. There was a disk and matching cassette tape, you would boot the instructional disk, then start playing the tape when the program asked for it. It had instructions on how to operate a mouse, and other interface tips.
I remember once I had a customer who’d just bought an original Mac come back to my shop with a problem with his tape cassette. He put it in, hit play, new age music started playing, and a guided meditation started with instructions on closing your eyes and concentrating on your breathing. The guy said “well, I knew Apple was different, I thought maybe they wanted to start the instruction after some relaxation exercises, but after 30 minutes of nothing computer-related, I figured it was the wrong tape.” Well, the tape had the right Apple label on it, but obviously something went wrong at the tape duplication facility. I gave him a good tape and kept the bad one, I think I still have it somewhere.
Does anyone remember the interactive little app that came with a lot of Macs in the mid-90s? It was a program that actually walked you through using the mouse and doing things like dragging-and-dropping… Very cool, and very Apple. I think I even found it on an old disk a couple years ago, but couldn’t get it to open on the current Mac I was using at the time.
I’d love to find someone who’d managed to convert it to a format that worked on today’s Macs. It would be cool to have such a slice of history to be able to play with again…
Perhaps one reason only preppy guys were shown using these is you practically had to have a trust fund to buy one.
I bought a 128K new in 1984, and it cost, with dot matrix printer and an extra floppy drive, $3300.
You could buy a new Ford pickup for that much money.
And my friends who were driving new cars laughed at me, as I drove my $125 1962 Falcon.
Took me two years to pay the damn Mac off.
I bought my first 512k Mac in October 12th, 1985 and received those wonderfull manual (and tapes!).
I trainned a lot of new users.
In those days, the most common problem was that people “seeing” their mouse.
When you write, the hand, the pen, the “result” (the writing) and your eyes are all in the same place!
So people saw “the place where its hand was”. This was a skill that had to be learned, as crazy as it sounds now. As when you learn to typewrite.
Also, the Inside Macintosh manual (the APIs’ programmer manual), that was a phonebook-sized manual, explicity told programmers that “you have to change your way of programming”… refering to the new “event programming” paradigm and graphical user interface.
Earlier this year I bought a Mac Classic II at a garage sale, including the manual (Dated 1992). Compared to the manual for the original 1984 Mac…the one I have is boring and uninspired. I wish all manuals were like the 1984 one…
how much did the mac weigh? the people toting it around in the boat bag don’t pretty nonplussed about schlepping around 30 pounds of mac with them. the bike basket, lols.
Thanks for putting these up, Peter, and John and Ries for your comments about cost.
My first Mac was an SE20, and I bought it instead of a car: never regretted it either, although $350 for a 2400 baud modem was pretty steep. Later bought the first Deskwriter for an outrageous $1,000 here in Canada. 🙂
When the time comes (soon, I fear) to upgrade my graphite G3 iMac, I figure I’ll pay almost the same amount of money for my next (fourth) Mac as I have for all the others.
I picked up a great book secondhand a few years ago, ‘Designers on Mac’ by Takenobu Igarashi and Diane Burns (Gingko Press, 1992). Interviews with people such as Neville Brody, Emigré, April Greiman, Erik Spiekermann and Why Not Associates, among others, and a good look at their working methods using what was still regarded then as new technology. Fascinating seeing what’s changed since then and what hasn’t.
“Also, why is the keyboard in Chapter 3 positioned like that? Why on earth was it posed that way?”
the answer is the subject of chapter 3: the finder. you do not interact with the finder using a keyboard, so you put it aside. remember the mac os was the first one relying on a mouse.
Apple had their own font for their written documentation which I don’t believe is being used anymore (please correct me if I’m wrong, recent Mac purchasers.) Apple Garamond was in every piece of documentation I’d seen from the first Macintosh 128k through the 90s and early 00s.
@John I. Clark – I believe the interactive tutorial you recall was a HyperCard stack. HyperCard was one of those ingenious Apple ideas where anyone could design an interactive presentation or database for just about anything. I still have an old HyperCard programming book around here somewhere. Unfortunately, Apple stopped supporting HyperCard sometime after System 9 came out, and was completely dropped during the transition to OS X.
Marc, you’re correct. They had very strict standards for documentation. I used to love reading through them even though I knew how to use them, it gave me great ideas on how to create awesome reports, papers, and articles for school.
I loved those old manuals, great story!
There are plenty of women and people of color in the Macintosh SE book published in 1987, BTW. Perhaps someone made a fuss?
The photographs also present the use of the computer in social settings. More than one person is in every shot.
Another gem: “Most computer screens look like the departing flight schedule at a busy airport, but the Macintosh SE screen looks like a light grey desktop.
Peter, this is great, and makes me nostalgic. I didn’t have a 128k Mac, though I remember playing with one in a store. My dad didn’t upgrade from our IIe until the Mac was up to a whopping 512k of memory. It’s fascinating looking at the commercial introduction of a paradigm shift.
I remember visiting the computer store to see my first MacIntosh soon after it was announced. The salesman was uninterested and directed me down a hallway, where I found a desk with a single Mac and nothing else (no documentation, no brochures, nothing). I sat down and, after 30 seconds, started to work. It was so incredibly easy to use! I was blown away.
I remember the manual I got with my 165c, it was a wonder of clarity for beginners, explaining basic concepts that still evade people today. There were at one time also tutorials demonstrating the basics of interacting with text (in SimpleText) and other things, all of which is now assumed to be known. Yet how many people still select text then press delete, not realising you can just type straight over it? (Not to mention double-clicking hyperlinks and submit buttons…)
That original manual however looks worthy of the original price of the machine 🙂
I got my first full time job programming the 128K Mac back in 1984. Nobody in Mexico knew how to use it or program for it. The owner of the company I worked for had his own private jet and flew the Mac from Texas to Mexico City. Then he hired me to program on it, he found me at the Anahuac University.
I remember those manuals, and I loved that thing. I still have the original ‘Inside Mac’ programming guide which at that time had to read 3-4 times over to understand everything.
Good memories, thankzzz
I still program for macs at http://batista.org
Great stuff Peter, let’s hear it for the Technical Authors who came up with the docs.
you can’t bike in the arcades of the quad anymore. now they have mean old people yell at you for that.