The MacUser Discovery
Nov. 14th, 2017 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt had been a while since I'd last looked at the site where I had found a large collection of Macworld magazines scanned. The thought had returned to me every so often that the gaps later on in the magazine's run might have been filled in, but perhaps I'd got to the point where I was just checking to see if the site was still around. On navigating from my bookmark to the front page, though, I saw there had been an addition, and a formidable one. Along with the Macworld magazines, a good number of MacUser magazines were now available.
When my family had made the climb up from the 8-bit era at last (notwithstanding the claims about the 16-bit internal registers of the Motorola 6809 in our Tandy Color Computers), we'd picked up both of the big two Macintosh magazines on a regular basis. For one reason or another, I did seem to prefer Macworld a bit more; it might have had everything to do with the John Dvorak columns on the last page of MacUser. Checking out the very first issue from late in 1985, I noted he was trying to explain a comment he'd just made in another place about the IBM PC AT being "a man's computer designed by men for men." Still, I could remember the comment in an issue of MacAddict after MacUser had merged with Macworld in the dark days of the platform about the second magazine to arrive having tried to compete on personality in general to begin with, and I'd also learned that one of the people from Creative Computing had been working for MacUser at the time of his unfortunate death in the San Francisco Bay area earthquake of 1989.
John J. Anderson had written Creative Computing's feature review of the original Macintosh in the middle of 1984, when the hype might not have been concealing the limitations of the original hardware but the frustration hadn't effaced the promise, and some of his comments about the elimination of modes remain interesting (although mentioning "Imagine how depressed the very first auto owners must have been when the Model T started popping up everywhere" can bring up a few unfortunate thoughts of smug arguments about how pricing ought to settle everything). A year later, though, when Lotus Jazz, an integrated package some considerable hopes had apparently been pinned on, hadn't turned out too impressively, he'd responded by placing the magazine's regular Apple column right after his negative review to present a laundry list of enhancements to be made before it was too late in the face of the Commodore Amiga's technological advances and the Atari ST's affordable price, including squeezing a full-page portrait-format monitor and two disk drives into something like the original Macintosh case. I'd supposed it was something the untimely demise of Creative Computing a few issues later hadn't left something broken, although at the moment I haven't got far enough into the MacUser archive to find just where he joined the magazine. Along that path, though, I've also managed to find some programming books in a second new section of the site covering the infamous "Macintosh BASIC" from Apple, which had been tinkered with by its programmer, even as third-party material had been produced in advance of an official release, until Bill Gates demanded John Scully kill the project with the more essential Applesoft BASIC at stake.
When my family had made the climb up from the 8-bit era at last (notwithstanding the claims about the 16-bit internal registers of the Motorola 6809 in our Tandy Color Computers), we'd picked up both of the big two Macintosh magazines on a regular basis. For one reason or another, I did seem to prefer Macworld a bit more; it might have had everything to do with the John Dvorak columns on the last page of MacUser. Checking out the very first issue from late in 1985, I noted he was trying to explain a comment he'd just made in another place about the IBM PC AT being "a man's computer designed by men for men." Still, I could remember the comment in an issue of MacAddict after MacUser had merged with Macworld in the dark days of the platform about the second magazine to arrive having tried to compete on personality in general to begin with, and I'd also learned that one of the people from Creative Computing had been working for MacUser at the time of his unfortunate death in the San Francisco Bay area earthquake of 1989.
John J. Anderson had written Creative Computing's feature review of the original Macintosh in the middle of 1984, when the hype might not have been concealing the limitations of the original hardware but the frustration hadn't effaced the promise, and some of his comments about the elimination of modes remain interesting (although mentioning "Imagine how depressed the very first auto owners must have been when the Model T started popping up everywhere" can bring up a few unfortunate thoughts of smug arguments about how pricing ought to settle everything). A year later, though, when Lotus Jazz, an integrated package some considerable hopes had apparently been pinned on, hadn't turned out too impressively, he'd responded by placing the magazine's regular Apple column right after his negative review to present a laundry list of enhancements to be made before it was too late in the face of the Commodore Amiga's technological advances and the Atari ST's affordable price, including squeezing a full-page portrait-format monitor and two disk drives into something like the original Macintosh case. I'd supposed it was something the untimely demise of Creative Computing a few issues later hadn't left something broken, although at the moment I haven't got far enough into the MacUser archive to find just where he joined the magazine. Along that path, though, I've also managed to find some programming books in a second new section of the site covering the infamous "Macintosh BASIC" from Apple, which had been tinkered with by its programmer, even as third-party material had been produced in advance of an official release, until Bill Gates demanded John Scully kill the project with the more essential Applesoft BASIC at stake.