- #THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER HOW TO#
- #THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER MANUAL#
- #THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER SOFTWARE#
- #THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER PC#
- #THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER PLUS#
And if you follow the few suggestions here, you and your Macintosh will be together for a long time. Your Macintosh is no more fragile than a television set. The first thing to know: You’ll never hurt your Macintosh by clicking in the wrong place or pressing the wrong key. For example, the maintenance section began: Its purpose? In 1984, and still in 1986, everyone had to be taught computer basics down to the hardware level. The audience was the general consumer market. I break down my assessment below, following the “user support materials” category used in the STC publications competitions. I’m biased, but I think it was a distinguished and ground-breaking effort, much like the product it supported.
#THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER PLUS#
How was the Macintosh Plus user’s guide of 1986 as a piece of technical writing? Well, I’m an experienced publications-competition judge at the chapter and Society level, so I am qualified to offer an assessment. But I blog about technical communication. I believe it was written on a Macintosh using Mac applications. Aside from a graphics refresh, it’s similar to the original Macintosh documentation, which you can still find on the Web. This edition is copyrighted 1986, written by (and credited to) Carol Kaehler (1942-1991). I no longer have my first Mac, but I’ve kept the user’s guide all these years. My copy of the Macintosh Plus user’s guide, written by Carol Kaehler (1986) (Since then, the next generation of workers, born with computers in the home, haven’t needed as much information, and our ranks have declined.
![the first mac plus computer the first mac plus computer](https://i0.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/apple-iii.jpg)
STC membership peaked at 24,000 in about 2001, just about when the curves of “I need to know” and “I already know” met. Consequently, computer skills went from exotic to a basic requirement for millions of workers in thousands of job titles. The labor force was soon introduced to computers, which over the course of one generation went from a rarity in the workplace to a necessity. The Mac, along with the PC, kicked off a golden era for home computing, and a golden era for technical writers. Of course, we know the product, and its slim documentation, succeeded. Imagine the pressure on the writer to keep that book short and sweet!
![the first mac plus computer the first mac plus computer](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/39/8f/94/398f94fd7004ea04873803dcdc2501e6.jpg)
(That commercial was actually the Apple board’s choice for the Mac’s introduction, but Steve Jobs talked them into the brilliant “1984” ad instead.) It was surely the first time computer documentation was used to sell a product on TV.
#THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER PC#
One of the first Mac TV ads made the point by dropping a stack of IBM PC manuals, followed by one slim book for the Mac.
#THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER HOW TO#
Apple couldn’t afford to hold the hands of millions of customers trying to learn how to use their Macs.
#THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER SOFTWARE#
As such, both the software and its documentation faced an incredible challenge. While the IBM PC was first, Macintosh was the breakthrough product that introduced consumers to computers (“the computer for the rest of us”). Macintosh literally changed the course of my life.
![the first mac plus computer the first mac plus computer](http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/macsig/mac_openclosed_large.jpg)
And I bought a few shares of Apple at $8, which over the years has paid for every Mac I’ve owned since. I sold some company stock and bought a Macintosh Plus Enhanced for myself, which gave me the tools to write a trade book on word processing. I completely rewrote my course material, which made me something of a UI expert for years. The graphical user interface was unlike anything I’d used before. But I was most intrigued by the software, and above all the operating system. The hardware was interesting enough: portable, with a mouse, diskette drive, and true WYSIWYG display matching pixel density (72 ppi) to printer point size. This was five years after the debut of the IBM PC (which from a UI perspective wasn’t interesting), and two years after the memorable introduction of the Macintosh personal computer, but the hands-on experience on that Mac was still a revelation to me. Not only did he give me a demo, he generously offered to let me use it at night after he left. I was developing a course on user interfaces, so when I heard that an executive on the top floor had a Mac, I had to see it. (A 20-megabyte removable disk drive was as big as a washing machine.) This was what the word “computer” meant to me.Īnd then I got my hands on a Macintosh. I tell you, those were heady days.) My division’s software ran on minicomputers, which were smaller than mainframes but still needed machine rooms.
#THE FIRST MAC PLUS COMPUTER MANUAL#
(One of my colleagues wrote an entire manual for a sort utility-excuse me, the Sort. In 1986 I was already a veteran computer software technical writer, documenting applications with command-line interfaces on operating systems that were the grandparents, uncles, and aunts of UNIX and then Linux.