Mac Floppy

A look back at the Mac's past when the best things in life fit on a floppy.

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[Apple2History.org reminds us](http://apple2history.org/2012/06/14/apple-ii-standard/) of a time before floppy disks when the cassette tape was the standard way of writing and retrieving data from an Apple ][.

The earliest Apple II owners did what most of the microcomputer hobbyists of the day did – they used the lowly cassette to save the programs they wrote, or possibly to load software that was purchased. And even after the Disk II did appear in 1978, it was still $495. Although this was less costly than floppy disk drives for other micros of the the day[1], it was still about one third of the cost of the entry level Apple II ! For many who pioneered the use of the Apple II, it was simply not affordable to get that expensive (though highly desirable) Disk II drive, at least not for a couple of years. From 1977 until around 1982, there were a significant number of software titles that were sold on cassette, because it was the most affordable way to use the computer.

I love that Apple still keeps Apple ][ Cassette interface instructions in its knowledge base. *Apple ][ Star Wars Cassette photo by [Grant Hutchinson](http://www.splorp.com/).*

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The “Print Directory…” command made its first appearance in System Software 6. Renamed “Print Window” in later versions of Mac OS, this command could be used to print the contents of a Finder window. It was removed with the advent of Mac OS X, but can be restored using this free utility. It is funny to think of Mac users referring to their folders as directories.

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System Software 6.0.8 supports four Apple branded printers out of the box, each with its own options and preferences. Here is the page dialog box with the Apple LaserWriter selected.

The original LaserWriter was released in 1985. Being the key feature of the "Macintosh Office" it was targeted at small businesses. Another feature of the Macintosh Office was Apple's new AppleTalk LAN technology making the LaserWriter Apple's first network printer. Just like Macintosh in 1984, the Macintosh Office was announced with a commercial during the fourth quarter of SuperBowl XIX ('Lemmings'). Worth approx. $7,000 U.S. the LaserWriter was in comparison with the competition rather inexpensive.

The 77 lbs. LaserWriter could print eight 300 DPI pages per minute with a 12 MHz Motorola 68000 processor and half a megabyte of RAM.

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A look at Find File in action.

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Find File:

To search for a file, type its name or parts of its name, then click the Go button or press Return. To search a specific disk or folder, use the Search Here command. You can work in another window while Find File is Searching.

To see information about a file that has been found, select the file by clicking its name in the list.

The next time you choose the Open command from an application, the Open dialog box will show the folder that contains the last file you selected in Find File.

Find File by David Goldsmith Copyright © 1986, 1987 Apple Computer, Inc.

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Find File in System Software 6 is a far cry from [Sherlock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_%28software%29) and [Spotlight,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_%28software%29) and leaves a lot to be desired. You could search for a file by name on any mounted volume or destination and move it to the desktop. You couldn't even open what you were looking for from the Find File dialog box.

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The Chooser got a facelift in System 6 that would be the basis for its appearance all the way through Mac OS 9.

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The default size of the System Software 1.1 System Folder.

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The default size of the System Software 6.0.8 System Folder.

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The System Folder in System 6 expanded quite a bit from the original 173K System Folder released in 1984. Added to the folder were additional printer drivers, the MultiFinder, Accessibility, Fonts, Keyboard, Mouse, and Sound. The total size of this System 6 System Folder is 1,330K, more than can fit on a 800K floppy!

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The modular design of the System Software 6 Control Panel leaves a lot of negative space. A choice of alert sounds, the Susan Kare volume selector, and a whole lot of wasted space.

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The modular design of the System Software 6 Control Panel leaves a lot of negative space. Double-click speed is a preference created outside of necessity. You either know how to double-click at the proper speed or you don't. Who double-clicks slowly these days, and if they did would they know a preference for double-clicking exists?

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The modular design of the System Software 6 Control Panel leaves a lot of negative space. Back in the day there were only two types of keyboards, “domestic” and “international.” Hard to know which keyboard you are using when living internationally. I always thought where you live is the domestic.

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The Control Panel in System 6 and some earlier versions of the Macintosh System Software received an update to allow additional control panel modules to be displayed in a scrolling left hand pane. Call me a purist, but I prefer [the original Control Panel](http://macfloppy.net/post/18503169922/the-most-controversial-part-of-the-control-panel) designed by Susan Kare better.

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A look at the MultiFinder in action with MacPaint, the Finder, and various about dialog boxes running in the background.

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From the Special menu the user could access the “Set Startup…” dialog box to enable the MultiFinder upon restart. Double clicking the MultiFinder icon in the Menubar while pressing Option and Command was a hidden keyboard shortcut for enabling the MultiFinder without restarting.The "Set Startup…" dialog box was also the place a user could set a start up application, or restart with the same set of applications and desktop accessories open. Think of it as Mac OS X Lion's resume functionality only 20 years earlier.

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In 1986, Apple released the Mac Plus which came standard with 1 MB of RAM. This amount of memory was sufficient to support some form of multitasking, which was first implemented by Andy Hertzfeld in his Switcher program, demoed in January 1985 on a Macintosh 512k, and released as a beta in April 1985. Switcher worked by designating a number of fixed "slots" in memory, into which applications could be loaded. The user could then switch between these applications by clicking a small button on the top of the menu bar. The current application would horizontally slide out of view, and the next one would slide in. Despite its awkwardness, this approach did fit well with the existing system's memory management scheme, and applications needed no special programming to work with Switcher. This early work on Switcher led to the development of MultiFinder by Apple system software engineers Erich Ringewald and Phil Goldman.

MultiFinder was the name of an extension software for the Apple Macintosh, introduced on August 11, 1987 and included with System Software 5. It added the ability to co-operatively multitask between several applications at once – a great improvement over the previous systems, which could only run one application at a time.

I was never a big fan of the MultiFinder up until it was integrated into System 7. It might have been because I was using a Macintosh 512k with half the memory of the the new Mac Plus. Or it might have been because I preferred to run a single application at a time. Either way it didn't really matter, I was only 5 years old and even at that young attention deprived age I could only play one game at a time. You can read more about how the Switcher can to be developed by Andy Hertzfeld [here.](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt)