#mac30th

[jamieonkeys-blog]

Sinclair QL is 30

It turns out that Mac is not the only computer to be having its 30th anniversary this year. Launched about two weeks before Mac, the Sinclair QL sadly is no longer being manufactured. I never owned one, but got many enjoyable years' use out of my Spectrum +2A and +3, by which time the Sinclair brand was owned by Amstrad.

I'm a Mac user today, and I love Macs, but it would be awesome to still be using a Sinclair as my primary machine. I used my +3 right up until 1996 before spending many years in the Wintel wilderness (Macs were fugging expensive in those days).

Here's a really nice new video (from a growing playlist) of the machine, its peripherals and boxed software.

The design still looks great today.

[ecachucho]

MacPaint 1.0 Less coding is more.

Watch one of the programming geniuses of our time, Bill Atkinson giving the first demo of MacPaint 1.0 (42:00-50:00min), basically everything that Photoshop is today in 1984. This was akin to magic at the time, and the audience at various points breaks out into applause.

http://techland.time.com/2014/01/25/steve-jobs-mac/

Interestingly this program was made with less than 6000 lines of code and is considered some of the most sparing code ever written.