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Friday, January 24, 2014 – Daily News 5A Apple's Mac still influences, 30 years after debut NEW YORK (AP) — Look around. Many of the gadgets you see drew inspiration from the original Mac computer. Computers at the time typically required people to type in commands. Once the Mac came out 30 years ago Friday, people could instead navigate with a graphical user interface. Available options were organized into menus. People clicked icons to run programs and dragged and dropped files to move them. The Mac introduced realworld metaphors such as using a trash can to delete files. It brought us fonts and other tools once limited to professional printers. Most importantly, it made computing and publishing easy enough for everyday people to learn and use. Apple sparked a revolution in computing with the Mac. In turn, that sparked a revolution in publishing as people began creating fancy newsletters, brochures and other publications from their desktops. These concepts are so fundamental today that it's hard to imagine a time when they existed only in research labs — primarily Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his team got much of its inspiration from PARC, which they visited while designing the Mac. The Mac has had ''incredible influence on pretty much everybody's AP photo This January 1984 file photo shows Steven Jobs, left, and John Sculley presenting the new Macintosh Desktop Computer. lives all over the world since But the Mac prevailed While Lisa had those computers are now so ubiq- and thus influenced genera- improvements first, it cost uitous.'' says Brad Myers, a tions of gadgets that fol- about $10,000. The Mac professor at Carnegie Mel- lowed. was a ''low'' $2,495 when it lon University's HumanThe Mac owes much of came out on Jan. 24, 1984. Computer Interaction Insti- its success to the way Apple Apple insisted on unifortute. ''Pretty much all con- engineers adapted those pio- mity, so copying and pasting sumer electronics are adopt- neering concepts. For text and deleting files would ing all of the same kinds of instance, Xerox Corp. used work the same way from interactions.'' a three-button mouse in its one application to another. Apple didn't invent these Alto prototype computer. That reduced the time it tools, nor was the Mac the Apple settled on one, allow- would take to learn a new first to use them. Xerox ing people to keep their eyes program. Corp. sold its own mouse- on the screen without worryAnd Apple put a premibased Star computer, and ing about which button to um on design. Early Macs Apple's Lisa beat the Mac press. showed a happy face when by months. It's impossible to say what would have happened if those machines 604 Main St. hadn't flopped with conRed Bluff sumers or whether others would have come along if (530) 529-5154 the Mac hadn't. they started up. Icons and windows had rounded corners. Such details made computers appear friendlier and easier to use — at least subconsciously — to the user, Myers says. One of the first applications enabled by the Mac's interface was desktop publishing. Early computers generated text the way a typewriter would — character by character, one line at a time. Users had a limited number of characters, with no variation in appearance. The Mac was one of the first to approach displays like a TV: Text gets incorporated into a graphic that the computer projects on the screen pixel by pixel. With those tools, wouldbe publishers could change fonts, adjust typeface sizes and add attributes such as italics. They could also mix images with text. The earliest Macs popularized ''what you see is what you get,'' or WYSIWYG; formatting on the screen largely reflected how the page would look in print. 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He says long-time computer users already knew how to perform computing tasks ''very efficiently with just two or three keystrokes. It might have been more efficient for them than to use a mouse.'' The Mac didn't run software for the company's Apple II computer, so there was little people could do with it until Aldus — now part of Adobe — released PageMaker publishing software in 1985. The original Mac had little memory and a small screen, and it lacked a hard drive. Although the Mac's processor was fast for its time, much of that power went to the graphical interface instead of tasks common for research and commerce. See a doctor without the typical emergency room wait or expense. BUY 1 GET 1 Half OFF Your 2nd Plate! For Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner (must purchase two drinks) Breakfast: Mon-Fri 9am-11am Lunch & Dinner: Mon-Thurs 9am-9pm Fri-Sat-Sun 9am-9:30pm $35 for 45 minutes. 530 566 1966 Half of the second plate of equal or lesser value. 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