Macintosh Office
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The Macintosh Office was an effort by
History
Previous efforts
Macintosh Office was the company's third attempt to enter into the business environment as a serious competitor to IBM.
Following the success of the
Apple's second attempt was with the introduction of the revolutionary
While Apple had a hit with the Macintosh, they still needed a way to make inroads into the professional world and the Mac was already being criticized as a toy by the business community.
Strategy
Apple had initially examined
This left Apple with no networking system until IBM released Token Ring. Internal work continued throughout, greatly aided by a series of memos from Bob Belleville, who outlined what the system would need to do and outlining the networking system, a networked laser printer, and a file server.[2]
When the Macintosh had originally been designed it used the
Armed with the proper networking hardware, Apple set about developing the other key pieces of its business suite.[3]
- It would include a dedicated file server they code-named Big Mac.Mac OS as an interface shell.
- Also included was a networked hard driveintended to be plugged directly into the network.
- Finally, a laser printer which would produce typesetquality documents also shared among all the users on the network.
By January 1985 Apple was ready to launch the LocalTalk network which would allow a small office to inexpensively share its newly introduced
In the meantime, third-party developers working with Apple, such as Infosphere and Centram Systems West (later Sun Microsystems) created AppleTalk-based file sharing applications called XL/Serve (later MacServe) and TOPS respectively. The former was actually a hard disk sharing application that allowed a remote client Mac to log onto a hard drive connected to the host Mac and work on a file. However, this arrangement meant that only one user could access the file volume at a time. Nevertheless, it fulfilled one of the main features of the Macintosh Office: a networked hard drive. By contrast, TOPS was a true file sharing application. With TOPS a remote client could log onto a host Mac and access and work on any file simultaneously with another remote or the host user. In addition, TOPS did not require a dedicated host, rather every Mac could be a host, offering peer-to-peer file sharing. What's more, TOPS was not limited to the Macintosh, but could also share files across platforms with IBM PCs. Both of these products, as well as others, helped fulfill Apple's announcement of the Macintosh Office.
Nevertheless, none of the software available represented a unified solution fully supported by Apple. Following the early removal of the Macintosh XL, Apple finally delivered its first hard drive for the Macintosh. Nine months after announcing it, the Hard Disk 20 was a mere 20MB hard drive. Though a welcome addition, it was slow and delivered none of the promise of a network file server. Though third-party products made good use of it, Apple would not offer another installment of the poorly implemented Macintosh Office for well over a year. Instead Apple canceled the UNIX-based Big Mac file-server concept and chose to focus on the next generation Macintosh II.[5]
In January 1987, Apple finally introduced its file sharing application AppleShare. Together with a faster SCSI hard drive, the Hard Disk 20SC released 3 months earlier, Apple finally offered an officially supported unified, simple-to-use file sharing network. However, it failed to deliver on the promise of the initial announcement made 2 years earlier. At best, the Macintosh Office was a piecemeal solution run on relatively underpowered Macs, lacking many of the features offered by third-party applications before it. In fact, it would be almost 5 more years before AppleShare would offer peer-to-peer file sharing under System 7. It would take four more months for the release of expandable Macs that could accommodate the growing industry standard, Ethernet, and larger, faster built-in hard drives powerful enough to manage AppleTalk's potential to serve a large office. IBM network compatibility was still unavailable.
Legacy
Though largely considered a failure by most, The Macintosh Office ushered in the era of
Timeline of Apple Inc. products
Timeline of Apple Inc. products
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See also
References
- ^ a b c Jim Barimo, "Apple, waiting for IBM net, links micros with AppleBus", InfoWorld, 26 March 1984, pp 45-46
- ^ Gursharan Sidhu, "Acknowledgments to First Edition", Inside AppleTalk, Addison-Wesley, 1988
- ^ "Apple's Worst Business Decisions"
- ^ Apple's Failed BigMac Project
- ^ Steve Jobs and 20 Years of Apple Servers