from Hacker News

Apple typewriter memo (2020)

by rafaepta on 6/21/25, 9:16 PM with 51 comments

  • by yosef123 on 6/21/25, 10:25 PM

    Personally, I don’t see this move as a negative. It implies that a company believes in its product and potentially wants to improve it. Usually, you can tell when a product is not used by its creator(s), and it’s not a good experience.

  • by PaulHoule on 6/21/25, 10:38 PM

    I was a gifted/troubled kid who was taking high school classes half time in the 4th grade at the school I was later to attend as my regular high school.

    Circa '81 or so they had a PDP-8/A with a printing terminal and two VT-61s which were unusual in that they had a block mode, though we ran a multiuser BASIC system that didn't take advantage of it until I looked up in the manual how to put it into block mode.

    My understanding was that this system was designed for word processing at small newspapers where it would be used to do all the typesetting as well as incorporating classified ads and that a newspaper had ordered it and never taken delivery which was why we got a deal on it. It looked a lot like the "DEC Word Processor" in the article, particularly the dual disk drive.

    The PDP-8/A had 32k words of 12 bits each, but regular pointers where 12 bits so it had a rather ugly scheme to access multiple pages of 4k words. We had the Crowther & Woods Adventure and a BASIC interpreter that could be used in single-user mode with the printing terminal and we could also boot it up with a three-user BASIC.

    Years later my school got a VAX-11/730 and the PDP-8 was donated to the computer club that was advised by our new physics teacher and I tried plugging in one of the VT-61s into the same current loop plug that the printing terminal was plugged into and it caught on fire because of the dust inside, we cleaned the other one out good and managed to get it running again.

    Given that the Apple ][+ had 64k of RAM addressable with 16 bit pointers it was probably a better machine than the 8/A overall, but the terminals for the 8/A were 80 columns whereas the ][ came with only a 40 column screen although 80 column cards for it were not unusual and when Apple made the late step of ASICizing the ][ they eventually built in an 80 column VDC.

  • by ginko on 6/21/25, 9:49 PM

    > ... and typewriters still aren't obsolete!

    I guess I'm living in a particular professional niche but I haven't seen a typewriter in ages. Let alone seen anyone using one.

  • by squelchy5000 on 6/22/25, 12:37 AM

    If only they would make their word processor scroll up as one types on it, rather than typing from the top to the bottom of the page. When composing longer form documents, all the action happens at the bottom of the screen. In banning typewriters, they forgot what was great about them.

  • by mproud on 6/21/25, 10:37 PM

    This was obviously satirical, with its tongue-and-cheek tone, name-bombing Ken, and the fact that seemingly escapes the blogger here it was typed on a typewriter!

    Apple was an upstart company in its day, the anti-IBM, creative, expressive, rebellious. The memo may have been driving a point, but it was mostly just going for a laugh.