Permanent Preservation Edition Legend PC Game 80’s Chronicles
As an extra edition of the series “Retro PC Games We Loved, Memories”, this article is “Permanent Preservation Edition Legend PC Game 80’s Chronicle” (Author: Jun Sasaki, Retro Let’s take a look at some articles from the PC Game Club) and introduce them.
The page I’m going to take up this time is “Computers Beyond the Sea Part 2”. In the book version, the images are monochrome, but due to various circumstances, some color and other photos are posted in this article.
Computers across the sea Part 2
The Macintosh, which was born in 1984, was an “expensive flower”, but it was advanced enough to match the price.
In 1979, Apple Computer (at that time), which had suddenly joined the ranks of top companies with the Apple II, launched the “Lisa Project” to create a new model Lisa.
In this year, Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s founders and a director, went on a tour of XEROX’s Palo Alto laboratory, where he adopted a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of letters and used it with a mouse. Meet Alto, a computer. Inspired by this, Jobs moved to reflect these functions in the Lisa project, but was removed from the Lisa project because of it.
A rare shop advertisement from the time. With the release of the Macintosh, pre-orders were accepted at an estimated price of 698,000 yen under the catchphrase of “a next-generation personal computer” and “a marvelous personal computer created by LISA’s technology.”
In the same year, the Macintosh project, which consisted of several people within Apple, was started. Jobs was initially skeptical about this project, but after being kicked out of the Lisa project, he shifted to the Macintosh project. When he was in charge of hardware for the Macintosh project, he pursued thorough beauty in the design of the circuit board and main body, and after numerous retakes, he succeeded in creating the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. It came with a one-button mouse, built-in a 512 x 342 dot black and white display, and was running the surprisingly advanced OS “system 1.0” at the time.
The original Alto GUI has been improved so that anyone can use it, and with this OS, you can copy files by dragging and dropping, eject floppy disks, and create documents with beautiful fonts drawn with bitmaps instead of dots. It provided usability that was unthinkable from the conventional character user interface (CUI), such as creating and drawing graphics easily using an interface that had never existed before.
That year’s Super Bowl TV commercial was the famous “1984”. As an aside, the FLINT CENTER in Cupertino, where the first Macintosh was announced, was also the place where the Apple Watch presentation was held 30 years later.
The first Macintosh (Macintosh 128k) had little memory, and the Macintosh Classic appeared after the Macintosh Plus, which was released with improvements to such parts, and the Macintosh SE series, which added expandability. The price is 198,000 yen, which is a bargain compared to the original Macintosh. Before and after this, models such as Macintosh LC and Macintosh IIsi were also released. The article is from Login No. 24, 1990.
The standard price of 2,495 dollars was converted to about 586,000 yen in Japanese yen at that time, and in fact, reservations were accepted in Japan at a reserve price of 698,000 yen. This was significantly more expensive than the 398,000 yen PC-9801F2 that appeared in October 1983, and it seems that it was a difficult amount to reach for not only for hobby use but also for business use.
The Macintosh had to wait for the Macintosh Classic, which was released in 1990, to show a glimpse of the spread of the Macintosh in Japan.
At that time, the Macintosh was sold exclusively by Canon Marketing Japan in Japan. The Macintosh attracted attention as the wave of desktop publishing (DTP) surged to Japan. As a hobby use, it’s still a lofty flower.
In the mid-1980s, I longed for the American-born 16-bit game PC, the Commodore Amiga.
In 1985, 16-bit personal computers with high graphic performance appeared one after another in the United States, and became a hot topic for hobby use such as CG and music. Atari 520ST (Atari), Apple IIGS (Apple Computer), and Amiga 1000 (Commodore).
After that, the “Amiga 500”, which appeared in 1987, realized a low price of 699 dollars (US) and became popular in Europe and the United States as a game PC. More than 1 million units have been sold. In 1988 Amiga games such as Electronic Arts’ flight simulator INTERCEPTER and Cinemaware’s action game ROCKET RANGER ranked among the top sellers.
It is also known as the hardware that brought epoch-making games to the world. For example, Populus (Electronic Arts) and Lemmings (Signosis) came out of the Amiga.
In Japan, due to changes in authorized distributors, it is difficult to obtain, and in 1989, “only about 300 units (according to the September 15, 1989 issue of Login) were on the market. The software was also available in Akihabara. However, it was said that Amiga games were amazing, and from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, it was positioned as hardware that advanced PC gamers longed for. there were.
Starting with the September 15, 1989 issue of Login, a corner called “Amiga Times” was set up, introducing new software. Around this time, advertisements will also appear.
Some images may appear different from the book version.