🚀 go-pugleaf

The genesis of the Mac's closed-box philosophy can be traced back to an
Apple internal paper, published a few years ago in one of the ACM SIG
publications, titled something like "Making a million computers a year".
A fascinating paper; the problems of producing computers in that kind of
volume are mind-boggling.  (For example, if you keep a one-month inventory
of $2000 computers, that's $166 MILLION dollars tied up in inventory alone!)
Harbingers of the Mac are all through that paper.  The closed-box approach
comes from two considerations:  (1) the people who will buy computers at
that kind of production volume ("the rest of us") want one-piece turnkey
hardware that does not need assembly or configuring; (2) maintenance and
support for that many computers is a horrible nightmare unless the
configuration is utterly standardized.

Seen in this light, the shift to a slotted Mac is *not* the correction of
a technical mistake; the original technical reasoning was correct.  The
mistake was in marketing, to wit the assumption of selling truly vast
numbers of computers to unsophisticated customers.  Given more modest
sales to generally more knowledgeable customers, the closed-box philosophy
is less appropriate.  (Actually, I think the closed-box Mac could still
have been a conspicuous success if it had had (a) more memory, (b) either
a built-in hard disk or a straightforward way of attaching fast mass-storage
peripherals [e.g. SCSI], and perhaps (c) memory-management hardware to blur
the limits of physical memory.  Apple's biggest mistake was not the closed
box, but a closed box that didn't have quite enough inside it.)
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry