History of the Living Dead
Good question. IMO, the ideal behavior would be that if you click the Safari icon while in a...
The Macintosh Launch - and Crash
Jobs' luck was about to run out. The Macintosh had an excellent launch - and truly awful sales after that. Jobs predicted that Apple would have sold 2 million Macs by 1985, but the company sold slightly more than 50,000. This was largely due to flawed marketing.
The Macintosh was intended for business users, but they had little use for a machine without a hard drive or a high quality printer. Consumers shied away from the machine because of its price. There was no market for the Macintosh.
OK, so suppose I've got Safari windows in spaces 1 and 2, and I'm in space 3. I click on Safari in the dock. Which Safari window do...
What's worse, Apple II sales had slowed dramatically. The PC compatible market was growing exponentially, but the Apple II's growth was dropping off. It peaked at $2 billion in 1985.
Worse, there were compebreastors to the Macintosh emerging. Digital Research, the company that had released the first successful personal computer operating system, CP-M, was working on a Macintosh-like interface called GEM. VisiCorp, the company that created VisiCalc, released VisiOn, which was a graphical interface bundled with a full featured office suite.
You would end up creating new Safari windows instead of switching to Safari. No, I think that part works correctly - i.e. it switches to the space where safari is. I wonder if tab-switching...
The biggest threat, however, came from Microsoft and IBM with their OS-2 and Windows efforts. Apple's board of directors insisted that Sculley "contain" Jobs to avoid other dud products and protect Apple from its growing compebreastion.
Meanwhile, Jobs was leading the Mac team on the ill-fated Macintosh Office and the Macintosh successor, BigMac. The first portion of Macintosh Office released was the LaserWriter, a high-end, networked laser printer. Based on software from the fledgling Adobe Systems, the LaserWriter created letter quality output and could be shared by multiple machines via an AppleTalk network.
The rest of the Macintosh Office wouldn't be launched for some time. The most important element, the intranet server, File Server, would never be released. In 1989, Apple would release AppleShare, but it took over the entire Macintosh. The product never took off.
BigMac was totally stalled. The existing Macintosh software would be replaced with Unix. Apple had gotten as far as buying a Unix license from AT&T, but development of the Macintosh environment that would run on top of Unix bogged down. After spending millions of dollars on a worthless Unix license, the project was canceled.