I've been reading and enjoying the author's examination of each month's <i>MacUser</i>. It's striking how much sheer support, in terms of new hardware and software, the Mac received right out of the gate. Although Amiga and Atari ST followed less than two years later with superior hardware, it's clear in retrospect (and, I suspect, to anyone at the time comparing <i>Macworld</i>/<i>MacUser</i>/<i>MacWeek</i> to the corresponding Amiga/ST publications) that Apple had completely sucked up the air in the "not PC" segment of the market.<p>Apple had the credibility to do so in the first place, of course, because of its success with the Apple II. In turn, Mac's share of the market was minuscule compared to what the IBM PC had built around itself since 1981, as any comparison of <i>PC</i>/<i>PC World</i>/<i>InfoWorld</i> to the above Mac publications would have shown. But it was enough to survive for the long term. Desktop publishing and "people who love windows and mice" were niche markets c. 1985-1990, but it is a niche, and a reasonably defendable one; Amiga's desktop video niche was correspondingly much smaller, and ST never found one at all outside maybe music.[1]<p>I wrote "superior hardware", not "superior hardware and software". Not enough attention has been given to just how good classic Mac OS was from the beginning. The care given to both the UI and underlying architecture is obvious. Atari and Commodore both outsourced their OS development and it shows. Yes, Amiga had out-of-the-box true preemptive multitasking.[2] But what good is it if the OS doesn't have quality libraries, toolkits, and primitives? As baroque and obscure as <i>Inside Macintosh</i> was for the Mac developer c. 1985, at least he had it as a resource, and at least the OS was sophisticated enough to justify such a baroque and obscure tome in the first place. And Atari TOS? Don't make me laugh.<p>[1] Yes, yes, Europeans, I know that Amiga and ST were much more successful across the Atlantic. That only meant that the PC takeover of the entire market just skipped the DOS era in Europe, as opposed to not happening at all.<p>[2] I dare anyone, then or now, to a) succinctly and accurately explain the difference between AmigaOS and AmigaDOS, and b) explain why that should matter in the first place