I just finished reading an article from the February, 1984 issue of Byte. An Interview with the Macintosh Design Team covers some of the decisions that shaped the original “toaster” Mac. It even has its own drinking game: any time Steve Jobs mentions that some IBM card has more chips than the entire Macinstosh, take a drink.

Two things really jumped out at me, as they are things that the computing industry rediscovered only a few years ago.

Instead of physical expansion slots like you’d find on the Apple II series, the Macintosh had “virtual slots”. These were provided by a Zilog SCC chip, and the serial ports on the back which did double duty as RS-232C and RS-422A ports. RS-422 is a souped-up serial standard, allowing 1mbit/s transfer point-to-point. The Macintosh team used this high-speed standard to create a networking architecture, where peripherals could be daisy-chained together, and they’d be addressed by their “virtual slot” number.

That sounds an awful lot like USB. It’s even serial.

Along those lines, I was amazed by an ad for something called a Portapac by Cryptronics. This was a 1″ thick box with battery-backed memory inside. It connected to your computer by a serial port, and you could upload files to it, and download them (presumably, it had something like a BBS program in its ROM). The ad touts the ability to move large files from one computer to another by storing them on your PortaPac and hooking it up to the other machine. It’s also recommended as a portable mass-storage device for the Tandy 100.

It sounds a lot like a USB flash or hard drive, doesn’t it?

Even though the technology wasn’t there to do either of these things with the kind of scale & performance we have today, I love seeing the germs of these ideas. People back in the 80s realized the need for a high-speed peripheral serial bus and portable storage. It just took some time for the technology to catch up.