I’ve long been fascinated by blue boxes, small devices built in the 1960s and 70s to hijack the old analog phone systems for free calls.
The underground group of hackers and tinkerers behind this were dubbed phone phreaks. One leader of this group operated by the handle of Captain Crunch, as it was discovered a plastic toy whistle included in the cereal could generate a tone used to trick the phone system into allowing long-distance calls.
Craig Hockenberry has pointed out that today marks a decade since Apple first published the iPhone SDK for download by developers:
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.
This blog post was a real joy to explore.
The Computer History Museum has an incredible YouTube channel, and just yesterday, they published a conversation with members of the original QuickTime team about the technology and how it came to be:
Yours truly, over on MacStories:
Within the next few months, macOS Server as we know it today will be going away, with many of its services being deprecated. Things like hosting calendars, contacts, email and wikis are going away as Apple focuses the product on “management of computers, devices, and storage on your network.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. macOS Server has been languishing for years, with many of its most common features being integrated into the mainstream version of macOS.
Jason Snell, after outlining a bunch of problems with the original MacBook Air:
And yet my affection for the MacBook Air was legitimate! It was so much thinner and lighter than any laptop I’d used before. It felt like the future. And the truth is, this is the biggest legacy of the MacBook Air: It predicted the future of laptops and then brought that future into being. It created an entire category for PC laptops, Ultrabooks, which was loosely defined as “PC laptops kind of like the MacBook Air.”
Every new Apple notebook — and many products from other companies — owe a lot to the original MacBook Air, as I write this month over on MacStories:
Today, all of our notebooks are thin and light. We’ve traded our optical drives in for a series of dongles and our spinning hard drives for fast, silent SSDs.
It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, notebooks had optical drives and a full array of ports, complemented by features like removable batteries.
Al Kossow, a software curator at the Computer History Museum recently published some exciting news about the Lisa OS:
Just wanted to let everyone know the sources to the OS and applications were recovered, I converted them to Unix end of line conventions and spaces for Pascal tabs after recovering the files using Disk Image Chef, and they are with Apple for review.
After that’s done, CHM will do an @CHM blog post about the historical significance of the software and the code that is cleared for release by Apple will be made available in 2018. The only thing I saw that probably won’t be able to be released is the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker in LisaWrite.
On this week’s episode of Under the Radar, Marco Arment and _David Smith discussed the rumor of Apple moving to a universal app platform across macOS and iOS.
Their conversation has changed my thinking on the topic. It’s easy for people like me to view the Mac in an idealistic way, not a pragmatic one. I want my Mac apps to be fully native and rich, integrating with system features smoothly. The reality is, sadly, that quite a few of the apps in my Dock aren’t native, but are either wrappers around websites or Electron monstrosities.
The Lisa is the computer that Apple used to introduce the GUI and the mouse. It was far too expensive, and after getting booted from the development of the machine, Steve Jobs wandered around the company until he took over the Macintosh project from Jeff Raskin.
The new, smaller computer packed Lisa-inspired technology at a much lower price. Since history honors winners, the Mac is the computer people remember.
That’s not to say the Lisa isn’t worth knowing about. I realized recently the machine’s 35th anniversary is coming up, so I spent a bunch of time researching the computer and it’s ground-breaking software for my column on MacStories this month. It’s on the long side, but if you use a Mac or iOS device, this computer is where much of the magic started.
The Henry Ford, keeper of many of technology’s most important artifacts1 has recently acquired the first project between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak:
Created to make free illegal phone calls, Blue Boxes were the first joint business venture between the two innovators, three years before the founding of Apple Computer Inc. in 1976. The new acquisition joins The Henry Ford’s collection, which also includes an original 1976 Apple I Computer. The Blue Box was purchased at Bonhams’ History of Science and Technology Sale.