Category: Apple History

Daniel Knight, writing about the start of Low End Mac:

When I started adding some profiles of Macs to my personal web space in April 1997, who would have thought that it would grow into something enduring? We used Macs at work, I had a Mac at home, and I was teaching myself how to make web pages using Claris Home Page. So I put together two dozen Mac profiles from the 1986 Mac Plus to the 1990 Macintosh IIfx, sharing specifications, links to other resources, and my own experience with these models.

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In my “Future Classics” series, I try to guess what current-era Apple products may become collectable in the future. It’s a weird hobby, I know.

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Apple’s line of displays wasn’t always in shambles as it is today. For decades, Apple had a selection of monitors for Mac users to choose from, including my all-time favorite.

In October 2008, Apple started phasing out its 20, 23 and 30-inch aluminum-clad Cinema Displays with the 24-inch LED Cinema Display, shown here with a MacBook Pro:

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The iMac G4’s unique design came out of technical limitations, but the computer quickly became an icon.

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It’s been ten years since developers could first officially build software for the iPhone, but it was a totally different ballgame back then.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Jason Snell had one heck of a holiday project.

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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.

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