Category: Apple History

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Introduction & Evolution

Introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Dashboard was easy enough to explain:

Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information — real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information and more — instantly. Dashboard disappears just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing.

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Unlike the other three books I’ve looked at recently, AppleDesign was not published by Apple.

Put out by Graphis, Inc in conjunction with Apple in 1997, AppleDesign is 287 pages of wonderful photography not only of finished Apple hardware, but prototypes, design mockups and more. The first third of the book is dedicated to an in-depth retelling of the processes and decisions that went into what Apple had made up to this point. The Apple II to Snow White grace the early chapters, then the book shifts to things like early Power Macs and the Newton line.

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Displays and wireless routers aren’t the only things Apple has left behind over the decades. This month on MacStories, I wrote about all sorts of businesses Apple has exited. It was a lot of fun to write about old-ass scanners and more.

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Designed by Apple in California and A Personal Guide to Personal Computers are not the only books Apple has published in the last 40 years.

So Far: The First Ten Years of a Vision was published in 1987, and celebrated the company’s tenth anniversary. Unlike *Designed by Apple in California," this book mixes text and photos nicely. It’s built on the premise that Apple is about far more than computers.

Chapter names include things like “Freedom,” “Courage,” and “Sharing.” The book is full of little stories about people making a difference in the world using Apple computers. It’s all very upbeat and touchy-feely. It even includes numerous page with the names of all past and present employees as of January 1, 1987.

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Copland was Apple’s failed attempt to modernize the classic Mac OS in the mid 1990s. While parts of it would end up in Mac OS 8, the dream of a modern Mac operating system wouldn’t be realized until after Apple bought NeXT.¹

Copland is a really interesting (and sad) chapter in the Mac’s history. Here are some documents I’ve collected over the years about it:

• An Introduction to Copland
• Copland Technical Overview

“Mac OS 8 Build D11E4” was a preview build of Copland. It ran on very select hardware, and had to be connected via a serial cable to a Power Mac running a special Debugger program:

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Designed by Apple in California is far from the only book Apple has published in the last 40 years.

Today, I wanted to share some select pages from A Personal Guide to Personal Computers, a sales book put out by the company in 1982.

The book works to make the personal computer more approachable, while building a case for purchasing an Apple system. I’ve scanned the first chapter as a PDF you can download here.

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The Power Mac G3 All-in-One was not an important computer, but it’s important to me.

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This incredible two-part series on the “Get a Mac” ads featuring John Hodgman and Justin Long is gold.

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I was recently digging around a bunch of old Mac OS X installers, and thought it would be fun to share Apple’s installation documentation for a bunch of releases.

All of these links are to PDFs. Right-click to download. The entire group can be downloaded as a .zip here.

Rhapsody

• Rhapsody Release 1: Installation Manual
• Rhapsody Release 2 Installation Instructions
• Mac OS X Server 1.0: Install Manual

Developer Previews and Beta

• OS X DP 1: Install Instructions
• OS X DP 2: Install Instructions
• OS X DP 3: Install Instructions
• OS X DP 4: Install Instructions
• Public Beta: Read Before You Install
• Public Beta: Welcome to Mac OS X

Mac OS X Releases

• 10.0: Read Before You Install
• 10.0: Welcome to Mac OS X
• 10.1: Read Before You Install
• 10.1: Welcome to Mac OS X
• 10.2: Read Before You Install
• 10.3: Read Before You Install
• 10.4 PPC: Read Before You Install
• 10.4 PPC: Welcome to Tiger
• 10.4 Intel: Read Before You Install
• 10.4 Intel: Welcome to Tiger
• 10.5: Read Before You Install
• 10.5: Installation & Setup Guide
• 10.5: Welcome to Leopard
• 10.6: Installation Instructions
• 10.6: Welcome to Snow Leopard

OS X Lion was the first version of Mac OS X purchased and downloaded via the Mac App Store. It and all later versions do not include this type of documentation.

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Up until Snow Leopard, new versions of Mac OS X would play a welcome video during installation. These helped set the stage for the new operating system.

Cheetah, Puma and Jaguar shared a video that highlighted the new Aqua interface. Panther’s featured the bright blue background with nice, crisp, white text. Tiger brought Spotlight, and as such, the welcome message was highlighted by a moving light. Leopard and Snow Leopard shared a darker clip that is reminiscent of the initial Time Machine interface.

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I came across this video while working on my book, and thought it deserved a link.

In it, the editor has cut together Steve Jobs showing off NeXTSTEP and OS X. It’s really fun to see how the features of the former informed so much about the latter.

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Jason Snell, at Macworld:

In a moment of somewhat unexpected nostalgia at its most recent media event, Apple pointed out that it was the 25th anniversary of the PowerBook. (It’s good to know that, 27 years later, Apple still would rather nobody remember the Mac Portable.) I’ve been a Mac laptop user since the original PowerBook era. That ancient history is my history. Since 1991, Apple has gone through seven distinct eras when it comes to its laptop strategy and design.

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