Thom Holwerda, writing at OSnews about the end of the Macintosh clone era:
The rather abrupt end of the clone program means there’s a number of variants of the Mac OS that never made their way into the market, most notable variants intended for the Common Reference Hardware Platform, or CHRP, a standard defined by IBM and Apple for PowerPC-based PCs. Thanks to the popular classic Mac YouTuber Mac84, we now have a few of these releases out in the wild.
I used iWeb back in the day to make early versions of my personal website, as well as websites for friends, before I started learning more about web development and switched to Adobe Dreamweaver. Apple only released two major updates to iWeb, with the last one arriving in the iLife ‘09 package. When the company migrated its cloud services from MobileMe to iCloud, the ability to publish personal websites was removed, and iWeb was finally discontinued in 2011.
Classic Mac Gaming on YouTube has a great video about a true classic for Mac OS:
Rakhim Davletkali has written a delightful blog post, reviewing macOS releases in reverse:
Apple’s first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell — the visual user interface — was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple’s first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people.
512 Pixels reader Brian sent me a screenshot they took way back on Mac OS X 10.0, showing that Apple’s current struggle with transparent user interface elements isn’t anything new:
I know this puts me in a very specific age bracket, but I did almost of all my writing in high school in AppleWorks 6 and still miss it.
Basic Apple Guy’s impressive project pairs nicely with mine.
The perfect $40,264 gift for the music lover in your life.
I’ve been in this racket long enough to see plenty of other websites, podcasts, and commentators come and go.
One of those names from the past is MacSurfer, an old-school link aggregation website keeping up with news from across the Apple ecosystem. Back in the day, getting a link on Macsurfer’s Headline News would mean serious traffic for a younger version of me.
While I first knew about MacSurfer in 2005 or so, I was a decade late; the site started back in 1995 WHEN I WAS JUST NINE YEARS OLD. Sadly, it was shuttered in 2020 due to revenue issues, but weirdly, the site seemed to spring back to life this week. Eric Schwarz was able to chat with its new owner, Ken Turner:
I recently stumbled across a promotional document for the Lisa, dating back to 1983. It’s a real gem:
In January 2007, I was on a trip visiting family in rural North Carolina during the week of Macworld Expo. When I got back to my aunt’s house after a day of visiting folks, I waited as her sloooooow Internet connection loaded apple.com.
What I saw blew my mind. The iPhone had been rumored, but seeing those original web pages was really something.
Here’s what that site said:
iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.
