Category: Apple History

Another in a slew of recent anniversaries, the computer that started it all turns 40 today. The Apple I isn’t a computer the way we think about computers now; your $666 got you a logic board. You had to bring a power supply, keyboard, display and tape drive to make it usable.

Image via The RetroMacCast

While this BASIC-running machine seems incredibly simple today, it sparked the personal computer revolution. It showed that computing didn’t have to involve punch cards and machines you couldn’t actually see or touch. While it was a hobbyist device and the Apple II would turn the corner toward the consumer market, we owe a lot to this little logic board.

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I had seen photos of this prototype Apple keyboard, but now I know a lot more:

Cassie is pure SnowWhite. What computers would it look good with? Perhaps a Mac SE or Apple IIgs, but even those strike me as a little too sharp-edged and hard. A computer to go with Cassie would have to be soft, like Esslinger’s other designs of the period.

via @morrick

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This is simply wonderful:

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Apple has published an Apple Music playlist highlighting some music from its rich history of ads. There are some fun songs in here.

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2016 collecting goal: every color of iMac G3. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

— Stephen Hackett (@ismh) March 17, 2016

I want to put together a video on the Mac that saved Apple.

The problem is that there are a lot of iMac G3s. While many of the colors are present on multiple generations, I’m not worried about those details for this project. I just am looking for one each case type.

Here’s where I am so far:

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While I didn’t outline Apple’s history in glorious detail, Joe Rossignol ove at MacRumors has. What an amazing four decades.

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40 years ago, Apple Computer, Inc. was born. While I certainly could wind a path through four decades of computers and products, software and services, I think that today is more about the why of all of it.

Why do we obsess over tiny design and development changes and decisions?

Why do we get into spats on Twitter about mobile operating systems?

Why do we care so much about an enormous, publicly traded company?

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It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.

Happy 40th, Apple.

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Lot of people wave their hands and complain about Apple’s lineup in the late 90s, but Riccardo Mori has done the hard work of listing all of the various Macintosh models that were for sale in 1996:

In a nutshell: there was some level of organisation in what many have called the chaos of Macs available back then, and despite the long list of Mac models, the families and form factors were just a few; one of the main causes that generated confusion in the Macintosh product line was the frequent rebranding, and the progressive meaninglessness of the Performa line as the consumer choice versus the Power Macintosh as synonymous of ‘Pro’ machine.

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This month, in my column over at iMore:

This month’s old Mac is the weird cousin of the iMac G4 we looked at in February. Introduced only months after the iMac G4, the eMac mashed up old ideas with new tech: It retained the all-in-one design defined by the iMac G3, but it shipped with a larger 17-inch CRT display and used the same G4 chipset found in the LCD-equipped iMacs.

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The tiny iPod shuffle was introduced as a “One More Thing” back in 2005 at the same Macworld where the Mac mini showed up. It was designed to push further into the low-end market than the iPod mini had done, but that’s a story for another time.

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HyperCard is one of the lost wonders of the MacOS age. The latest episode of Simple Beep covers in depth.

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