This week in my column over on iMore, I tackle some of the weirder accessories Apple has sold over the years.
Category: Apple History
Spotlight’s first interface⇢
Riccardo Morrick has taken an in-depth look at OS X Tiger’s UI for Spotlight. I agree with him; Leopard left a lot of good ideas on the cutting room floor.
Macintosh or Windows?
This video may be everything wrong with Apple in 1996. I’d write more about this, but I fell asleep.
On Backup.app
Backups always come up this time of year. If you’re at home visiting family, it’s your Nerd Duty to make sure your family members have something in place to keep their data safe.
There are lots of good options out there today, but back in the early 2000s, that wasn’t true. If you were a .Mac subscriber, though, Apple’s Backup.app made data duplication easier than it had been previously. You didn’t even have to download the app; you could install it right from your iDisk folder.
The Macintosh TV: The worst of both worlds⇢
This month in my iMore column:
Turns out smashing a TV into a Mac running System 7 was … less than ideal.
1-800-SOS-APPL
I woke up to a fun tweet in my timeline this morning:
@ismh Maybe one of your Macs are eligible? https://t.co/ynjmkC601k
— Nikhil Ravishankar (@knekill) November 19, 2015
I had no idea this existed. In short, some Macs sold between 1992 and 1996 came with free telephone support as long as you owned the machine. In 1997, Apple tried shutting it down, but got hit with a lawsuit.
The best part? The phone number still works.
A trip through iOS 5.1.1
I spent some time yesterday organizing my Apple collection with some new shelves and bins and in the process, fired up my first-generation iPad. It’s running iOS 5.1.1, the last build to support the device. In our post-iOS 7 world, older versions of iOS really do look dated.
Simple Beep #26: Preserving Mac history⇢
Simple Beep is a podcast looking back at the history of Apple and the Mac community. Each episode, Ed and Brian tackle the hardware, software and services that got us to where we are today.
Needless to say, I’m a huge fan, and jumped at the chance to join the guys for their anniversary episode.
We spoke about our first encounters with the Mac, our Apple hardware collections and the importance of archiving technology for the future. Go check it out.
Attack of the (Mac) clones⇢
Christopher Phin:
Imagine if today, you could buy “a Mac” from Sony or Lenovo or Dell that wasn’t just cheaper than what you’d buy from Apple, but faster and more expandable—and still ran El Capitan perfectly. That’s pretty much where we found ourselves in the late ’90s with companies such as UMAX, Akia, Motorola, and of course Power Computing, the first to be granted a licence from Apple.
I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time exploring this chapter of Apple’s history. It’s a prime example of just how screwed up Apple was before Jobs came back. Cancelling this program was one of the first things he did.
On Apple’s fall music event⇢
Autumn used to be a little more colorful for Apple fans.
System 7 in a browser⇢
System 7 is what comes to mind when I think about the classic MacOS, as it does for many. Turns out, you can relive the glory days in the browser today.
Thanks for the link, Brian!
Panic opens a Pippin
Remember the Pippin, Apple’s ill-fated gaming console from the mid 1990s? It looks like the crew over at Panic Software have gotten their hands on one:
One new SCSI CD-ROM drive later, our Apple Pippin Devkit is working! The future of gaming had MacOS 7 buttons! ???? pic.twitter.com/1cvmmUaDAJ
— Panic Inc (@panic) September 30, 2015
Don’t miss the “Usage Guidelines for the Pippin Logo and CD-ROM Packaging” document Cabel Sasser posted, either.