My buddy Thomas Brand has put together a nice set of links to celebrate the 18th birthday of the Newton MessagePad 2000.
I owned a 2000 for several years in college, complete with Wi-Fi card, keyboard and carrying case. It synced contacts, calendars and more with my PowerBook G4 via an ADB/USB adaptor. I could send and receive email, take class notes and more all on the little green machine.
Mind-blowing stuff.
A year ago, Federico, Myke and I looked back at the original iPhone keynote. It’s hard to believe the announcement was eight years ago.
Brian Stucki:
This weekend marks the ten year anniversary of the first Mac mini. I feel confident in saying that no one has watched this little machine grow more intently than I have watched it. It’s the center of everything I do here at Macminicolo.
To celebrate a decade of working with the Mac mini, I’ve put together a timeline of hightlights from the last ten years.
If I had unlimited funds to grow my Mac collection, a TAM would be first on my shopping list.
Here’s your required Sunday afternoon reading.
Mike Solomon:
I saw this great post about how tiny the original Macintosh screen was compared with the current (and enormous) Retina 5K iMac screen.
So I thought I’d take the opposite approach. Below are 1-to-1 pixel mockups of how Mac OS X Yosemite would have appeared on the original Macintosh’s 512×342 pixel screen.
It’s crazy to think about the progress the Macintosh has made in 30 years.
via Daring Fireball
Greg Kumparak:
The Apple II may be one of the most important systems in the history of personal computing — but that doesn’t mean it was perfect. Nearly 40 years later, Steve Wozniak is still coming up with ways he could have done it better.
My friend Thomas Brand rounds out yesterday’s article on control interactions within MacOS and OS X with a feature I totally overlooked.
The original Macintosh shipped with a very simple control panel that allowed users to adjust their computer’s volume, mouse tracking speed and desktop background, among other things:
Today, System Preferences is a bloated mess compared to Susan Kare’s 1984 masterpiece:
However, the history from the original Macintosh Control Panel to Maverick’s System Preferences isn’t a linear one.
In 1994, with the System 7.1-running PowerBook 500 series of notebooks and the Duo 280c, 1 Apple introduced the Control Strip, which can be seen in the lower left of this screenshot:
True story: I was going to write up the history of the Macintosh II, but then ran across this artcle by Benj Edwards.
If you want to understand why Apple went off the rails in the 90s, reading up on this machine isn’t a bad place to start.