Holy moly, this is a great website.
Category: Apple History
The QuickTake 100 turns 20⇢
Stewart Wolpin at Mashable:
First unveiled at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo on February 17, 1994, the QuickTake 100 went on sale 20 years ago from yesterday — June 20, 1994. It was priced at $749 and initiated the age of consumer digital photography.
One reason why the QuickTake 100 is not often mentioned as an Apple breakthrough — other than the fact that Jobs’ himself had nothing to do with it — was that it’s one of the few non-computer products Apple produced and one Apple itself didn’t design.
⌘⇢
Tom Chatfield:
Graphical use interfaces had existed before, but they had never commanded a general affection to match the eagerness of early adopters. Much like a good map, Kare’s designs helped transform this by providing something beyond information: a human elegance echoing the Mac’s intuitive philosophy of design.
The Apple QuickTake 200
Back in the 90s, Apple made digital cameras. The QuickTake 200 was the best — and last — of the three models the company sold. For sale less than a year in 1997, the $600 camera shot 640x480 images at f/2.0 to f/8.
Apple’s lost future⇢
The Verge has put together the motherload of old, weird Apple prototype photos.
On Apple’s online store⇢
Seth Fiegerman:
Steve Jobs glanced at the sheet of paper with Apple’s future on it and promptly flicked it away onto the table. Then he uttered one of his trademark criticisms to Eddy Cue, the manager who had handed it to him.
“This sucks,” Jobs said.
Woz, on BASIC⇢
Steve Wozniak, on Gizmodo:
In 1967 or 1968, as a senior in high school, our electronics teacher (the best teacher of my life in many teaching regards) arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale (Sylvania) to program a computer because I already knew all the electronics in class at school. Mr. McCollum did this for students with electronics abilities every year, finding local companies with engineers and projects that would let high school students come and and get some experience. I learned and programmed in FORTRAN on this IBM computer.
Don’t Use It⇢
Well, I have a new favorite Apple support document:
How come I shouldn’t use System 6.0.6 on ANY Macintosh? And why should I use System 6.0.7 only on newer Macintosh computers?
System 6.0.6 has compatibility problems with the new Macintosh computers. System 6.0.6 was pulled from production and replaced by System 6.0.7. There are a few versions of System 6.0.6 floating around that were sent out before the software was pulled from production.
On the Blue and White Power Mac G3
The first notebook I used full-time was a 1GHz Titanium PowerBook G4, and while I used a bunch of iMac G3s and beige Power Mac G3 in high school, my part-time job at the time came with what I consider to be “my” first Mac — a Blue & White Power Mac G3.
(That’s my exact machine. I just got it back through an extensive set of trades on the Memphis gray market for old Macs.)
On the Past, Present and Future of Apple’s Aqua User Interface
Building a new operating system is a monumental challenge, and in January 2000 when Aqua was introduced, Apple was in the thick of the transition to OS X.
Beyond the staggering amount of development work taking place to smash Mac OS and NeXTSTEP together, Apple was hard at work on the user interface of OS X. But to understand what OS X would become (and how it would look), it’s important to remember where the company had been before.
A Brushed Metal tour⇢
Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2.0⇢
Last year, I got a preview of the Apple Pop-Up Museum, a show in Atlanta showcasing the best of Cupertino’s hardware over the years.
This year, some of the guys behind that project are back, with Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2.0:
This year’s exhibit space will be greatly enlarged over last year, occupying the whole retail space of the store. About 2/3 of the space will be occupied by a museum display of personal computing artifacts from the Kenbak 1 forward. The remaining 1/3 of the retail space will contain hobbyist vintage computing exhibits. For those who missed last year or who would like to see it again, the Apple pop-up museum from last year’s festival will again be available.