I knew about most of these, but I hadn’t come across the Apple Presentation System before.
Category: Apple History
Apple I Sold for $671,400⇢
Steve Lohr for The New York Times:
An Apple–1 computer, made in 1976, sold for a record $671,400 on Saturday at an auction in Germany, including all fees and taxes, said Uwe Breker, the German auctioneer.
That surpassed the $640,000 record for an Apple–1, set last November at a sale at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, Auction Team Breker. The fall 2012 sale was a sharp rise from the previous record price for an Apple–1 of $374,500, set in June 2012 at Sotheby’s in New York.
The Lost Art of Apple Code Names⇢
Linus Edwards:
The most infamous computer code named after a famous person was the PowerMac 7100, code named Carl Sagan. When Sagan heard of this code name he was so offended he actually sued Apple, even though the code name was strictly internal and never publicly advertised. Apple’s team subsequently added new code names for the PowerMac 7100, including BHA (Butt Head Astronomer) and LAW (Lawyers are Wimps).
The rest of Linus’ article is great, but the PowerMac 7100 story always makes me smile.
The Show Me Apple Museum⇢
If you didn’t make it to Atlanta, the Show Me Apple Museum in Canada looks pretty cool, too.
The collection appears to be very well-rounded. In fact, scrolling through the pictures, I can’t think of a single important machine that’s not on display.
Looking Back at the Future: A Preview of the Apple Pop-Up Museum
**
Green
Yellow
Orange
Red
Purple
Blue**
As I walked through the glass door to be the offices behind of what used to be an Atlanta-area CompUSA store, those six familiar colors filled my vision.
The store is being temporarily brought back to life, but instead of selling all-in-one printers and CDs of cruddy PC software, it’s being used to peddle history.
Inside, I met Lonnie Mimms, the man behind the Apple Pop-Up Museum, a 6,000 square-foot display of much of the company’s history, from blue boxes to iPhones. Almost everything on display is out of his personal collection, including the giant six-color logo across from the entrance.
1984 Macintosh Manual⇢
The Apple Pop-Up Museum⇢
The Apple Pop-Up Museum is an effort to display some of the rich history that Apple pretends it doesn’t have.
The displays will be on show in Atlanta April 20–21, as part of the Vintage Computer Festival Southeast.
The group promises an Apple I, the first disk II and controller card, an original Apple II, an original Lisa and a Xerox Alto, among other machines.
If I wasn’t going to be in Florida with Make-a-Wish, I would be in Atlanta for this in a heartbeat. The exhibit and festival sound awesome.
The Lego Apple II⇢
I need this to be a kit. So, so badly.
Apple’s RSS Reader
With the original iPhone’s release, Apple released a second, less-shiny product:
An RSS web client.
Found at reader.mac.com, it was fairly simple. If you visited a RSS link in Mobile Safari, .Mac’s page would load up the feed on a nice looking page:
image via AllThingsD
Turns out, the page is still there. If you visit that URL on an iPhone, here’s what it looks like:
(As an aside, what it looks like on the desktop.)
The Brushed Metal Diaries: An Introduction, a Trojan Horse and a History of Abuse
While most people think of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or some drunken loser when they hear the term “brushed metal” in the context of UI design, the interface is far older than either of those two things.
Think back to the summer of 1999. People were canning fruits and vegetables in preparation of Y2K, Cher was on the radio everywhere, and people could walk around in denim vests without living in fear of being punched in the face.
On the eMate 300
Anyone who has been following technology since before the Dawn of the Smartphone should remember the Apple Newton. The handheld device was sold from 1993 to 1998, and is regarded as being ahead of its time.
The family of devices all came equipped with (eventually) decent battery life, handwriting recognition and a pen-based UI, and all ran the Newton OS.
Apple didn’t just keep Newton OS confined to glowing green handheld devices, however. In November 1997, just four months before the entire project would be shut down, Apple shipped the eMate 300.
On the Color Classic⇢
Benj Edwards:
At a time when it seemed that compact Macs would forever be saddled with 9-inch monochrome displays, the Color Classic burst forth with a glorious, ultra-sharp 10-inch Sony Trinitron tube that handily displayed 256 colors—although it did so at a 512 by 384 resolution that almost matched its compact ancestors.
I own a Color Classic, and enjoyed Benj’s article about the machine. It was a great little machine in its day.