Category: Apple History

Pierre Dandumont has saved a long-lost bit of Macintosh history:

If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions. But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM.

I had talked about this mysterious ROM a few years ago. It’s documented by Apple in some old documents, but without much detail. According to Apple, the ROM contains fonts for kanji in 12 and 18 points, and they are loaded at startup by KanjiTalk. On a regular Macintosh Plus, you need a floppy disk with the files, which slows down startup and uses some RAM, whereas on a Japanese Macintosh Plus, the font is in ROM and doesn’t take up RAM. You also avoid loading files from a floppy disk, theoretically saving 6 seconds during startup. That’s a conservative estimate, as we’ll see—it assumes you’re not switching disks manually.

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macOS Sequoia supports these Intel-based Macs:

• 2017 iMac Pro
• 2018 Mac mini
• 2018–2020 MacBook Pro models
• 2019 Mac Pro
• 2019–2020 iMac models
• 2020 MacBook Air

What’s more important than the model year is when these Macs stopped being sold:

Model:Removed from Sale:2017 iMac ProMarch 20212018 Mac miniJanuary 20232019 Mac ProJune 20232020 MacBook ProOctober 20212020 iMacMarch 20222020 MacBook AirNovember 2020

As you can see, the Intel Mac mini and Intel Mac Pro lasted all the way until 2023, with the 2019 Mac Pro being removed from sale less than two years ago, when its Apple silicon-powered replacement was announced at WWDC.

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Rich Trouton spotted something in the release notes for macOS Sequoia 15.5, released earlier this week: that AFP is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version of the operating system. He writes:

This announcement is providing a end-of-the-road notification for AFP, which has been included in Apple’s operating systems for the Mac since System 6 in 1988. The ability to run an AFP server was removed from macOS as part of macOS Big Sur and it is not possible to host AFP shares from APFS formatted drives, so the AFP client has been the final functional part of AFP left as of macOS Sequoia.

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Today marks ten years since the original Apple Watch shipped. In that decade, it’s gone from a slow and constrained device that was trying to do far too much to something that I wear every day and night to track my fitness and get a very select number of notifications.

Basic Apple Guy has put together a great blog post to mark the occasion:

What follows is me meandering through the past decade of the Apple Watch, covering some of its history, my thoughts, uses, and my impressions on a decade of this unassuming yet increasingly vital product in Apple’s lineup.

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MacPaint was one of the Mac’s original first-party applications, and was written by Bill Atkinson himself. Jeffrey Starr has published an in-depth look at the application’s source code:

One of two launch applications for the Apple Macintosh in 1984, MacPaint is emblematic of the Macintosh’s early quirky revolutionary branding, focus on ease of use, and appeal to artistic customers. Using the source code, we examine the design and implementation of the application. We find that the buffer management and bucket filling algorithms demonstrate mechanical empathy with the 68k platform and leverage the limitations of the domain as a means to improve performance. We also find positive and negative aspects in the code style and architecture and its pliability for change. Finally, we dispute some claimed novel aspects of the program while also arguing for its significance and impact on the development of digital graphic systems.

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iiiDIY has a great video about getting a LC630 cleaned up and running again:

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Andrew Rossignol has done what I was sure was impossible:

I have been diving into the world of large language models (LLMs), and a question began to gnaw at me: could I bring the cutting-edge of AI to the nostalgic glow of my trusty 2005 PowerBook G4? Armed with a 1.5GHz processor, a full gigabyte of RAM, and a limiting 32-bit address space, I embarked on an experiment that actually yielded results. I have successfully managed to achieve LLM inference on this classic piece of Apple history, proving that even yesteryear’s hardware can have a taste of tomorrow’s AI.

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Doug Brown:

This whole saga starts with a very interesting blog post written by Pierre Dandumont in 2022. Pierre’s (excellent) blog is in French — Google does a good job of translating it for me. He found a quote in a book referring to special functionality bundled with Apple’s Macintosh Performa 550 computer:

If Apple’s programmers, in creating the Performa series, were aiming to make idiot-proof computers, they were serious about it. The Performa 550 is an amazing case in point. When you run the included Apple Backup program (see Chapter 15), you get a little surprise that you didn’t count on: a hidden partition on your hard drive!

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Start Monday off right: with some beige upgrades.

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This blog post by Doug Brown blew my mind a little:

This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.

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John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:

Sotheby’s is auctioning the estate of renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. The auction house, which is auctioning the estate’s assets in multiple lots includes several collections of classic iPods and custom iPods…

Just look at some of these things:

Sotheby’s posted this video to Instagram, highlighting the collection:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sotheby’s (@sothebys)

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I haven’t gotten very far into this interview yet, but Serlet’s history and career should be more widely known than it is.

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