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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.
I first experienced BASIC in high school that same year. We didn’t have a computer in the school but GE, I think, brought in a terminal with modem to promote their time-sharing business. A very few of we bright math students were given some pages of instruction and we wrote some very simple programs in BASIC.
Woz’s work in BASIC changed the world. Without it, Apple would have never made it long enough to build the Mac OS.
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.
You should use System 6.0.5 (or System 7) on most Macintosh computers made before the Macintosh Classic, Macintosh LC, and Macintosh IIsi. System 6.0.7 has features in it that only benefit newer Macintosh computers. This does not mean that you can’t use System 6.0.7 on older products, it just means that it is not the recommended system.
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.)
The Blue and White is an interesting machine, beyond my attachment to it.
Of course, 1999 was a weird time for the company. OS 8 was out, and the cat was out of the bag about OS X, but Aqua was still a year away.
Things, however, were looking up. Apple has sold 1.6 million of the out-going beige machine. The new machines, however were designed to be faster, more expandable and better designed.
The processors in the Blue and White were fast (and copper!), the machine had lots of expansion bays, but the inclusion of an ATI Rage 128 video cards and FireWire set the machine apart.
Lastly, the Blue and White was the first Mac to ship with FireWire, leaving behind SCSI forever.
Hardware & Software
More so than the iMac G3, the Blue and White is a transition model. It was the debut machine for FireWire, and brought USB to Apple’s professional lineup. To the chagrin of pro users, however, the company dropped the serial ports, floppy drive and SCSI support found on the out-going machine. This computer also holds the distinction to be the only Mac to ship with both ADB and FireWire.
Most importantly, it was the first Power Mac to ship with the New World ROM.
Inside, the Blue and Whites were packed full of fairly standard parts. Drives connected over IDE, the RAM came in generic modules, and the processor sat on a ZIF socket. With 4 PCI slots, the Blue and White could easily be customized for video and audio work, connecting serial-powered devices and more. The “Gossamer” logic board was based on the beige G3 before it.
Early blue and white G3s (“Revision 1” units) had IDE controller problems related to the ATA/33 hard drive controller that made it impossible to connect two hard drives and prevented the use of newer drives. Using newer ATA drives in those units resulted in data transmission errors if the drives were connected to the on-board ATA/33 controller, the severity of the problem varying according to the particular make and model of the drive. Workarounds include replacing motherboards and employing the use of SCSI, Ultra ATA or SATA PCI controller cards. Stable operation can be achieved if the drive can be limited to Multi-Word DMA Mode 2 (disabling UDMA), although this limits throughput to 16 MB/sec. Some hard drives support disabling UDMA in firmware through manufacturer-supplied utilities (generally DOS-based). Alternatively, the transfer mode can be limited to Multi-Word DMA Mode 2 through the use of third-party driver software such as FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.
In late April 1999, the line was speed-bumped by 50 MHz, bringing the high-end model to 450 MHz. These “Revision B” machines shipped with a revised logic board and didn’t experience the nasty IDE controller issues.
(Thankfully, mine’s a 400 MHz Rev. B.)
The 350, 400 and 450 MHz models from the Rev. B series shipped with the same logic board — dubbed “Yikes” that would end up in the first Power Mac G4 machines.
The Blue and White was a huge upgrade in terms of looks. Just look at the previous G3 tower:
The new case was codenamed El Capitan. Its feet and handles were easy to grip, making moving the G3 easier than ever. The front, back and top were bold, showing off the Bondi Blue plastic in a much brighter way than the iMac, and the translucent side panels were enough to make any beige box look dingy.
All of the internals were easy to get to, thanks to the handle and drop-down side:
The opening door was a revolution, and Apple liked showing it off. Compared to the closed and heavily customized Macs of today, the Blue and White seems almost foreign.
The Blue and White isn’t the first Mac that was easy to open, but compared something like the Power Macintosh G3 (Desktop) that preceded it, it’s elegant:
Beyond the functionality, the Blue and White was downright beautiful.
Sometimes, a machine comes along that sets the tone for years to come. Until the 2013 Mac Pro, the G3’s bones remained in place. Just check out the 2002-2004 “Mirror Drive Door” Power Mac G4:
While the Power Mac G5 and Mac Pro ditched the fold-down side, the machines’ shared case design retained the easy-to-reach internals and handles:
Software wise, the Blue and White has one of the widest ranges of any machine.
Revision A machines came with Mac OS 8.5.1 and Rev. B shipped with 8.6, but all Blue and Whites are capable of running OS X Tiger, thanks to the 1 GB RAM ceiling and FireWire ports.
Beyond its impressive client reach, the Blue and White is important in Apple’s server history, as Steve Jobs used one to demo Mac OS X Server 1.0 for the first time.
The Blue and White gave Apple the power it needed to run the smash up of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS 8. In what may be one my favorite demos ever, Steve Jobs booted a rack of 49 hard drive-less iMacs from a single Power Mac G3.
As future-thinking as it was, except for the most basic of tasks, the G3-powered Blue and White is past its useful lives. Even with overclocking, this machine’s just run out of steam.
Conclusion
In many ways, the Blue and White set the tone for modern Mac towers. Its easy-access door would remain a staple for 14 years, and its inclusion of things like FireWire and Ultra-ATA brought the Power Macintosh into the 21st-century. It holds a special place in the Apple history books, and an important place in my collection.
So that’s the first lesson I take from Memphis: Memphis will always, and instantly, be weirder than whatever rubric you’re using to help you understand it.
As a life-long, native Memphian I can say that Phillips got the city exactly right after just four days here.
This week, with Myke at the Úll Conference, the Italian one and I discuss WebObjects, the recent MacBook Air update and OS X’s possible impending redesign before talking about what may be ailing the iPad as a product.
Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been banned for life by the NBA in response to racist comments the league says he made in a recorded conversation.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced the discipline Tuesday, saying that Sterling has been fined $2.5 million and that the league will attempt to force a sale of the Clippers.
Silver also stated that Sterling cannot attend any NBA games or practices, be present at any Clippers office or facility, or participate in business or player personnel decisions.
A good day to think about this sort of thing. Props to Adam Silver for not putting up with Sterling’s bullshit.
Clear for iOS and OS X are well-known for being easy and fun to use. Today, both apps have been updated to support reminders. Here’s Realmac’s Dan Counsell on the company blog:
We’ve been busy working away on the next big update to Clear, and today we’re thrilled to announce that Clear with Reminders is now available on the App Store. Set a reminder, and Clear will remind you across all your devices as Clear for Mac also gets this new feature today as well!
Reminders hasn’t cluttered Clear’s interface. Swiping and pinching are still used to navigate lists and add items, but when an item is added, there’s a new tappable link to create a reminder, which brings up a custom date picker:
iOS 7’s default UIDatePicker has issues, and what Realmac is using in Clear is a big improvement. I wouldn’t mind seeing this implementation become standard across iOS apps.
Once a reminder is created, it does exactly what you think it will: send a push notification to your devices at the specified time:
Clear for iOS is $4.99. The Mac app is $9.99. Both are well worth it if you’re looking for a great way to keep up with to-do lists.
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With custom host name redirect, you are not beholden to a single platform. If you choose to leave at any time, you may do so. A simple change in redirect is all you need to get up and running again. There’s no need to waste your reader or listener’s time to update their feed with a new URL. We know all too well that this can lead to lost subscribers and pent-up frustration on both ends. Furthermore, you can export any newsletter subscribers that you may have, as well as download a compatible JSON file containing subscriber data collected from your feed.
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Apple has determined that the sleep/wake button mechanism on a small percentage of iPhone 5 models may stop working or work intermittently. iPhone 5 models manufactured through March 2013 may be affected by this issue.
Apple will replace the sleep/wake button mechanism, free of charge, on iPhone 5 models that exhibit this issue and have a qualifying serial number.
Good on Apple — it seems that a lot of people I know have run in to this issue. Taking care of people out of the warranty period is the right thing to do.
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 Visual Tour of Mac OS
From the original Macintosh up through System 6, Mac OS looked basically the same:
As the screenshot shows, Apple was very conservative when adding color to the Mac’s user interface.
Mac OS 8 brought much more color with its Platinum interface. Notice the monochromatic pinstripes and simple controls. Even here, color is used somewhat sparingly:
Mac OS 8 was released over 12 years after the original Macintosh. For over a decade, the Mac’s UI stayed basically the same. Screens grew in size and color support was added, but Apple moved very slowly.
( OS 9 — released partly as a stop gap carried much of the same UI.)
It would come back to bite them in the ass.
Enter NeXT
While Apple was trudging along with Mac OS, the team at NeXT was hard at work. While the initial release of NeXTSTEP was monochrome, later builds — including OpenStep, pictured below — were in full color.
After the purchase, Apple announced [Rhapsody,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) a BSD-based operating system was powered by a Mach microkernel. It contained the object-oriented Yellow Box API framework, the Blue Box compatibility environment for running “Classic” Mac OS applications and a Java Virtual Machine.
In short, Rhapsody was the structure bridging the old and the new. It was also the front lines for Apple’s work on the interface of its new system.
This is how the company described its work:
Rhapsody’s user interface will combine elements from both the Mac OS and NEXTSTEP, but will be closer in look and feel to the Mac OS Finder. We realize that customers need a consistent interface in the two operating systems to deploy them throughout a single organization. It’s important for training and ease of use. One of the advantages of NeXT’s technology is the easy support of multiple user interface paradigms.
Shipping in August 1997, Rhapsody looked like Mac OS with little chunks of NeXT design, as Apple outlined:
Rhapsody would end up becoming Mac OS X Server 1.0 in March 1999. Still running the mash-up of Mac OS’ and OpenStep’s UIs, OS X Server 1.0 was the first retail release of an Apple-branded, NeXT-based OS:
The user interface was designed to reflect the hardware of the day. Candy-colored iMacs and iBooks looked great with Aqua’s bright buttons and colorful window controls.
As anyone who’s seen the screenshots knows, Aqua looks very nice. Even in this very first private release, the attention to detail in Aqua is impressive. Everything appears sharp and polished. All the UI elements look just as good as they do in the screen shots on Apple’s web site. Some even look better.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I believe that Mac OS X DP3 has its heart in the right place. It certainly looks very nice, and it is generally impressive in action. But the devil is in the details, and Aqua manages to get most of them wrong. The dock is a total write-off. It doesn’t need to be “fixed” so much as it needs to be split-out into individual components that do a particular task (and do it well), rather than a catch-all dock that does everything atrociously. The Finder still needs to be fleshed out, but it’s on the right track with its offering of both the new browser-style interface and the traditional Finder windows. The core OS is sturdy and interesting as ever. As with DP2, I was not able to freeze the system at any time, and performance was quite good, with a few eye-candy-related exceptions (genie on the G3 and opaque window resizing on both machines). I continue to enjoy the technical aspects of Mac OS X, and I hold out hope that Apple will listen to its users and reconsider some of the UI decisions made for Mac OS X.
Just reviewing that screenshot shows some of the UI’s initial problems. The Dock was terrible, the transparency made some content — like window titles — impossible to read at times, single-application mode was super janky and the menu bar’s centered Apple logo was very troublesome.
(Fun fact — Mac OS’ “Apple menu” was still intact on the left end of the menu bar. That logo was just eye candy that apps with too many menus had to skip over. Seriously.)
By the time 10.0 Cheetah shipped in March 2001 (after four developer previews and the Public Beta), Apple had fixed a lot of the weirdness in Aqua, including that Apple logo:
In fact, most OS X users would look at 10.0 and not be surprised by much at all.
This is due to the fact that, for many years, OS X’s UI didn’t change all that much, besides gaining speed. Once Mac hardware caught up to the UI’s demands, Aqua shined.
These days, there’s not much of Aqua left. While OS X Mavericks’ interface is clearly derived from what Apple announced 13 years ago, it has aged.
The changes started with 10.3 Panther and right off the bat, things went off the rails a little. Many of Aqua’s conventions remained intact, but the pinstripes that once mimicked Apple’s hardware were replaced with our friend Brushed Metal:image via GUIdebook
Panther’s buttons and scrollbars seem out of place next to the brushed metal, and the window controls are downright cringe-worthy. Mac OS X Tiger didn’t stray far from Panther’s line, although the company did make several improvements to the UI, including dialog boxes and font smoothing. As shown below in this image, even 10.4 included some very Aqua-like elements:
image via Ari Weinstein, who sent me a correct version of the screenshot I had been using originally here.
Tiger’s successor, however, brought sweeping changes.
image via Apple PRLeopard’s user interface came crashing down like an iron fist. Pinstripes were smoothed over, and brushed metal was swept away. The rounded corners that had defined the Mac’s menu bar since 1984 were removed.
The new theme will likely involve tweaks to the existing design and perhaps a “flattening” of Aqua in-line with Apple’s iTunes and iPhoto interface elements.
At the time, I thought this rumor was really weird. 10.6 didn’t bring a new UI, and Marble sounds more like Leopard than anything else. Oh well.
During the event, the company announced Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. The new OS brought many iOS-based features to the desktop, including full-screen apps, improved gesture support, and a grid-based app launcher named Launchpad.
Lion continued down Leopard’s path of dulling Aqua, but brought things like stitched leather, linen and green felt from iOS to the Mac.
Today, OS X Mavericks looks like the successor to 10.6 more than anything else:
image via Apple PR
10.7 and 10.8’s skeuomorphic elements are basically already considered outliers at this point.
But even in Mavericks, there’s not much left of our old friend Aqua. I’m not even sure the name still really applies, at least how Steve Jobs introduced it over a decade years ago.
Homework Assignment:Find an hour to watch John Gruber’s talk from Webstock 2011 on the history of Apple’s UI design. The bits toward the end of the talk are a little dated, but it’s still worth the watch.
The Future
There’s been a lot of chatter that Mac OS X 10.10 ( Sigh.) will usher in a new UI.
Based on the product artwork alone, it’d be easy to think that OS X and iOS 7 are closer in appearance than they are:
Both of these icons were present at last year’s WWDC, but Mavericks got only a slight UI refresh — nothing more than losing some stitched leather and a bunch of linen. It was no redesign.
This year, however, many people believe OS X is due for a visual overhaul.
OS X 10.10 will be the successor to the current OS X, 10.9 Mavericks. Mavericks focused on power-user features and under-the-hood enhancements to improve hardware performance, battery life, and graphics processing. 10.10, however, will focus on aesthetics. According to sources, Apple Senior VP of Design Jony Ive is leading a “significant” design overhaul for OS X, and the new design will be the operating system’s cornerstone new feature (none of the mockups online, like the one above, are a good indicator of what to expect).
The new design will not be as stark as iOS 7, but it will include many of the flat elements and white textures instead of re-creations of life-like elements. The end-to-end redesign is said to be a top priority at Apple right now, with the specific details about the changes being sworn to extreme secrecy. Apple has been testing new features such as Siri and support for iOS AirDrop compatibility, but it’s unconfirmed if those enhancements will be ready for 10.10.
As Peter Cohen pointed out at iMore, Apple could move OS X closer to iOS without merging the operating systems.2013 didn’t bring an OS X redesign but it’s not hard to imagine that if Apple does have a new UI ready for OS X, it would fall in line with iOS.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Apple is going to overhaul the look of Mac OS X in the next version. As more and more apps bridge the gap between the desktop and mobile, the lack of consistent branding and design across platforms is becoming a problem.
I fully expect to see flatter user interfaces, squircle icons, a new Dock, and Helvetica Neue as the system font.
I’ll be surprised if Lucida Grande survives as the system font past 10.9. I will, however be sad. It has defined so much of OS X for years, but I bet that 10.10 will bring more than a new typeface.
While I don’t know if Apple would go this far with OS X, it is interesting to consider.
Apple’s recent opening of an OS X Beta Seed Program is interesting, too. Surely new builds of 10.9 aren’t so important that Apple would introduce this system. 10.9.3 isn’t much to write home about, and certainly doesn’t require a wide-reaching base of testers.
If 10.10 is going to have a new face, wouldn’t it make sense to let all sorts of people test it before it ships as a final product?
As we spoke about on The Prompt, iOS 7 brought excitement. People showed off the beta to their friends like it was new toy. It’s not hard to imagine that Apple would want to bottle some of that up and dump it on its aging — and comparatively boring — desktop operating system.
I don’t know what’s going to happen during Tim Cook’s keynote on June 2, but there is a lot of smoke pointing to an Aqua-colored fire.
