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Images, videos, quotes & other tidbits from Apple's history - A companion to www.storiesofapple.net - New stories on www.patreon.com/storiesofapple

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Source: Old Vintage Computing Research: An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91 (featuring GEIS AppleLink and a look at System 7.0 alpha)

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[…] dividing the existing models simply into two small "Compact" and "Modular" families. This appears to have been the manifestation of Macintosh manager Jean-Louis Gassée's "high-right" goal which tried to sell high-margin, high-performance machines at the expense of the "low-left" budget market. Unfortunately for Apple, the strategy permitted cheaper XT-class PCs to proliferate in Apple's relative absence while failing to compete effectively with Unix workstations at the top. In December 1989 Apple's stock tanked 20 percent after a dismal holiday sales season and Gassée departed a month later, but this presentation doesn't reflect the subsequent product shakeup that birthed the deliberately low-end Mac Classic and LC.

Old Vintage Computing Research: An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91 (featuring GEIS AppleLink and a look at System 7.0 alpha)

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Updated with a few notes from Al Kossow, who was at Apple during this period An interesting document has turned up at the Internet Archive...

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Imagine the universe where the price negotiation went the other way. Apple ships a 1998 OS based on BeOS instead of NeXTSTEP. The native framework is Be’s C++ kits, with a Carbon/Blue-Box-style compatibility path for existing Mac apps. Mail.app is built on BFS attributes instead of mbox files. Spotlight is just query(). The iPod’s media playback inherits the Media Kit. iOS, when it arrives a decade later, is a BeOS descendant rather than a NeXT descendant. None of this happened, and we cannot know if BeOS would have scaled to ten million developers or stalled before Mac OS 9’s discontinuation. But it is impossible to read Be’s spec sheet now without imagining it.

The BeBox: BeOS Hardware, Photos, and the Apple Deal That Wasn't

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It’s An Apple Lisa, On A FPGA | Hackaday

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Apple has had a bipolar attitude towards developers for at least the last 40 years, never quite deciding whether we are indispensable or insipid. Recency always blurs perspective, but it seems to me to have reached a less and less nuanced nadir. At times like this, history can be inspiring in its reminders. Slots and modularity once saved the Macintosh - desktop publishing was a killer app, but a more capable platform gave those applications the ability to truly shine, securing its foothold in a world where the previous (and then still current) cash cow, the Apple II, was about to start fading from relevance. And dollars to donuts say that the iPhone, for all its advances, would have been a shadow of its current success if Apple had continued to produce every single app - make a home screen of your most important apps, and I doubt Apple would not have wanted to write all of them themselves, nor been any good at writing many of them.

Your Habits Make You ～ take

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“I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use,” he told Forstall. “And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I’m going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible.” Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone’s software-“against Steve’s knowledge and wishes,” Forstall says. [...] Two weeks after the iPhone’s release, someone figured out how to “jailbreak” the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall’s office. “You have to shut this down!” But Forstall didn’t see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. “If they add something malicious, we’ll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they’re doing is adding apps that are useful, there’s no reason to break that.” Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed. Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. “You know what?” he said. “We should build an app store.” Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac’s memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He’d disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.

Daring Fireball: David Pogue’s ‘Apple: The First 50 Years’

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There are two main flight computers that use two radiation hardened IBM PowerPC 750FX single-core processors, a CPU introduced in 2002 and used in Apple computers such as the iBook G3 until 2005. While the two CPU’s in each flight computer might be similar to the processor in the iBook G3 laptop, the rest of the flight computer bears little resemblance; the flight computers have been ruggedized for space travel with a larger housing, a thicker circuit board, and hardware to minimize vibrations.

Artemis Updates - AmericaSpace

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Scott Forstall both arranged for the covert development of app, sandbox and profile infrastructure, as well as talked Steve off the idea of killing jailbreaking and letting it be as long as it was just a fun community experiment. Indeed, it was Steve catching wind on the latest app developments that ultimately made him change his mind on officially supporting app development, at which point Scott could unveil his skunkworks and presumably shave months off the effort.

Your Habits Make You ～ take

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Apple is at its best when the openness of the Woz strain is coupled with the determination and focus of the Jobs strain.

Your Habits Make You ～ take

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Steve Jobs’ first dream for an Apple headquarters: Coyote Valley, San Jose

Steve Jobs’ first dream for an Apple headquarters: Coyote Valley, San Jose

Cupertino was not Steve Jobs’ first choice for a state-of-the-art Apple headquarters.

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 Jobs said he stepped up his involvement in Apple last December [1997], shortly after Apple bought his Next Software Inc. company for $430 million.  "I became aware . . . that the senior lieutenants Gil (Amelio) had surrounded himself with were not the people Apple should have," he said to Newsweek. "And the organization was pretty wacky."  -- As for the future of Apple, Jobs says it is bright. He said the company has axed more than 70 percent of its projects, keeping the 30 percent that are "gems."

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We need some stinking (Apple) badges!

1983

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Seybold 1989: Adobe's John Warnock physically turning his back to Bill Gates when Gates announced a partnership with Apple (Jobs was at NeXT in the shot) to create TrueType as a challenge to Adobe's PostScript font dominance.  Source: Aldus PageMaker on the Apple Macintosh

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From System 7.1 to macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) with the same SSD without formatting: the upgrade of death - The Rabbit's Journal

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Historic Apple Buildings Walking Tour with Early Employees

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The History of hypertext and HyperCard on the Macintosh