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Apple Businesses

Apple: First to Latest 143

Posted by michael from the too-much-time-on-their-hands dept.
athagon writes: "Being a rabid MacOS fan, I recently tripped over an amazing site on the 'net: Apple History. Intrigued, I continued onward and found a host of information, "codenames", photos, and tech info in general (all who knew that the G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!). Interested? Check out the site." Random thought: how long before Trivial Pursuit comes out with an edition specializing in technology/computer/internet subjects?
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Apple: First to Latest More

Apple: First to Latest

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  • Frustrating situation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (all who knew that the G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!). Interested? Check out the site.

    I can't check out the site, my hand is up.

  • Re:Nice site... but.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let me get this straight..... You have a friend that is into Macs and he is JEALOUS of your PC running windoze 2000. Well, here is my config G4 Sawtooth, ADP Graphics, 512M RAM (the same RAM you have in peecees), two ATA hard drives (same hard drive in Peecees) two USB ports, two firewire ports, a cd burner attached to the firewire port, an HP 1200 lasrerjet. I am running OS X which allows me to run BSD/GNU software, classic apps. My G4 comes also comes with Openfirmware (the same as on a Sun Workstation) do you think I am going to look at any W2K box with wonder? Please explain "all the good stuff" I am missing?

  • Re:I hope things are much better :) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Also, don't underestimate the effect of Apple shipping their IDE for free with every copy of MacOSX. MacOS has *never* had a good, free dev. environment. The only choices were MPW (ok, but wasn't always free, and not well supported) and HyperCard (sucks) There's RealBasic for like $100 or so (if you don't wanna compile for windows), but it's limited and has continual bugs. There are alot of people writing AppleScripts and whatnot on Macs that would really be better off writing real apps, but they aren't gonna shell out $400 to be able to do it. This could end up being the 2nd best decision Apple's made in the past 10 years. (The best was buying NeXT instead of Be.)
  • The original code name for the machine was "Carl Sagan", but when this news got to the late Mr. Sagan, he sued Apple, and the code name was changed to BHA, or "Butt-Head Astronomer"

    Although you can see his point - the other two machines in the same range were "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion", neither of which you would really want to be associated with as a scientist...

    -dair (you've got to love the judge's conclusion though: "One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'Butt-Head'" :-)
  • IBM named multiple models 'XT'.

    The IBM 5160 PC XT had an Intel or AMD 8088 4.77 MHz CPU in it.

    The IBM 5162 PC XT/286 had a 286 6 MHz CPU in it. This is the only 286 which can officially be called an XT (I exclude expansion boards as it's cheating to stick a 486 ISA expansion board in an XT :).

    The IBM 5150 PC, which is technically not an XT had a choice of 8086 or 8088 running at 4.77 MHz.
  • Ok, lets do the math:

    128 * 2 == 256
    128 * 4 == 512

    Well I'll be, 512 is four times more than 128. And for those of you who are spoiled by the ultra-cheap RAM of today, 512k was an ocean back then, and cost a king's ransom. One of the big reasonss the Lisa was so expensive was all that RAM.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • Posted by Nr9:

    Mac OS X 10.0.0 = Cheetah
    the older mac os series from 7.6 on are a bunch of musical terms.

  • *raises hand* (Score:5)

    by alewando ( 854 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:46PM (#305996)
    G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!


    That one's actually easy, since MOSR [mosr.com] had been repeating the name "Sawtooth" for months in advance of its release.

    What's much more interesting (and which most people don't know) is why the Lisa got its name.

    Before Wozniak joined with Jobs to found Apple, he was something of a studmuffin (certainly by any standard that encompases Bill Gates, at least), but he had a little trouble "keeping his dick in his pants" as we like to say at the MUG. At times, he was going through three girlfriends a week (and twice as much vermouth and heroin).

    Lisa was the one who finally set him on the straight and narrow, because it was her experience in getting an abortion that showed him he wasn't cut out for parenthood and had other things he wanted to accomplish first. He was seventeen at the time.

    When the marketers were trying to decide what to name the hot new prototype, one of them recalled Wozniak's motivational story about his torid past and so named it "Lisa".

    I'm glad there's now a site to chronicle these events. You can learn a lot about a bit of technology by examining where its inventors came from and what they had to overcome in order to bring it to market, at least in a predictive sense of foreseeing where the company and its technology will go.
  • Just to give folks a reminder: Just 'cause someone put it on a web-page doesn't mean it's true...

    So...you are saying that the Xerox->Lisa is just a myth so it is untrue.

    However, since I read you saying that on a web page, then it too must be untrue, meaning that I can clearly not choose the cup in front of me, er, uhh...that the Xerox->Lisa thing is true.

    Truely sir, you have a dizzying logic.

  • The Lisa's name has nothing to do with either of the Steves. It is a popular myth that Jobs named the computer after his daughter, but at the time it was being developed Jobs didn't acknowledge that he had a daughter called Lisa. He only later accepted paternity.

    Lisa was the name of the daughter of one of the hardware designers on the project, whose name escapes me. Remember that at this time Apple was already a massive company, although many people seem to retain the vision of Woz designing every motherboard, and Steve drawing up every marketing campaign.

    Read any of the excellent books on the era for background (Jim Carlton's Apple, for example).

  • Check out his bibliography [apple-history.com] for some reading material. In addition to this stuff, there are some great books which give (often contradictory) accounts of the software projects you mention, as well as some unconfirmed "skunkworks" projects which never saw the light of day. The most interesting of these is "Star Trek", an effort to port Mac OS 7 to Intel hardware, cosponsored by Intel and Novell. The team developed a proof of concept, were given a holiday as a reward, and came back to discover the project had been killed.

    The books I've read and can recommend are Jim Carlton's Apple, John Sculley's Odyssey and Gil Amelio's In The Firing Line. The last two are insider's accounts, which doesn't make them any more trustworthy. However, coupled with some independent background material, they make fascinating reading. All available at Amazon.

  • Re:Innacuracies (Score:3)

    by Ryano ( 2112 ) on Monday April 09, 2001 @01:52AM (#306000) Homepage

    "...it's not a particularly rigorous piece of historical documementation or even good basic journalism."

    Actually, this site is one of the best places to point people if you want to explode the myths surrounding the development of the GUI. Buried deep within the site is this page [apple-history.com], which reprints a discussion between Bruce Horn and Jeff Raskin, two of the Mac's many parents, as to the ins and outs of the GUI development. They don't agree with each other on many issues, but one thing which comes across clearly is that the "urban legend" surrounding these events is just too simplistic to be true.

    One thing these discussions reveal is that the story of Apple swiping the concept wholesale from Xerox is simply an impossibility. Like the Internet, many of these concepts had been floating around since the 1960s, when neither Apple nor Xerox PARC existed. What's more, further key concepts were dreamt up entirely by Apple, such as "drag and drop", and others seem to have been arrived at independently at several sites.

    Here are some quotes from Raskin taken from this discussion:

    As I said in my history of the Mac Project ... the Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit.

    ..it is perhaps understandable that people would find it necessary to invent a history that derives the Mac's genesis from the nearest similar work. The honest intellectual debt the Mac owes to the work at PARC was not a case of highway robbery.

  • ... and only the die-hards are still fighting them. Wake up and smell the coffee! In the late eighties, the wars shifted to the applications arena. Companies lived, fought, and died over such things as word processors (AmiPro, WordStar, MacWord, Word, EdWord, etc), spreadsheets (Wingz, 1-2-3, SuperCalc), and office suites.

    The application wars are essentially over. Guess what ... microsoft mostly won! The browser battles are also fading into the past.

    The next war is fought over network services. Microsoft has started the Battle of the Bulge with DotNet/Hailstorm, so man the defenses!

    Stop quarreling over OS superiority ... it reeks of the stale vi/emacs flamage, or tops-20 vs vms, or dos vs. cp/m
  • Wow, what an amazingly bad post.

    128 * 2 = 256

    512kB is four times as much as 128kB. Which doesn't matter a hell of a lot, b/c IIRC the Lisa shipped with a full MB in '83. That little feat wouldn't be equalled until the Mac Plus came along. (barring various hacks) Really the Mac should've shipped with 256 - 512kB when it came out - especially given how much they were overcharging for it.
  • Sadly, a few years ago I lost my manuals that came with my Apple ][+. One of them was the Apple ][ System Reference, or something like this -- as opposed to the DOS manual and the Applesoft BASIC manual.

    Anyway, this manual had a glossary in the back, and in that glossary was included this word and definition:

    feature n. - A bug as described by the marketing department.

    Whatever happened to that Apple Computer? That's what I want to know. I can't see today's Apple putting something like that in a manual. Hell, they don't even print manuals anymore.
    --

  • Unfortunately you're wrong (or at least innacurate.)

    The Xerox "Star" preceeded Apple's "Lisa".

    However as the Star cost decidely more (even more then Lisa's steep $10,000) it wouldn't classify as a consumer-OS. Therefore the Lisa can lay claim as the first "Consumer-OS with a WIMP (Window Icon Mouse Pointer) interface."

    Unfortuntaly the Star had Xerox's top-notch non-sales team behind it & while a first & technically interesting (bitmapped display, portrait display, initial use of Ethernet, etc.) it never to succeed in any large scale.

    By the way for those who want to repeat the old urban-legend about Apple "stealing" Xerox's ideas actually the Lisa concept was well developed before the Apple folks ever visited Xerox PARC.

  • I'm going to correct myself here: The website does get it right in a couple of places, notably in the hardware timeline where it has an extensive set of links under the heading Xerox GUI.

    However the year-by-year business timeline is significently flawed & leaves the misimpression I noted.

  • Hey Duuude - that was the case back then.

    The Xerox Star went for $25,00-$40,000 a station. The Lisa shipped for $10,000. Early Macs cost $4,000 (yeah those little toaster-Macs.) Since you couldn't buy the OS separately from the hardware the costs can't be broken out.

    Just for comparison my originial IBM XT cost in the neighborhood of $10,000 too (in early-80's money!) It had:

    • 16 bit 8086 (better then the previous 8088s)
    • A 5.25" 360KB floppy
    • A massive 10MB Winchester drive
    • Built-in tape-drive port on back (for making backups to a modifed audio casette recorder)
    • 64MB RAM (woohoo!)
    • 13" IBM Monochrome Display with a Hercules card (oooh! The GeForce 3 of it's day)
    *&*
    • IBM Color Card with a 13" IBM Color display (COLOR!)
    That was a totally studly system for back then. Came with a choice of UCSD-Pascal or DOS 2.1. My box was even tricked out with a "Baby Blue II" card allowing it to run CP/M on an onboard z80 processor (there wasn't much stuff out there for DOS or 8086's.)

    Back to the Apppe Lisa costing 10 grand, yeah, that's why it's little cousin the Mac sold so well. It didn't have all of Lisa's advanced features like multitasking, bigger monitor, etc. but it cost less then half as much & got you most of the goodies. That's why today folks buy Mac's & the last couple thousand Lisas were consigned to a landfill in Arizona.

  • Before grinding your axe you might want to actually do a bit of research first. Apple didn't just reheat the Star & resell it cheaper, they developed a similar but different & far more usuable product.

    I've used a Star, I've used a Lisa, & also the originial Mac (I'm a former Manager for The Computer Museum.)The Star was not particularly complete and was not particularly usuable. Apple's folks made a number of significent advances that GREATLY improved the concept & execution, not just fine-tuning but fundemental changes.

    Finally it would all be just as much a myth that Xerox PARC invented all of this. Much of it had been floating around in academia for a while & Xerox PARC was notable for integrating & actually producing some working examples.

    It's rare that ideas get invented whole-cloth by a single person or institution. Generally they're a product of a general zeitgeist and typically a widely held world-view of the future. The Xerox Star was just such a product as was the World-Wide-Web (Gopher & other protocols/tools had been evolving in this direction for awhile.)

  • Actually I believe I understood you & still disagree.

    First I'm going to recommend you invest some time into reading what the original website has to say regarding the subject, the good stuff with letters between the original developers, pictures of the Lisa OS as it developed, timelines showing what happened when & where it came from.

    This would give us a common ground to discuss within.

    Again, I don't believe Apple lifted their material from Xerox PARC nor did it come about as a result of seeing PARC's stuff. Some of the developers were from PARC or were aware of PARC's stuff but even then they didn't re-invent PARC's material but instead developed a WIMP that differed significantly - significantly enough that it stands as a peer & not as a descendant.

    Next I'm going to point out that Smalltalk is not a panacea. It's got some things right and many things not-so-right. Even the (comparatively) heavily popularized Squeak Smalltalk-implementation isn't something most folks would want to use as a significant tool. I've buddies who are big Smalltalk fans (& I'm an admirer) but few would want to run it all day, "live" in it.

    There were some guidelines worked out early in the Lisa project that make interesting reading. Among them they make strong arguments for a constrained OS & GUI that would be consistent, (user) efficient & easily comprehensible. An easily-extended interface was specifically NOT their goal.

    When the Lisa project set out everyone was dealing with a completely different toolkit for every application. Instead they wanted to get AWAY from this & instead go with a universal set of tools / methods / models that would be clearly & consistently applied across the OS & the applications.

    No more Ctrl-Fizzle to copy in EasyWriter, Shift-mumblefarb to copy in Lotus 1-2-3, Alt-snippy to copy in Bank Street Writer. Instead it would be one set of reused controls across the OS & applications.

    Yes something more elaborate, more elegant, more extensible appeals to those of us more hackish but for precisely the same reason they terrify the folks who just want to sit down & use their Mac. Even for those of us who customize our Macs now the first thing we usually do when sitting at another's is turn off their customizations.

    I recall way-back-when when Borland was shipping it's own version of the Microsoft Foundation Classes for users of Borland's compilers developing for the Win 3.x environment. Everything was *almost* the same as the MS MFC but not *quite* - the graphics were different, the buttons larger, the layout a bit off. It invariably confused the users - some applications looking slightly different, vaguely unfamiliar.

    Apple was smart to avoid that trap. Indeed they invested a good deal of time & effort in building up to this sort of thing but then axed it when developers, trainers & UI specialists started getting nightmares working in just such an idiosyncratic world. Your Smalltalk-UI would (I expect) quickly become a maze of developers doing things in subtly "better" ways...

    One can't argue that the MacOS is a particularly well-designed product. Its QuickDraw was innovative as was its built-in Toolbox. The artistry Apple has shown in honing their interface over the years has been amazing.

    (I recall being so impressed when Apple rebuilt parts of their OS to make "Control Panels" look & act like every other application when they were internally not at all structured as such: Apple specifically presented a lie in order to make their GUI more *USER*-logically consistent.)

    On the other hand it quickly became dated & proved remarkably resilient to overhaul. Much of the impetuous to improve has always come from outside Apple (file-sharing was originally a small freeware hack, multitasking wasn't in the MacOS (Lisa had it) but was introduced with a 3rd-party tool, reveal-triangles & nested menus came from apps that broke the UI guidelines, extensions & patching traps were never designed in & were always a nasty kluge that seriously compromised system stability.) Apple rarely was able to effect substatial changes in it's OS & yes, it remained static for long periods of time.

    Indeed even with Apple's transition from m68xx to PPC much of the code remains emulated m68xx - surely a legacy they'd shake if they could.

    But would have following Xerox's model been much better? I don't believe so. The Alto was no joy & the Star not one either. The machines that most fit the model you seem to desire would have been the Symbolic's LISP machines & even they never made any great strides in the OS model or GUI (though they were perfectly poised to do so.)

    You might be interested at looking at the GNU HURD. One of it's potential strengths is it's relatively small "fundamental" OS & great flexibility in user-controlled traditionial-OS elements. While it's not the pervasive unified-model you seem to desire (indeed almost the opposite) it nonetheless promises unprecedented flexibility in OS tools / methods / models.

  • Innacuracies (Score:5)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Sunday April 08, 2001 @10:57PM (#306009) Homepage Journal
    Just to give folks a reminder: Just 'cause someone put it on a web-page doesn't mean it's true...

    For example the web-site linked to claims that it was a visit to Xerox PARC that inspired the Apple Lisa. Rather the Lisa was well along it's development (with the GUI close to it's final form) before the famous trip.

    While it's become geek-folklore to assert Apple "stole" the GUI from Xerox PARC you'll note that none of the folks involved have ever said so & indeed often go to lengths to point out the differences between the Xerox Star & what Apple shipped as the Lisa & Macintosh. Indeed this would be more accurately labelled an "urban legend".

    Overall the web-site is a nice one & presents lots of information (none of it particularly unknown but still nice to see out there) however it's not a particularly rigorous piece of historical documementation or even good basic journalism.

  • If you count stuff produced for in-house use instead of just what's offered for sale to the general public I think the Xerox Alto got there first.
  • i wanna rescue you at rigel!
  • "I'll take Macintosh Codenames for $400, Alex"
    "This 13.6 pound Mac with 32-bit clean ROMs was originally nicknamed "Stingray""
    "What is the Mac IIci?
    "Correct!"
  • The original poster's still wrong, though.

    IBM never shipped an XT with a tape drive port. Only the 5150 shipped with it, and as you said, that's not an XT. So, in all reality, this guy had a 5150 with an 8086, and dropped the cash for a CGA card and a 10MB Winchester. Not a bad system at all back then, but not an XT. The tape drive would've actually been useful at times, too, considering how many people still used them.


    Raptor

  • Just for those of you interested.. the exact page(s) on apple-history.com which is suspect is here [apple-history.com]

    The text does look a little too professional for Tom's site.. but apple-history.com is not the most professional of sites either. Someone is lying, not that I really care who it is :)

  • Glad to see a response by you.

    It is a good writeup.. if it is true that you did write the content, which I do believe considering the contrast between the professionalism of the writeup vs Tom's site.. then perhaps you should write an email to Tom requesting that he directly links to your page instead of providing a hacked copy of it on his page.

    If you really wanted, I'm sure you could sue him as he does claim he wrote it according to the header (although the header is on all of his pages).

    In any case, nice site.

  • I was looking for some information on the history of Apple today, for ammunition against some trolls lurking on irc.. I found this [iquest.net] page, when I saw this link.. I realized that the history section is lifted directly off of the page I had seen earlier.

    Of course, the page I found could be the counterfeit one, but I don't see why the personal homepage of an apple employee would need to copy this from another site!

    The page I linked to is written by a Tom Elam, while Apple-history.com claims that all material was written and copyrighted by a Glen Sanford!

    You can never be too careful with information you find on the web, it may not be from who you think it is

  • From the site:

    "The main site was down for a few hours, as we maxed out our bandwidth for the month. We've transfered over 12GB in the last two weeks! I've worked out a way to make sure that if we max out our bandwidth in the future, we just pay more, instead of the site going down..."

    They are _really_ going to thank slashdot for this story being posted.

    I hope everyone uses the mirrors where appropriate.

    Roy Ward.

  • Apple is now cool for being the largest installed user base of a single Unix distribution.

    Only problem: It isn't.


    Cheers,

  • A couple of years ago, I was watching Jeopardy. An engineer who'd been playing had done really well -- won several games, in fact -- and Alex Trebek said to him "You know, traditionally, engineers don't do so well on the show, but you've been doing great. Why is that?" He replied: "Well, Alex, the reason most engineers don't do so well on the show is that you're missing categories like 'differential equations' and 'rotational kinematics'".

    I'll take "regular expressions" for $400, please.......ah, "What is the /eeg
    modifier?"

    --
  • Anyone who follows apple's product close enough should know what are their software/hardware's codename.
  • Since Apple bought out NeXT, I thought I the following link might be of interest. This helps understand the beginnings of MacOS X:
    www.nextmuseum.com [nextmuseum.com]

  • Not to speak ill of the dead... (Score:3)

    by bbk ( 33798 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @10:25PM (#306022) Homepage
    But check out the Powermac 7100 page... The original code name for the machine was "Carl Sagan", but when this news got to the late Mr. Sagan, he sued Apple, and the code name was changed to BHA, or "Butt-Head Astronomer".. No joke. You can check out the whole story here:

    http://www.macspeedzone.com/articles/appleconfid en tial/sagan.shtml

    BBK, random fact monkey
  • I backup Tom on this one. In "Fire in the Valley" it's stated that Lisa was the name of his daughter (and first born child I believe)

    ke-PHUNK!
  • Offtopic? How was the parent post offtopic? I also just (30 seconds ago) saw a post on the advertisements in games that was "redundant" even though it was a perfectly good post about Wipeout and in-game ads. As far as I could tell, nobody had mentioned it before that. Moderation used to be bad and misplaced but now it's downright WRONG.

    Now.. go ahead and moderate *THIS* post as "offtopic" because this one (my post) really is offtopic.
  • For an alternative view of how Newton came to be, look at Jerry Kaplan's _Startup_, the story of Go Corp. PenPoint, and how Taiwan's MITI came to own a 32-bit, object-oriented, pre-emptive multi-tasking OS.

    The short version is Kaplan came up with the idea (first published in Niven & Pournell's _The Mote in God's Eye_, I believe) of commercializing a pen slate computer, Mitch Kapor (and others) bankrolled it, and they had an Apple engineer sit in on the original bull session sketching out the company concept.

    ::still kicking myself for getting rid of my NCR-3125 running PenPoint, and wish someone would make a pen slate I'd be interested in buying::

    William


    --
    Lettering Art in Modern Use
  • Gotta ask, what's with the horse?
  • Can someone link me to this "you may not copy our UI" Apple story?
  • if we were all using Freenet (or something with the same technology but lacking the idiology that without anonymity the technology is useless) then the "Slashdot effect" would be a non issue. Then again, I suppose it might manifest itself in other ways, like all that talk about "unpopular data just disappearing off freenet" might have even worse ramifications when a piece of data becomes popular in a very short period of time and then not so popular after a week or so.
  • Checking X is one thing that Apple can get away with because there's no-one standing around (and not doing anything themselves mind you) saying "but X is great because of network transparency and my never-touch-the-mouse window manager" and shit like that. Apple doesn't have to convince anyone that dumping X is a good idea because the people who use their OS have never seen X (and hopefully never will).
  • we've been using this point and grunt interface ever since!
  • How about.. "You've been awake for 36 hours straight? I dont care! This shit sux!"
  • Fuck animals and frankly, fuck you. If you think AROS is the bomb (and frankly there aint much competition about) get your ass into gear and make something out of it. Wannabe operating system toting son of a bitch.
  • Some reason I dont think there will be too many victims of the crime lining up to sue this site for revisionist history. The past is alterable man. Just repeat the same lie enough times and have it documented by journalists who are too lazy to do their own research and it soon becomes fact. That's the way the US single handedly one the second world war didn't you know.
  • I hear ya man.. but people dont want to. They like their stupid little window managers. Not that many people who run linux actually use gnome and kde and all that crap. There are literally thousands of apps written for motif that people use. All of them could be ported to gtk or qt or something but are they? No. Once again, what becomes popular has nothing to do with what is good. It has to do with "network effects" as we all used to say 3 years ago.
  • Make sure you turned off your cache and are not being transparently cached.
  • Actually it's a quote but seeing as I cant actually point you at the person who said it I guess I'll just have to accept your critisism. Now if you were really smart (which you obviously think you are) you would have said "that's because they didn't poll you", but I guess that's too much to ask of one man's grasp on statistics. Think a bit longer before making inane observations, k? Thanks.
  • Making the lives of slashdot readers tedious is my favourite past time, and I'm sure you're aware of the irony of posting a zero content message to slashdot to tell us to stop posting zero content messages to slashdot.
  • That's indeed a urban legend. You can see the history of the creation of the LISA as well as screenshots at:
    http://home.san.rr.com/deans/lisagui.html

    One interesting site with extensive and seemingly accurate information is:
    http://library.stanford.edu/mac/index.html

  • "I'm surprised he has anything like this at all on his personal site." As a good troll he sometimes has to *pretend* that he is interested in truth and fairness. Why else do you think he bought an iMac? I would point out though that the header at the top of his page appears on all his pages, so it is possible he "forgot" to remove it from that particular page. Which still wouldn't excuse not crediting the original source but it would be less nefarious.
  • Yeah, that last one is really cool. I stumbled on to it a while ago when I did a web search for my name and discovered that they cited me on Page 3 (footnote 8). What a blast from the past.
  • V'Ger was the code name for the G4+ or G4e or PPC7450. Now if you really want to get technical, what was the code name for the 10x multiplier rev of the Amumnium(I know that's spelled wrong, get over it) G3?
  • His name is Glenn. He was at UCL at the same time I was, and we were both mac geeks and americans, meaning basically we both hung out in the same mac labs at odd hours and between classes.

    He said he started the site as a way to fuse his love of computers with his love of history (he was a history major) and that not many people had tried to chronicle tech history (this was four years ago). Looks like he kept with it...

    I think the powerbook 1400 had just come out, apple was at $12 a share, and they were creating prototypes with the exponential chip. Glad those days are over :)
  • Yawn, wake me up when the dream is over....

  • Great Apple II history sites (Score:4)

    by sheckard ( 91376 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:45PM (#306045) Homepage
    Funny, I spent most of last night looking at this stuff! Here's some interesting stuff I uncovered, fits right in:
    http://www.hughes.net/~gcifu/applemuseum/index.htm l [hughes.net]
    http://www.hypermall.com/History/ [hypermall.com]

    I stayed up way too late reading the last one last night...
  • Yeah, that's very true, and the fact that apple has such control lets them do things that /.'ers (particularly trolls) only dream about.

    Personally, I don't love X in the slightest, but I think that the fact that it's a workable system gives it a lot of clout. While I wish it had more of a tiered approach (there was some comment about the Networking built on top of the GUI, not vice-versa that I loved) I think that the libraries that are built on top of it should give everyone a real impressive reason to keep going with it. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't chuck X, just not run around screaming to throw it away before actually having something really good in it's place. I'm just waiting patiently for Berlin :-)

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • Yeah, I think it's the first on the choices. The fact that the Mac has UNIX under the hood and they managed to do the impossible by chucking X (an idea that I think has been blown way out of proportion.) For the first time, the Mac isn't just "the computer for the rest of us", but the computer also for the UNIX hacker in the rest of the rest of us.

    "I may not have morals, but I have standards."
  • Yeah, such as from Mac OS Rumors [macosrumors.com], Mac rumors [macrumors.com], Apple Insider, or others (macsurfer, and macslash had links).

  • Lots of mirrors (Score:5)

    by jpatokal ( 96361 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:40PM (#306050) Homepage
    In a rare case of foresight, the site has official mirrors around the globe:

    Gotta love that front page note though, dated January 30th:

    The main site was down for a few hours, as we maxed out our bandwidth for the month. We've transfered over 12GB in the last two weeks! I've worked out a way to make sure that if we max out our bandwidth in the future, we just pay more, instead of the site going down...

    Baaaaaaaad move...

    Cheers,
    -j.

  • Mirrors! (Score:5)

    by Xenex ( 97062 ) <xenex@noSPaM.opinionstick.com> on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:41PM (#306051) Journal
    From Apple-History.com [apple-history.com]'s front page:

    1/30/01

    The main site was down for a few hours, as we maxed out our bandwidth for the month. We've transfered over 12GB in the last two weeks! I've worked out a way to make sure that if we max out our bandwidth in the future, we just pay more, instead of the site going down... I've also moved the movies and most of the images to a seperate server.

    As always, please use one of our mirrors [apple-history.com] if possible.

    And this was back at late January...

    This time the Slashdot effect isn't just funny or stupid. It is going to cost a fan that is dedicating their own money for no profit.

    For the love of god, do them a favour, and use theirmirrors [apple-history.com]!

    Incase you missed that:
    MIRRORS!! [apple-history.com]

  • Read Infinite Loop. It gives a very interesting perspective on this. I believe it was actually Jef Raskin that had been working on this theory while he was doing his Masters before even entering the industry. He knew he wanted to develop the Lisa with a GUI, and took the rest of the Lisa engineers to PARC to convince them of it.

    Though, I must admit, I may have mixed up Raskin with someone else here. Either way, apparently the engineers took the trip, and Steve ad to be convinced it was his idea much, much later. Apparently this is the best way to get Steve to do anything.

  • yeah you're a troll, but for those who haven't read the article (which, incidentally, was posted here earlier today..) .. the article is total bs. it takes a few quotes from a book that linus wrote where he puts mach down. since osx is already out, and there's actual current news about it, they invent stories to start flamewars, making them edgy. so long as you click a few more banners...
  • If you are interested in information like this about Apple, check out Apple Confidential [owenink.com]. It used to be The Mac Bathroom Reader [owenink.com]. It's a great read and it's been verified and updated. There are even two sample chapters online. If you're interested in Apple trivia, check it out.
  • Interestingly, the Lisa had 512K of RAM (in 1983), four times more than the Mac

    Last time I checked, 512 was only twice as much as 128. The first Mac had 128 [apple-history.com], not 64, and was soon upgradable to 512 (aka Fat Mac).

  • Random thought: how long before Trivial Pursuit comes out with an edition specializing in technology/computer/internet subjects

    A. as long as it takes one of their execs to read this article...


    -shpoffo
  • In five years, I just dont see Apple being part of the picture any more in reality than they are now

    Some Mac Evangelists consider this a good thing, me included. It's not the marketshare that is of concern, it's the quality and efficiency of the tool. Apple, and by that I mean S.J., gets a little too cocky when the marketshare is relatively large.

    --
    dman123 forever!

  • Well, I have an 8K bit core plane in front of me right now. It's 5 inches square and about twice the thickness of a typical PC board. It weighs maybe 100 grams. There are cores on both sides, holes for nine mounting screws, and contacts on all edges of the board--installing it must have been a PITA.

    This one was manufactured by a company called FabriTek sometime in the late 1970's, probably a third-party replacement or OEM for IBM, CDC or Univac. The cores, each about the size of a period on a (10pt) printed page, were pressed in Minnesota, then shipped to some far east sweatshop, where they were strung by hand, as were almost all core planes. Each core has three wires running through it.

    Half a gig would require over 524,000 of these. Worse, these are the bare cores and the wires. The interface circuitry would be somewhere else.

    So yes, I can imagine it, but doing so is giving me a headache, so I'll STFU now.

  • Hardware-oriented (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:54PM (#306059) Homepage
    I'd like to see more software history, such as the story of the abandoned OS projects (the Microkernel, Copland, Bedrock, etc.) What went wrong? How far did those projects actually get? Was it a management problem or a technical problem? An insider's retrospective on those would be valuable.
  • no consumer OS costs $10000 dude
  • I never really got into Apples after the Apple II. I never liked the GUI and I certainly never liked their all in one "You must buy Apple hardware and software" ideas.

    I stress, this is my opinions. The only things I liked Apple for was the graphics and video editing abilities, but not much more. Apple themselves could have had the market much like Microsoft does IF they ported their OS to different hardware or allowed less restrictive licencing. It could have happened - Apple does have a great deal of good will thru it's history that Microsoft never had. What Microsoft had tho, was the ability to market and place it's products (be it legal or illegal - however it did I wont comment on here, that fact is they have) far better than Apple have. it seems to me apple have been obsessed with being better looking and just cooler. Might work for the hardcore fans, but for the Great Unwashed? "Hey I heard these eye-Macs come in different colours" - and then go buy the latest Intel based box with Windows

    IMO, apple had the world in their grasp. They failed to seize the opportunity when they had it and even now they just dont see the way to spread their products further than their current share, which I understand is still declining.

    It sort of sums it up when my former flatmate, an real Apple evangelist, looked at my W2K box and wonder why he cant have all the good stuff - hardware, apps etc. I had. Even he realises Apple have dropped the ball and badly.

    Is OS X going to change anything? I dunno. Hope so. Sadly, I dont think so. In five years, I just dont see Apple being part of the picture any more in reality than they are now
  • He was alive at the time. I'm not sure whether or not it was Sagan being a butthead or just not understanding things. His lawsuit was based on the idea that Apple was going to be selling a product with his name, which he did not endorse. "Sagan" was only the codename, but it had been leaked and widely published, so one could understand the misunderstanding.

    OT: That's not to say that Carl wasn't prone to buttheadism. My brother, who went to Cornell, told me a story about him. Carl Sagan lived next door to a frat, and one night the fratboys invited him to dinner. He came and they all had a grand ol' time. A few weeks later, the frat received a letter from Mr. Sagan. What they assumed was a thank-you note turned out to be a very large bill for the 'speaking engagement.'

  • It used to be that few people knew the code names for apple models. Then apple decided that it would stop changing the name of a machine when it changed the architecture. For a while, you could use the cpu speed to identify it uniquely but that's precarious.

    Use of the code names became commonplace when arch changes became significant. For example, when sawtooth was new, two models both claiming to be G4 (yikes/sawtooth) were so different that the linux kernel ran fine on one but needed massive changes before it would run on the other.
  • I always heard that Apple is a horrible place to work... at least that's what the movies show.
  • Blue and Pink, based on the color of Post-its used to brainstorm ideas on the future of the MacOS, blue for stuff that could be added, and pink for stuff that needed a complete rewrite. Blue became System7 (hence Bluebox and TruBlueEnvironment for MacOS X's "Classic" environment.) and Pink became Taligent (a "set of object-based system service frameworks built on top of an enhanced version of the Mach 3.0 microkernel", sound familiar?).

    Opus - A 68k Microkernel from 1988, the original host for TAE (Taligent Application Environment) frameworks.

    Copland - Replacement for TaligentOS, apart from preemptive multitasking most of Copland's tech became MacOS 8 (userland) and MacOS 9 (kernel).

    Gershwin - Projected successor to Copland, no actual coding.

    Star Trek - Apple & Novell's MacOS for Intel.

    Road Warrior - System 7.01 (first PowerBook OS)
    Cube-E - System 7.1
    Jirocho - System 7.1 Pro
    Mozart / Capone - System 7.5 (Capone vs Chicago)
    Marconi - System 7.5.2
    Unity - System 7.5.3
    Buster - System 7.5.3r1 (Gil Amelio's childhood nickname)
    Son of Buster - System 7.5.3r2
    Harmony - MacOS 7.6
    Ides of Buster - MacOS 7.6.1
    Tempo - MacOS 8.0
    Bride of Buster - MacOS 8.1
    Allegro - MacOS 8.5
    Veronica - MacOS 8.6
    Sonata - MacOS 9.0
    Fortissimo - MacOS 9.1
    Moonlight - MacOS 9.2
    Rhapsody - MacOS X Server 1.0
    Cyan / Siam - MacOS X (a different shade of blue)
    Kodiak - MacOS X Public Beta
    Cheetah - MacOS X 10.0
    Puma - MacOS X 10.1
    Jaguar - MacOS X Server 2.0

    Walkabout - Location Manager
    Amber - OpenDoc
    Warhol - Quicktime 1.0
    Dali - Quicktime 1.5
    Biscotti - Quicktime for Java

    Pigs in Space - A/UX 1.0
    Space Cadet - A/UX 2.0
    Hulk Hogan - A/UX 3.0

  • And how many know what has the code name SteveJobsLivesInMyClosetAndTellMeThings.com [mosr.com]?

    This isn't a good site, many people will remember when someone doctored a shot of a new Nokia product and Meader ran it as "Top Secret iPhone revealed by our Apple sources", or the whole UMA-1 vs UMA-2 bullshit that he's been plying for years.

    What he has called UMA-1 in the past was really called Core99 and Apple has even used this "codename" in public, and yet when Apple finally moved the January2001 iMac to a new architecture, where "UniNorth" (north-bridge) and "KeyLargo" (south-bridge) were combined into Pangea [apple.com] he didn't even notice!

    You seem unaware that trolling MacOS Rumors [mosr.com] is a popular pastime among knowledgeable Mac users, and alledgedly even Apple staff?

  • Actually, this codename thing is probably one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Mac world -- it's the only way to tell a fellow Mac user which PowerBook G3 model you have (even if Pismo and Lombard are virtually indistinguishable apart from SCSI vs. Firewire). Then system releases -- may I show off?

    7.5 -- Mozart
    8.0 -- Tempo (not Copland)
    8.1 -- Bride of Buster
    8.5 -- Allegro
    9.0 -- Sonata (not Gershwin)
    X Server -- Rhapsody
    Sherlock -- V-Twin

    (Now if someone could fill in the blanks -- I used to know 7.6, for example, but I can't remember...)

    What I found most enlightening about the article was the fact that my Power Mac 6500 was a Gazelle -- I did not know that. I was, however, under the impression that the codename for the 6400 was Hacksaw...

    /Brian
  • ... is the SE/30. I own one -- got it for $10 at a flea market. (Fafnir/Green Jade, according to the article... I didn't know that...) It's not much today -- OpenBSD is a painful install, but if you've got a big enough hard drive it works beautifully. (Apple would have a market for these if they brought them out again with a cheap G3-based motherboard, I think -- they make excellent thin clients for mail stations and the like...) The greatest of all toasters is the SE/30.

    /Brian
  • and wintel is a *real* 32-bit multithreaded OS? hardly... and if you are speaking of Linux, then I would suffer to use the work *real*, since Linux is a big ongoing test. That's why there isn't a mass outpouring of consumer support for it.

  • This is why I've said before that we the slashdot readers should institute a system of mirrors for sites linked to in postings. Usually, the only effect is that many people who don't refresh every five minutes usually have to fight through the slashdot effect in order to view the material. But sometimes there are cases such as this where this poor Apple fan might have to pay out the wazoo for our slashdotting.

    If anybody is willing to organize a system of mirrors for slashdot, I would be willing to contribute what resources I can. Namely, my web space and bandwidth from two different accounts here at my university. Hell, I'd even offer to server the stuff off my own box if it weren't for the fact that I still have to boot to Windows for a few select pieces of software and games.

    If anybody wants to attempt to set up a mirror system, give me an email: caldwell@NOSPAM.eecs.tulane.edu. And remove the obvious to mail me.


    --------------------------------------

  • Donate to Apple-History! (Score:5)

    by Rura Penthe ( 154319 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:57PM (#306071)
    If you go to this site and like it please consider donating [apple-history.com] to Apple-History to help them stay alive. Especially considering what a heavy strain slashdotting the site is going to be on the financial resources of the site owner. :/
  • Why? We all know that mac folk (escpecially the self-proclaimed "rabid" ones) have lots of money to burn.
  • ...but when this news got to the late Mr. Sagan, he sued Apple...

    I don't know if I'm more shocked that Mr. Sagan can somehow act from beyond the grave, or disappointed that our legal system allows deceased people to file lawsuits.

  • Some good a Trivial Pursuit for the Internet would be... Real world updates way too fast. I remember when Monopoly came out with the ".com" edition. No sooner had it arrived on store shelves then, *poof*, one of the businesses on the board goes under. So much for dead-tree in the Internet.

  • Oh how obscure!? (Score:3)

    by table and chair ( 168765 ) on Monday April 09, 2001 @05:44AM (#306075)
    all who knew that the G4 AGP was codenamed "Sawtooth" raise your hand!

    Um, doesn't pretty much everyone distinguish the AGP G4's from the PCI G4's by referring to them as Sawtooth and Yikes? It's not like this is some obscure bit of insider trivia... my Blue and White G3 has the word "Yosemite" on a sticker affixed in a plainly visible spot on the motherboard, a practice I'd assume continued to the G4's.

    Since any real Mac user would have known that and chosen something more appropriate to call to our attention, I suspect the person who submitted this story is in fact a closet MacOS freak, who likes to prance around in thick guiliciousness when nobody is looking, with the ocassional bout of exhibitionism, as we can see here. Most of the time he can be found stroking his Start button with a pitiful expression of desire and self-loathing on his face..

    "But everyone will laugh at me if I say I want a Macintosh!"





  • I have three friends at Apple, and they absolutely *LOVE* it there. And they've worked there for about 3 years. Two of them work in OS X Engineering, the other in marketing.

    Just to let you know ---

  • Great Apple history (Score:4)

    by piecewise ( 169377 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:50PM (#306077) Journal
    I too am fascinated with the history of Apple. They're reall an American icon, and a great success->failure->success story. Think about it.. Apple was one of the first true tech stocks. Apple started the personal computer industry. Apple made the first PDA. In fact, thereis a GREAT book called Defying Gravity on how the Newton was made. Fascinating book.

    I'll share a tidbit about Newton, then, for all of you to enjoy.

    The Newton was developed by Michael Tchao.. But he was awfully afraid to present the idea to then-CEO John Sculley, in fear of him thinking it was stupid or risking his job.

    They were all on a trip to Japan for Macworld, and Michael's collegues felt it an appropriate time to mention it to Sculley.

    Michael did so.. and Sculley, ever eager to learn, began brainstorming with him. Two years later, it was a product.

    I think this is a good example of Positive Environment. When you work at a company where you can openly talk about a product idea, and get the ball rolling, that company in the end will be very successful.

    I have friends who work at Apple, and they always say what a positive environment it is. How positive the OS X engineers are.. how helpful the OS 9 engineers are.

    In fact, if you look at apple.com/jobs (not Steve Jobs, but rather employment ;-) -- it says Apple is looking for "cool, talented people"

    How COOL is that?!
    :-)
  • where Linus calls MacOS X crap [cnet.com], which has been posted on every media outlet from here to Cupertino?

  • thought everyone knew this one (Score:3)

    by firewort ( 180062 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @09:38PM (#306079)
    All apple-heads know of this site... and it gets regular linkage from lowendmac.com

    The only reason I can fathom that this article got posted was-

    Apple is now cool for being the largest installed user base of a single Unix distribution.

    Apple makes nice hardware (and some jerk always says he can get a junkbox x86 cheaper) even if the previous OS was always a kludgey sort of cooporative tasking thing. (amazing how it made the transition from 68k to PPC, tho...)

    Apple got slammed by Linus recently, so anything Apple is newsworthy here.

    Well, it's always good to see a site like apple-history.com get noticed. They've set a goal for the type of content they want and always delivered it with complete information, never half-baked, always quality.



    A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close

  • Trivial Pursuit: (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday April 08, 2001 @10:35PM (#306080) Journal
    Random thought: how long before Trivial Pursuit comes out with an edition specializing in technology/computer/internet subjects?

    Well, there is this User Friendly cartoon sequence on Geek Jeopardy [userfriendly.org]

    "I'll tale Obscure Modem Commands for 300, Alex"

    (there are several of these in the following week or so of cartoons)

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Please, for the love of God, mod this down.

    FOR THE RECORD:
    Steve JOBS had an illegitimate daughter Lisa to some woman he had a relationship with in a commune/apple farm in Washington state. (This experience was where the name of the company came from in the first place.) Initially he denied the child was his, but later accepted her as his own. project managers "codenamed" their projects after their children; and while there's lots of rumors afoot about who had a child named "Lisa", fact of the matter is, the only person on the Lisa team with a daughter of that name was -- you guessed it -- Steve Jobs.

    They tried to backpeddle and create some official acronym for what "Lisa" was supposed to stand for (Logical Intuitive something-or-other methinks... I can't remember offhand.) but the engineers all said it stood for "Let's Invent Some Acronym" since they all knew where the name came from inthe first place.

    I'm writing this off the top of my head, but the facts are pretty damn stright. If you want the real scoop check out The Mac Bathroom Reader [amazon.com] by Owen W. Linzmayer... it's got the real scoop, and is as humorous as it is informative. Great book.
    in the meantime, please mod this down... it makes the wonderful Woz out to be some sort of screwed up druggie.
    ---

  • Very nice comment, sympathetic, nostalgic, conceding, yet still ending with a note of doom.

    As long as Apple continues to make a profit, it can survive. That's necessary, but not sufficient. Apple also needs to continue gaining/getting developer support. It needs to get commercial apps.

    It's already got the Microsoft products, so it's not being kept out of the office. It's got the Adobe products, so it's still strong in the graphics industry. It's got the BSD OS in OS X, so hopefully they can woo and attract the large and diversified Open Source guys.

    Apple's strength and hope is diversification. It can, right now, tackle multiple growth points; the development community who prefer a Unix workstation (at commodity prices with a slick if unoptimized UI), the education community which has traditionally worked with Macs, the business community with it's full suite of M$ Office programs and sealed box hardware, the Good Looking People, with the Titanium powerbook and the Cube, the graphics and DTP community as a traditional stronghold for Macs, and the consumer market, with it's pretty and stylish iMacs.

    Apple just has to be smart enough to choose 2 or 3 of the fastest growing markets and jump in; will it be people who, having become saturated with cheap fast computers, desire style and flash? Will it be the education market, as schools start to get networked and connected as never before? Will it be the business industry, as the economy recovers and gets back on track? Or the development community, as the economy recovers and everything tech becomes hot again? Or the home market, with the push for digital content, digital hubs, and digital media?

    Hopefully Apple will choose wisely, because it would be nice to see what other cool stuff they can pull off in six years :)

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • Not a lot of people know that the Apple Lisa [apple-history.com] was the first personal computer ever with a GUI, and be sold with a mouse. Most people assume it was its descendant, the Macintosh.

    Interestingly, the Lisa had 512K of RAM (in 1983), four times more than the Mac had when it came out over a year later.

    Problem with it, though, was that it also came with a $10,000 price tag. In 1989, Apple finally junked thousands of unsold Lisas [sunder.net] in a nearby landfill.

  • Hey, the site's running aqua ! That's forbidden ! Immediately cease and desist !
  • Actually, if you want to deal with Apple products, you pretty much have to know the codenames.

    For example, there were 3 or 4 different G3-based PowerBooks, all with the official name "G3 PowerBook".

    Well, that confused even Apple, so the technotes start talking about "G3 PowerBook (bronze keyboard)" and "G3 PowerBook (firewire)".

    Since these are utterly retarded product names, the Mac users have pretty much fallen back to the codenames. So when you L@@K at eBay, you see all these ads for "WallStreet PowerBook" and the like. Which of course also makes zero sense to someone not inbred into the Mac community.
  • There's some interviews with Raskin and others on http://library.stanford.edu/mac/ [stanford.edu]

    Nice, very good research there...

    cu Lars

  • Missing a great pun... (Score:3)

    by CyberDawg ( 318613 ) on Monday April 09, 2001 @07:20AM (#306117) Homepage

    This site omits what I thought was one of Apple's best puns.

    When I got my first Apple///, it came with a pre-release version of their new operating system. On the front cover of the manual, it was plainly labeled as the Sophisticated Operating System, or Apple SOS.

    I still have that manual, and a couple of Apple///s, too.

  • I think you misunderstood what I was saying, and we seem to basically agree: Xerox didn't come up with all that stuff, but Xerox demonstrated the first working example of an integrated GUI-based desktop for business applications. That is what Apple saw, and that is the idea they based their Mac business on.

    I should add that I don't think that Apple is guilty of either patent violations or intellectual dishonesty: they are a company that made a product and they only have to stay within legal bounds, not academic standards.

    What I do fault Apple for is that they didn't take a lot of the other stuff that formed the basis of the Xerox systems, foremost Smalltalk. MacOS delivered the look, but it failed to deliver the safety and programmability. I think Apple set us on a course of twenty years of horribly engineered, kludgy, bulky, difficult-to-extend systems. By that I don't mean just MacOS up to and including version 9, but Windows and Gnonme/KDE.

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