- These aren’t “four-digit codes”; they are unterminated strings of exactly four 8-bit characters in the MacRoman text encoding.
- Win95 was viewed as an abomination by the rest of the tech industry at the time. Nostalgia for it was inevitable since it became a lot of people's first computing experience, but it's jarring if you were an adult in tech in 1995. Or simply a Mac user.
I think retrocomputing is an important way to think about an alternate history of personal computing where something other than Unix and Wintel won, and possibly viable alternate futures where we could still change to different paradigms.
- Title could use minor clarification - the iMate was a cheap (in every sense) ADB -> USB adapter, not the keyboard itself
- Good point. I still have 2! I used old Apple keyboards for a couple decades into USB because of them.
- They usually fillet me if I don't keep the OG title from the article. I usually only deviate if it's > 80 characters or if its too obscure to be known to a wider audience. In this instance, I added on the bit about being a classic apple keyboard for context.
- Impressive investigation!
For what it's worth, this has been corroborated by people I know who worked on the GS. Apple wanted to make more and faster IIgs's, but was stymied by 65816 supply issues to the very end of the IIgs' lifespan.
- Warhol was so impressed by how usable the Amiga was he thereafter ignored it and all other computers for the rest of his life.
- Don't get me wrong -- a lot of cool stuff got done with the Amiga. But Warhol was an interesting footnote at best.
- It just legitimized computer art even if it was ever fleeting. Shows he could excel in any medium. Just as nobody really talks about the sculptures of Picasso or a Jackson Pollock still life
- You didn't need an Amiga for that; many artists did 1-bit art on early Macs: https://www.macpaint.org/historical_gallery.html
- Wendell Sanders — Apple III engineer — is on record saying this was due to corrosion on the memory board connectors, not to heat. Dropping or moving the computer with force would cause the contacts to rub together and clear the corrosion temporarily. The problem went away when they upgraded the connectors.
- Can't reach the site at the moment, but people interested in this subject need to read "The Pentium Chronicles".
- It probably has something to do with Woz choosing to become irrelevant to Apple after approximately 1980. His last interesting project for Apple was the Disk II controller, as far as I can tell.
If it were me, I’d still celebrate him & the Apple II, but it’s Tim Cook’s call.
- > Apple had largely been imitating Xerox
can we please stop with this canard
The development of the Mac UI is documented at https://www.folklore.org/ (with polaroids!). It was influenced by Xerox — with Xerox’s permission — but “largely imitating” is completely false.
- Author here: Would it not be fair to say that black and white WIMP with an emphasis on desktop publishing is an imitation of Xerox, especially when they were paying for the privilege?
- "influenced by" is fair. "imitation" is pejorative; it implies no -- or substantially inferior -- original work, which is certainly not the case. Don't take my word for it; use an Alto simulator and a Mac 128k. Those are very different experiences!
- Despite my strong apple tendencies - I really like the piece and critique of the period and what GEM had and what could have been. I thought GEM was going to bring something in the PC and Atari ST world but it never happened. Sigh. Instead we got a sea of bland and inspired windows PCs.
- I am probably going to get myself in trouble as English is my second language. I would not want to put words speaking for someone else. Imitation suggests a copy of or substitute of the original that is not as good like. coffee mate vs cream or nutra sweet vs sugar. I had the same negative excitement as the Op.
Apple was definitely inspired by what they saw at Xerox. The essence was certainly there, but constraints made it a unique experience. It didn’t need a file server. It had a tiny ram footprint 128k vs 384k as the base model. And the single button mouse required a different approach to the UI/UX that the two button of the star didn’t even try to solve.
And yes. I bleed six colors …
SGI made absolutely fantastic workstations, for example.
I was 3D gaming with full video and audio chatter in the mid to late 90's, viewing models in stereo, running powerful applications remotely over X, with the 3D GLX extensions.
Man so many good ideas in the Indigo Magic Desktop!
Package management that included the ability to pause on events such as disk full so a guy could remove other software, or add disk, whatever.
8 bit machines have relevance in embedded spaces.
And it is fun to wonder what would have happened had the Amiga gained traction.
It really was a beautiful time filled with all sorts of great tech people can draw inspiration from today.