Probably worth mentioning that PNG was created to attempt to sidestep the GIF patent mess.

Hated those caddies -- they were a lot more delicate than the CD-ROMs themselves. Trays were a big improvement.

Folks interested in PLATO should read Brian Dear's definitive tome: The Friendly Orange Glow.

http://friendlyorangeglow.com

> The fact the 520 ST had barely half a year of development, and beat both the Macintosh and Amiga to market with a GUI is incredible to me

The 520 ST shipped a year and a half after the Mac. Maybe the author meant "color GUI," but the ST GUI itself is very monochrome. Maybe it went down differently in Oz.

Very nice PDP-8, -11, -10 kits here for some folks, might be too late for 2024, though.

https://obsolescence.dev/pidp10.html

When I first encountered Computer Shopper sometime in the late 80's, Stan Veit, original editor of Computer Shopper, had retired but was writing a column on his experiences in the early PC industry. He owned one of the earliest computer stores in New York and interacted with a number of the early entrepreneurs.

Those columns are neatly collected in a book:

https://archive.org/details/stan-veits-history-of-the-person...

This is an incredibly interesting interview that I hadn’t seen before. He lays out an actual philosophy behind why the Mac was designed the way it was: users (in the 1970’s) weren’t used to typing esoteric commands and mostly didn’t want to learn.

Expectations have changed a bit since then — we are now, IMHO, too eager to force training on users. Sometimes in the name of “opinionated design.”

This is mostly still good, relevant advice that software engineers in particular really should take heed of.

Lunatic Fringe was a lot of fun — IIRC, at a time when there weren’t very many standalone arcade games for the Mac.

A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:

- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.

- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).

- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms

Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)