Slashdot Mirror
Apple: First to Latest
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?
That one's actually easy, since MOSR 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.
"...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, 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:
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.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
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'".
/eeg
I'll take "regular expressions" for $400, please.......ah, "What is the
modifier?"
--
Tweet, tweet.
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:
d en tial/sagan.shtml
http://www.macspeedzone.com/articles/appleconfi
BBK, random fact monkey
Funny, I spent most of last night looking at this stuff! Here's some interesting stuff I uncovered, fits right in:m l
http://www.hughes.net/~gcifu/applemuseum/index.ht
http://www.hypermall.com/History/
I stayed up way too late reading the last one last night...
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."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
- http://history.eis.net.au/
(Australia)
- http://apple-history.macstuff.co.nz/
(New Zealand)
- http://www.platinium.fr/apple
(France, translated)
- http://www.theyopy.de/applehistory/
(Germany)
- Thttp://www.tevac.com/applehistoryitalia/
(Italy, translated)
- http://www.apple-history.nl
(Netherlands)
- http://applehistory.acmug.com
(Norway)
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.
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 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!
Incase you missed that:
MIRRORS!!
If you are interested in information like this about Apple, check out Apple Confidential . It used to be The Mac Bathroom Reader . 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.
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.
If you go to this site and like it please consider donating 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. :/
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 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.
;-) -- it says Apple is looking for "cool, talented people"
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
How COOL is that?!
:-)
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
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
Well, there is this User Friendly cartoon sequence on Geek Jeopardy
"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 comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.