My colleague, computer historian David Greelish, has started work on a documentary about a seminal Apple computer which changed the world. Not the Macintosh, but Before Macintosh: the Apple Lisa. The Lisa was the first commercially available computer to bring the Graphical User Interface (GUI) outside of the laboratory, with windows, menus, a mouse and… Read More
Longtime Macintosh users certainly remember Clarus the DogCow, a quirky and unusual component of the original Mac OS. Clarus is a hybrid digital entity falling somewhere between a Dog and a Cow (aka DogCow). She was born in 1983 in Apple’s labs during the Macintosh creation, as a character in the Cairo font designed by… Read More
Part of keeping our digital heritage alive is the ability to run software from years past. This may be for historical reasons, for performing current work, or just to play old games. But with the passage of time running classic software on original hardware becomes more difficult. Vintage computers are getting harder to maintain, or… Read More
Sometimes my vintage and professional Mac lives collide, and I wind up working on a consulting job involving a system old enough to be in the Mac Museum. Such was the case this week with an iBook G4 I encountered, which appears to have had quite a life. This particular system is a 2003 12-inch… Read More
How many generations of Mac technology (both hardware and software) can you cram into a single Macintosh? Inquiring minds need to know! I haven’t nearly hit the limit yet, but here’s a good start towards answering the question. Introducing the Macintosh Wayback Machine: • 24″ Intel iMac running OS X El Capitan • Apple ADB… Read More
A new addition to the collection has recently arrived, one I’m quite excited about. Captured alive from the wilds of geekdom, the VMM is now the caretaker of an elusive JLPGA PowerBook 170 in all its multicolor glory. In 1992 Apple manufactured approximately 500 multi-colored PowerBook 170 models to commemorate the Japanese Ladies Professional Golf… Read More