Time for a new watch

For the last few years I have had a Swatch but it was starting to get a bit shabby so time to get a new watch. I decided it was time to get a smart watch, an Apple Watch SE in fact. I like the fact I can see what my heart beat is and hopefully it will give me more accurate activity reporting than my phone does (as the watch should be with me for longer). It is very nice, and space grey like my Macs of course.

Apple & Unix : The early years

Since 2001 and the release of MacOSX, the operating system of Apple Macintosh computers has been Unix based but this was not the first time Apple developed and released a Unix for the Mac. 

In 1988 Apple released A/UX which was based on Unix System, it came with a version of the Apple Mac graphical user interface and ran on select Motorola 68K Macs. It was able to run Mac and X-Windows applications. Unix commands could be run via a dialog box which also allowed the user to select command line options in a user friendly way. The initial version of A/UX included the System 6 Finder with the Finder switching to System 7's with A/UX version 3.0.

Despite the positive reaction to A/UX from some quarters, A/UX was never a great success for Apple and today remains in obscurity. Apple thought A/UX could help them get the Mac into big business and the growing enterprise market. Apple finally dropped A/UX in 1995, the already announced v4.0 never seeing the light of day.

This wasn't the end of Apple's pre-MacOSX Unix efforts though. In 1994 they released the Macintosh Application Environment for Solaris and HP/UX. It could allow Macintosh applications to be run on Unix computers from Sun and HP. It again used a version of the Mac OS 7 Finder and special tools for importing and exporting to and from the Mac and X environments. MAE was discontinued in 1998. Thus ending Apple's involvement with Unix... well for the time being...

Screenshot from WinWorld https://winworldpc.com/product/a-ux/3x

Welcoming Sophie

My Chromebook Pixel has had a good hard life but it has finally come time to replace it. The screen is flickering, the keyboard slightly broken and Google support ends later this year. The Pixel has been replaced by a MacBook Air. This is my first computer with an ARM based chip (not counting the various iPhones and iPads I have had in the past). Hopefully, Sophie (as she has been called) will have just as long a working life as the Pixel (though I will try and not break the keyboard on this one!)

Of course, I bought a Mac mini last year called Emily which remains my main workstation, whereas Sophie is my personal assistant. For the first time I have two new (or new-ish) computers to hand. Which is nice.

Apple beige

Apple Computer attracts the kind of obsessive attention to detail from users and fans which no other computer manufacturer has ever achieved. Let's face it, only Apple could drive someone to delve into great lengths to discover what actual colour the company's earliest computers were. They were supposed to be Apple beige but like everything else surviving examples (like my Apple IIe below - this model was a slightly darker beige than earlier Apple IIs by the way) may have shifted in colour after exposure to light. So, what actual colour was the beige these computers were created in during the late 1970s and early 1980s? The article is worth visiting alone for the photo of the Apple Computer beige touch-up paint jar, that must be a very very rare surviving Apple artifact!

Copland, the mythical beast unveiled

Copland was one of Apple's biggest failures. It was an attempt to bring MacOS up-to-date in the early to mid 1990s but after several years of expensive development and project chaos, Apple was left with a mess which would crash even if you blinked too fast. Copland was cancelled, not even making it to a proper developer release and Apple looked elsewhere for the future, which ended up being MacOSX...

But Copland has been lost to time, or has it? A few builds did make it out into the wild and on this blog the sheer horror of build D7E1 is revealed (yes it crashes a lot). It did introduce a lot of technology which made it into subsequent versions of MacOS however. To me Copland is a bit of a mythical beast so seeing this video is like seeing footage of Bigfoot walking down Erdington High Street.

Upgrading our systems

After eight successful years our Macbook (Miriam) has entered semi-retirement and has been replaced by Emily, who is a Mac Mini. We've gone back to a "desktop" style computer after a decade of laptops - one reason being Miriam, and the Macbook before her (Suzy), never actually moved from the desk. You can get more bang for your buck with a desktop computer, and a much bigger screen.

Emily is our first main computer without a traditional hard drive (it has an SSD) and no CD drive. Although Miriam's CD drive was hardly ever used especially in recent years, it will be interesting to see if the lack of a drive on the new computer will end up being a problem or not. Miriam is always available if we need to check a CD-ROM of course...

Restoring a 6502

Restoring a microchip is much like any other kind of restoration, just on a smaller scale. This website details how a circuit board found in a barn (literally stinking of cow manure) contained a rare early MOS 6502 CPU from May 1976. The 6502 was extracted from the board, cleaned up and still works!

The 6502 is one of the iconic early CPUs of the microcomputer revolution in the 1970s being first produced in 1975, powering the likes of the Apple II (my IIe seen below). Amazingly the CPU is still produced today and used in many embedded systems.

History of the World in Apple Objects (15) : Macintosh LC

In the final instalment in this series we have the Macintosh LC. The LC stood for "Low Cost" though that was in relative Apple terms. The LC came in a slim line box known as the pizza box and was equipped with a Motorola 68020 processor and 2MB of RAM. It also had a hard drive.

It went on sale between 1990 and 1992 later superseded by the LC II and LC III, one of which I did have once too.

History of the World in Apple Objects (14) : Workgroup Server 60

The most unusual Macintosh in my collection, the Workgroup Server 60 was a version of the Centris 610 to support small networks of Macs (it came with AppleShare software). The Workgroup Server 60 was released in the Summer of 1993 and sold until the Autumn of 1994.

It had a Motorola 68LC040 processor, 4MB of RAM, an 80MB hard drive and mine has a CD-ROM (an early type of CD-ROM at that with a CD caddy). Not a bad computer for it's day!

History of the World in Apple Objects (13) : Macintosh IIcx

The Macintosh IIcx was introduced in 1989 and sold for two years. It was similar to the IIx though in a smaller and easy to open case which was also used by the more powerful Macintosh IIci which succeeded it. The IIcx came with a Motorola 68030 running at 16Mhz and could support up to 128MB of RAM (though that would have cost the GDP of a small country back then).

The IIcx ran Mac OS 6 up to 7.5.5. Unfortunately this one is unlikely to run anything anymore though still has the cute case!

Augmented reality

Augmented reality or AR is likely to be one of the next "big things". Virtual objects are overlaid on a view of the real world to portray extra information or just for fun. The latter is the case with Apple's Mac Pro AR utility to advertise their new computer. AR is used to let you see how their new computer would "look" on your desk using your phone's camera.

However I thought it would be more interesting to take my virtual Mac Pro for a walk around the business park at lunchtime. The technology is really interesting and it would be cool to try developing something with AR one day, it will probably have to wait until I get my next computer though as my ancient Macbook is a bit wheezey these days. My next computer won't be a Mac Pro though due to cost (unless I win the lottery)...

Return of the TwiggyMac

The Twiggy Mac is the stuff of myth surely? What am I talking about? Well the Apple Macintosh, up until a fairly late stage in the project (which was finally released in 1984 of course) was going to use the same 5 1/4 inch "Twiggy" disk drive as used in the Apple Lisa. Unfortunately the Twiggy drive was rubbish and often failed, indeed this was one of the Lisa's Achilles' heels (along with the huge price). Luckily Sony had just bought out their new 3.5 inch floppy drive format which Apple used instead and the rest is history...

It has been assumed that none of the Twiggy drive equipped Macintosh prototypes had survived as Apple had had them all recalled and destroyed in 1983. However one was found and later on another one turned up too!

After some restoration work the Twiggy Macs now work again and could boot from the original Twiggy system disks which included a beta version of Mac OS from August 1983. This version of the eventual first release of Mac OS included some intriguing differences from the final version including "Steve sez" in dialogue boxes. The whole story is recounted in the highly enjoyable Twiggy Mac website.

Heres how it ended up looking, my 512K

Apple, NeXT, Be and Steve Jobs

It is all part of Apple's rich history, how when the chips were down Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded and help lead them from the abyss and towards where they are now: one of the biggest companies in the world. However this fascinating blog post details how that almost didn't happen.

In the mid-1990s Apple was struggling. MacOS was becoming out of date and attempts to create a new more modern version were failing hard. Apple looked to buy in an existing operating system to form the basis of the MacOS replacement. In the end they chose NeXT Computer (another company founded by Steve Jobs) and Next's operating system became the basis of Mac OSX. It nearly wasn't this way though, BeOS was also a contender and it is interesting to consider how (Apple) history and maybe the history of the world would have been different if BeOS had been the chosen system.

NeXT Cube

Creating the Apple Lisa (and Mac) user interface

How exactly are graphical user interfaces (GUI) created? Obviously it involves quite a lot of advanced programming and design work but where do you start, especially back in the 1970s when there weren't many examples of GUIs to gain inspiration from? This extraordinary page on the Mac Folklore website has a series of photographs how the Apple Lisa GUI developed from the first basic graphic tests to the finished article which shipped in the early 1980s, and later carried on by the Apple Macintosh to the present day.

What is especially interesting how the Apple UI, with elements still familiar and used today such as the menu at the top, evolved. Early in the Lisa GUI development a softkey menu along the bottom of the screen was the direction the developers took before the abrupt change to a window and mouse based design. Inspired / stolen from Xerox PARC? Well various theories abound, i'm sure there was plenty of inspiration taken but some elements of the GUI are said to predate that.

It is interesting that in 1980 the Lisa had a menu on the top of windows (like Microsoft Windows later went with) instead of along the top of the screen as how the final design used.

History of the World in Apple Objects (12) : Macintosh IIci

The Macintosh IIci which was on sale between 1989 and 1993 was a more powerful version of the earlier IIcx and indeed was the most powerful Macintosh for some time. It had a 25Mhz 68030 CPU and at least 1MB of RAM. Now these do not sound much nowadays but back in the day it was a pretty good spec.

It came in a very nice compact case which remains one of my favourite Apple Computer cases. The top is easily removable so you can get at the innards and perform repairs or upgrades. A far cry from today's super locked down units. I'd love a modern Mac in such a case to be honest.

History of the World in Apple Objects (11) : PowerMac 7200

The PowerMac 7200 was one of the second generation PowerPC powered Macintoshes. It was introduced in 1995 with a PowerPC 601 CPU. The 7200 was a decent machine with CD-ROM, capable of running MacOS 7.5.2 up to 9.1 (though sometimes a bit slow on later OS releases). It came in the dull beige case common to Apple in the 1990s before the iMac and everything went colourful (for a bit anyway).

My 7200 was a work station at my first employer Tw2, used for producing web sites. Later it became a dedicated printer workstation. I rescued it when Tw2 went bankrupt.

History of the World in Apple Objects (10) : A2M2002 Apple Joystick

Obviously if you played games on your Apple //e you needed a joystick! The A2M2002 Apple Joystick is in the same grubby beige as the Apple //e itself. We can safely say Apple hardware design has come a long way. The design itself isn't too bad, certainly superior to the Atari type joystick most people used. Though I've never actually used it on my Apple IIs it does feel like it would be quite sensitive. The two fire buttons are a nice touch.

History of the World in Apple Objects (9) : M0001A Mac Plus

The Mac Plus was the third model of Macintosh computer after the 512K. The Mac Plus had a huge 1MB of RAM and could be expanded to a mind boggling (and especially wallet busting in 1986) 4MB! The Mac Plus also introduced the SCSI bus which became the main peripheral port for Macs until USB. Finally the Mac Plus was the first Mac in the Platinum colour which would become standard until the iMac (though earlier ones like mine were still in beige).

Otherwise the Mac Plus followed the same compact format as the two earlier Macs. Also later Macs like the SE and Macintosh II family eclipsed it it remained in production as the (relatively speaking) cheap low-end Mac until 1990. It had the longest production run of any Mac model and was supported until 1997, able to run Mac OS 7.

History of the World in Apple Objects (8) : M1212 Apple Macintosh Color Display

Another set of Apple objects/junk (depending on your point of view) from my collection.

The Apple Macintosh Color Display M1212 is, as you might guess, a monitor. For Macintosh computers. Although a CRT display and thus obsolete these days it did have a Trintron display so had a reasonable display for the time though only had a resolution of 640x480. It had a standard DA-15 Apple connector so could be used with a range of Mac desktops. Whether mine still works is unknown.

I can't remember where the monitor came from. It appears to have a "Faculty of C.I.S." sticker on it so perhaps it came from a university. I may have bought it off Ebay along with one of the Macintosh IIs I have though we are talking around fifteen years now since I last bought any Apple hardware off there!

The story behind Apple DOS

A fascinating article on the Apple's first Disk Operation System (DOS) which it needed for the Apple II microcomputer. As the article describes Apple was forced to buy in a Disk Operating System (DOS) from an outside company to work with the Apple II and the innovative disk drive Steve Wozniak had designed as they didn't have anyone in house who could develop the DOS in time.

Apple DOS was critical in the success of the Apple II and hence Apple itself which may not have survived long enough to develop the Lisa and Macintosh if the Apple II had not been the success it was. Indeed the Apple II continued to be a success well into the late 1980s.

Apple DOS was written by Paul Laughton, and it together with Woz's disk drive and VisiCalc (the first killer app) made the Apple II a success in business. Interestingly it was developed on a minicomputer, stored on punch cards and debugged on that system before being put on Apple's microcomputer (more about this can be read here on Laughton's own website). This is nothing new of course, the Apple II itself was used to write early Lisa and Macintosh system software.