The following are photos of places and computers described in each chapter of the book. Enjoy.
Chapter 1
Original Apple II PlusAtari 2600 from 1978Cannonball Blitz Apple II Game2 Apple Disk ][ Floppy DrivesA Tandy external hard disk drive.Radio Shack TRS-80 Computer.
Chapter 2
Moving to CA to go to college.
The little shop in northern CA which was once an Alphagraphics – where I first used a Macintosh. Now a tile store.
The 2nd of 2 original Mac models – the Mac 512K – soon followed by the Macintosh Plus.
The original Mac desktop – much like today’s but with crude graphics. The Mac’s desktop design was based on the Alto computer developed at Xerox in the 1970’s. Sadly, Xerox never did anything with the technology.
When early Macs crashed, this is what you would see.
Apple’s original LaserWriter printer – the first commercial laser printer released to the public.
Aldus PageMaker – the world’s first commercial desktop publishing program. Aldus was later acquired by Adobe, which rebranded the app InDesign – which is still around today.
Apple’s original automated Mac factory in Fremont, CA.
In 1989 the lower floor of this building in the Bay Area housed an Egghead software shop.‘
After the Mac Plus, I bought a Mac IIciwhich had a removable lid on top. Note the 3.5″ floppy disk drive slot on the right. The 2 buttons on the lower left were a reset switch and a programmer’s NMI button which could be used to interupt program flow and drop into MacsBug, Apple’s Macintosh debugger at the time.
Apple’s ResEdit tool – a resource editor for the original Mac OS.
An early Mac IIci video card which used the NuBus interconnect design.
Before the internet Apple published its tech docs in a series of books called Inside Macintosh.
I learned to program the Mac by starting with this book published in 1989.
The forerunner of the IIci was a larger model simply called the Mac II.
The company in San Francisco where I did my 1st moonlighting job.
The entrance to the San Francisco Market Street BART Station.
San Francisco in the late 1980’s was cleaner, and more orderly.
A compiler for the Mac in the late 1980’s was THINK C by a company called Symantec, which are still around today. They also made a Pascal compiler called THINK Pascal, and Norton Utilities – the forerunner of today’s Norton LifeLock and other software.
I bought both THINK C and THINK Pascal at Egghead Software.
The successor to the Mac IIci was the Quadra 700, which had a vertical orientation.
Amoeba Music in Berkeley, CA.
One of the earliest hits on the Mac was a screensaver called After Dark.Incredibly, After Dark has been resurrected today by a company called Infinisys. It even works on modern M1 Macs. You can even see some of the original After Dark screensavers today on Bryan Braun’s site.
The Wired for Sound interface.
At Novell we were issued one of the first PowerPC-based Macs – the PowerMac 7100.
The 1st Novell N. CA bldg. – where NetWare for Macintosh was born.
The later Novell bldg. in San Jose, CA.
Long before Windows Server, Novell’s NetWare dominated the PC server market.
Just down the street on DeAnza Blvd. is the Donut Wheel– hands down the best donuts in Silicon Valley – and virtually unchanged since the late 1980’s.
DeAnza 6 across from 1 Infinite Loop.
My apartment complex 3 blocks from Apple.
The day I moved to Cupertino. The far wall would become my workstation area where my PowerMac 4400 arrived the next week. Most of the anti-spam product was also written here.
1 of 2 Cupertino Starbucks where Dan and I used to hang out in the morning.
Quinn “The Eskimo” from Apple’s DTS – who now lives in Scotland. You can still follow Quinn today on Twitter.
At the time Apple was experimenting with new user interfaces – such as this one from the ill-fated Copland project.
A new and exciting technology at the time was created by an Apple/TI joint venture and was called FireWire, which was a high-speed serial bus. FireWire is all but gone now, thanks to faster replacements such as ThunderBolt from Intel.
Before the internet, Apple’s Developer Relations group published a magazine for developers called d e v e l o p.
AppleLink software on 3.5″ floppy. AppleLink was an Apple online communication service before the internet.
Apple’s AppleLink online service. This was before the internet went mainstream.
Jean Louis Gassé – former head of Apple France, and founder of Be, Inc. – an Apple competitor. Be ultimately failed and was sidelined by Steve’s other company NeXT, which was sold to Apple in 1997, although the BeOS was technically superior. Amazingly, BeOS lives on today in the Haiku Project, which is nearing initial release.Gassé is now a venture capitalist.The main advantage of BeOS and Haiku are its blindlingly fast speed – several times faster than either macOS or Windows.Also check out the cool retro Be T-shirts over on Redbubble.
Apple’s failed OpenDoc technology was part of Mac OS 8 and 9. It’s goal was to provide document editing without apps.
The OpenDoc logo.
Another failed 1990’s Apple technology was called AOCE – and its companion sharing interface called PowerShare. AOCE‘s goal was to provide seamless collaboration across all Mac OS-based apps.
Inside Mac: AOCE.
Developer Beta CD-ROM.
CodeWarrior‘s user interface from 1998.CodeWarrior was later bought from its developer, Metrowerks by embedded systems company NXP, which still sells it today.
Chapter 6
Apple’s internal museum at 1 Infinite Loop.
Steve at the launch of the NeXT computer, which ultimately failed.NeXT’s OS, NeXTStep later became the basis of macOS and iOS at Apple.
FWB’s original HQ in Redwood City, CA – now a Ferrari dealership.
Ocean Beach district in San Francisco, facing north. The large dark strip at the top is Golden Gate Park.Pacific Ocean is on the left.
The one, the only, the legendary Taco Bravoin San Jose. Best burritos in northern CA.
Apple’s original “Wheels for the Mind” Macintosh ad campaign.
IBM’s PowerPC 601 CPU – used in Macs starting in 1994.
The PowerMacintosh Debugger – successor to 68K’s MacsBug.
The soul of a new machine – Apple’s original iMac circa 1998.2023 will be the iMac’s 25th anniversary.
Also in 1998 Apple released a larger desktop Mac called the PowerMac G3, which was based on the same architecture as iMac. It also sold a huge 21″ CRT display to match.
An Orange Micro SCSI “Grappler” PCI card for Power Macintoshes.
FWB also licensed their drives and cards to companies such as Radius, which made displays, display cards, and storage.
Dan working on the anti-spam product. It was the dawn of the internet and X-Files dominated evening TV.
The original blacklist-blocking logic diagram.
Apple’s description of the HFS+ volume header layout.
Before there was CodeWarrior, or Xcode, there was Symantec’s C++ compiler and IDE.
Listening to J-Pop CDs, including Noriko Sakai’s light and breezy 10 Songs.This album spawned the #1 smash hit in Japan and Asia, Aoi Usagi(The Blue Rabbit).
Chapter 7
Silicon Valley facing north. Adobe‘s HQ is just to the right of center in this photo.Milpitas, where The Company was located is in the green area just below Mt. Hamilton, shown here in the upper right corner.
Redwood City/Woodside in Silicon valley where the original FWB HQ was located. Sand Hill Rd. is just a few miles away.
FWB’s 2nd location on Union St. in west San Francisco.
Inside Sony Metreon across from Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
At MacWorld trade show at Moscone Convention Center, San Francisco. iOmega was one of the largest drive vendors of the day – famous for their quirky little 100MB floppy drives, the Zip 100.
Inside Apple’s Blue + White PowerMac G3 in 1998. The entire HDT 3.0 upgrade was written on this machine.
Later that year Apple also released the first iBook – a colorful clamshell-like laptop based on the same G3 architecture as the iMac and PowerMac. It was an instant hit. In 1999, 3 other models with new colors and faster speeds appeared.
Apple iBook ad circa 1998. In 1999 a “keylime” green version was also released.
2nd-gen “Graphite” iBook model.
Apple iMac ad, circa 1999. The 2nd generation iMac came in 4 new colors.
A 2nd gen “strawberry” iMac.
Apple had been toying with iMac-like prototypes since the late 1980’s, including the ones shown here, which were never released.
Another iMac-like prototype, which also never saw the light of day.
Playstation 2 retail console.155 million units were shipped worldwide.
The Sony Playstation 2 game asset audio editor.
Apple’s 6-pin to 4-pin FireWire connectors. Sony called the 4-pin connection iLink® and filed for a trademark.
The 1st of the G4-based PowerMac computers – a 450 MHz “Graphite” model.. I wrote the Playstation 2 audio development tools on this machine during most of 2000 and 2001.
Later that same year Apple released the PowerMac G4 Cube Macintosh – a G4 Mac the size of a box of tissues.
Apple released Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001.
An early version of Apple’s Rhapsody OS – a version of Mac OS 9 with some of the NeXTStep OS technology grafted on.
A year later Apple released a follow-on G4 model – the 867Mhz “QucikSilver” G4 – one of Apple’s best Macs ever.
