A trio of nostalgic finds covers everything from a visual history of Apple patents to the ads and catalogs that marketed these products to consumers.

Andrew McConnell received an old mail-order computer catalog from 1980, with the first 12 pages featuring Apple products. For the low, low price of $974.95USD, you could purchase a 16K Regular Apple II that weighed less than 12 pounds! Or, if you're really crazy with your money, you could spend $1123.95USD on a 48K Plus system.

The really neat thing about browsing through this catalog is seeing all the accessories available for the system at that time. A $34.95 device called Bright Pen was touted as an alternative to the keyboard or game paddle input, and seemed to be an ancestor of the Wacom tablet. Further in, another accessory called Light Pen appears to be a more expensive Wacom predecessor. SuperTalker added voiceover capabilities to the Mac and SpeechLab allowed for dictation. There was a music synthesizer, the ability to add a real-time clock for $200, basic software, and more.

RedLightRunner has compiled a page of some of the best-known Apple ads from the past couple of decades. Its earliest offering is the infamous 1984 ad and there are several early 80's and late 90's offerings there. My favorite is the ad from 1999 for the Airport Base Station. The device sails across the screen like a UFO, complete with creepy B-movie music that is sure to give some people nightmares. It's definitely not a comprehensive collection of ads - it's missing all the current ones and others from the 80's such as this ad from 1986. But, it is a great start at building a collection.

Over on the Technologizer blog, Harry McCracken has posted a visual history spanning 31 years of Apple patent filings - featuring everything from Woz's drawings of the original Apple II in April 1977 all the way to the "multi-functional hand-held device" from December 2007 which turns out to be the iPhone. It's not all the patents filed by Apple, but it's a great summary of some of the devices Apple has come up with. You can find more articles about various Apple patents here at TUAW as well.

Many thanks to all those who submitted tips!

Here's a nice find. Peter Merholz recently got ahold of an original Mac User Manual from 1984 and has posted a bunch of pics along with commentary. The most interesting thing, of course, is seeing them trying to explain basic computing GUI concepts like click-and-drag and scrolling that we take so much for granted. Like Peter, I love the helpful simile that the "Finder is like a central hallway in the Macintosh house." You know, just looking at the thing makes me want a Mac classic!

[via Digg]

Casey Ryback, Steven Segal's character in Under Siege, never had it easy but he had great toys. Sure, he was "just the cook" but apparently SEAL cooks have access to some amazing gadgets. Like special communicators, explosives and Miss July. Under Siege was so successful, the filmmakers decided to create a sequel, Under Siege 2, which takes place on a train with his niece (that actress from Roswell and Grey's Anatomy) and a Newton. No, really! Not kidding here. Behold the glory that is Newton in Under Siege 2.

Update: My bad. This seems to be a repeat of a post from before my time here at TUAW. If you have a great (but non-repeat!) idea for Blast from the Past, drop us a note via our Tip form.

If your business is out of control, suggests this ad, perhaps a Macintosh could solve all your problems, with its shiny, shiny spreadsheets, word processing, and other business features that allow you to concentrate on your business rather than learning how to become a computer expert. More to the point, the Macintosh proves it can defeat alligators and lower the incidence of in-office sewage... or something like that. You do have to give the ad-makers credit for their clever twist on the standard lemonade-from-lemons solution.

I am assured by those having worked with the Macs of that time, and with managers of that vintage, that many of those early, expensive macs ended up rarely used on managers' desks as a kind of status symbol rather than as an actual productivity tool. And that those alligators might have been cheered on just a bit by the employees.

July 1997. Apple Computer (and it was still Apple Computer back then, none of this Apple, Inc business) revealed the latest and greatest operating system: OS 8. It was even delivered on time! Selling for $99, OS 8 introduced a spiffy updated Finder, preemptive cooperative multitasking and memory protection. The standard installation required about 100 MB of disk space and 16 MB of RAM.

At the launch, licensing deals weren't quite worked out with the makers of the Mac clones--remember them?--but they were expected to start shipping their hardware with OS 8 pre-installed in short order. Of course, technologists were focused on the imminent arrival of Rhapsody--due to bow in 1998, but never actually showing up at the dance.

May 11, 1988. The dawn of a new Apple ][gs+. Someone claiming early access to the development posted details to an online board, which was copied and forwarded and eventually posted to Usenet: "please don't spread this special information around, as apple would not be happy if this got out to the public. I will post more info as I discover it. this new machine has alot of potential!"

The "inside information" that was posted contained a description of the new Apple IIgs+. Let me slip for a moment into a more excited mode: <Fangirl Rumor Mode>OMG! OMG! Have you heard? I know this guy who knows this guy who actually has received an actual Apple II GS+ and he wrote about it on one of the boards that my friend's friend was on and here's a copy of his notes about the changes for all of your readers on Usenet! Like it's got 768K of RAM including 512K "fast" RAM and 128 "slow" RAM and the sound chip no longer buzzes and there's a super Hi-Res mode and a normal 320x200 mode with 256 colors per line! And there's a built-in SCSI port on the back and the peripherals are now slot independent! I'm not sure I can swing the $1054 for the IBM MS-DOS card--but I swear that they swear that this is a real product not vaporware!</Fangirl Rumor Mode>

According to Arnold Kim, at normalkid.com, the GS+ never was released and the Apple II line was discontinued.

It's December 20, 1996. Apple has just acquired NeXT in a $400 million deal that brings Steve Jobs back to Apple. Jobs will act as an "advisor" to CEO Gil Amelio, bringing his charisma to the team led by Amelio and Ellen Hancock.

The deal offers $350 million in cash and stock as well as covering about $50 million of NeXT's debts. Apple suggests that it will start shipping products using NeXT's new OS some time in 1997. After abandoning Copland, some had predicted Apple would acquire the Be operating system.

RixStep hosts a copy of the early 1997 letter sent to NeXT customers regarding the Apple/NeXT Merger as part of its Red Hat Diaries. In this letter, Gil Amelio promises to continue to develop and enhance WebObjects and to provide cross-platform support for QuickTime. He looked forward to WebObjects running on Power Macs in short order.

James and John love old Macs. So much so, that they get together about once a week to talk about collecting and using old Macs on their new podcast, the RetroMacCast. Each episode "strolls down memory lane" to discuss older Macintosh computers, from both the perspective of the collector and the user. In a recent episode, the two discussed the signatures found engraved on the inside of their 128K "toaster" Mac and using one as a recipe server in the kitchen and troubleshooting using "the Dead Mac Scrolls".

The style is extremely laid back and each podcast uses m4a picture annotation, so there's always something to look at as they talk. Episodes last about 20 to 30 minutes on average. I really enjoyed listening, especially as the hosts kept finding things to discuss that caught my interest. Clearly, they worked to an outline and this level of organization helped the podcast keep moving forward.

Thanks James

People didn't always know how to point and click. The ubiquity of today's mice, trackballs, touch-pads and other UI inputs clouds the memory of a time when Apple needed to train users to work with pointing devices.

GUIdebook, the Graphical User Interface gallery, works to preserve and showcase historical GUIs. Today's Blast from the Past, "Mousing Around", is an introduction to mastering your 1984-vintage Macintosh mouse. It's part of a larger Guided Tour of Macintosh, with most of the instructions originating on a cassette tape (available for download as a Zipped 36MB MP3 file).

It's very much a trip back to the time of HappyMacs. The screens, which include a connect-the-dots game, a piano emulator, a maze, and a magician seem especially childlike compared to the sleekness of today's OS X's interface with its distinct grown up sensibility.

Like many other companies, Apple offers archival versions of its product manuals for products that have long since been discontinued. As a regular user of OS 9 on my PowerMac 7200, this comes in more useful than you might imagine. So I was delighted to find that the archival support goes back even further than I'd previously thought, when a random search turned up this page offering the Apple II Users' Guide and Product Manual. I am not an Apple II owner, but I know that there are any number of units still out there and still working in hobbyists' basements.

Printed out in 2002 and converted to PDF, the 84-page manual starts off with the classic story about Steve Wozniak, "the creation of an engineer who hated so much to leave his computer behind at the end of the workday that he made himself a home computer." The manual brags about how memory capacity has grown over time from 4K on the Apple I to 256K on the Apple IIgs, and how you could stretch that 256K to 8 megabytes and beyond. (In the early '90's, 8 MB of RAM would easily set you back $800 or more.)

I particularly enjoyed the problem-solving checklist--testing for loose connections, that your monitor is plugged in and the disk drive connected to the computer--which gives you a real sense for the technology of the day.

So how much ahead of its time was the 1993 Apple Newton? This video may give you a good idea. In a world where the Palm did not yet exist, where PocketPCs were still a dream, the Newton blazed the path that many other PDAs would follow. Handwriting recognition, transformation of sketches into high-quality graphics, device-to-device information beaming, and printing/fax capabilities were just some of the features that were built into the Newton. I still look back at the device and wonder what might have developed from it were it not rushed too fast to market, at the wrong price point, with unfinished and buggy software, especially when the world was just waiting for the right PDA. The right PDA turned out to be the 1996 Palm, with all its pseudo-handwriting Graffiti, lower price-point and less ambitious technology. What a pity.

A new banner on Apple Computer's main page states that the first 30 years were just the beginning. "Welcome to 2007," it tells us. We at TUAW like to look backwards as well as forwards. Here's a nostalgic peek back to 1976, to the Apple-1. (Click the advertisement image to enlarge.)

It's been a long trip indeed from the Apple-1, which was priced at an easy-to-remember $666.66. Compare and contrast today's widescreen displays with the support (not monitor, just support) for 24 line x 40 character per line video output. The motherboard shipped with 4 Kbytes of RAM, and you could put up to 8 KB of RAM on that baby, not to mention its support for FAST 1 Kilobaud cassette tape storage (really, just about everything was an optional extra). And Apple Basic was FREE! Oh, and did I mention that you had to build the kit yourself? More than "some assembly" required.

It's hard to believe that my iPod and Mac Mini come from the same company as the Apple-1, separated by only thirty years.

Do you remember the days of MarksMan (aka Prototyper)? AppMaker? Mac Common Lisp? Smalltalk Agents? This FAQ may bring back some memories. It's a snapshot in time from 1996, which seems like yesterday in real time but was, technologically-speaking, a million years ago. The prices for developer tools really stands out--development packages for $695, a resource editor for almost $300. Amazing, isn't it, how cheap Mac Software has become on the whole? And I'm more than a little sure that a contributing factor is that the dev tools are free now. That was something that really struck me on the way back from NeXT to Mac. On NeXT, Interface Builder and the whole GNU programming suite were included. When I returned to doing Mac development, the sky-high prices for devtools (even with student discounts) really bugged me.

It's the "appliance for the '80s". Or so Dick Cavett would have had us believe. This is an actual Apple II commercial from waybackwhen(TM), pointing out all the advantages an Apple computer could make in our lives. Like balancing the budget. And tracking recipes. Fortunately, the commercial's writers had a pretty good sense of humor and there's a nice comic punch at the end.

Check out the two external floppy disk drives, that awful keyboard and the teeny screen in the big case.