History Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily iPhone app: The Visible City celebrates Vancouver's neon past

by Mel Martin (May 10th, 2013)

In 1953, Vancouver was aglow with nearly 19,000 neon lights. Today, only a few dozen of those historic signs remain. Those interested in the city's glowing, buzzing past should check out The Visible City, an iPhone app from the Museum of Vancouver. This free app offers informative, colorful ...

iMac G3 on a 1998 episode of Computer Chronicles

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 12th, 2013)

Computer Chronicles aired on PBS during the '80s and '90s and tracked the rise of the personal computer. Not surprisingly, Apple was often featured on the program. We've stumbled upon one episode that Apple users may find interesting. The 1998 episode kicks off with a look the new iMac G3, ...

A look at the original Apple II disk operating system documents

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 3rd, 2013)

A collection of documents detailing Apple's work on its first disk-based operating system recently surfaced at the DigiBarn computer museum, and CNET got a first-hand look at the compilation. The documents date back to the late 1970s and include contracts signed by Steve Jobs and Steve ...

Photoshop 1.0 source code now available from the Computer History Museum

by Mike Schramm (Feb 15th, 2013)

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. (home of Google, and just a few miles from Apple's HQ in Cupertino) has a new display up, featuring none other than the source code to Photoshop 1.0, the very first version of Adobe's powerhouse photo-editing software. The exhibit features ...

Inside Siri's military origins and how it almost came pre-installed on Android

by Randy Nelson (Jan 23rd, 2013)

Since the debut of the iPhone 4S in 2011, we've become accustomed to asking our devices for assistance with various tasks thanks to the iOS-exclusive Siri. But there was a time when owners of Android devices nearly had the A.I. helper at their fingertips. In a truly excellent look at Siri's ...

Unreleased Apple products revealed in Hartmut Esslinger's upcoming book

by Randy Nelson (Dec 27th, 2012)

Hartmut Esslinger founded Frog Design, the firm responsible for some of Apple's most iconic products of the 1980s, including the Apple IIGS and the Macintosh II. Now the legendary designer behind the "Snow White" design language is providing a rare glimpse at some of his work that never saw the ...

Adobe turns 30 this week

by Mel Martin (Dec 4th, 2012)

The Life@Adobe blog reminds us that Adobe Systems turns 30 years old this week. Wow, that's gone by pretty fast. Founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, the company started when the pair left Xerox PARC to develop the PostScript page description language. Apple was an early fan ...

Gree closing down OpenFeint on December 14

by Mike Schramm (Nov 19th, 2012)

I believe we've now reached the end of iOS' first generation as a platform -- it's almost every week now that we're hearing about a major startup losing a founder or a big franchise shutting down. This time it's OpenFeint, the social gaming platform started up way back by Jason Citron and ...

Neil Young leaves Ngmoco

by Mike Schramm (Oct 26th, 2012)

Well it's the end of an era for one of iOS' first big companies. It was just about four years ago that I posted here in this very space that former EA executive Neil Young (no relation) was going to start up a company called ng:moco, and it was soon after that he published the breakout hit ...

Hidden photos found in Mac SE ROM (Updated)

by Kelly Hodgkins (Aug 30th, 2012)

Update: As noted in the comments, the presence of these images in the original Mac ROMs has been known for years, so this decoding project qualifies as a "rediscovery" rather than an original find. The folks from NYC Resistor found an old Macintosh SE computer on the side of the road in ...

Apple's original software construction kit: HyperCard turns twenty-five years old today

by Kelly Guimont (Aug 11th, 2012)

Twenty-five years ago today, HyperCard was released at Macworld Expo Boston. Apple's software construction kit for the rest of us began shipping on every new Mac as of August 11, 1987; you could also buy it for $49. It required 1 MB of memory (yes, one megabyte) and a pair of 800K floppy ...

History Here app is perfect for summer travel

by Mel Martin (Jul 19th, 2012)

History Here for iPhone is a clever take on travel discovery apps. The app comes from The History Channel and A&E Networks. In a nutshell, the app knows where you are and what historical sites are near you. It could be a National Park, a Civil War Battlefield, a museum, a Western fort or ...

Rare video of Woz from 1984 talking about computing, joining Apple and the Mac

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jun 24th, 2012)

Reader Sarah Bailey of the North East Ohio Apple Corps sent us the video below of Steve Wozniak talking about the then-new Macintosh and lots of other Apple (and early computing) lore when he visited the Cleveland Apple club back in 1984. It's always great to see these old videos digitized for ...

How 'Marklar' OS X on Intel owes its start to a one-year-old boy

by Michael Rose (Jun 10th, 2012)

It's among the most famous skunkworks projects in personal computer history. Marklar was a secret Apple development program to put Mac OS X on the Intel x86 microprocessor -- or in some sense put it back on Intel, as the underlying NeXT OpenStep OS did work on x86 chips. Ten years ago this ...

MacStories looks at four years of the App Store

by Mike Schramm (May 18th, 2012)

It's been almost four years since Apple debuted its App Store platform for iOS (and then the Mac), and MacStories has an in-depth look back at that time. In just four short years, Apple has gone from saying that all we'd need on iOS are web apps, to a millions of dollars a year industry that ...