Mad props to my parents for keeping our basement an Apple museum! Aside from a pristine Apple //c (with monochrome monitor), vintage Apple ][ ,and Mac SE/30 (with a color monitor card) they kept most if not all of our Mac and Apple programming books from my youth. A few games even survived, although my addiction to Wasteland forced my dad to ship several of the more fun games to my French cousins. So I took some quick pics and made a vintage Apple books and software gallery. Enjoy the trip down memory lane-- and if any of the authors of these books are around, let us know in the comments.
Some of my favorites:
Chipwits - one of my favorite edutainment titles ever (and the original authors are trying to bring it back)
Jeeves - before he hit the web he was your personal assistant
Holy cow that's a lot of stuff-- he's a matching grayscale (!) display and speakers, all the cables, a spare motherboard, all the books and discs, and even the original sticker sheet. Who keeps the sticker sheet?!? The thing even still runs Omniweb (inside NeXTSTEP 3.3 patch 2), and he's got a screenshot of Google up and working.
So how much will it run you? Currently, the auction is at $710 with a business week left to go even higher, but seriously now-- how much is it worth to you to get a little piece (or in this case, a lot of pieces) of non-Apple Jobs?
After we posted that neon Apple sign a little while back, reader Franco thought we'd get a kick out of this Apple flag for sale on eBay, and he was right. The best news is that right now, it's sitting pretty at only $10 (reserve not yet met, though) flying upwards-- what are you TUAW readers, rich?-- so you could own a little piece of Apple history for cheap.
As for dating it, the page says the 80s. No mention of Macintosh might put it before 1984, but that's just a guess-- Apple IIs were known as the first "personal computers" and those were made all the way up until the early 1990s. I really love those fonts, though, and of course the rainbow logo is a classic.
Everyone has their indispensable, go-to utilities for the Mac, but for my money (that is, no money at all) you can't find a better reference tool for vintage Mac support than Ian Page's obsessively complete Mactracker. As noted previously on TUAW, it's great for figuring out RAM requirements and OS compatibility for anything Apple has ever shipped out the warehouse door in Cupertino.
One thing it hasn't been, up until now, is a Universal Binary. Since the REALBasic environment Ian uses started gracefully popping out those two-faced apps in early October, Mactracker has now caught up and the 4.1 release has all the Intel goodness one could wish.
Read on for additional new features, courtesy of the Mactracker blog...
How's
this for vintage Apple hardware? While looking through the Macintosh Flickr group, I came across this gem that fits in perfectly
with our vintage Mac theme. The photographer, jotefa, writes that it's a 5mm wrench that came with the serial interface
card for his Apple ][. Hold on to that, jotefa. It's pretty cool.
For the month of April,
the theme for our Rig of the Day will be "Vintage Macs" in honor of Apple's anniversary. We start things off
with Erin MJ's shot of a well-loved Performa 578. She still remembers all those years ago
when this very machine first arrived at her house:
"...in my six-year-old excitement, all I noticed
was that it was COLOR! Our first color computer! I loved this computer, because it had Kid Pix (which rocked my world
like you would not believe) and Mario Teaches Typing and Wacky Jacks." Ah yes, Kid Pix. I too fell in love
with that application.
If you'd like to see your own rig featured here, simply
upload photos into our group Flickr pool. Let's see your vintage
Macs (Apples and Newtons, too)! We'll select an image every day (usually) to highlight.
I'm a Mac girl who spends most of her time
hanging in the terminal, so you may say old school stuff makes me happy. If that's the case, then I'm jumping for joy
at the extra old-schoolness of this GLTerminal port for OSX.
If you want to make this work, in GLTerminal go to Preferences -> Renderer ->
Plugin and choose "Classic Terminal" and your Phosphor Color of choice (white, matrix green, or amber). Also,
don't forget that to jump out of full screen mode you will need to use command-return.
Recently, I learned the importance of keeping old files current, and why it's helpful to keep a working vintage Mac around. The school I work for was audited by both the state and Federal Departments of Education earlier this summer (we passed with flying colors, by the way). They wanted to see everything we could hope to show them, and many of the faculty and directors were pulling out research they had conducted years ago to satisfy their demands. However, none of the files could be opened. This is how they landed on my desk.
I had folders upon folders of Microsoft Excel files...from 1989! Yes, these were genuine Excel 1.0 documents, created the year I graduated high school. Excel 2004 wouldn't open them, nor would Excel X, Excel '98, NeoOffice/J or OpenOffice. What's left to do? Call on a vintage Mac. More after the jump.
This weekend I was reading Mr. Barrett's site (a Mac tech who has helped me out of more than a couple of jams) when I saw his link to this fantastic collection of classic Mac games. I wasted a good deal of the early 1990's playing SimCity, The Fool's Errand and of course, Maelstrom. This was back when System 7.6 was all the rage and everyone was in awe of the one SE/30 we had at work.
So, go and dust off that 4400 you have in the basement (or pick up an emulator, as Mr. Barrett suggests) and have some old school fun.
Mad props to my parents for keeping our basement an Apple museum! Aside from a pristine Apple //c (with monochrome monitor), vintage Apple ][ ,and Mac SE/30 (with a color monitor card) they kept most if not all of our Mac and Apple programming books from my youth. A few games even survived, although my addiction to Wasteland forced my dad to ship several of the more fun games to my French cousins. So I took some quick pics and made a vintage Apple books and software gallery. Enjoy the trip down memory lane-- and if any of the authors of these books are around, let us know in the comments.
Everyone has their 
How's
this for vintage Apple hardware? While looking through the 
Recently, I learned the importance of keeping old files current, and why it's helpful to keep a working vintage Mac around. The school I work for was audited by both the state and Federal Departments of Education earlier this summer (we passed with flying colors, by the way). They wanted to see everything we could hope to show them, and many of the faculty and directors were pulling out research they had conducted years ago to satisfy their demands. However, none of the files could be opened. This is how they landed on my desk.
This weekend I was reading 
