Vintage Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Player piano rolls made on a Mac... and an Apple II

by Michael Rose (Jun 1st, 2011)

I'm a big fan of the Canadian TV series How It's Made, shown in the USA on the Science Channel. There's something hypnotic and soothing about all those lathes, molds, conveyors and such, producing the things that we all take for granted. One of the older episodes was on this weekend, featuring ...

Vintage Apple-1 up and running

by Kelly Hodgkins (May 11th, 2011)

An original Apple-1 sprung back to life during a presentation at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy this week. Hand-built by a then young Steve Wozniak, the vintage computer was purchased by Mark Bogle for US$211,000 as part of a high-profile Christie's auction. Despite its age of 35 ...

One of Steve Jobs' first TV appearances in vintage video

by Kelly Hodgkins (Feb 9th, 2011)

It's always fun to take a look back in time, and it is even more fun when the person we are looking back at is Steve Jobs. In this short video clip, a 23-year old Steve Jobs prepares for one of his first television appearances. It is entertaining to see him act surprised when he spies himself ...

Macintosh Portable prototype hits eBay, unusual keyboard configuration intact

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 27th, 2010)

If you are looking to grab a piece of Apple history, here is your chance. Spotted on eBay is a prototype Macintosh Portable computer, an early predecessor to the PowerBook. The Macintosh Portable debuted in September 1989 and was a semi-portable, battery-powered version of a desktop Macintosh. The ...

Flickr Find: Grampa Mac Portable, meet the baby MacBook Air

by Michael Rose (Nov 1st, 2010)

It's hard to look at Patrick McCarron's snapshot of -- how many generations? Hard to count -- many generations of mobile computing development and 22 years of Macintoshes on the move without being a little bit awed. The Mac Portable, 1989's answer to getting things done on the go, seems ...

Command key USB stick

by Dave Caolo (Jul 2nd, 2010)

Here's an awesome little tidbit. Apple fan Laurent Bourrelly, who runs pomme-c, was rooting though his pile of Apple goodies when inspiration struck. Why not build a USB flash storage device out of a spare key? The result is the gizmo you see at right: a USB Command key. If you'd like to build ...

Found Footage: Twitter on an Apple IIe (kind of)

by Dave Caolo (Apr 26th, 2010)

Here's a great video from technabob that shows an Apple IIe displaying archived Tweets from a 5.25-inch floppy disk, complete with lo-res graphics. Here's how it works. Modder Yergacheffe uses a PC for interacting with Twitter. He hacked together a PC-to-Apple IIe interface for moving data ...

Grackle68k: a Classic Mac OS Twitter app

by Dave Caolo (Nov 17th, 2009)

It's always nice to own the latest and greatest Apple hardware, but some of us still use vintage machines. I've got a G3 All-In-One on my workbench that displays iFixIt PDFs while I work. I'll admit that I've wanted to tweet from that machine from a dedicated app, and now I can. Grackle68k is a ...

The growing list of unsupported Macs

by Dave Caolo (Oct 22nd, 2009)

Out with the old, in with the new. This week's hardware releases were met with new additions to Apple's vintage and obsolete hardware lists. The following have been added, and I'm sad to say that I'm still using the Dual Ethernet Airport Base Station: iBook G4 (Early 2004) iBook G4 (14" Early ...

TUAW Review: StuffIt Deluxe 2010

by Steven Sande (Oct 3rd, 2009)

If there's one Mac application that has seemingly been around forever, it's StuffIt. This compression and archiving utility was the tool to use for compressing files years ago, and I'll still occasionally run into a .sit file extension when pulling up old files. The original application was the ...

Visua Mobile's old Apples collection

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jul 14th, 2009)

A couple of months ago I wound up in Paris and received a surprising direct message via Twitter from a young employee at Visua Mobile. Having nothing better to do in the City of Light, I wound up at their offices. I'm often suspect when a "mobile" development company rings me about their iPhone ...

TUAW First Look: Cellar puts your wine collection in your pocket

by Michael Rose (Jun 29th, 2009)

Beverage choice should be simple: coffee or tea to rev up, wine or beer to spin down (App Store links). Of course, when it comes to drink choices, there's definitely an app for that: from the makers of espresso-instructions app Barista, we now have the $0.99 Cellar (under App Store review and ...

TUAW 1986

by Dave Caolo (Apr 1st, 2009)

Luxo Jr. gets Academy Award nomination Even though Steve Jobs is no longer with Apple, we're still interested in what he's doing. You'll remember that he bought a computer graphics company from director George Lucas last year (for a rumored $10 million), which he named "Pixar." We don't know how ...

What every superhero needs: Watchmen black SE/30

by Michael Rose (Mar 6th, 2009)

Even though reviewers and early attendees have pointed out a slew of Apple references (including a snippet of the 1984 ad) in the Watchmen film, the one we've been waiting for most eagerly is the appearance of Adrian (Ozymandias) Veidt's sleek black SE/30. In the film version of 1985, it's what ...

Apple: Welcome to the obsolete list, PowerBook G4

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Feb 4th, 2009)

Ars Technica reports that Apple will announce the latest additions to its list of vintage and obsolete machines on March 17. The list, initially reported through MacMerc, includes the following: The "vintage" machines are ones where service parts are available to repair machines purchased in ...