Apple history - page 5

In some ways, it’s hard to remember what the world looked like before Apple arrived in 1976. The upstart company made computing consumer-friendly, fashionable and, ultimately, ubiquitous.

In just four and a half decades, Apple made a surprisingly big impact on the tech scene and the world at large.

As we look back on the company’s 45th birthday this week, we take stock of 45 ways Apple put a ding in the universe. Hit the highlights in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Get the free app to enjoy the stories on your iOS device. Or read them on the web via the link stacks below.

Apple took a proverbial sledgehammer to the Unofficial Apple Archive, an online collection of more than 15,000 classic Apple ads and assorted other materials, last weekend. Cupertino’s legal team issued a slew of takedown notices to Vimeo and the Unofficial Apple Archive’s host provider, Squarespace, resulting in thousands of vintage Apple ads vanishing in the blink of an eye.

While I understand the reason for the takedowns, I really, really wish Apple hadn’t tried to wipe the ads off the internet. Fortunately, Apple could set things straight — by embracing both its past and its most ardent fans.

How does an autograph collector part with a favorite item? Dan Caldwell of Billionaire Collectibles sets the price high enough so that letting go is not so painful.

He has what is likely the only Steve Jobs autograph currently for sale, a signed work-anniversary certificate for an Apple employee. The $77,000 asking price on eBay is how much someone “will have to pay to peel it out of my hands.”

Taking a full-screen screenshot on a modern Mac or iPhone is just a matter of tapping a couple of buttons. But things used to be a whole lot more challenging, as longstanding Apple employee Chris Espinosa recently shared on Twitter.

Kids (and “how to” article writers) today don’t know how good they’ve got it!

Sam Henri Gold generously posted for all to see his extensive collection of Apple promotional materials. There are images going back to the 1970s, and videos starting in the 1990s.

During a commencement speech at Tulane this morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave graduates a new twist on the old adage about finding a job you love. He also talked about Apple’s vision to “move humanity forward.”

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

This is Part 2 of a two-part section on Apple’s misadventures in manufacturing. Part I is here.

Steve Jobs carried his dream of end-to-end control over manufacturing to NeXT, the company that Jobs founded after being booted out of Apple in 1985. It was here that he learned a tough lesson about manufacturing: that sometimes it’s more trouble than it is worth. Or, perhaps more kindly, that great manufacturing capabilities mean nothing if you don’t have a product people want to buy.

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Steve Jobs always had a deep fascination with automated factories. He was first exposed to them during a trip to Japan in 1983. At the time, Apple had just created a new floppy disk drive called Twiggy. During a visit to Apple’s factory in San Jose, however, Jobs became irate when he discovered the high failure rate of Twiggy drives Apple was producing. More than half of them were rejected. Jobs threatened to fire everyone who worked at the factory

Imagine being an engineer assigned to help develop a device — and you’re not even allowed to see what it is supposed to look like.

Secrecy was so important to Apple on its first iPhone, the first prototype was not a handset but a large development board for team members to hook to a display to try out various functions.

Mark Pelczarski’s first contribution to the personal computing revolution came in a zip-lock bag.

With no App Store in 1979, Pelczarski bagged disks and photo-copied instruction manuals for what was then one of the first digital paint programs for the Apple II.

You can buy a piece of Apple history next month. An Apple-1 computer built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak will be auctioned off.

But bring your credit card. The auction house expects it to go for about $300,000.

This week on The CultCast: You’d never know it from Steve Jobs’ effortless keynote introduction, but the original iPhone was plagued with huge design and production issues that almost made Apple call it quits — right up until the day it was released! To commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary, we’ll recount some of the incredible stories behind iPhone’s beleaguered early days, and celebrate how Apple pulled off one of the greatest device launches in history.

Our thanks to Shutterstock for supporting this episode. Kickstart your next interactive project with video clips or music tracks from their collection, and save 20 percent for a limited time at shutterstock.com/cultcast.

When legendary Mac repair shop Tekserve closed its doors last summer in New York City, Apple fans of a certain age experienced two deaths.

They bade goodbye to the original Genius Bar, technicians that had been servicing their devices for nearly 30 years. Those fans would also never again stare at Tekserve’s impressive Apple computer artifact collection, which was quickly auctioned off to an unknown bidder for $47,000.

The collection returned to a museum display today, more than 4,600 miles away in the Ukraine. Its new home is at the headquarters of software developer MacPaw.

The first iMac’s frightful code name was an in-joke that reflected Steve Jobs’ respect for Sony. The working name — “MacMan” — was so horrible it would “curdle your blood,” according to Ken Segall, the Apple exec who eventually came up with the name “iMac.” Nearly 20 years after Apple shipped the iMac G3, we now have an explanation for the craptacular internal name — courtesy of Phil Schiller, the guy who came up with it.

Edward Parks III will likely be the first singer on an opera stage to perform in running shoes, jeans and a black mock turtleneck shirt.

Yet Parks knows there is nothing casual about playing Steve Jobs. He is soaking up all he can about the late Apple co-founder as he prepares to bring his much-heralded baritone voice to the role this summer in the world premiere of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at the Santa Fe Opera.

“I’m taking in everything that is out there and stuffing it in my head so that I can come away with my own thoughts of who he was and what he means to us,” Parks, 33, told Cult of Mac. “I think at first it was a little daunting. This is going to have a lot of attention, not just from the opera world but in the tech community.”

Next week marks 10 years since Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone, blowing our collective minds regarding the possibilities that smartphones presented.

Coming up on a decade later, if you’re still using the first-gen iPhone on a regular basis, we want to hear from you!

Given that it’s currently the world’s most valuable brand, few people would suggest that Apple should give up its name in favor of something a bit more, well, geeky.

But that wasn’t the case when the company launched, as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently revealed.

July 1, 1976: The Apple 1 goes on sale, becoming the first computer ever sold by the Apple Computer Company.

Arriving the same month Jimmy Carter was nominated for U.S. president, Family Feud debuted on TV, and the United States celebrated the 200th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the Apple 1 is only produced in small numbers, and sells for the unusual price of $666.66.

Arriving on this day in 1993, the Macintosh LC 520 was among the first of Apple’s LC 500 series of medium-price Macs.

Selling for $2,000, it was particularly popular in educational institutions, a market Apple continues to pursue today. If you went to school in the decade of Nirvana, Bill Clinton and Pulp Fiction, this could well have been the Mac you used!

Sometimes affectionately called the “cheese grater,” the original Power Mac G5 first went on sale on June 23, 2003 — offering what was then Apple’s fastest-ever machine and the world’s first 64-bit personal computer.

Check out the video of Steve Jobs introducing the computer 13 years ago today.

In the music industry, they talk about the “difficult second album.” Fortunately that didn’t hold true when it came to Apple releasing its highly successful second-gen iPhone, which it unveiled for the first time on June 9, 2008.

Adding GPS, 3G data and a higher-quality build than its predecessor, the iPhone 3G was arguably just as revolutionary for what it did on the software side. iOS 2 arrived at the same time, and introduced push email, turn-by-turn navigation and, most significantly of all, an App Store — something Steve Jobs had previously been adamant Apple would’t allow.

Check out the debut of the iPhone 3G below.

For years, Apple has been under pressure to open an Apple museum. The company’s rich and storied past has its fans clamoring for a central repository of that history.

Word from the company: No. Apple’s leaders say they are more interested in the future than the past.

In fact, the most complete historical collection of all things Apple is nowhere near Cupertino. The serious Apple fan must travel to, of all places, Savona, Italy.

Legendary Silicon Valley tech adviser and former Apple board member Bill Campbell had died.

Campbell was popular for dishing out wise advice to top tech leaders like Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos, and was popularly known by his nickname, “The Coach.”

This week on The CultCast: We look into the past at some of the most pivotal moments in Apple’s 40-year history. Plus: Why the iPhone 7 Plus may be your only choice for dual cameras; what it’s like downsizing from the iPhone 6s to the SE; and we pitch our favorite new tech and vote on which is best in an all-new Faves N Raves!

Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode of Cult of Mac’s weekly podcast. It’s simple to build a website that looks beautiful on any device that visits at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off.

Apple turns 40 today and, while a lot has changed since the company’s early days, it seems that questions about government snooping have not.

ABC News today released footage from a vintage interview in which a very young Steve Jobs debates computers on a 1981 episode of Nightline.

In addition to trotting out his “bicycle for the mind” metaphor, Jobs also talks about how best to stop the government from snooping on your computer, a topic that seems very timely in the aftermath of Apple’s battle with the FBI.

Check out the Steve Jobs interview below.