Another mad tinkerer surfaced this week spending a huge amount of time an effort recreating a decades-old Apple concept. Designer Kevin Noki dropped a YouTube video Wednesday showing every detail about how he remade Apple’s abandoned FlatMac concept from 1984 into a working prototype. And like an inspiration for the iPads that would come later, it’s a thing of beauty!
“This project has been a dream come true! As a designer, I’ve always been inspired by groundbreaking concepts, and this time, I challenged myself to recreate one of the most iconic and unrealized prototypes: Hartmut Esslinger’s Apple FlatMac,” Noki wrote on his YouTube video page.
Inspiration for iPad: Designer recreates Hartmut Esslinger’s Apple FlatMac design prototype
Noki’s 49-minute video, available below, shows the whole FlatMac project. That includes him asking the still-with-us design legend Esslinger for spec details and permission to make the prototype, perfecting each 3D-printed piece of the hardware and making it work just like it would have in the 1980s. He starts by showing Esslinger’s book, Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple, and describing his iconic work for the company.
Esslinger, by the way, is a German-American industrial designer who helped put Apple on the design map in the early 1980s. In 1984, he and his company, frog design, created the Snow White design language and applied it to Apple products, including Apple IIc and Macintosh II computers, through 1990. Then Esslinger ended up following Steve Jobs to NeXT.
Photo: Kevin Noki
Noki’s video goes on a long time, but you can always fast forward through the parts where he demonstrates using sandpaper, gluing bits together, soldering and the like. In other words, you see everything in his process (except shots of him waiting around for parts deliveries, thankfully). In the end, Noki uses the machine to design a poster for the product, very much like what Apple might’ve done decades ago. He even had it professionally printed at a “shop that still accepts floppy disks.”
Noki links to all the products and suppliers he used on his YouTube page, where you can also watch the long video.
Watch him make a 1980s Apple FlatMac prototype:
