In the late 1980s and early 1990s, computing made a great leap forward with the advent of 16-bit microcomputers like the Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST. The Apple II, introduced in 1978, was a phenomenally successful platform, eventually coming to possess a 20% share of the personal computer market in the US. But by […]
Category Archives: Apple History
As a computer manufacturer, Apple gets a strangely distorted press. Its position as the only serious commercial competitor to Microsoft guarantees that every move the company makes is documented – and often distorted.
The Apple III was meant to be Apple’s bold entry into the business market; it ended as Apple’s first commercial failure and put the company into financial uncertainty. It was also responsible for sprouting both the Lisa and Macintosh projects, efforts that would save Apple. Wendell Sander, father of the Apple III. Photo courtesy of […]
Realizing that the Apple II would not sustain Apple forever, the Sara project began. The main idea of Sara was to create a more powerful and capable Apple II. It would include 128 KB of RAM, an integrated floppy drive, and a high resolution display – 80 columns wide instead of the Apple II’s 40.
If you think the original Macintosh was an impressive piece of design and engineering, you may find Apple’s Lisa even more innovative.
For most Mac users, Apple’s Lisa isn’t even a footnote in Mac history. The $10,000 computer is rarely remembered as the Mac’s mother – and those who do remember it also tend to recall how Apple dumped thousands upon thousands of unsold Lisas in a Utah landfill when the computer was discontinued.
I ran across images of some Apple prototypes created during the early years of Macintosh design – things like a cube-shaped Mac, a MacBook notebook, and a table-like device among them.
2014 – If you were on the Mac Web in July 2007, you probably saw Fudder’s article, The Very First iPhone – or at least stories about the article or links to it. The mock-up (below) was created by Frog Design, built by Hertmut Esslinger, and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Apple IIc.
Apple made the biggest change in Macintosh history with the introduction of the Macintosh II and SE in 1987.
With the Motorola 680×0 architecture running out of steam and Motorola’s 88000 making haste slowly, Apple had to look a bit further afield for its next processor architecture. Here’s how IBM’s RISC project became the heart of the Mac.
John Sculley, who had once been hailed as Apple’s savior for huge sales increases and good PR (like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and Steve Jobs rolled in one) had presided over the splintering of the product line and a sharp decline in market share. The same trends continued after Sculley was forced out, and the […]
2005.11.15 From the day of his appointment as Apple CEO in February 1996, Gil Amelio presided over an ailing company. After the near-disastrous reign of Michael Spindler, Amelio promised to change the corporate ethos of Apple.
Apple Corps was founded as a tax haven for the Beatles’ considerable cash reserves in January 1968. Apple Corps would finance a record label and other pet projects of the band members while also providing a “front” for their financial activities to reduce personal liability and taxes.
Apple had transformed from a small three man venture in the late 1970s into a huge, multinational corporation in the late 1980s. With these changes came troubles.
The first Apple proposal to move the Macintosh to Intel hardware did not begin with Mac OS X. It began in 1985, shortly after Steve Jobs’ departure from Apple. The project was quickly nixed by Apple’s management, but it would be revived several years later in a joint effort by Novell and Apple to port the […]
On January 24, 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh to its Board of Directors and to the world – and the computer world has never been the same.
Over the summer of 1997, Apple brought the era of authorized Macintosh clones to an end to keep Apple solvent.*