Category: history

Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue

This is a big colorful book by long-time tech and Apple author and commentator David Pogue. It covers, in mostly chronological order, the history of Apple as a company, and the evolution of Apple products.

Apple has had an outsized influence on the design of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices, and this book really makes you understand and remember that.

There was one page early on in the book, talking about the Apple I, where a lot of things went wrong. The text confused kilobytes with kilobits (KB vs Kb, the case matters!), RAM with ROM and bytes with kilobytes. The result was a page that made no sense to someone who was knowledgeable about computers.

Fortunately, I didn’t see any glaring errors on the other 600 pages, which I enjoyed tremendously.

There are a number of interesting and funny stories in the book, many that I hadn’t heard before.

Of course, there is the big story arc of Steve Jobs founding Apple, leaving, and eventually coming back to save the company from near disaster. I really hadn’t appreciated how dire the situation was at Apple in the 1990s until reading this book.

I was especially interested in a lot of the history of how our devices came to be the way they are. All laptop computers used to have the keyboard at the very front edge. Now, none of them do. How did that happen?

Computers didn’t have USB ports until Apple introduced them. Computers had floppy drives and CD drives until Apple removed them.

This is overall a great book for Apple fans.

Full disclosure: MacMAD received a review copy of this book.

Twenty Years Ago – 1996 Mac Setup

I just found this photo of my computer desk from 1996.

Computer Equipment on Desk
Laserwriter, Power Mac 7200, Modem, Optical Drive & Heavy CRT.

Here’s my reasonably well-equipped computer setup from 1996. From left to right:

  • The miracle piano. My wife was using that. It connected to the Mac via MIDI. I don’t know of a modern piano teaching system comprable to it
  • Apple LaserWriter NT printer. Apple’s last LaserWriter came out in 1996. My new printer is about the same size and speed. It’s� cheaper, more reliable, and has WiFi, though.
  • A microphone. That was a rarely used accessory. Who knows what was going on that day.
  • Yellow Touch-Tone desk phone
  • 9600 baud modem
  • Removable media optical drive — I think 100 Mbyte capacity
  • Power Macintosh 7200 – 90 MHz Power PC 601, 500 MB hard drive, CD-ROM, floppy drive
  • A big, heavy CRT – probably a Bill Bernett after-the-meeting special
  • A joystick, probably for the�game F/A-18 Hornet
  • Blue mousepad. Hey, I still have that mousepad. I should probably get a new one occasionally
  • Another telephone, Model 500 black dial phone. This phone stayed in use longer than the yellow one. It was still working when my landline was disconnected entirely about 2015.