Apple history - page 16

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.

December 13, 1994: Apple strikes a deal with Bandai, Japan’s largest toymaker, to license Mac technology for the creation of a new videogame console called the Pippin.

The device, powered by a PowerPC 603 CPU and running a stripped-down, CD-ROM-based version of Mac OS, shows a struggling Apple is willing to take a chance on something new. Unfortunately, the Pipping becomes a total sales disaster.

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.

September 18, 1989: Steve Jobs’ company NeXT Inc. ships version 1.0 of NeXTStep, its object-oriented, multitasking operating system.

Incredibly advanced for its time, NeXTStep is described by The New York Times as “Macintosh on steroids.” In an ironic twist, the operating system Jobs plans to use to compete with Cupertino turns out to be one of the things that saves Apple a decade later.

September 15, 1988: Apple releases the Apple IIc Plus, the sixth and final model in the Apple II computer series. It’s a great machine, with impressive capabilities, but suffers from poor marketing and support.

With the Mac around, Cupertino simply doesn’t seem interested in the Apple computer anymore.

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!

November 22, 1995: Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature-length movie, lands in theaters. The charming film wows the world with the wonders of computer animation.

The most successful of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs‘ business ventures during his wilderness years away from Cupertino, the box office smash makes his belief in the power of computer graphics pay off in a big way.

How big? A cleverly timed decision to sync the movie opening with Pixar’s public offering turns 40-year-old Jobs into a billionaire.

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.

September 14, 2005: Apple embraces exclusive music releases by debuting a digital EP from Coldplay on iTunes, featuring four previously unheard tracks from the enormously popular band.

100% of profits from the charity EP go to support victims of Hurricane Katrina. However, Apple’s ability to broker exclusive music deals with major record labels and popular artists shows that the company’s current exclusives-driven Apple Music strategy stretches back more than a decade.

September 6, 2007: Apple deals with its first iPhone PR crisis, as early adopters complain about the company dropping the price of its new smartphone by $200 just two months after introducing it.

In response, Apple CEO Steve Jobs offers affected customers a $100 credit, which can be used toward the purchase of any Apple store product.

“Our early customers trusted us, and we must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these,” he writes in an open letter to iPhone customers published on the Apple website.

August 10, 2004: The iTunes Music Store catalog grows to 1 million songs in the United States, a first for an online music service.

Stocking music from all five major record labels and another 600 indies, and with more than 100 million songs downloaded, the iTunes Music Store is officially established as the world’s No. 1 online music service.

“The iTunes Music Store offers the world’s most extensive collection of downloadable music with over one million tracks available,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of applications, in a press release. “With more than one million songs, over 600 independent labels and dozens of innovative features, iTunes is the ultimate destination for discovering and downloading music.”

August 9, 1995: The Netscape Communications IPO floats shares of the company behind Netscape Navigator, the Macintosh’s default browser, on the stock market.

While not totally an Apple-centric moment, this was big news for Mac fans in 1995. The success of Nestcape’s $2.9 billion IPO also sweetened Wall Street on technology companies. Plus, the experience of using Netscape Navigator to surf the internet on a Macintosh is something many older Apple users will still remember fondly.