Given its position as the company’s earliest arch-nemesis, Apple’s partnership with IBM was massive news when it was announced a couple of years ago. But it wasn’t the first time the two companies had agreed to help one another.
On 30 June 1993, Apple and IBM shipped their first collaborative product: the catchily-named “SNA.ps 5250” emulation software package, which for the first time let Mac users run software available previously only for IBM PCs. It was the first step in allowing Macs and PCs to talk to each other in a way that didn’t trap their respective users in proprietary ecosystem hell.
