Apple History

Larry Tesler talks about Steve Jobs’ trips to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, including the one where Jobs eyed the company’s graphical user interface prototype — which ended up on Mac OS. Introducer: Larry Tesler, I believe you took Steve on a tour of Xerox PARC and showed him some technology that became important. I wonder if you could tell …

Apple is now (2017) the most valuable company in the world. But 20 years ago it looked like the company was about to completely implode. Nevertheless Apple was celebrating it’s anniversary. It had been twenty years since Apple had officially incorporated, and it marked the occasion with the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, or TAM. The machine was a technological showcase of the day, …

In this vintage nine-minute video, cofounders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak looked back at some of it, dating all the way back to 1976’s Apple I.   The speaker at the start of the video is Paul Terrell, who founded one of the world’s first computer stores, the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California, in 1975. The next year, he …

Some interesting UI design history from Jack Wellborn at Worms and Viruses: While watching the video, I couldn’t help but notice two snippets at the 7:36 mark from 1982 about scroll bars. First, an Apple engineer shows how scrolling works in the Lisa, followed immediately by a similar demo from Xerox. This juxtaposition immediately struck me as interesting because Apple …

Steve Jobs had assembled a dream team of genius programmers and engineers, whom he urged like a cult leader with flattery and verbal attacks to continually new heights. But the ever-changing demands of Jobs delayed the Mac project, so that the Apple co-founder finally lost his bet against the Lisa team. It was not until the 24th of January 1984, that the Mac was finally ready.