This Day in Apple History

Steve Jobs had the marketing savvy but Steve Wozniak had the technical skills. Interested in technology at an early age Woz, as Steve Wozniak is popularly known, would go on to design the Apple I, the Apple II and a very slick, and very popular disk drive. Woz's…

When Apple first released iTunes at the 2001 MacWorld San Francisco people saw the program as both a useful addition to the Mac software library and an admission that Apple felt it had missed the boat on the music swapping revolution.When the iPod came out later in 2001…

Apple has overlooked a lot of potential hits over the years but one of the biggest mistakes was HyperCard. It was a new way of managing information that relied on a note card metaphor. Users could enter information on the virtual note card and link pieces of the…

Gather a herd of Mac lovers in a centralized location, get Steve Jobs to do the keynote and you have a recipe for a lot of "boos," at least if the presentation also includes an appearance by Bill Gates on a giant video screen.Bill Gates showed up on…

Looking at the list of Apple Presidents over the years, you'll note quite a bit of change. Starting with Michael Scott the position then went to Mike Markkula. Markkula was succeeded by John Scully who was followed by Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio. Finally, Steve Jobs returned and stabilized the…

When Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, ChiatDay soon followed. Obviously, feeling the move was a mistake Steve took out an ad saying that Apple had made a huge blunder by axing ChiatDay.In full control of Apple for the first time Steve quickly switched the advertising account back…

What do John Lennon, Picasso, Albert Einstein, Muhammad Ali and Ted Turner all have in common? They were all featured as people who, ungrammatically, "Thought Different" in Apple first marketing campaign post Steve Jobs return.Te campaign attempted to make the Mac the computer of choice for those who…

Apple was counting on the Newton to replace the Mac as the company's primary source of income. Then President John Sculley had thrown all his weight behind the project and the engineers who worked on the device read like a cast of Apple All-Stars.The Newton was nothing if…

The debate about the one button mouse raged for years. Proponents claimed that the one button mouse was easier for novices to use and cited early Apple research to back up their claims. Those that disagreed said the single button mouse was too limited and in the days of widespread…

At one time MacWorld Boston was the summer edition of MacWorld. New product introductions, vendor booths, the whole Apple MacWorld feel but on the East Coast and in the middle of summer.Alas, a Boston MacWorld is but a fond memory for Bostonians, the annual gathering was first moved…

The Mac's roots are often traced to Xerox PARC. The deepest roots undoubtably tap into the desktop metaphor Apple employees first saw on at the PARC demonstration but the biggest influence on the Mac was the Lisa.The Lisa had a lot of problems, everything from the price to…

Trip Hawkins (of Electronic Arts fame) and Steve Jobs were looking for a machine that would be better than the Apple II. They came up with a rather boring and conventional machine that was tagetted to ship in 1981.The machine was supposed to sell for two thousand dollars,…

In the current computing climate the notion that you can get video from a source onto you computer is a given. That wasn't always the case. Apple pioneered the easy video import video market with their line of AV computers. The line consisted of the Mac 660AV and the 840…

Vannevar Bush was a prescient guy, and an individual whose influence on computers was vast but remains underrated. Bush had this to say about computers:" Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to…

When the first iBook was introduced it was clearly aimed at consumers, everything from the funky shape to the impossible to miss colors screamed that this was not a laptop aimed at the professional. The intervening years saw the looks transform from play doh flouresccent to a subdued…