The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
Dan Vincent (via Hacker News): The Apple II and Commodore 64 with their 6502 and 6510 CPUs clocked at 1 MHz could trade blows with Z80 powered computers running at three times the clock speed. And the...
View ArticleThe End of Finale
Greg Dell’Era (via Ric Ford): 35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, a groundbreaking and user-centered approach to notation software. For over four...
View ArticleSnow Leopard at 15
Joe Rossignol: Today marks the 15th anniversary of Apple releasing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which became available to purchase for $29 on August 28, 2009.After advertising Mac OS X Leopard as having...
View ArticleAn Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers
Roderick E.J.H. Gadellaa (Hacker News): As noted elsewhere, a developer-lamented but regulator-overlooked aspect of Apple’s monopoly on iOS browser engines has been the prevalence of show-stopping...
View ArticleScripting News at 30
Dave Winer: Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog.I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started because I needed content to...
View ArticleA Brief History of Defragging
Howard Oakley: All storage media, including memory, SSDs and rotating hard disks, can develop fragmentation, but most serious attention has been paid to the problem on hard disks. This is because of...
View ArticleNetscape at 30
Jamie Zawinski: According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different...
View ArticleJohn Geleynse Retires From Apple
John Geleynse: Being a part of Apple for 25 years has been the privilege and experience of a lifetime. […] We released the platforms and tools that helped bring incredible products to life. We inspired...
View ArticleThomas Kurtz, RIP
Valley News (Hacker News): Tom is well known as the co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language in 1964. A version of BASIC still exists today. John Kemeny and Tom had already...
View ArticleUnreal on Internet Archive
Timothy Geigner: But it just doesn’t have to be like this. Companies could be willing to give up their iron-fisted control over their IP for these older games they aren’t willing to support or preserve...
View ArticleApple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires
John Gruber (Mastodon) has gone through the list of Apple acquisitions: The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users...
View ArticleMicrosoft at 50
Steven Levy: [Nadella] tells a story from a few years ago, when a group of tech analysts came from China to take the measure of Silicon Valley. They attended all the key developer’s conferences:...
View ArticleDonald Bitzer, RIP
Dag Spicer (via Hacker News): Bitzer studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), obtaining a PhD in 1960. Following graduation, he joined the UIUC faculty,...
View ArticleScott Knaster Occasionally Misses Expectations
Scott Knaster: I worked in Silicon Valley for many years with brilliant people at amazing companies that changed the world. A lot of my stories are about those people and places. But some of them are...
View ArticleThe HFS Pixel
Encyclopedia Macintosh (p. 65, via Alex Rosenberg, rezmason): HFS and MFS disks can be distinguished by the presence or absence of the HFS pixel. You can tell if a drive or disk is formatted as HFS or...
View Article25 Years of the Dock and Aqua
James Thomson (Mastodon, Hacker News): On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo. […] The version he showed was quite...
View ArticleTony Fadell Wanted Apple to Buy Sonos
John Gruber: I asked Tony Fadell and he confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the very earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to debut with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like...
View ArticleA Few Words About Indie App Business
Charlie Monroe: The first few apps I released had almost no downloads, no users and there was no income from them. They are long forgotten by the world and even by me. Be prepared to have some...
View ArticleGoogle Maps at 20
James Killick (via Adam Chandler): In 2018 Bill [Kilday] wrote a book about their travails. It is the definitive, insider story of Google Maps. The book is called “Never Lost Again” and I can’t...
View ArticleProVUE at the First Macworld Expo
Jim Rea: Forty years ago today the doors opened for the very first MacWorld Expo in the Brooks Hall basement in San Francisco. For most of you this event probably seems like ancient history, somewhere...
View ArticleAltair Basic Source Code
Bill Gates (via Slashdot): It feels like just yesterday that Paul and I were hunched over the PDP-10 in Harvard’s computer lab, writing the code that would become the first product of our new company....
View ArticleObituary for Cyc
Yuxi Liu (via Hacker News): The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat’s 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival...
View ArticleGit at 20
Taylor Blau: Exactly twenty years ago, on April 7, 2005, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit to a new version control system called Git. Torvalds famously wrote Git in just 10 days after Linux...
View ArticleInvestigating MacPaint’s Source Code
Jeffrey Starr (via Stephen Hackett): One of two launch applications for the Apple Macintosh in 1984, MacPaint is emblematic of the Macintosh’s early quirky revolutionary branding, focus on ease of use,...
View ArticleCareless People
Cory Doctorow (Hacker News, Amazon): I never would have read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all memoir about her years running global policy for Facebook, but then Meta’s lawyer tried to...
View ArticleThe Subjective Charms of Objective-C
Gabriel Nicholas: To argue that Objective-C resembles a metaphysically divine language, or even a good language, is like saying Shakespeare is best appreciated in pig latin. Objective-C is, at best,...
View ArticleRevisiting ZFS for Mac
Hacker News is highlighting Adam Leventhal’s 2016 post (2016 comments) about Apple’s Leopard-era support for ZFS: A few weeks before WWDC 2007 nerds like me started to lose their minds: Apple really...
View ArticleYouTube at 20
Alex Weprin: Twenty years ago today, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a 19 second video titled “Me at the zoo” to the platform. As anyone who follows YouTube knows, it was the first video hosted...
View ArticleRetrospective on Reverse-Engineering a Tiger Bug
Rosyna Keller (Mastodon, tweet): At the time, Apple only allowlisted specific menu extras by class name (checked in -[SUISStartupObject _canLoadClass:]). Any attempt to load a menu extra that...
View ArticleMac Themes Garden
Damien Erambert (via Hacker News): Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.[…]What I...
View ArticleThe Macintosh Repository
Davo: The Macintosh Repository is a community driven effort to preserve old software from the classic Mac OS era.It has ~18k entries of software images from floppys & cds, scans, fonts, icons and...
View ArticleRust at 10
Graydon Hoare (Slashdot): Rust turns 10 today, or at least it’s been 10 years since the 1.0 release. In this decade (and the near-decade of development before!) it has undergone growth and change I can...
View ArticleApple in China
Issie Lapowsky (Amazon, Reddit, John Gruber): But Cook was in Beijing that day to do the opposite: to impress upon President Xi Jinping’s government that Apple was so committed to China that it planned...
View ArticleBill Atkinson, RIP
Facebook (Hacker News): We regret to write that our beloved husband, father, and stepfather Bill Atkinson passed away on the night of Thursday, June 5th, 2025, due to pancreatic cancer. He was at home...
View ArticleChrome Doesn’t Support JPEG XL
Jim Bankoski (2022): Helping the web to evolve is challenging, and it requires us to make difficult choices. We’ve also heard from our browser and device partners that every additional format adds...
View ArticlePaula Bozinovich, RIP
Brian Croll, quoted by John Gruber: Paula was an employee who you are not going to see profiled in any books on the history of Apple or Steve Jobs. She worked closely with the ops team to ensure CDs...
View ArticleFakespot Shuts Down
Bryson Thill (via Hacker News): Fakespot’s technology revealed some eye-opening statistics. About 43% of the best-selling Amazon products had reviews that were unreliable or fabricated, according to a...
View ArticleAlmost Fired for Color Picker Poetry
John Calhoun: It was frankly a thing I liked about working for Apple in those days. The engineers were the one’s driving the ship. As I said, I wrote an HSV picker because it was, I thought, a more...
View ArticleLisaGUI
Andrew Yaros (via Marcus Mendes, Hacker News): LisaGUI is a “web OS” - a website that mimics the look, feel, and functionality of an operating system. More bluntly, it’s a giant JavaScript program...
View ArticleA History of Mac Settings
Marcin Wichary: As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I...
View ArticleApple: The First 50 Years (Forthcoming)
David Pogue (tweet): In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again...
View ArticleWoz’s Ongoing YouTube Lawsuit
CBS (via John Gruber): Steve Wozniak, who helped introduce new technologies by inventing the earliest Apple computers, is sounding the alarm about one of the great threats of this new Information Age:...
View ArticleJavaScript Runtimes of the Last Decade
Whatever, Jamie (via Hacker News): This last decade has seen an inundation of new JavaScript runtimes (and engines in equal measure), enabling us to run JavaScript in all manner of contexts with...
View ArticleThe Steve Ballmer Interview
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal: We sit down with Steve Ballmer, the legendary former Microsoft CEO and owner of the LA Clippers, for an epic conversation covering his 34 years at Microsoft. Steve...
View ArticleVintage Macintosh Programming Book Library
VintageApple: Nick R. was generous enough to send me his entire vintage Mac programming library to be destructively scanned and shared with the community. We’ve added a few of our own for a pretty huge...
View ArticleSizes of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
Alexander Gromnitsky (via Hacker News): At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes...
View ArticleThe Tim Cook Era
Jason Snell: But here we are, living in an era where Cook has now served as Apple CEO longer than Jobs did. The Apple of 2025 is quite different from the company Cook took control of back in 2011....
View ArticlemacOS Icon History
BasicAppleGuy: With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle...
View ArticleAbstract App Icons Within Icons
Matthew Cassinelli: The App Store icon is made up of three app icons supporting each other (like apps on the App Store do). Just like the Shortcuts is two app icons, connected in the middle (like...
View ArticleDavid Lerner, RIP
Sam Roberts: David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple...
View Article
![Personal Investments • Re: 401k investments [which to choose?]](http://i.imgur.com/wA51OIw.png)
