Elegy for the Native Mac App
Keaton Brandt (Reddit): To the old-school Mac community, installing some shitty cross-platform Java app on their pristine Macbook was an admission of defeat. Even web apps were avoided whenever...
View ArticleAdobe at 40
Harry McCracken (2022, via Hacker News): It’s a milestone that only a few of today’s highest-profile tech companies—such as Apple and Microsoft—have reached. And much of Adobe’s long history is...
View ArticleEthernet at 50
Iljitsch Van Beijnum (via Dave Nanian): But in the end it was Ethernet that won the battle for LAN standardization through a combination of standards body politics and a clever, minimalist—and thus...
View ArticleThe App Store Turns 15
Phil Schiller: Happy 15th Birthday App Store 🎂 Ken Case (Mastodon, podcast): Fifteen years ago today, on Thursday, July 10, 2008, Apple launched the iPhone App Store. And we launched the first app we...
View ArticleThe Disappearance of Classic Video Games
Kelsey Lewin (via Hacker News): The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic...
View ArticleeWorld Promotional Mailer
Stephen Hackett: An anonymous 512 Pixels reader recently mailed me something amazing — a promotional mailer for eWorld, dating back to 1994. In the package was a set of 3.5-inch eWorld 1.0 installer...
View ArticleMid-1990s Sega Document Leak
Kevin Purdy (Hacker News): Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something...
View ArticleEdward Fredkin, RIP
Alex Williams: An autodidact who left college after a year, he nonetheless became a full professor of computer science at M.I.T. at 34. He later taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and...
View ArticleTextual Paint
Isaiah Odhner (via Rhet Turnbull): MS Paint in your terminal.This is a TUI (Text User Interface) image editor, inspired by MS Paint, built with Textual.[…]Many file formats are supported, including...
View ArticleLisa’s Secret Burial
The Verge (video): Sabotage, hired goons, and a landfill in Utah: this is a story about the life, death, and afterlife of Apple’s most pioneering flop, the Lisa computer. How it inspired generations of...
View ArticleBram Moolenaar, RIP
Alex: In the early 90s, programmer Bram Moolenaar was frustrated with limitations of the vi text editor.So he created his own open source fork called Vim!Vim improved on vi with new features like...
View ArticleThe iMac at 25
Jason Snell (MacRumors, Hacker News): Essentially, Jobs went back to his playbook for the original “computer for the rest of us,” the Mac, to sell simplicity. The Mac’s mouse-driven graphical interface...
View ArticleFake Steve Jobs and Letters from BILL G
Matt Sephton: On 9th August 2006, “Fake Steve (Jobs)” started blogging at The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. The blog featured scathing criticism of Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large, a pinch...
View ArticleJohn Warnock, RIP
Adobe (via Reuters, Hacker News): Dr. Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. Charles Geschke after meeting as colleagues at Xerox. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, groundbreaking technology...
View ArticleApple Discontinues iTunes Movie Trailers App
Joe Rossignol: Apple today updated its iTunes Movie Trailers app for the iPhone with a notice that the Apple TV app is the new home of movie and TV show trailers. It is no longer possible to use the...
View ArticleThe macOS App Icon Book
Michael Flarup: The macOS App Icon Book is a beautiful artbook dedicated to preserving the craft of app icon design. It’s a vibrant journey through the art of desktop app iconography for macOS. The...
View ArticleForty Years of GNU and the Free Software Movement
Free Software Foundation (via Hacker News): On September 27, 1983, a computer scientist named Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop a free software Unix-like operating system called GNU, for...
View ArticleGoogle at 25
Google (via Hacker News): Twenty-five years ago we launched Google Search to help you find answers to questions big and small. As we celebrate our birthday, here’s a look back at how our products have...
View ArticleThe History of Cover Flow
Andrew Coulter Enright (in 2005): I thought [the iChat AV] implementation would work perfectly if applied to my Visual Browsing problem.Like paper cards flipping within a bar jukebox, I pictured each...
View ArticleMicrosoft Finalizes Activision Blizzard Acquisition
Dan Milmo (Hacker News, MacRumors): Microsoft has completed its $69bn (£57bn) deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the maker of games including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, after the UK’s...
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