1/ Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. This was both the most important release of Internet Explorer for the Mac, and the last release. Here are some anecdotes and thoughts from an insider’s perspective. [thread]
A photo of Apple’s personal computer CPU family tree…from left to right: 6502 (Apple II), 68k (Lisa), PowerPC (Power Macintosh), x86 (iMac), and now Apple silicon (MacBook). These are the first production computers from Apple using each of these instruction set architectures.
If you live in the UAE 🇦🇪 (or GCC 🇸🇦🇴🇲🇧🇭🇰🇼🇶🇦) and own any vintage Apple products (sold in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s) that you no longer want…please do let me know. I’m always looking for interesting additions to my collection including computers, printers, etc.
@Late283
@elonmusk
There’s 7 billion of us, it’s ok to work on multiple problems at the same time…that’s kinda how we’ve done it for the past 10,000 years.
The folks at
@Starlink
recently updated the map on their website () to also show performance data at sea. For comparison, I’ve attached our map displaying the average latency data for the Starlink Flat High Performance terminals sold by my team at
I’ve see a lot of comments about the size of the iPhone 12 Pro Max…don’t get me wrong it is quite big…but I figure I’d share these photos to give some historical context of the size of Apple’s handheld devices over the years.
I’m super excited (and relived) to share this short video clip of my
#apple1
restored and fully functional! With great difficulty we managed to restore it without modifying the board or replacing any components! I’ll share a longer video detailing the process soon.
Look what my parents found! My Apple Studio Display from when I was in university. A real gem and such a timeless design despite being 26 years old. I really wish they made a Mac in this color scheme.
Twenty years ago today, I was part of a team from Microsoft that visited Apple’s Infinite Loop campus to review plans for supporting Mac OS X following the release of the Public Beta a week before. We had a great working relationship with the engineers in Cupertino. Good times!
This is what an Apple computer would have looked like on your desk in 1976…if you had a white desk in a white room that is…but you get the idea.
#apple1
(photo by
@danigorgon
)
More than two billion people regularly use smartphones with ARM processors. This revolution began nearly 30 years ago with the first ARM-powered handheld computer. Here’s my story of what it was like to be there on Day 1 when the first Apple Newton PDA went on sale. [thread]
25/ We were all proud of the work we had done, the critical acclaim, and the enthusiasm of Mac users who had traditionally frowned upon Microsoft’s past efforts to build Mac software. However Microsoft did not win the browser wars and the DOJ prevailed. [end of thread]
I’m not big on selfies, but this one I had to share: me and my first Apple computer. Forty years ago (Sept ’82), my dad brought this amazing machine home and I knew right away I wanted to spend my life working with computers…some dreams do come true!
#bleedsixcolors
#AppleEvent
At last! The Macintosh PowerBook 170
@JLPGA_official
special edition, produced in limited numbers to commemorate Apple’s sponsorship of the 1992 Japanese Ladies PGA golf tournament. 💻 🏌🏻♀️🇯🇵
9/ The UI of MacIE 5 was a major departure from any existing MS product, or for that matter any Mac software. Microsoft engineer
@MafVosburgh
hired UK based Nykris to design the iMac inspired “new look” as it was called internally. More details here:
10/ This “new look” had an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s later Aqua interface for Mac OS X. However it was developed in complete secrecy within Microsoft. When we previewed MacIE 5 with the “new look” to Apple in the Summer of 1999, Jobs was not pleased.
We are regularly seeing our
#Starlink
maritime customers getting above 300 Mbps download speeds on their Starlink Flat High Performance terminals in the past few weeks, with bursts above 400 Mbps. Upload speeds are regularly going above 50 Mbps for customers, with bursts above 80
6/ MacIE 5 was built by a team of~40 talented & dedicated people in Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (MacBU) based in San Jose, CA. I joined that team fresh out of university in June ‘99 and helped design some of the features of MacIE 5, and also managed the Mac OS X version.
I made time today to celebrate
#Macintosh
at the
@AAPLcollection
and think about what it’s meant to me for the past 35 years…I can’t wait to see what the next 40 years has in store for us!
13/ Some time after the launch of MacIE 5, Apple acquired SoundJam and it’s development team. It was released by Apple under the name iTunes. Jeff Robbin ended up heading the iPod software team and remains at Apple today as a VP. We cut the feature and deeply regretted it.
I spent last night in the desert testing my new telescope and astrophotography gear. It went better than last time and I was able to capture this image of the Andromeda Galaxy with one hour of total exposure time before it started to get foggy.
The installation team at
@Elcome_Intl
have been frantically installing
@Starlink
for our maritime customers worldwide and I wanted to share some photos of their work! The feedback from our customers has been extremely positive and demand has exceeded all expectations.
This deal is the reason I got hired by
@microsoft
right out of university and spent four amazing years building the default browser for the Mac. We went above & beyond the terms of the agreement to make it the best browser on the platform.
22/ From the horizontal pin-stripped background of the toolbars, to the 24-bit semi translucent buttons and Gaussian-blurred menu backgrounds, none of it was part of Apple’s Aqua UI elements in the Carbon toolbox...yet to the casual observer they were almost indistinguishable.
7/ The standards compliant rendering engine for MacIE 5 was not shared with the Windows version. It was a new, independent code base designed from the ground up by
@t
and
@sfalken
to handle both existing web content and newer standards compliant content.
21/ In his keynote presentation, Jobs implied that the Aqua-like interface of MacIE 5 was a benefit of the Carbon-ization process, but other than the scroll bars and window controls, the rest was generated by the UI code in the app and looked identical in the Mac OS 9 version.
24/ A few days after Macworld Expo ended, I was given a special “Aqua” build of Mac OS X to take to Redmond and demo to Bill Gates along with MacIE 5. It was the first time he had seen Mac OS X and I was one of the few people outside of Apple who had an Aqua build of Mac OS X.
I took the iPhone 14 Pro out to the desert to see if it really can photograph things that are “far out” and there’s certainly an improvement over previous models. This area has a fair amount of light pollution, so this is not an ideal test…but I’m impressed!
5/ Web developers had suffered during the browser wars as the opposing sides, especially MS & Adobe, had pushed proprietary technologies rather than supporting standards. MacIE 5 was the first mainstream browser on any platform that correctly displayed standards compliant HTML.
Has anyone heard this Macintosh startup chime (sound) before? This recording is from a prototype Power Macintosh 9700/G3 (aka “PowerExpress”) that I recently added to my collection.
20/ The folks at Apple, especially my friend Todd Rooney from WWDR, felt bad for my parents and offered them VIP keynote passes. They ended up sitting up front for the keynote (which they had no interest in) while I sat in the back of the room with the rest of my team.
Who else misses
@macworld
Expo? The first one I attended was in 1992 (Boston) and the last in 2003 (San Francisco). The sense of community was amazing, unmatched by any other trade show I’ve attended since.
8/ This rendering engine was code named “Tasman” because our office was located at the intersection of Tasman Rd. and North First Street in San Jose. When marketing wanted to come up with a mascot for this release, we settled on a Tasmanian Devil named ZipIE.
Just picked up my MacBook Pro (M1 Max 32C / 64GB / 4TB) and the line at the Apple Store went all the way around the corner! People are really hyped for these new machines.
After a twenty year search, my collection of vintage Apple computers is finally complete. Now begins the process of restoring this original 1 to operating condition.
#apple1
#1of200
@AriX
I designed the MacIE 5 toolbar customization feature and was surprised when I saw the same implementation a year later in Mac OS X 10.0. Though
@siracusa
described it as “shamelessly reminiscent” of MacIE 5, I’m happy that it lives on in macOS and iOS.
I’ve now got all my vintage Apple laptops and portable devices on display. I consider that aspect of my collection to be complete. I’m still looking for more colors of the iMac! I only have 4 of the 13 colors that were made. 🇦🇪
12/ Media Toolbar was based on code licensed from the developers of SoundJam MP, a popular MP3 player. Unbeknownst to us, Steve Jobs too had his eye on SoundJam and it’s lead developer Jeff Robbin. Jobs insisted we cut this feature claiming it undermined QuickTime.
My Dad texted me these photos after he found an old Macintosh in a closet. Must have been there for nearly 20 years. Another computer I forgot I owned. In fact, I have no recollection of it. He says there’s more where this came from. 😬
@Nedsfeed
@elonmusk
There is gravity in space...it’s called referred to as microgravity because it’s not as strong as what we experience on Earth but it’s there...maybe learn?
The Photos widget on my iPad reminded me of this photo that I took twenty years ago today. Who recognizes where it was taken? Answer in the alt text of the image.
11/ Since no one outside Apple was supposed to know about Aqua at the time, he couldn’t say anything to us about the resemblance; instead he directed his ire at another new feature in MacIE 5 called Media Toolbar. This feature provided support for playing back MP3‘s on websites.
I’d like to congratulate my dear friend (and former roommate)
@OmarShahine
for his well deserved promotion to Corporate VP
@microsoft
for
@SharePoint
,
@onedrive
, etc. It’s a good thing I left MSFT when I did because if I had stayed he would probably be my boss now! 😬
@teslaphotografr
@ishabazz
I had the same experience a few years ago finding a TD Ameritrade account I opened in 1999 to buy 100 shares of $AAPL and eventually forgot about. I still maintain that account, but due to stock splits it contains 11,200 shares now.
2/ Mac IE 5 was first unveiled by Steve Jobs during his Macworld San Francisco keynote address on January 5th, 2000. Here’s a link to a YouTube video of that part of the keynote. Be sure to come back to this thread for the backstory:
I’m still waiting for Apple to take back the first Developer Transition Kit I got fifteen years ago. I wonder how freaky the innards is the new DTK will look.
#WWDC20
19/ My parents were visiting from Dubai that week and we hardly got to spend any time together. They welcomed the new millennium watching the fireworks on TV in my apartment while I worked all night on getting the demo ready.
17/ It was quite an unusual request. Traditionally, a Microsoft exec would come on stage to unveil and demo our products. In this case, Apple’s insisted that Jobs would do the demo himself. Talking points were agreed, but much to our dismay Jobs didn’t mention a single one.
Today I’m migrating from an Intel powered Mac to one powered by Apple silicon. In my time as an Apple user I’ve used computers based on the 6502, Motorola 68K, PowerPC, Intel x86, and now M-series CPUs. It’s been quite a journey, but the Mac’s future has never been brighter.
23/ The response to MacIE 5 at Macworld and by the press was better than we had hoped, probably helped by the fact that it looked great and very similar to some of Apple’s own apps running under the yet-to-be-released Mac OS X.
4/ Apple had to bundle IE with every Mac and obviously wanted it to be great. They were desperate for developers to commit to their fledgling Rhapsody OS (Mac OS X) and to demonstrate that their Carbon APIs were mature enough for complex Mac apps to be “easily” ported.
@tomgara
It’s not just the US…there hasn’t been a global economic disruption of this magnitude in our lifetimes. Perhaps the end result will be better preparedness for future pandemics.
I finally got around to firing up my Newton MessagePad 2000 and looks like the last time I used it was 24 years ago! 🤯
It’s even got my old college cellphone number listed...and yes I’m still using the same passcode on my iPhone today. 🤦🏻♂️
14/ A few weeks before that Macworld keynote, Apple requested us to work on a Carbon version of MacIE 5 for some press events. Our dev lead
@sfalken
, Eric Soldan, and I spent a few long days in Cupertino working with Apple and Metrowerks engineers to get MacIE 5 compiling.
It’s certainly been a busy weekend for the
@AAPLcollection
! It’s going to take us a while to catalog and restore all of these Macs, but what’s especially cool is that they were all sourced locally here in the UAE.
I shared the backstory of my collection of vintage Apple computers with eBay CEO Jamie Iannone this afternoon. He was a gracious host and I got some swag, a good day for a geek like me.
@shanv
3/ This release was important for Microsoft, Apple, and the web community. For Microsoft, IE 5 demonstrated their “commitment” to their lucrative Office for Mac customers, gave them an edge in the browser wars, and was meant to take some of wind out of the DOJ’s anti-trust case.
16/ They were impressed...so impressed that they intended for Jobs to demo it in his keynote a few days later. That didn’t give us much time to get something that buggy and limited in functionality ready for a major public demonstration. This was just before the NYE holidays.
18/ The 3 of us, along with several Apple engineers, worked long hours for the next few days fixing bugs and implementing workarounds in both the MacIE 5 codebase and in OS X to get it in shape for a demo. I was responsible for defining the demo script, testing, and coordination.
15/ At the end of “boot camp” we demoed a rudimentary version of MacIE 5 launching and displaying a locally cached web page to
@pschiller
and members of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Relations team. It worked, but barely.
Our
@Starlink
Maritime customers are transferring an average of 54GB of data per day and rising as they find new uses for a high speed, low latency internet service at sea. About 70% are on the 1TB Mobile Priority plan, 20% on the 5TB plan, and 10% on the new 50GB plan.
The Newton MessagePad 120 video phones in
@forallmankind_
S3E2 were pretty cool! I wonder if anyone’s got some decent screenshots of the MessagePads themselves and their docking stations. Obviously, the Apple of our timeline never made a color handheld in 1992…not until 2007.
1/ Fifty years ago today, my father moved to Dubai. He was a 30 year old engineer who had spent a decade serving in the Indian Navy and then a few years working in Bahrain & KSA. He came to Dubai to start a business with his best friend. 50 years later he’s still here. [thread]
Happy 70th Birthday
@stevewoz
! You are the spark that ignited the personal computer revolution, and you did it with a smile and sense of humor the world could use a lot more of.
43 years ago today, the first Apple II computers were delivered to customers…exactly one week before I was born. Makes me feel young and old at the same time. I was an Apple II user until 1989 when I got my first Mac.
][
I spent the evening out in the desert taking photos of the night sky. Here's the first photo I've edited: a "stack" of six exposures of the Andromeda Galaxy. Each exposure was 10 minutes long and taken with a Sony α7R Ⅳ mirrorless camera using a 600mm f/6.3 telephoto lens.
I’ve just returned from attending the Satellite Show 2023 in Washington DC and all the buzz was about Starlink Maritime and the future of connectivity at sea. My team is averaging 4-5 Starlink installs per day, and we hope to increase that to 7-8 vessels by the end of the month.
19 yrs ago I took this photo of Todd Rooney,
@OmarShahine
, and
@drlorashahine
at a reception held at the Apple Store Palo Alto the night before the store opened. Steve Jobs and Avie Tevanian were handing out t-shirts at the door. Jobs died exactly 10 years later: October 5, 2011.
@Joxley_Official
@elonmusk
It’s fueled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen, which when combined and burned don’t produce any smoke. What you’re seeing is a combination of steam and dust.