Apple celebrates 30 years

On April 1st, 1976, began a computer company like no other. It was the dawn of Apple. I was in the fourth grade on December 25, 1981, when my family got its first computer, an Apple II+. That was long before the Macintosh—even before the Apple //e. You’ll notice the sample screen shot of Apple DOS 3.3, the first operating system I ever used. The screen shot is a little misleading. The user in the screen shot entered “catalog” to get a directory listing, but you’ll note that the shorter “cat” did the same thing.

Wired Magazine has a fun little round up and screenshots of various Apple operating systems over the past 30 years. They’re missing an important but never-quite mainstream operating system that Apple first released in 1988 called A/UX, or Apple Unix. Wikipedia has an interesting but brief entry describing it here.

If you wanted to run Unix on your Mac instead of System 7 or whatever, you could. But like most proprietary Unixes, it was godawful expensive. I seem to recall the operating system alone being in the $1,000-$1,500 range. Anyway, it’s important to note because most people think that Apple only recently got into the Unix business with their acquisition of NeXT in 1997, which led to the release of Mac OS X 10.0 a few years later. But in reality, Apple released it’s first Unix-based operating system much, much earlier. A/UX was a System V (AT&T/Bell Labs) variant, and Mac OS X is a BSD (Berkeley) variant (in case you were wondering).

This site has a lot of great history and data on the original Apple II line. You can even find emulators out on web for PC and Mac if you want to get in touch with old skool geekery. I still remember that the Apple II+ had a 1MHz 6502 CPU. I taught myself AppleSoft BASIC on that thing, and later, assembly language machine code.

My history with Apple goes way back, and it’s good to see them doing so well again after the ups and downs of the 1990s. In 1981 when we got our first Apple, Steve Jobs was very much a part of the company, and it was really his leadership at that time that gave Apple a distinctive name and brand. Even back then, Apple was making cool computers like the //c, which I think was designed by frog design. Yes, indeed, it was.

I frequent this coffee shop near where I live, and it’s laptop heaven in there. Everybody goes there with a laptop, and it’s usually about 90% Apple laptops. That’s great to see because it’s mostly college-age students. So the kids are picking up the Mac habit.

Congrats on 30 years, Apple Computer!

Tags: 30th · a-ux · anniversary · apple · apple computer · frog design · ii+ · mac os x · steve jobs