Memories of a 90′s Apple fanboy
I’m an Apple fanboy, I’ll admit it. But in my wildest dreams I never thought I’d see the day where you had to wait in line just to get into an Apple store. It seems like Apple can do no wrong these days, but a lot of people don’t know or don’t remember what being an Apple fan in the 1990s was like. Well, let me share 5 stories from the days of Simpsons, Sienfield, and Gil Amelio.
Speaking of Seinfeld, Jerry himself had one of these in his TV show apartment in the mid to late 90s. If he actually purchased one, which was approximately the price of a Hyundai Excel, it would have been delivered via limo and set up by a guy wearing a tux. At least, that was what we read in MacAddict.
To be fair, it was a “before it’s time” concept and sleek design. But the price tag was way out of reach – even for Apple products.
“Ahead of it’s time” is a running theme here. Long before Microsoft bought it’s way into the video game market with the x-box… Apple tried with a box of their own. They came out with a video game system called the Pippin, which like most things Apple tried to do in the 90s was expensive, cumbersome, and failed to gain traction.
Back in the mid-90s Apple faced what Microsoft faces now – an aging and bloated operating system. Mac OS 7, or System 7 as it were – was to be succeeded with a newly rebuild and optimized Mac OS for version 8 called Copland, named after composer Aaron Copland.
Over the years, delay after delay piled up and we were simply teased with demo disks, magazine articles, and the occasional Batman movie cameo. In the meanwhile, Microsoft released Windows 95 which blew the aging System 7 away.
Apple scrapped Copland and released a Mac OS 8 based on updated System 7 code. A new Mac OS wasn’t released until the 2000s when Mac OS X came out. Copland would have been sweet music to many Mac user’s ears if it was ever allowed to play.
Many people know the Apple Newton, a touch screen PDA which handwriting recognition. It was parodied for it’s iffy recognition – but it was arguably a solid idea. The Newton OS found itself on this nifty device called the eMate. At a lower price-point, it was sort of like a netbook before netbooks… but it never really caught on.
Taco Bell had a promotion where you could win one of these, but all I ever won from them was the free gas.
The QuickTake was an early digital camera Apple released around 1994. As you’d expect it was expensive and never really caught on. The QUICK part of the name referred to QuickTime which as you know is Apple multimedia technology that we still get to install and run updates for today.
Besides being a fore-runner in digital cameras in general it did do some neat tricks. For example, part of the QuickTime technology being released at the time included QuickTime VR which allowed for panoramic 360-degree photography.
Honorable Mention: HyperCard
HyperCard was a program on early Macs that allowed you to essentially drag-and-drop create programs by laying out objects on cards. The “stacks” where hyper-linked to each other. Hyper links then became popular elsewhere, such as on the slightly more popular world wide web. Yes the not-so-subtle implication there is that HyperCard helped popularize hypertext protocol and the web as we know it today. But hey, I’m just a fanboy.



















