Mini-review: David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years

I almost never buy e-books, but I decided to spring for an electronic copy of David Pogue's Apple: The First 50 Years to see if I even wanted to bother with the hardcover. Previously the essential tome on Apple (and especially Mac) history was Owen Linzmeyer's Apple Confidential, still on my shelf in the well-thumbed 2.0 paperback. I was prepared to find this book lightweight on the technical side and I expected that it would concentrate far more on Apple the electronics company than Apple the computer company (after all, the cover's a big flippin' clickwheel). I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. While I'm much less interested in the history of Apple after, say, the Intel transition (because I'm still bitter), over half the book's 540-odd content pages are dedicated to Apple prior to Jobs' 1997 return.

For example, relevant to our recent article, Pogue provides a solid discussion of the Apple-1 (including the little-known Computer Conversor 4000) and a lot of nice period photographs of Jobs and Woz working on it. The Apple III segment is extremely well-written, with even a thermal photo of just how hot that darn thing ran, plus a complex discussion of the Lisa and of course many pages on Jef Raskin and the early Macintosh. Later on, there's a decent section on Copland and its technical aspects that isn't just a rehash of the Wikipedia article, whereas Linzmeyer mostly considers it from the perspective of the events leading to Jobs' return, and Pogue also gives a small but pithy ELI5 on OpenDoc as well. Pogue even has a picture of the iguana iguana powersurgius image embedded in the PowerSurge and Apple Network Server ROMs, and some interesting photographs of early design prototypes of Spartacus, or what would become the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. While Pogue doesn't speak much about the Apple Network Server, our favourite Apple system here at Floodgap (because one of them used to serve Floodgap), he at least namedrops it along with the cancelled Power Mac 9700, though oddly he completely omits any mention of the Workgroup Servers (on the other hand, while Linzmeyer provides the codenames for these systems, neither the 9700 nor "Power Express" appear in the earlier text).

Another notable chapter is "Moonshots" (chapter 21). This is aggravatingly brief, but if you ever wanted to see the Cray that John Sculley bought to design the Aquarius RISC chip, you can see it there (love the purple), along with a nice picture of the Jaguar mockup. Kaleida and Taligent get short perfunctory mentions, but they didn't get a lot of print in Owen's text either, and of course Star Trek gets a decent sidebar. The prototype photographs, in fact, are probably the best reason to buy the book. There's a nice photo of the TIM mockup (a corruption of "Time To Market") which used a Macintosh Portable to run the show, but was in fact the design prototype for the PowerBook 100. On the other hand, Pogue calls Gary Davidian's early 68K emulator Cognac, but I don't think this is correct: the emulator was part of the RLC ("RISC LC") project, and that was codenamed Cognac, the renegade group in Apple led by Jack McHenry. Pogue also doesn't mention McHenry nor the RLC's architecture (originally the doomed Motorola 88100, the "other white meat"), nor that there were other RLC-like systems based on MIPS and ARM, though I don't know if Davidian's emulator actually ever ran on those. For his part Linzmeyer has a single mention of Cognac, which he lists as the codename for the "Power Mac project."

Other landmarks abound. There is an entire chapter on Newton as well, including a picture of the Cadillac prototype (hi Greg!) with its diffuse infrared system for room-wide data transfer, and which the earlier book doesn't even mention. Pogue also includes the Interactive Television Box, albeit briefly, and a longer bit on the PenLite, two oddball projects similarly missing from Owen's text. In fact, the book even talks about the Swatch project, reportedly based on the Sony PTC-300 PDA and effectively a Mac in a Newton-sized form factor, with colour pictures. The Apple clone manufacturers get their own special section; while Linzmeyer has a more detailed chapter "The Clone Quandary," Pogue's "Clones" is pithier and easier to follow. Apple 1990's gadget hounds will like the QuickTake section and pictures of the PowerCD, AppleDesign Powered Speakers (I still use a set with my 7300) and even the Apple combo Mac/fax. There's a nice colour screenshot of eWorld, though Owen's coverage is better, a sidebar on Magic Cap, though I also favour Owen's, and a portion on the Pippin.

When Jobs came back, the book got less interesting for me, and I sort of idly paged my way to the end. I don't think there's a lot there people haven't seen, and I was surprised that the famous picture of the Yosemite G3 acting as an iPhone prototype wasn't in the book. He has so many other great pictures you'd think he could manage that one (there is an interesting picture of the creeptastic Face Lab, though). The last couple chapters of the book are so speculative as to be almost useless, which Linzmeyer to his credit didn't even try to address, knowing that the company's history was far from settled.

Still, having gone over it electronically, I think I want this in my bookshelf too and I'm going to pick up the hardcover after all. I see some names in the back who have been good friends of this blog in the past and I think that in general is a good testimony of its accuracy and relevance (my brief quibbles above notwithstanding), and as far as the writing style goes, Pogue has always been able to spin a good tech yarn. If he ever decides to do a more detailed dive into it, I'd probably pay decent money since he knows the right people to talk to — I don't know if it would sell but if it's on the order of the quality here, he'd get my bread in a minute. Until that happens, check this one out and see if you agree.

6o6 v1.1: Faster 6502-on-6502 virtualization for a C64/Apple II Apple-1 emulator

I'm doing periodic updates on some of my long-term projects, one of them being 6o6, a fully virtualized NMOS 6502 CPU core that runs on a 6502 written in 6502 assembly language. 6o6 implements a completely abstracted memory model and a fully controlled execution environment, but by using the host's ALU and providing a primitive means of instruction fusion it can be faster than a naïve interpreter. This library was something I wrote over two decades earlier for my KIM-1 emulator project for the Commodore 64, and relatively recently I open-sourced and discussed it in detail. It runs on just about any 6502-based system with sufficient memory.

For this update I made some efficiency improvements to addressing modes, trimmed an instruction out of the hot path, provided an option for even more control of the 6502 interrupt flag and implemented a faster lane for direct stores to 6502 zero page (as well as the usual custodial and documentation updates). And, of course, any complex library needs a suite of examples, and of course, any update to a complex library demands new examples to play with too.

So, given that this year is Apple's 50th anniversary (and, as it happens, my own 50th year of existence personally), what better way to show off a 6502-on-6502 virtualization library than with an Apple-1 emulator ... that runs on the Commodore 64 or Apple II? Now yea, verily, this is hardly the first such example and several others have done something of the sort, but I submit that 6o6 makes our take on it here unique, and as a bit of fun we'll discuss the Apple-1's hardware and look at all that prior 8-bit emulator art for comparison (for the C64 and Apple II and even more exotic systems like the SAM Coupé).

Refurb weekend double header: Alpha Micro AM-1000E and AM-1200

I've mentioned previously my great affection for Alpha Microsystems hardware, which are rather obscure computers nowadays, but back in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly sophisticated 68000-based multiuser systems that turned up in all kinds of vertical markets. For example, my first Alpha Micro (an Eagle 300) came from a party supplies store, my Eagle 450 was in a 9-1-1 emergency dispatch centre, and I've seen or heard of them running in medical and veterinary offices, churches, and even funeral homes. In fact, I know for a fact many of these blue-collar computers are still out there quietly doing their jobs in back offices and small businesses to this day. They're probably most technically notable for AMOS, their highly efficient real-memory preemptively multitasked operating system, and the fact they are (as far as I can tell) the only 68K-based machines to effectively run little-endian.

Sadly my beloved Eagle 300 appears to have suffered a system board fault and will not complete the power-on sequence, so the ColdFire-based Eagle 450 has temporarily taken over server duties for it on ampm.floodgap.com. Fortunately I have a source identified for E300 replacement hardware and one or both of these systems might turn up in a future article. Until then, in our continuing household computer inventory, we have two, count 'em, two additional and earlier Alpha Micro machines we need to disposition as well: a 1982 Alpha Micro 1000 (specifically the AM-1000E, originally sold with a 30MB hard disk) and its bigger brother, a 1987 Alpha Micro 1200 (as a AM-1200XP, with additional serial ports and a 70MB disk).

The AM-1000 family were probably the most widespread Alpha Micros, at least to the extent any Alpha Micro ever was widespread, and their flexible form factor meant I knew nearly as many people who used them as desktop workstations as who used them as office servers. Neither one is booting, and if they're junk they're too big together to stay in the house. If we can get them back into AMOS, we'll find them something to do. If we can't, we'll recover the space and send them to storage. In this Refurb Weekend we'll tear them apart, find some surprises, dig a couple more out from storage for comparison, and even throw one of their hard disks into the freezer and actually get data off it ...

... but first, a little history, and then a funny story that should be past the statute of limitations about how I broke into the church database as a teenager. And, yeah, it involves an Alpha Micro.

Hedley Davis has died

A more obscure Commodore employee (where he apparently met his wife), but still quite influential during the Amiga era. Along with more pedestrian units such as the Amiga 3000 and the monochrome Amiga 2024 monitor, my favourite device he worked on was the 1987 prototype SX-500. That's exactly what it sounds like: an Amiga 500 crammed into a portable SX-64 case, even keeping the same 5" colour screen and basic keyboard layout. The picture here is a bad scan of a bad film picture I took at VCF 5.0 and I need to figure out where those original photos went. Dale Luck has this unit and hopefully it still works, but neither Thomas Rattigan nor Irving Gould would have ever released an adventurous product like this, and perhaps it was just as well. Later he worked on the Xbox and, my favourite console of its generation, the Xbox 360 (PowerPC for the win), on which my wife is slowly learning to play Portal and getting abused by GLaDOS on a regular basis, and in retirement taught at the University of Delaware. He passed away last week at the age of 68. Rest in peace.

Hideki Sato has died

Remember when Sega made consoles? Hideki Sato remembered, because he was involved in or designed all of them — from the 1982 SG-1000 under Sega Enterprises Ltd. president Hayao Nakayama, later reworked as the SC-3000 home computer, to of course the extremely popular Mega Drive/Genesis and the technologically overwrought Saturn, to the flawed but ahead-of-its-time 1999 Dreamcast, the very last console the company released to date and one of my favourite machines. Joining Sega in 1971, he later became acting president from 2001 to 2003, and finally retired from Sega in 2008. I can think of no better summation of his career than his own, a detailed retrospective on each machine translated from the Japanese. He passed away this weekend at the age of 77 (X.com link). Rest in peace.

The Scriptovision Super Micro Script video titler is almost a home computer

Canadians, rejoice! Not only do you have curling, the Big Turk and Tim Hortons (and, when I was in BC last, Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar), you also have a number of interesting indigenous computers like the underappreciated Micro Computer Machines MCM/70 portable, the Tarot Electronics MIMIC (not to be confused with the more notorious Spartan Mimic), the Dynalogic Hyperion and of course the NABU Personal Computer. And, like your neighbours to the south, you have terminals too, most notably the Telidon and Alextel.

Terminals, however, are in many cases based on general purpose architectures, just lashed to restrictive firmware — a good example would be the DEC VT220 which is controlled by our old friend the Intel 8051 — and game consoles likewise fall naturally in this category. Plus, there's a third group of computer-adjacent devices that qualify as well: the video titlers.

Video titlers (also known as character generators) are exactly what they sound like: devices that stamp bitmap data, usually text, on top of a video signal, like this typical example from a 1992 demo video for the consumer-oriented Videonics Video Titler. Distinct from what you might do as part of an editing system, many of these machines operate in real-time and over live video input such as the classic Chyron systems. Today's titlers are usually add-on boards controlled by a standard desktop computer, but for much of their existence they came as standalone devices with their own CPUs and video hardware, and that means they can be potentially hardware-hacked like anything else.

Well, Canada, you have your own indigenous video titlers as well, and here's one designed and manufactured in beautiful Montréal: the Scriptovision Super Micro Script, circa 1985.

The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32x16 small or 10x4 large character layer with 64x32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you'll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture.

More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own — though we'll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there's also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we're done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We'll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly ... after we fix it first.

Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMs

Grateful acknowledgement made to the several former Apple employees who materially contributed to this entry. This article wouldn't have been possible without you!

Here's why I need to do inventory more often.

This is an Apple prototype ROM I am ashamed to admit I found in my own box of junk from various Apple Network Server parts someone at Apple Austin sent me in 2003. The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino. Best known for being about the size of a generous dorm fridge and officially only running AIX 4.1, IBM's proprietary Unix for Power ISA, its complicated history is a microcosm of some of Apple's strangest days during the mid-1990s. At $10,000+ a pop (in 2026 dollars over $20,700), not counting the AIX license, they sold poorly and were among the first products on the chopping block when Steve Jobs returned in 1997.

stockholm, my own Apple Network Server 500, was a castoff I got in 1998 — practically new — when the University bookstore's vendor wouldn't support the hardware and it got surplused. It was the first Unix server I ever owned personally, over the years I ended up installing nearly every available upgrade, and it ran Floodgap.com just about nonstop until I replaced it with a POWER6 in 2012 (for which it still functions as an emergency reserve). Plus, as the University was still running RS/6000 systems back then, I had ready access to tons of AIX software which the ANS ran flawlessly. It remains one of the jewels of my collection.

So when the mythical ANS MacOS ROM finally surfaced, I was very interested. There had always been interest in getting the ANS to run MacOS back in the day (I remember wasting an afternoon trying with a Mac OS 8 CD) and it was a poorly-kept secret that at various points in its development it could, given its hardware basis as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500. Apple itself perceived this interest, even demonstrating it with Mac OS prior to its release, and leading then-CTO Ellen Hancock to later announce that the ANS would get ROM upgrades to allow it to run both regular Mac OS and, in a shock to the industry, Windows NT. This would have made the ANS the first and only Apple machine ever sold to support it.

Well, guess what. This is that pre-production ROM Apple originally used to demonstrate Mac OS, and another individual has stepped up with the NT ROMs which are also now in my possession. However, at that time it wasn't clear what the prototype ROM stick was — just a whole bunch of flash chips on a Power Mac ROM DIMM which my Apple contacts tell me was used to develop many other machines at the time — and there was no way I was sticking it into my beloved production 500. But we have a solution for that. Network Servers came in three sizes: the rackmount ANS 300 ("Deep Dish") which was never released except for a small number of prototypes, the baseline ANS 500 ("Shiner LE"), and the highest tier ANS 700 ("Shiner HE") which added more drive bays and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

Which brings us to this machine.

Meet holmstock, my Network Server 700, and the second ANS in my collection (the third is my non-functional Shiner ESB prototype). This was a ship of Theseus that my friend CB and I assembled out of two partially working but rather thrashed 700s we got for "come and get them" in August 2003. It served as stockholm's body double for a number of years until stockholm was retired and holmstock went into cold storage as a holding bay for spare parts. This makes it the perfect system to try a dodgy ROM in.

I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refurb Weekend) and show the process.