What’s a Mac app that was included on the very first Macintosh back in 1984 – long before the internet – and still exists on today’s machines, albeit with a different name?
Designer and author Marcin Wichery has not only traced the first 20 years of development of that app, but has also included emulators that let you experience it for yourself …
The app in question: Control Panel, more recently renamed as Settings.
That might not sound like the most fascinating of apps to track across time, but Wichery disagrees.
Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
He provides emulators that allow you to play with many of the Mac generations yourself. There are easter eggs hidden in these!
Wichery also links to relevant Apple stories along the way, like the time Steve Jobs loudly yelled at Andy Hertzfeld to “shut up!” during a presentation to Bill Gates.
We showed Gates how the Macintosh mouse cursor moved smoothly, in a flicker-free fashion.
“What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?”, he asked. Many current personal computers had special hardware to draw small bitmaps called “sprites”, and he thought we might be doing something similar.
Of course, the Macintosh didn’t use any special hardware at all. It did everything in software, which was more flexible anyway, during the vertical blanking interval to eliminate the possibility of flicker. In fact, Burrell and I had recently gotten a mouse to run smoothly on an Apple II, using a similar technique (see Apple II Mouse Card).
“We don’t have any special hardware for it!” I blurted out, probably with a proud sneer in my voice. “In fact…” I was about to mention that we got it running on an Apple II, which had one tenth the processing horsepower of a Macintosh, when Steve guessed what I was about to say.
“Shut up!”, he yelled as loud as he could, looking directly at me.
CNET’s Jeff Carlson said he ended up spending hours at the site.
I never thought I’d be riveted by a history of the Macintosh Control Panel, but an article about its design evolution has brought out the Apple history nerd in me. And I especially didn’t expect to find myself absorbed for hours in the way it’s presented.
Try it for yourself at Frame of Preference.
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Photo: Maxime Bober (expanded in Photoshop AI)/CC2.0
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