10 years ago today, Apple released the Mac OS X Public Beta. It was the general public’s first chance to experience the new OS and the commercial debut of the software (a previous release, confusingly named “OS X Server,” was based on a pre-OS X prototype called Rhapsody).

The Public Beta sold for $29.95, and Apple offered that amount off the purchase of OS X 10.0 for those who bought the Beta.

I’ve always been a fan of OS X, and this anniversary got me wondering how development on this very innovative OS started. After some digging, I wrote a brief history on the origins of OS X for Macworld. I was fortunate to have the help of Avie Tevanian, former VP of Software Engineering at Apple (1997-2006), as a reference to help me get some points straight.

While I was at it, I also wrote a shorter piece about some of the differences between the Public Beta and Snow Leopard (the most recent version of OS X).

What are your thoughts on OS X? Do you use it? Did you use it? Let us know in the comments.

An image like this should be familiar to early Macintosh users, since the first Macs only supported 1-bit color. That is, two colors total: each pixel could be black or white — on or off — and nothing in between. The image above uses only black and white and a dithering effect to trick your brain into perceiving shades of grey. Somehow, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Update: Hover over the image to see 1-bit Mona Lisa rendered with Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion, which is another algorithm for converting color images to black and white.

Ten years ago this month, Apple shipped the Power Mac G4 Cube, a unique computer that fared poorly in the marketplace but captured the imaginations of many computer enthusiasts. Naturally, I warmed up my dexterous typing fingers and wrote something about this anniversary. Well, two somethings, in fact, and they’re both up on Macworld.com today.

The first, “The Cube at 10: Why Apple’s Eye-Catching Desktop Flopped,” is an exploration of reasons why the Cube fared so poorly sales-wise.

The second, “Apple’s Cube Was Ahead of Its Time,” compares and contrasts the G4 Cube and the Mac Mini, exploring in particular why the Mini was successful when the Cube was not.

I’d like to thank my editor at Macworld, Philip Michaels, who always does an excellent job of distilling my work into crystal clear prose.

I Wanted One

On a personal note, when Apple announced the G4 Cube in 2000, I thought it was amazing and I immediately wanted one. Although I’d traditionally been a PC-clone user, I had been following Apple news closely since the return of Steve Jobs in 1996.

Of course, I couldn’t afford a Cube, so I simply pined away and read about others’ Cube experiences online. I remember the “cracks” issue being a fiasco in the news after the Cube’s release (one my articles discusses that issue), which seemed embarrassing for Apple.

Overall, I’m glad I didn’t buy one, because they were very expensive. I’m lucky I only had a credit card with a $200 limit (Amazingly low, isn’t it? That was just before banks started throwing high-APR credit at everyone and their brother. Now I can’t get them to stop raising my limit.) I still don’t own a Cube, so if anyone wants to donate one to the cause, I’d be willing to listen.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the articles. Feel free to share your G4 Cube memories below.

Hot on the heels of my recent post about the “Mac Pedestal” in which I suggested building shelves with compact Mac supports, VC&G Reader Charles Mangin informed me that he did just such a thing and wrote about it on his blog in 2007.

You can see the result above. Nice work, Charles. With all the Macs I have in my garage, maybe I should try this myself and redefine the meaning of “Mac Shelf.”

Long-time VC&G reader Mike Melanson recently emailed me this photo of an interesting encounter he had with a stack of retired Apple Macintoshes. He writes:

Upon visiting my alma mater last week (University of Colorado @ Boulder), I snapped this picture of a stack of vintage PowerMacs topped with an old iMac that was rotating through some generic campus announcements.

Not a bad use for five Power Macs, I’d say. I could imagine an interesting table with Power Macs for its legs — or a bookshelf supported only by Mac Pluses at the ends. Any other ideas?

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Have you seen any vintage computers in the wild recently?
If so, snap a photo and send it in.

Twenty-five years ago this spring, Apple released the LaserWriter, its first laser printer. Few today remember that Apple’s hefty printing machine had as much of an impact on the way the world uses computers as the Macintosh itself. In conjunction with Apple’s famous PC, the LaserWriter pushed the personal computer into the worlds of graphic design and publishing.

So begins my latest piece over at Macworld.com, which examines four reasons why we should care about the historical legacy of Apple’s first laser printer. It also touches on the early Apple-Adobe relationship, which began with the LaserWriter. That relationship has come under closer scrutiny recently thanks to the nasty iPhone-iPad /Adobe Flash feud.

If you’re interested in more Apple printer information, check out this article I did for Macworld last year. It lists “Apple’s Five Most Important Printers.” Supposedly.

This reminds me of a psychic parlor trick.

The Sony-designed 3.5″ floppy drive (1982) first made waves in the mid-1980s with its use in the Apple Macintosh, released in 1984. The format quickly gained popularity in the PC market and overtook the 5.25″ floppy disk in overall usage by the early 1990s. PC clone manufacturers, many of whom had supported both the larger and smaller floppy formats, eventually stopped including 5.25″ drives in their machines.

Today, 3.5″ floppy drives are rarely found in new PCs thanks to more capacious CD-Rs, removable flash media (especially USB thumb drives), and nearly ubiquitous computer networking. However, that hasn’t stopped Windows XP from requiring @#^$ RAID drivers on a floppy disk when it’s being installed.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you still use 3.5″ floppy disks regularly? What for?

Younger computer fans may not know this, but for almost twenty years (1980-1999), Apple, Inc. sold Apple-brand printers for use with its computers — a fact that’s easy for us to forget today, ten years since Apple shipped its last printer.

That being so, Macworld recently asked me to write an article about Apple’s long history in the printer business. I was happy to take the assignment, of course, and a few days ago, Macworld published the result, titled “Apple’s Five Most Important Printers.” I structured the article along the same lines as the popular Mac laptops piece I did back in September.

In the course of writing the article, I learned more than I thought I’d ever know about Apple printers, and I enjoyed the research process quite a bit. Of particular interest was Apple’s original LaserWriter (1985, seen above), a famous peripheral that holds a monumentally important place in computer history.

I also created a companion slideshow of various Apple printers for Macworld, which you can see here. I hope you enjoy it.

VC&G Collecting Tip: Remove your old computer clock batteries.

Right now.

I’m serious: do it. Despite my regular battery purges (done to avoid just such a situation), I forgot to remove the Mac IIsi PRAM battery you see above because the computer was buried under a bunch of stuff. The battery electrolyte leaked out and corroded everything it touched, ruining the logic board. Sometimes you can recover from battery leaks with extensive cleaning if the damage isn’t that bad. In this case, it wasn’t worth the effort. Bye, bye, IIsi.

While you’re ditching the vintage clock batteries, do yourself a favor and remove the main power batteries from any laptops in your collection. I typically store laptop batteries in a gallon zipper bag each. Even if the batteries are dead/bad (which they usually are), I save the plastic cases for re-use if I plan to rebuild the battery in the future.

As a good rule of thumb, never keep batteries (no matter how new) in any electronic device for longer than a couple weeks of non-use. Any longer, and you’re just playing Russian roulette with your gadgets.

Almost all batteries leak eventually. If your old ones haven’t leaked already, you’re very lucky. Focus on alkaline and NiCd batteries first, because they leak the worst; lithium cells can leak as well (as seen above), but it’s less common overall.

Regardless of the type, if they’re old, remove them now — even if it requires clipping or desoldering — and spare yourself the leaky battery blues later on.

As you may have already noticed by my previous two posts, the Macintosh Portable turns 20 this week. As part of the celebrations, I not only took one apart for Technologizer, but I also wrote two Macintosh laptop retrospectives for Macworld: “The Five Most Important Mac Laptops” and a slideshow, “Twenty Years of Notable Apple Totables.” Hope you enjoy them.