On the 10th of May 1999, during the WorldWide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced the PowerBook G3 Lombard and Mac OS 8.6.
Although both have been overshadowed by other products (the Pismo and Mac OS 9), they nonetheless represent important steps in Apple’s hardware and software evolution.
One could argue that the search for “thinnovation” which brought us the MacBook Air in 2008 started with the Lombard, which is more powerful than the 1998 Wallstreet and yet 20% thinner. Mac OS 8.6 offered a similar breakthrough in extending the battery life of old and new portables, up to an incredible 5 hours and -using two batteries- even 10 hours of mobile productivity.
This is why at the MacDay, the annual gathering of italian Mac users near Bologna, on the 10th of May 2009 Storie di Apple celebrated the two products with a short presentation called “La sottile innovazione di Apple”.
Since I believe the slideshow sums up nicely the key points of the importance of the PowerBook G3 Lombard and of Mac OS 8.6 (which even had the beginnings of multithreading and protected memory), I created a translated version of the slideshow.
You can find it in the Stories of Apple Documents Archive from where you can freely view and download it in PDF format.
It’s a small experiment which -if appreciated- can and will be repeated in sharing information about the history of Apple, so please send feedback and comments.
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