Dylan sues Apple
In the summer of 1994 folk singer Bob Dylan sued Apple for trademark infringement.
The musician was seeking to bar the company from using his name in conjunction with any new software product.
Apple had in fact been developing a programming language derived from Scheme and Lisp and had called it ‘Dylan’.
It was created in the early 1990s and was originally intended for use with the Newton platform. Unfortunately the implementation did not reach sufficient maturity in time, and the development of the platform was instead done with a combination of C and NewtonScript, invented by Walter Smith.
The Dylan language internally was code-named Ralph and only later adopted its name, chosen by James Joaquin. It supposedly stood for “DYnamic LANguage”.
After Bob Dylan took legal action Apple was forced to reach a confidential out-of-court settlement to obtain the rights to trademark Dylan. The Cupertino company briefly released the language for 68k-based Macs in the fall of 1995, with a “technology release” version available (”Apple Dylan TR1″) that included an advanced IDE.
The same year Apple promptly abandoned the effort.
Fortunately the language has survived and is actively maintained by a group of volunteers, the Gwydion Maintainers.
During the Nineties two other parties contributed to the design of Dylan and developed their implementations. One was a commercial IDE for Microsoft Windows, done by Harlequin and the second was an open source compiler for Unix systems, done by Carnegie Mellon University. Both of these implementations are now open source and available online -as Open Dylan and Gwydion Dylan- for a variety of platforms thanks to the aforementioned Gwydion Maintainers.
The image of Bob Dylan is from the Apple ‘Think Different’ campaign and is taken from Red Light Runner Store.
The 68k->PPC transition and Snow Leopard: comparing apples to oranges
In “Snow Leopard: Party like it’s 1998″ there’s an attempt to quell the outcry of Mac users for Apple dropping PowerPC support in Snow Leopard by recalling the late Nineties transition from the Motorola 68×00 to the PPC machines.
It is a good and praiseworthy idea but unfortunately, in the description there are a couple of major inaccuracies which undermine the effort.
In the post it is stated that
On October 17, 1998 Apple released Mac OS 8.5, the first operating system that ran solely on Macintoshes with PowerPC processors. As far as system software upgrades go, this was the end of the line for any Mac built before the Power Macintosh 6100, introduced in March 1994. Earlier Macs ran on some variation of 680×0 processors and were supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment. Emulation works, but it also slows things down. By 1998, Apple decided it just couldn’t support 680X0 emulation for a number of reasons, but chiefly among them was speed.
The Mac OS 8.5 was surely the end of Mac based on the 68k family of processors, but Apple kept on making and selling machines based on this hardware platform long after the release of the Power Mac 6100 in March 1994.
Macs such as the PowerBook 280 and the Quadra/LC 630 were launched during 1994 and even the following year, in the April and August of 1995 Cupertino introduced non-PowerPC models such as The Performa 580 and the PowerBook 190cs.
And those Macs were not “supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment”. It was the way around: Macintoshes based on the PowerPC chips had to use emulation to be compatible with the (operating) System (which was later called Mac OS), which was still full of 68×000 code.
During the late Nineties Apple kept on slowly cleaning up the Mac OS code by “a PowerPC native, multi-threaded Finder” (does this ring a bell?) in Mac OS 8.0 and transitioning away from the old CISC CPUs by first limiting support to 68040 Macs with release 8.1.
Image taken from www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~schaelss/vintage/index.htm
From 25 to 75 millions users
At the WWDC 2009 Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Product Marketing, announced thatthe Macintosh has experienced an explosive growth and even more did the number of OS X users.
While in 2007 the number of active users of Apple’s operating system was at 25 millions in 2009 it had suddenly risen to 75 million. How could this be?
The secret to Apple’s tripling its active user base in the past two years is the runaway success of the iPhone platform. During the keynote presentation Schiller produced a chart showing the number of actual active OS X users, not just of Mac OS X users. It’s very important to strike the difference between those two terms: OS X and Mac OS X.
The growth isn’t just about Macs but it ows a lot to the many iPhones and iPod touchs sold so far, to be exact around 40 millions of the devices. Both have a version of the former Mac OS X and of its technologies and have thus incremented the market share of Apple’s operating system and key programs such as the web browser Safari.
The birth of the iPod Division
At the end of May 2004 Apple’s organization underwent a major shakeup. Three years after the introduction of its digital player, the Cupertino company created a new iPod division.
Jon Rubinstein was appointed Head and his role changed from “Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering” to the new “Senior Vice President iPod Division”.
The rest of Apple’s activities at the time were redirected into the Macintosh Division, with Timothy Cook at the helm.
Although Cook’s role was widened, his formal status didn’t change, at least according to the Executives Profiles page on the Apple website where he kept the old title of “Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations”.
The reorganization reflected the growing importance of the iPod at Infinite Loop, in particular after the introduction of the enormously successful iPod mini.
Five years later the iPod division came to an end when Apple’s digital walkmen joined the iPhone in the new “Devices Hardware” division, headed by new Senior Vice President Mark Papermaster
The screenshots of Jon Rubinstein are from cached versions of the Apple.com website on the Internet Archive and are “courtesy of Apple”
The Lombard Ad: words in motion
The launch of the Macintosh PowerBook G3 “Lombard” in 1999 marks a new stylistic direction for Apple television ads and animated movies.
The use of typography is a mainstay of Apple which has used it since the early Eighties to market products and most of all its brand. The ad for the Lombard PowerBook (also known as “Bronze Keyboard”) takes the use of typgraphy even further marrying the images of the laptop witha series of words in many languages (actually the same word and/or concept) alternating and speeding towards the viewer.
This style will be later used not only in promoting the follow-up, the PowerBook Pismo, but will also be part of all the intros to Apple’s operating systems.
In the 1999 ad “slim” and “slank” were Apple’s key words, still set in Apple Garamond as would the similar Mac OS 9 intro.
The last of the “classic” Mac OS also started the “Welcome” ritual which has been used (so far) in all of the Mac OS X intros since 2001 although set in the Lucida Sans and from 10.4 with an added 3D effect.