> Esslinger had been working with Steve Jobs since 1982 and was of paramount importance for the look of Apple products as an external designer -—as of 1983 also as Corporate Manager of Design. The start of collaboration between Steve Jobs and Hartmut Esslinger went from 1982 to 1983 with “Snow White,” a new color and design concept that was the base for all future Apple products. Besides specifying certain design aspects, the concept entailed introducing a new color. The dull “greige” of the industrial and corporate workplace was to be replaced by a broken white-called “Snow White" in the US. First used for the Apple llc, this white not only made the computer esthetically compatible with living rooms but also psychologically underpinned the user-friendly menu navigation. The new “Snow White” line worked up by Hartmut Esslinger was supposed to be launched with the Macintosh Computer—originally designed by Jerry Manock-but many reasons made this impossible. So the revised version could not be introduced until later: with the Macintosh SE.
The first product to feature the Snow White design language was the Apple IIc, which featured a color known as "Fog" which is distinct from the Platinum used in Apple's products from 1986-1999. For a good side-by-side comparison, check out this image of an original Apple IIc (1984) and the Apple IIc Plus (1988): https://i0.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/iic-and-i...
And since I didn't actually see a link to the filament in the Ars Technica article, here it is https://polarfilament.com/products/retro-platinum-pla-1kg-1-...
I've not had too many issues with it on my crappy Ender 3 clone. I print at 225C with a 60C bed, which lowers to 55 after the first layer. Never had any problems other than typical bullshit with my Z-offset.
People are making replacements for the dead lead-acid batteries from the original Mac (so-called) Portable. There are USB-powered cables to charge/power early MacBooks. I'm sure others can rattle off several other devices.
Now you have people 3D printing replacement bezels, etc. for these old machines. Very cool.
If anyone cares about old shareware game source code, I used the opportunity of recovering some old code to create a number of disk images (that you can mount from a modern Mac emulator like Basilisk II for example). Here is one (I think you can find the other three or so from this one):
https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-UnfinishedTa...
> Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience.
So it seems like the color is for 3D-printing stuff to look "new"?
Makes me wonder if there will be a "thirty years discolored" version as well, if you want to print a piece to replace something broken... or can you just leave it out in the sun for a couple weeks or something?
Would probably just need to make this part of a build loop where you send it through a high intensity light/heat cycle such as when they beat up jeans for purchase by people who buy those.
"Would you prefer the color tone of the 1977 Apple II or perhaps a 1980 Apple III?"
I actually don't know if there's a good source for this, but I've heard that the yellow discoloration caused by UV rays actually happens because of the specific way that window glass is filtering the UV spectrum unevenly; that would at least partly explain why retrobrighting, where you literally put things out in the sun or expose them to UV-C light directly, seems to actually work, and some people claim that even just leaving yellowed plastic out in the sun with no cover also works to an extent.
The first mac cube was the 4th computer I ever got my hands on, iirc. TRS80, Commodore, Apple II, Mac Plus
I am sure though, if you spent time polishing and painting the surface it would feel much better. It's still similar plastic after all.
Biggest problem for me, if printed in PLA the + shaped slot eventually gets too loose and the key pops off. Can just print another but it's annoying for sure.
Resin printers would likely have a much nicer out of the printer feel, with much smoother details at that size (for caps with 3D details on top). You could also print a whole set much quicker. Same speed for one cap as it would be for 100 at once.
If Tim Cook introduced new Mac hardware with the retro look (anything before, eh, 2003) the tech world would lose its flipping mind.
I don't know if my reaction is as one who is being made aware of just how old they are (61, BTW) or if it is a bit of a sweetness that I feel that younger generations are coveting these older machines instead of reflexively landfilling them.
And now they’re well into middle age and they have money.
Yes for some people who used these machines once, they might just think of them as old machines, the same way an ancient Roman still alive today might not think much of mundane Roman tech.
But getting into retro-computing as a hobby is more like being a historian or archaeologist. There is endless lore to discover, and restoring old hardware is an art. Some of these people were never old enough or even existed to lust after these machines.
Someday, all the people who used these machines will be dead, completely dead, and the machines will be all that remains. Blessed are those who keep them running in their memory.
Take a look at the Commodore 64 developer manual and quickly realize that without much difficulty, one can learn the full assembly instruction set along with all BASIC commands.
https://www.commodore.ca/manuals/c64_programmers_reference/c...
The machine is completely open to experimentation. You can write to memory anywhere including the active display terminal. The chips are easy to mix, match, swap. Hardware and software is malleable, not a locked-down black box of complexity and TPIM modules!
It's the people now with full time employment, who couldn't afford them when they were 16. Now they can, and the cars in good condition are more scarce.
But I think my current passion has more to do with the simplicity of it, and being forced (well, more or less) to learn 6502 assembly. (Oh, and Christ an original KIM-1 is a good deal more than $400 now, ha ha. But there are nice reproductions you can build yourself.)
What a breath of fresh air the thing is — having so little between its hex keypad and its six character display.
But once I went through Vogons and had the impression that many of them lacked any taste. A lot of PCs (and Macs) were total shite back then. If you want to dink around, you can now get the best old stuff.
Ultimately, they're collectors. They collect the good and the bad.
In 2025 it’s just “the charm of owning a classic car”. Instead of an annoyance, you might think of it as having a unique and endearing quirk.
In the mid-to-late 90s I had probably fifteen of them laying around and couldn't give them away. No one wanted these heavy bulky noisy keyboards. Now people pay hundreds of dollars for the originals and there's even a company[1] devoted to making new ones.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a Model M and still have a couple, but I would never pay these insane amounts for one.
I had a 386 with 4MB RAM and am not the least nostalgic about it. In fact damn near everything about that machine was limiting and something I couldn't wait to replace with something newer.
I even didn't care for the beige color schemes of the day -- I remember going for the brushed aluminium case way back because I was excited it wasn't freaking beige.
Watching some of the channels though I'd say a lot of the retro experience isn't quite what most people had. A lot of modern retrocomputing is putting together what would have qualified as a "dream machine" back in the day. Some are specced up to the absolute best one could get, some are unrealistic (1990 Monkey Island on a 2000s Pentium 3), some are jazzed up with scifi tech like floppy emulators.
It is difficult to be nostalgic about the machines lacking, for want of a better term, a soul. PC compatibles are as soulless as it gets. Quite soon after introduction, they became part of the endless treadmill of faster CPU - more memory - better graphics - larger HDDs. (That doesn't stop people being nostalgic about software running on PCs, again with that same basic characteristic.)
I think for me it's that they are too much the direct ancestors of current machines. There's basically zero software from that era nor any modern software written for these machines that really cares all that much about bus timings or cycle counting. It runs just as well or even better on modern machines in an emulator.
I'm not a big gamer, but even if I play later-1990s era EGA/VGA games on a modern PC, it feels basically normal to me.
I am nostalgic about machines older than that, particularly the mid-to-late 1980s machines that I grew up with. I now have decades of experience writing software. Even though I don't do much with hardware in my day job, I do know my way around hardware interfaces. I can read schematics and chip data sheets and know how to make it work. And what's nice about these machines is that many of them came with schematics and hardware register descriptions. Even if the paper is lost to time, someone has scanned them in and put them on the internet.
So I like to tinker with them. I like making them do things I wished I could do 35-40 years ago. I especially like when I can do it with pure software. Once such example is a DOS driver I wrote to make Tandy ROM drives accessible to (newer) non-Tandy DOS versions. https://github.com/dfelliott/tandy1000-romdrive
I had a 1000 TL I think I got probably late 1988 or early 1989. Back then I had a 40 MB hard card and it had to be partitioned because of DOS's 32 MB limit. When I upgraded to DOS 5 in 1991, literally going to the store the day it came out, I was dismayed to find I could no longer run Deskmate which was one of the main reasons to own a Tandy.
A few years ago I bought another one (my old one sadly bit the dust in a natural disaster) and went to work on fixing the problem. The journey was fun, and so was the end result. I finally got what I wanted, a machine running Deskmate and other software on DOS 5.
Coupled with my "sci-fi" Gotek I now have a machine that does a really good job of behaving like a machine of that era, because it is a machine of that era, running my old games with Tandy graphics and sound exactly how they ran back then. And I have real nostalgia for these games. There's something neat about what could be done with hardware of that era.
Emulation is just not quite the same. There's something about the CGA rasters on the tube that just feels right.
Plus, even though the machine bit the dust, I still have my old floppies, which I've started reading in with a Greaseweazle.
The Gotek doesn't really detract from the experience, it just takes away the drudgery of dealing with actual floppies and avoids wearing down what little is left of them.
Essentially people used to feel that their inability to perform a given task was gated by their lack of access to a certain sort of machine, such as a UNIX workstation or LISP machine. Now we all have surplus computing power and cheap peripherals the sense is that we must be missing some essence that was lost since these machines, because that is the nicer explanation than that given access to tools far better than those in previous generations most of us have no idea what to do with them, or worse that we allow ourselves to be distracted entirely.
The musical equipment world is just like this too.
Perhaps you'd feel the same way about a machine or tool or toy that you used when you were 10?
The effect is similar for those of us whose exposure was earlier, but similarly devoid of computers prior.
In my case it was a 1996 Mac tower w/internal 28k modem, at which point I was seven. It was not only the first computer of any sort in the house (no game consoles either) but also our first CD player. Up until then, the extent of tech for me was a late 80s Sharp VCR and an even older faux wood console Zenith TV hooked up to a roof antenna (no cable). Anything beyond that existed only in TV commercials and movies.
It was such a huge shift that it’s difficult to articulate. It sparked a lifelong obsession.
These people are passionate about old computer hardware. I’m not, but it makes me happy to know they are happy doing what they want.
Too bad Jobs turned the company into a boring locked-down anti-consumer appliance factory.
And by the way, Microsoft saved them with a $150M injection.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
https://hackaday.com/2016/04/01/apple-introduces-their-answe...
