Last week, I had a chance to visit @hypertalking’s (James’s) excellent collection of Mac-related stuff. He’s particularly interested in collecting 1990s Macs, which is the era of Apple history I don’t have a lot of personal experience with, so it was doubly exciting.
Here are some 100 photos from that visit:
Marcin Wichary
15 May 2023 / 50 posts / 90 photos
Hypertalking Mac collection
This is an archive of a Mastodon thread from 2023. You can still read the thread (and all the replies) at its original location, however the photo quality is much better on this page.
James’s work has recently gone viral! He meticulously recreated a few of Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji in the original Mac’s resolution and 1-bit colour.
I got to see them all in person! Great Wave Off Kanagawa, In All Its 1-Bit Pixelized Glory
I got to see them all in person! Great Wave Off Kanagawa, In All Its 1-Bit Pixelized Glory
Anyway, on to the collection. There must be thousands of rainbow Apple logos in here.
…recessed or otherwise.
Love that you can see a little texture on this.
A fun (although maybe more pretentious than usual) “do” and “don’t” manual of using the Apple logo.
If you can’t afford six Pantone colors, you can always approximate them. Love, John.
Oh, no, not these.
These 1970s truck and van shapes are amazing.
What is this, a font picker.
“…with ’Illustrator‘ by Adobe.” Which James of course also has, in multiple editions!
(I got rate-limited by my Mastodon server. More later. 😢)
Somewhere here is also the first PowerPoint, around the time it’s been acquired by Microsoft. The manual is pretty impressive – it looks like a proper book.
Prince of Persia I and II in their cool respective boxes.
Apparently, SimCity – James has a huge collection of Mac-specific editions – got in trouble for putting Godzilla on its box… so that was changed to a tornado later.
The most ambitious crossover in history: BBC Basic for a Mac!!!
Microsoft Bob for a Mac! Sort of.
I have not heard of this before and I used to have a site cataloging GUIs.
I have not heard of this before and I used to have a site cataloging GUIs.
5 mice award/rating from MacUser. Kinda cute?
There’s a lot of training and sales materials. Here’s one for System 7, explaining TrueType on prepared full-size transparencies. A fractal of obsolete tech.
Here are some materials explaining DTP. The first one is gorgeous. The second one… yeesh.
HyperCard! For education!
The diagram for the never-released Macintosh Office (server).
From a huge binder (binders!) for salespeople of the original Macintosh.
A plastic Mac suitcase. Kind of a lame one, honestly.
Apparently, what you do with your new Mac is…
…draw a cat.
TiBook wear and tear.
I have never seen this gorgeous photo of the original iMac before. I’m sad we’ve never gotten a hi-res digital version of it.
Strange experiments in early multimedia publishing: CD movies with extra features, and e-books on floppies.
A rare Apple TV set top box! (*Not* Macintosh TV.) I learned it was called “Apple Interactive Television Box.” Apple Interactive Television Box
The infamous Bandai Pippin, the Apple’s Mac-based console.
“Through the looking glass” Lisa/Mac game. Through the Looking Glass (video game)
A super strange accessory where the mouse is repurposed to be a yoke control for flight simulators.
A third-party trackball.
A rare Pioneer clone, complete with a rebranded mouse and keyboard.
Speaking of clones, a cute logo from another (Japanese?) clone maker.
Speaking of logos, <reverb>THE LOGO</reverb>.
It’s wild how the default font picker on Macs today still looks like this thing from 1987:
The dramatic angle of the mouse in this photo is so interesting.
Them fighting words.
After a unique first edition, Lisa 2 got its branding (and eventually its name) to be much closer to the Mac’s.
Similarly to how the photos of the Mac in its first manual showed an earlier unreleased edition with a 5" Twiggy drive, Lisa’s early photos show a keyboard with temporary legends.
The final design looked something like this:
James hypothesized this icon was also with a Twiggy drive.
This feels like a pretty ugly treatment of a modifier key in this Filco Mac keyboard.
Some more keyboards. I’m sure these shapes are super nostalgic to some!
As I’m sure is this view.
This must be the most beautiful degauss button in history?
And these are some more hot 1990s close ups.
Thank you James for inviting me! Check out his site here: hypertalking.com, and all of the above photos are also here on Flickr: Flickr
