Good article on Steve Jobs' role in design

[ka jowct]

Walter Isaacson article in Smithsonian Magazine:

[Speedy]

Nice read!

[vision63]

Love that story.

[M A V I C]

Great read. One question.

"Apple products in the 1980s featured white cases"

Ok, so I didn't get into Macs until the early 90's... but I've never seen a Mac from the 1980s that was white. Have they all just yellowed and thus I never saw what they looked like, or is the author mistaken?

[Lew Zealand]

Mistaken. The cases were "platinum", i.e. light gray. Those yellowed in time to the familiar beige. The original Macs were beige IIRC, and then moved to platinum around the mid '80s. I have 2 original Mac Plus KBs around the garage somewhere, unused in original boxes and both are platinum, again IIRC.

[tenders]

The original Macs and Pluses were beige. The SE was the first Mac in platinum, but the Pluses were produced for a very long time and it's possible they switched to platinum at some point. I'm thinking they might have been renamed the Mac Classic when they switched colors. Some of them did tend to yellow as they got older, especially where they got warmer.

I think that the Apple IIc (the one with a handle that you could carry without the monitor like a briefcase) and the IIGS were white, though, and they predated and overlapped the first beige Macs and Pluses.

The ImageWriter II printer was the bridge between Apple IIs and Macs. Compatible with both, it was white and existed long before the white Mac SE existed. I had a Plus and an IWII in college and always thought it was odd that they were mismatched while my little brother's IIGS and IWII looked like they were designed to go together on the desk. The 1200 baud modem was also white and compatible with white IIs and beige Macs.

[Speedy]

We have an ImageWriter II that is platinum. We bought it along with our SE in '88.