I’ve just just got off stage at Macaduk 2025 having presented on the topic of the vi editor, Apple history, and the development of the graphical user interface. I’ve had a ton of fun researching this topic. Maybe too much fun. There were so many rabbit holes to disappear down, so many books to skim read, endless videos on YouTube. And these days you can emulate just about any classic computer you can think of… and in javascript too…

The end result was a struggle to work out what to include, and what to remove (hah - issues with editing in a talk about editors…) and it meant I really struggled to finish the slides on time. I’m sure* my audience didn’t notice.

Anyway - have a list of some of the things that helped me to (finally) finish a slide deck. Rather a lot of it comes from archive.org - the scans of old out of print books were something of a revelation… and I learned an iPad is great for reading content like that. I wish I could have got it working on my new Kindle Scribe - but the web browser isn’t smart enough to deal with the login required to “borrow” copies of books. So iPad it was…

Books

• The Little Kingdom - the private story of Apple computer - an absolutely awesome book. I really enjoyed this one, learning loads about the early lives of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - and lots of behind the scenes warts and all stuff about Apple. The edition I was reading was from 1984 - there’s a newer book Return to the Little Kingdom - but for a computer history talk, I wanted to read the original.
• Apple Confidential - and the revisited version Apple Confidential v2.0 - loads of fantastic Apple history, stories, timelines and everything else in between.
• The Apple II basic Manual - a joy to read! Now all I need is an Apple II to go with it.
• Accidental Empires one of my favourite technology books of all time. My paperback copy is very battered, and the book is out print - so I’m thrilled to discover a digital copy via archive.org - if you’ve not read it before, please do.
• Fumbling the Future how Xerox dropped the ball in terms of the amazing things they created at Xerox PARC in the 1970s

Websites

• The ever wonderful Folklore Project - a collection of stories and memories from the team who built the Mac.
• A fantastic essay about Larry Tesler Of Modes and Men
• Larry Tesler’s homepage NoModes.com
• The Making the Macintosh project - especially the Early Mac with interviews and other resources from Jef Raskin.

Toys

I’ve had a lot of fun playing with virtual machines online. On the Mac side I’m in love with Infinite Mac which lets you spin up a whole stack of classic versions of mac OS - NextStep and now OS X too - up to and including 10.4 (Tiger)

Don’t worry windows folks, I found something similar for Windows too… (you too can see how rubbish Windows 1.0 and 2.0 were… but Windows 3.0 gets a pass…)

Oh - and the Altair 8800 emulator - that I still don’t understand how to use.

And the amazing Owlet BBC Micro emulator. BBC basic, but with real time previews and modern IDE features. Shame my BBC Basic skills are still fairly limited…

Oh - and don’t forget the Xerox Alto Emulator that allowed me to imagine that I too was a 1970s computer scientist. You too can be confused by the Bravo editor’s bizarre user interface, and also discover there were a LOT of games written for the Alto considering it was never really a product folks could buy…

YouTube resources

• Larry Tesler - Origins of the Apple Human Interface
• Triumph of the Nerds, Episode 3 - ‘Great Artists Steal -although the other episodes are very much worth watching too!
• Bill Atkinson: Polaroids showing the evolution of the Lisa GUI - a video from 2022, from which I learned loads about the amazing contributions made by Bill Atkinson in defining how we all interact with computers today.
• Inside the flop that changed Apple forever A neat little overview of Apple’s Lisa computer, and how influential it was in the development of the Mac and of modern computing in general.
• Lisa: Steve Jobs’ sabotage and Apple’s secret burial - not sure how useful it was - but, it’s true, a whole stack of Lisa computers really did end up in landfill in the late 1980s…
• The Bravo Editor Demo I shared as part of the presentation
• Larry Tesler demoing the Gypsy text editor

Oh - and entirely tangentially, because Xerox are an important part of the story… and because Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod are amazing… The Secret Life of the Photocopier

I’ll sort out a proper post - and tidy up the slides for sharing… but suspect it’ll take a little while before the team at Macaduk start to release the videos on their YouTube Channel

It goes without saying (but let me say it anyway) thanks so much to the team at Jigsaw24 for running such a fantastic conference. I still have to pinch myself to believe I’m on the same bill as some of the smartest Mac folks around.

(also, yes… this blog post was absolutely written using the vim editor…using a mixture of Google Cloud Shell - plus vim on a Mac laptop on the train home from Brighton)

* yes - there was an audience. Not a big one… but…