


At first glance you might wonder if the extensive list of all the open source projects has been removed from the site. If you visit the page today, you’ll see a new emphasis on Apple’s high-level projects, such as Swift and WebKit. This resource is useful primarily to developers, but may also interest curious technophiles who want to take a peek “behind the curtain” to see how much of the magic just beneath our fingertips is made.
#Netnewswire github mac os#
Since the earliest days of Mac OS X, Apple has complied with the licenses for the dozens of open source components it includes in the OS by posting (sometimes a little belatedly) updated versions of the source code to its Open Source at Apple web page. Spelunking Apple’s Open Source March 17, 2023
#Netnewswire github install#
Suffice to say, after testing that 50-floppy install process more than a couple times, my muscle memory was pretty darned good. I was supposed to make sure it worked.Īnother thing John recalled on the show was how some folks got amazingly good at floppy-swapping process, developing a muscle memory for fluidly withdrawing and inserting disks on command. That massive box was the System 7.5 installer, split across 50 or so (as best as I can recall) 800K floppy disks. In fact they did not even support the relatively higher density 1.4MB floppy disks of the era.
#Netnewswire github update#
The System 7.5 update was remarkably backward compatible, and supported computers as old as the Macintosh Plus and SE, which did not include a CD-ROM drive. One day during the lead up to finishing System 7.5, my boss brought a massive box full of floppy disks into the lab I worked in. It was a little tedious, but because CD-ROM discs had a massively higher capacity than floppy disks, it usually only required a few swaps.

The system used the same basic strategy: it would eject one disc and prompt you to insert another, until the installation process was completed. Typically at that time, major OS updates were installed from CD-ROM discs. But when it came to installing new software onto a Mac, some amount of removable media juggling was usually required. By this time hard drives had become commonplace and the kind of floppy-swapping John described had become a lot less common for most users. The first release I worked on was Mac OS 7.5, which was released in 1994. I was hired to work as a QA tester with the engineering team that shipped Mac OS system software updates. The conversation reminded me of one of my first jobs at Apple. Depending on the complexity of a workflow, you might be prompted to swap disks once, twice, or potentially dozens of times. He described the painstaking process of needing to insert a different disk whenever programs required access to specific executable code or data. On the latest Accidental Tech Podcast, John reminisced about the early days of the Mac, when a single 3.5″ floppy disk drive was typically used not only to boot a Mac, but also to run any applications, and to save any user data.
