Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional strobe pin that indicated that a key had been pressed. Press the “A” key on the keyboard and the 7-bits representing the letter “A” in ASCII would be set high/low on 7 output pins and the strobe pin would momentarily go high. Needless to say, the Apple I was wired up in such a way that when the strobe pin pulsed it would immediately fetch the 7-bits of ASCII from the keyboard.
Part 4: Brief history of Apple ML Stack
By Mirai Labs, frontier on-device AI lab. Building the models, inference runtime, and quantization stack from the device constraint up.
Our interfaces have lost their senses
We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.
The Accidental History of the @ Symbol
Once a rarely used key on the typewriter, the graceful character has become the very symbol of modern electronic communication
Shift Happens: A book about keyboards
Shift Happens tells the story of keyboards like no book ever before, covering 150 years from the early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pockets.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983), was the first time an appellate level court in the United States held that a computer's BIOS could be protected by copyright. As second impact, this ruling clarified that binary code, the machine-readable form of software and firmware, was copyrightable too and not only the human-readable source code form of software.[1][2]
Home | apple-svelte
apple-svelte is a component library based on Apple's Human Interface design language.
Apple at 50: eight technology leaps that changed our world
From Apple II to the iPhone, time and again this extraordinary company has anticipated the value of opening up computing to everyone.
Protected by its moat, Apple has time to get AI right
Best of all, the hardware it sells today will run whatever Apple comes up with.
AskTog:
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
Is Apple's AI Strategy as Safe as It Looks?
ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering
A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.
Michael Tsai - Blog - Alan Kay on the iPhone
If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it.
Apple’s new Processor Trace instrument is incredible · Victor Wynne
The new Processor Trace instrument has flown under the radar with this years WWDC announcements but many developers will find it truly indispensable.
We Melted iPhones for Science
OASIS generated real-time video with on-device AI. Four years later, Apple redesigned the iPhone so that AI won't burn your hand -- and admitted that we were right.
Thought as a Technology
Have you ever felt awe and delight upon first experiencing a computer interface? An interface that surprised you with its strangeness, with a sense of entering an alien world?