Although March 24, 2001 signaled the release of the first version of Apple’s long-awaited industrial-strength operating system, with loads of warts and missing features, that wasn’t the first time I got to see it. You see, Apple released a Public Beta version the previous September, but I got a look even earlier. In those days, […]

In the early days of the Classic Mac OS, we had a few virus infections. I recall working at a design studio in the late 1980s, when we’d get loads of floppies that were infected by a so-called desktop virus. Without going into boring detail, the malware embedded itself into the desktop files used by […]

Back in the 1990s, as Apple struggled to build an industrial strength operating system to take it into the 21st century, they were exhorted to make sure preemptive multitasking was implemented. In those days, Macs had cooperative multitasking, which meant that each app had to play nicely with other apps and make sure they didn’t […]

Since my recent column, “Does Windows 7 Make a Difference?,” was published, there has been an active debate about a new Microsoft window management feature, where a document is pinned at the edge of the screen a grabs half the display. You can place a second document on the other half of the screen to […]