Andy Hertzfeld was an early Apple employee who created the amazing Folklore.org, which contains an oral history of Apple Inc. and the creation of the first Macintosh computer. These Folklore.org posts were all collected into the 320 page book Revolution in the Valley, published by O'Reilly Media in 2004.
This project has extracted all the posts and their metadata from Folklore.org, cleaned up the markup, and converted them to Markdown for easier reading and converting to other formats.
Folklore.org is an unique source of incredible first hand content about Apple. Unfortunately the website and its content have some problems that make reading the content a poor experience:
- Does not have a mobile friendly layout
- Missing images
- Low res-thumbnails used in articles, requiring links out to high resolution ones
- Broken links
- CMS issues (posts 32-51 and 53-132 don't exist, breaking paging and navigation)
- Table-based layouts with complex and obtuse HTML markup.
- Accessibility issues (images without ALT text, etc)
- Formatting issues
I wanted to clean this content up and make it available to Gemini Space. Luckily this content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 1.0), so it can be remixed into other mediums. I was also able to leverage the Wayback machine to find versions of the posts as they existed in the mid 2000s, to recover lost images.
Gemtext versions of these posts are available on my Gemini Capsule: gemini://gemi.dev/apple-folklore/
Many of the images from Folklore.org are rare and hard to come across anywhere else. Unfortunately they tend to be lower resolution. Where possible I have updated the images with high-resolution sources with appropriate licenses.
applesoft.jpgupdated with a photo of AppleSoft IIa cassette. Source: Apple II Documentation Project.apple-silent-type.jpgupdated with a photo of Apple Silentype Printer. Source Wikimedia Commons.bill-byte-cover.jpgupdated with a high resolution front cover of Byte Magazine February 1984 Internet Archive.disk2.gifreplaced withdisk-ii.jpg, a photo of the Disk-II floppy disk drive. Source Wikimedia Commons.inside_mac.gifreplaced withbook-inside-machintosh.jpg, a photo of the cover of Inside Macintosh Promotional Edition. Source: Internet Archive.language_card.jpgreplaced withcard-apple-ii-language.jpg, a photo of the Apple II Language Card. Source: Apple II Documentation Project.lisa.jpgreplaced with a photo of the Apple Lisa. Source: Wikimedia CommonsPC.jpgreplaced with a photo of the IBM PC. Source: Wikimedia Commons.pirates.jpgupdated with a photo of the cover of "The Pirates of Silicon Valley". Source: Wikipedia Commons.tscan_brochure.jpgupdated with a higher resolution version of the Thunderscan ad from MacWorld Magazine July 1985. Source Internet Archive
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