Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font

https://www.spacebar.news/apple-history-hiding-in-mac-font/

by rbanffy • 12 months ago

158 31 12 months ago

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plorg• 12 months ago

I'm assuming this came up in reference to this post from yesterday:

https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-echoes-i...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819962

rbanffy5• 12 months ago

I absolutely love the way Windows computers show up as a beige low-budget monitor with a BSOD. I wonder how they show up these days - I no longer have Windows boxes on my network.

pdntspa• 12 months ago

They still show up that way, same with linux servers running Samba.

To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit old. They could at least update the graphic. But Windows has not been that crashy since Windows ME.

Maybe they could update it with something that pokes fun at how much Windows spies on you by default.

quitit• 12 months ago

There's a lot of nuance in there. From the way the beige is tinged yellow, to the loathed sliding mount.

sgt• 12 months ago

How do I paste the gid* fonts into TextEdit, for example? Only UTF8 fonts seem to work.

pimlottc• 12 months ago

As mentioned in yesterday's article [0], they can't be used because they haven't been mapped to a Unicode code point:

(A note on most of these characters is that they don't actually map to any defined Unicode code point; they are unconnected glyphs. Font Book will show them but you can't really copy them anywhere. A tool like Ultra Character Map will let you at least grab a graphical representation and paste it somewhere, as I have done here.)

0: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-echoes-i...

rbanffy5• 12 months ago

You can open them in a tool such as FontForge and force an encoding. You might need to add some padding at the beginning so that you get the symbols on a usable range.

shortrounddev22• 12 months ago

From a time when apple had soul

rbanffy5• 12 months ago

Don't be so harsh. There's a lot of great people working there, committed to make great computers and software. It's not an easy task.

NoSalt• 12 months ago

They are probably talking about the company as a whole. Back when there were easter eggs and the UI was more raw, yet more "approachable".

I stopped using Apple Macintosh OS after Snow Leopard, aftger they started making it more difficult than necessary to access the full power of the Unix underpinnings. In some way, I miss Macintosh OS 7.5, 8, and 9 more than OS X.

shortrounddev22• 12 months ago

I'm sure there's lots of creative people there, but unfortunately they work for a company that seems to determined to just keep going back to the well over and over

jama2112• 12 months ago

This is such an old man shakes fist at cloud statement

chaos_a• 12 months ago

The old text to speech voices are still around in Sequoia. Some have been changed to a generic "my name is x". But most still make their fun little jokes.

Found in the voice over utility app.

Accessibility > Voice Over > Voice Over Utility > Speech > Add Voice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk

quink• 12 months ago

Apple released its final CRT monitor in 2000

Not a standalone monitor, but eMac. 2002, with the last revision first released in 2005.

oddevan• 12 months ago

I was honestly surprised at how much older hardware is even in the newer SF Symbols library. When I saw my first iPod in there, I couldn't help but shout it out in my app... https://eph.me/pt-easter-egg.jpg

Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font

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