To make its graphical interface work, the Mac needed a high-performance graphics system, for which the late Bill Atkinson (1951-2025) and Andy Hertzfeld designed and implemented QuickDraw. When it came to driving printers, though, Steve Jobs licensed the new page description language PostScript from Adobe, where it had just been developed by John Warnock (1940-2023), Charles Geschke (1939-2021) and others. PostScript is a stack-based interpreted language that could take many seconds or even minutes to image a page for printing, so wasn’t practical for doing much else at that time.

In the early 1990s, as desktop publishing became dominant among Mac users and we were all sending one another faxes, several companies recognised the need for a universal document format that could display laid-out text and graphics. Among them was Adobe, where Warnock formulated the aims of what he then referred to as Interchange PostScript or IPS, and so led the development of Portable Document Format. It’s telling that the final sentence of his proposal reads: “In any event corporations should be interested in site-licensing arrangements.”

When the first version of PDF was released in 1993, with its Carousel reader app, it faced competition from other similar ideas, and Adobe found itself competing against products including Farallon’s Replica, and Tumbleweed’s Envoy that gained the support of WordPerfect, then a popular cross-platform word processor. PDF didn’t become dominant until Adobe distributed its reader app free, rather than charging $50 for it as it had initially.

For many years, the only way to create really good PDFs was using Adobe’s Acrobat Distiller app, costing $695 for a single-user licence. That ingested PostScript files, created on the Mac by printing to a file, and transformed them into PDFs that could in turn only be read using Adobe’s software. Although PostScript was by then a prerequisite for all publishing work on Macs, it wasn’t until 1996, when PDF reached version 1.2 in Acrobat 3.0, that it captured the prepress market, which it consolidated in 1998 with the PDF/X-1 standard.

This is Acrobat Distiller 4.0 running on Mac OS 9.1 in early 2001, showing a few of its bewildering array of options for turning PostScript files into PDF.

At the same time, John Warnock’s aspirations for success in enterprise markets were being realised, and PDF steadily became the standard for fixed-format electronic documents, with the support of the US Internal Revenue Service and Adobe’s free cross-platform Acrobat Reader.

When Steve Jobs established NeXT in 1985 he must have become the only person to have licensed PostScript from Adobe twice, as NeXTSTEP adopted Display PostScript as the centrepiece of its graphics, developed collaboratively between NeXT and Adobe. At the time many thought this to be a mistake, as PostScript isn’t as efficient a graphics language as QuickDraw, despite Adobe’s efforts to accelerate it.

When NeXT and Mac merged to form the beginnings of Mac OS X in 1997, Display PostScript was replaced with PDF as the central graphics standard for both display and printing, in what was dubbed Quartz 2D. This was first demonstrated at WWDC in 1999 and lives on today in macOS. At the time, Apple’s in-house PDF engine in Quartz was one of few, alongside Adobe’s.

Prior to Mac OS X, Adobe Acrobat, both in its free viewer form and a paid-for Pro version, had been the de facto standard for reading, printing and working with PDF documents on the Mac. The Preview app had originated in NeXTSTEP in 1989 as its image and PDF viewer, and was brought across to early versions of Mac OS X, where it has remained ever since.

This PDF shows Apple’s original iPod promotional literature from late 2001.

Adobe continued providing its free Acrobat Reader for Mac OS X, here seen in 10.0 Cheetah.

The full paid-for version of Adobe Acrobat provided an extensive suite of editing tools, here in Mac OS X 10.1 Puma in early 2002.

By Mac OS X 10.3 Panther in 2003, Apple was claiming that Preview was “the fastest PDF viewer on the planet”, capable of navigating and searching text within PDF documents “at lightning speed”. This worked with the Mac’s new built-in support for faxing, which rendered received faxes in PDF to make them easier and clearer to access.

This is an early Keynote Quick Reference guide from 2003, viewed in Preview.

At that time, Preview was also able to convert Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files and raw PostScript to PDF, so they could be saved in the more accessible format, and printed easily.

This page from the 9/11 Commission Report of 22 July 2004 is being viewed in Preview.

Acrobat Distiller remained an important component in Adobe’s paid-for product, even though Mac OS X was capable of generating its own PDFs. It’s seen here in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2005.

This is Acrobat Pro in 10.4 Tiger in early 2006, showing its long list of supported export formats.

Since those heady days, Preview has been relatively neglected. Revision of both the Quartz PDF engine and its API brought a spate of bugs that only abated with macOS Sierra. Preview has adopted an uncommon model for PDF annotations that often doesn’t work well with other PDF products, but it has remained very popular for completing electronic forms. Then, in macOS Ventura, Apple removed all support for converting EPS and PostScript to PDF, most probably as a result of security concerns, and their progressive disuse.

Although rumours of the death of Preview continue to prove unfounded, it’s unlikely to feature again as one of the strengths of macOS.

References

John Warnock (1991) The Camelot Project, on the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine.
Laurens Leurs’ The history of PDF.

Depending on where you were, public Internet access first came in the early 1990s. Before that there were dial-up bulletin boards accessed using a modem.

The first of those bulletin boards (BBS) went online in Chicago in 1978, thanks to the pioneering work of Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. Those were joined by FidoNet BBSes in 1984-85, developed by Tom Jennings in San Francisco. Here in the UK one of the earliest was Compulink Information Exchange, founded by Frank and Sylvia Thornley. That went commercial as CIX in 1987, and the following year brought the first public access in the UK to limited Internet services such as email and Usenet.

Following discussions on CIX, Cliff Stanford (1954-2022) and his business partners Grahame Davies and Owen Manderfield set up the UK’s first public Internet service, Demon Internet, in a scheme originally known as tenner a month, or TAM. This was founded on the strength of 200 initial subscribers each paying £10 per month a year in advance from 1 June 1992. Demon grew rapidly to reach more than 50,000 subscribers, following which it was bought by Scottish Telecom in 1997, and two years later was demerged and became a public-traded company Thus plc.

At this time, Apple employees and third-party developers communicated using an integrated email system, AppleLink, a service operated by a descendant of General Electric (GE), one of the early computer manufacturers, GE Information Services Company, or GEISCO. Apple’s Internet presence expanded as AppleLink shut down in 1997. GEISCO went on to become GEnie, and died quietly with the new millennium.

Dial-up

Dedicated connections over ADSL were still prohibitively expensive for most users. Like most landline phone calls, online charges were highest during the day, and fell after 6 o’clock in the evening. Most nights the race would be on to see who could connect to their Internet provider before they ran out of incoming phone lines, and you’d have to wait an hour or two before one became available. The following screenshots walk through establishing an Internet connection using Mac OS 8.6 or 9.x with TCP/IP and Remote Access control panels, in 2001.

Armed with your ISP’s instructions and connection details (phone numbers, log on sequences, etc.), open the Modem control panel and check it’s configured correctly (port/internal, modem type). Then open the TCP/IP control panel, and use the Edit/User Mode menu command to display this dialog.

Changing user mode increases the scope of the TCP/IP dialog. In most cases, switch the upper pop-up menu to PPP (the protocol you’ll use to access your ISP), and configure the next pop-up down to Using PPP Server. Some ISPs may instruct differently. Other boxes should only be completed if advised – IP addresses of name servers, for instance. Some ISPs may advise you of a ‘hosts’ file (specifying IP addresses for services such as mail and news), which can be read in by clicking the Select Hosts File button.

Click on the Options button and ensure that TCP/IP is made active. If you can spare the memory, uncheck the Load Only When Needed box, to save memory fragmentation. Using the File/Configurations menu command, name and save these TCP/IP settings so they can be recalled readily. Then quit the control panel.

You should normally access your ISP through the Remote Access control panel, which needs to be set up with the access phone number, your user name (normally the first part of your Internet domain name, allocated by your ISP), and password. Unless you fancy typing your password in every time (or have security problems such as children!), let it save your password.

Click on the Options button to set other important features of Remote Access. Some ISPs require a full script to log on each time, in which case you must obtain a copy from the ISP, and install the script here, for a command-line host. This is unnecessary for most ISPs, thankfully. Avoid checking the top option, of connecting whenever you start TCP/IP applications, as it can cause untold aggravation each time you start your Web browser, for instance. Set any other options, and click on OK.

Finally, set up your email software, browser, and other Internet applications. In recent versions of Mac OS, Apple provides the Internet control panel as an easy way to do this – details entered here, particularly for incoming and outgoing mail, should apply to all compliant applications. Then re-open Remote Access and your applications, and click on Connect.

Mobile

Even if you were fortunate enough to have a mobile phone in those days, they had to use dial-up Internet connections too. So what did we do when we were on the road with a PowerBook G4, or the modem couldn’t connect? We connected to the Internet via a Bluetooth dongle and mobile phone. This next sequence of screenshots explains how to manage this technological feat. The phone I was using at the time was a brand new Ericsson T68, with a display resolution of 101 x 80 in 256 colours, no camera, but the novelty of predictive text. My Mac was running Mac OS X 10.1.x or later, with Apple’s Bluetooth support software (bundled in 10.2 Jaguar), an Apple-supplied D-Link USB Bluetooth transceiver, and Bluetooth-equipped mobile phone with airtime facilities and contract (e.g. GPRS).

Install the Bluetooth software (10.2 already has support) and connect your USB adaptor to a port on your Mac. A new pane appears in System Preferences, Bluetooth. Click to open it and check the Discoverable and Show Bluetooth Status items. Enter the Bluetooth control section of your phone’s menus, turn Bluetooth on, then set your phone to Discover. Authenticate using the same number, 1111 perhaps, on each, and they should pair.

Once paired, and that can sometimes prove a bit fiddly, your phone knows your Mac by its AppleShare computer name, and your Mac knows the phone by its name. Re-pairing in the future should be simpler, but follows the same basic sequence of making your Mac discoverable, letting the phone discover it, then completing the pairing. Switch your phone’s Bluetooth to automatic to save battery power when not paired.

Click on the Network pane, and using the Active Network Ports popup item turn off other connections apart from bluetooth-modem. Configure that connection to use PPP in the TCP/IP pane. Switch to the PPP pane, and enter connection details provided by your phone network. The phone ‘number’ to dial is a special series of characters, set by the network, and you may need to set PPP Options too.

In the Modem pane, select an appropriate phone from the popup Modem list. Although using an Ericsson T68 here, the closest listed is the T39 running at 28.8 Kbps (not Mbps). You may have to try out different modem setting scripts to see which works best with your particular phone, network, and airtime contract. You can also create your own connection scripts using Modem Script Generator.

Apply the changes to Network now, and open the Internet Connect application. Ensure that the correct configuration is selected, and check the details again. When you’re happy, and confident that your phone is within Bluetooth signal range and has a good phone signal strength (if using GPRS, ensure that its signal is strong rather than the regular GSM voice signal), click on the Connect button.

Once your connection is established you can browse the Web, collect and send email, and use all the facilities of the Internet from your Mac. Connection speeds are inferior to those made over telephone wires, though, and pedestrian compared with broadband. The menubar status holds a popup menu for ready access to key applications. Click on Internet Connect’s Disconnect button when finished.

Finally, in case you hadn’t already gathered, these were really slow Internet connections, and even small downloads could take several hours, if you weren’t disconnected. But there were times when software played tricks to amuse us. Here’s a screenshot of me trying to download and install the 14.4 MB update via Demon, to take Mac OS X 10.1 Puma to version 10.1.1 in November 2001, claimed to take 11,643 days at 44 Kbps.

Further reading

Bulletin boards (Wikipedia)
FidoNet (Wikipedia)
CIX (Wikipedia)
Demon Internet (Wikipedia)
AppleLink, a long personal reminiscence

Although taken for granted now, Apple didn’t release the first version of Safari until January 2003. Before that was a succession of interesting experiments to try. Those started with Netscape Navigator in 1994, which lasted until 2007, although by then it was little used on Macs.

Netscape is seen here in 2000, following my successful purchase of downloadable versions of Conflict Catcher and Suitcase from Casady & Greene’s online store.

Two years later, and I’m browsing Amazon’s listing of my never-published book that was slated for 31 March the following year. I’m so glad I never pre-ordered it.

Netscape had been at the front of browser development, leading with on-the-fly page display, cookies and JavaScript. But in 1996, it was challenged by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and Apple’s more innovative Cyberdog. The latter was sadly abandoned the following year, leaving the way clear for Apple to replace the bundled Netscape with Internet Exploder, as it quickly became nicknamed.

This is Microsoft Internet Explorer in 2001, providing the front end to Mac OS X Server through Webmin.

Cookie settings in Explorer were highly detailed in 2005.

Many of us abandoned Internet Explorer for alternatives such as Camino. That had originated within Netscape as Chimera in 2002, based on its Gecko layout engine, with a native Mac OS X front end. The following year it was rebranded as Camino, and amazingly lasted until 2012.

There were other competitors, such as Omni Group’s OmniWeb, which had been developed for NeXTSTEP since 1995, then moved to Mac OS X until 2012.

This is OmniWeb in 2007, showing the different browsers it could identify itself as, including a single version of Safari 1.0.

In January 2003, Apple launched the first beta-release of its own browser, Safari, and bundled it in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther when it was released that October. Since then Safari has been a regular fixture in successive versions of Mac OS X, OS X, and macOS. For several years, it was the only browser on iOS and iPadOS.

This is Safari 1 showing the front page for Apple’s developer site in 2004, complete with the offer to download Xcode version 1.5 with dead code stripping as a new feature. That year, Mozilla Firefox was released as an alternative, and has continued to support Macs ever since.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger came with Safari as the only bundled browser when it was released in April 2005, although it took Safari 2.0.4 in early 2006 before it was stable.

Page loading was slow in 2005, when Apple’s front page took a total of over 16 seconds to load fully, but that only used 6.8 MB of memory. By contrast, today Apple’s front page only takes a couple of seconds but requires over 200 MB.

There were times when the only way ahead with these early versions of Safari was to completely reset it, emptying its cache, and even removing all passwords and AutoFill text. This is Safari 2 in 2006.

Prominent among the plugins in 2006 was the dreaded Shockwave Flash, which had only recently been taken over by Adobe when it acquired Macromedia the previous year. Details of plugins are here being displayed on an internal web page within Safari 2.

Safari 3, bundled in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in October 2007, brought the claim that it was then the fastest browser, but it was troubled by bugs and security problems at first.

Safari 3 had already grown extensive preferences, covering the use of plugins, Java, JavaScript and cookies, seen here in 2007.

Its successor, Safari 4, followed in the summer of 2009, ready for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, with further performance improvements, particularly in its JavaScript engine.

By 2009, Safari 4 was able to warn the user if it was about to visit a site blacklisted by the Google Safe Browsing Service. At least when that service was available. That year also saw Preview and Beta releases of Google Chrome, now Safari’s most serious competitor on Apple’s hardware.

Safari 5 was released a year later, in 2010, and was bundled in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011. This brought Reader mode and opened the door to third-party extensions.

Safari’s hidden Debug menu provided a collection of tools for web developers, and more recently has become the even more extensive Develop menu.

By the release of macOS 10.12 Sierra in 2016, Safari had reached version 10.

By 2016, close control over Adobe Flash Player had become critical, as a result of its frequent exploits, although it remained highly popular with content developers before Adobe finally killed it at the end of 2020.

Since 2021, with the release of macOS 12 Monterey, Safari 15 and its successors have been able to perform on-the-fly translation, as demonstrated here.

Safari is now the bundled browser in macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS, and this year is set to leap in version number from 18 to 26 with the arrival of Tahoe and its sister OSes. It has been a long and sometimes troubled journey over those 22 years, and despite strong competition from Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers, it remains the browser of first choice for a great many using Apple’s hardware products. I hope my screenshots have brought back more happy memories than traumatic moments.

Reference

Wikipedia.

Spotlight, the current search feature in macOS, does far more than find locally stored files, but in this brief history I focus on that function, and how it has evolved as Macs have come to keep increasingly large numbers of files.

Until early Macs had enough storage to make this worthwhile, there seemed little need. Although in 1994 there were precious few Macs with hard disks as large as 1 GB, networks could provide considerably more. That year Apple offered its first product in AppleSearch, based on a client-server system running over AppleShare networks, and in its Workgroup Servers in particular. This was a pioneering product that was soon accompanied by a local app, Find File, written by Bill Monk and introduced in System 7.5 that September.

Sherlock

The next step was to implement a similar architecture to AppleSearch on each Mac, with a service that maintained indexes of file metadata and contents, and a client that passed queries to it. This became Sherlock, first released in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998. As access to the web grew, this came to encompass remote search through plug-ins that worked with web search engines.

Those were expanded in Sherlock 2, part of Mac OS 9.0 from 1999 and shown above, and version 3 that came in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002. The latter brought one of the more unseemly conflicts in Apple’s history, when developers at Karelia claimed Sherlock 3 had plagiarised its own product, Watson, which in turn had been modelled on Sherlock. Apple denied that, but the phrase being Sherlocked has passed into the language as a result.

Spotlight

Sherlock remained popular with the introduction of Mac OS X, but was never ported to run native on Intel processors. Instead, Apple replaced it with Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, in April 2005.

Initially, the Spotlight menu command dropped down a search panel as shown here, rather than opening a window as it does now.

A Finder search window, precursor to the modern Find window, is shown in the lower left of this screenshot taken from Tiger in 2006.

Spotlight was improved again in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, in 2007. This extended its query language, and brought support for networked Macs that were using file sharing.

This shows a rather grander Finder search window from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2009.

Search attributes available for use in the search window are shown here in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, in 2014.

Spotlight’s last major redesign came in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2014, when web and local search were merged into Global Spotlight, the search window that opens using the Spotlight icon at the right end of the menu bar. With Global Spotlight came Spotlight (then Siri from macOS Sierra) Suggestions, and they have been accompanied by remote data collection designed to preserve the relative anonymity of the user.

This Finder window in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, in 2015, shows a more complex search in progress.

This shows a search in Global Spotlight in macOS 10.12 Sierra, in 2017.

Local Search in the Finder’s Find window can now use a wide variety of attributes, some of which are shown here, in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, in 2018. Below are search bars for several different classes of metadata.

Over the years, Spotlight’s features have become more divided, in part to safeguard privacy, and to deliver similar features from databases. Core Spotlight now provides search features within apps such as Mail and Notes, where local searches lack access.

Spotlight’s indexes are located at the root level of each indexed volume, in the hidden .Spotlight-V100 folder. Those are maintained by mdworker processes relying on mdimporter plugins to provide tailored access for different file types. If an mdimporter fails to provide content data on some or all of the file types it supports, those are missing from that volume’s indexes, and Spotlight search will be unsuccessful. This happened most probably in macOS Catalina 10.15.6, breaking the indexing of content from Rich Text files. That wasn’t fixed until macOS Big Sur 11.3 in April 2021.

Over the last few years, macOS has gained the ability to perform optical character recognition using Live Text, and to analyse and classify images. Text and metadata retrieved by the various services responsible are now included in Spotlight’s indexes. From macOS 13 Ventura in 2022, those services can take prolonged periods working through images and file types like PDF that include images they can process to generate additional content and metadata for indexing.

Those with large collections of eligible files have noticed sustained workloads as a result. Fortunately for those with Apple silicon Macs, those services, like Spotlight’s indexing, run almost exclusively on their Mac’s E cores, so have little or no effect on its ability to run apps. For those with Intel processors, though, this may continue to be troubling.

In less than 30 years, searching Macs has progressed from the basic Find File to Spotlight finding search terms in text recognised in photos, in almost complete silence. Even Spotlight’s 20th birthday passed just over a month ago, on 29 April, without so much as an acknowledgment of its impact.