I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 320. Here are my solutions to them.

1: What ET wants is a call coming to the Mac.

2: A glass to enlarge among the liquid.

3: Daybook you might already have started elsewhere.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: What ET wants is a call coming to the Mac.

2: A glass to enlarge among the liquid.

3: Daybook you might already have started elsewhere.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

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.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 319. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Successor to 3 inside a scheme was part of a popular atelier.

2: High speed subatomic particle took the lead in the 1990s.

3: Creator of a squire’s assistant was the first, but died before Mac OS X.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Successor to 3 inside a scheme was part of a popular atelier.

2: High speed subatomic particle took the lead in the 1990s.

3: Creator of a squire’s assistant was the first, but died before Mac OS X.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

Since writing A brief history of local search, I have come across numerous patents awarded to Apple and its engineers for the innovations that have led to Spotlight. This more detailed account of the origins and history of Spotlight uses those primary sources to reconstruct as much as I can at present.

1990

ON Technology, Inc. released On Location, the first local search utility for Macs, a Desk Accessory anticipating many of the features to come in Spotlight 15 years later. This indexed text found in the data fork of files, using format-specific importer modules to access those written by Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, MacWrite and other apps of the day. Those files and their indexed contents were then fully searchable. This required System Software 6.0 or later, and a Mac with a hard disk and at least 1 MB of RAM. It was developed by Roy Groth, Rob Tsuk, Nancy Benovich, Paul Moody and Bill Woods.

1991

Version 2 of On Location was released. ON Technology was later acquired by Network Corporation, then by Symantec in 2003.

1994

AppleSearch was released, and bundled in Workgroup Servers. This was based on a client-server system running over AppleShare networks. September’s release of System Software 7.5 introduced a local app Find File, written by Bill Monk.

1998

Sherlock was released in Mac OS 8.5. This adopted a similar architecture to AppleSearch, using a local service that maintained indexes of file metadata and content, and a client app that passed queries to it. This included remote search of the web through plug-ins working with web search engines, as they became available.

Early patent applications were filed by Apple’s leading engineers who were working on Sherlock, including US Patent 6,466,901 B1 filed 30 November 1998 by Wayne Loofbourrow and David Cásseres, for a Multi-language document search and retrieval system.

1999

Sherlock 2 was released in Mac OS 9.0. This apparently inspired developers at Karelia Software to produce Watson, ‘envisioned as Sherlock’s “companion” application, focusing on Web “services” rather than being a “search” tool like Sherlock.’

2000

On 5 January, Yan Arrouye and Keith Mortensen filed what became Apple’s US Patent 6,847,959 B1 for a Universal Interface for Retrieval of Information in a Computer System. This describes the use of multiple plug-in modules for different kinds of search, in the way that was already being used in Sherlock. Drawings show that it was intended to be opened using an item on the right of the menu bar, there titled [GO-TO] rather than using the magnifying glass icon of Sherlock or Spotlight. This opened a search dialog resembling a prototype for Spotlight, and appears to have included ‘live’ search conducted as letters were typed in.

2001

Karelia Software released Watson.

2002

Mac OS X Jaguar brought Sherlock 3, which many considered had an uncanny resemblance to Watson. That resulted in acrimonious debate.

2005

In preparation for the first Intel Macs, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, released in April 2005, introduced Spotlight as a replacement for Sherlock, which never ran on Intel Macs.

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

2006

On 4 August, John M Hörnkvist and others filed what became US Patent 7,783,589 B2 for Inverted Index Processing, for Apple. This was one of a series of related patents concerning Spotlight indexing. Just a week later, on 11 August, Matthew G Sachs and Jonathan A Sagotsky filed what became US Patent 7,698,328 B2 for User-Directed search refinement.

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

2007

Spotlight was improved in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, in October. 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.

2014

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

In OS X 10.10 Yosemite, released in October, 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, accompanied by Spotlight Suggestions.

2015

John M Hörnkvist and Gaurav Kapoor filed what was to become US Patent 10,885,039 B2 for Machine learning based search improvement, which appears to have been the foundation for Spotlight Suggestions, in turn becoming Siri Suggestions in macOS Sierra. Those were accompanied by remote data collection designed to preserve the relative anonymity of the user.

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

c 2019

Apple acquired Laserlike, Inc, whose technology (and further patents) has most probably been used to enhance Siri Suggestions. Laserlike had already filed for patents on query pattern matching in 2018.

I’m sure there’s a great deal more detail to add to this outline, and welcome any additional information, please.

4 August 2025: I’m very grateful to Joel for providing me with info and links for On Location, which I have incorporated above.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Total banker’s order quickly verifies integrity.

2: 1 broke by 2005, 2 is still cryptographic, 3 is even better, but not in Iran.

3: Missing from …MNOPQTUVW… but present in CD.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 316. Here are my solutions to them.

1: From PageRank and 10^100 to a set of letters.

2: A hooligan went from directory to search then declined into finance and news.

3: After changing name three times, this directory has gone wavy.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: From PageRank and 10^100 to a set of letters.

2: A hooligan went from directory to search then declined into finance and news.

3: After changing name three times, this directory has gone wavy.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

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

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 315. Here are my solutions to them.

1: It came with a tumbler from Camelot in 1993, then opened in 2008.

2: Replacement for 3 to avoid royalties with transparency has just turned three.

3: CompuServe animated its palette with 256 colours but we still can’t agree how to say it.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: It came with a tumbler from Camelot in 1993, then opened in 2008.

2: Replacement for 3 to avoid royalties with transparency has just turned three.

3: CompuServe animated its palette with 256 colours but we still can’t agree how to say it.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

Searching the Internet, more recently its web servers, has proceeded in four main phases. Initially, humans built structured directories of sites they considered worth visiting. When those couldn’t keep pace with the Internet’s growth, commercial search engines were developed, and their search results were ranked. Around 2000, Google’s PageRank algorithm became dominant for ranking pages by their popularity. Then from late 2024 that is being progressively replaced with AI-generated summaries. Each of these has been reflected in the tools provided by Mac OS.

Directories

In the earliest years of the Internet, when the first web servers started to appear, and files were downloaded using anonymous FTP, users compiled their own lists by hand. Some curated directories were made public, including one maintained by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and another at NCSA. Individuals started using Gopher, a client to discover the contents of servers using the service of the same name. The next step was the development of tools to catalogue Gopher and other servers, such as Veronica and Jughead, but it wasn’t until 1993 that the first search engine, W3Catalog, and a bot, the World Wide Web Wanderer, started to transform Internet search.

Berners-Lee’s directory grew into the World Wide Web Virtual Library, and still exists, although it was last updated several years ago, most is now hosted elsewhere, and some is broken. The most famous directory was originally launched in 1994 and was then known as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, later becoming Yahoo! Directory. This offered paid submission and entry subscriptions, and was closed down at the end of 2014.

The favourite of many (including me) was launched as GnuHoo in 1998, and later that year, when it been acquired by Netscape, became the Open Directory Project, then DMOZ, seen here in the Camino browser in 2004. Although owned by AOL, it was maintained by a volunteer community that grew rapidly to hold around 100,000 links maintained by about 4,500 volunteers, and exceeded a million links by the new millennium. DMOZ closed in 2017 when AOL lost interest, but went on as Curlie using the same hierarchy.

Sherlock was 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 new 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.

Indexing and ranking

Human editors couldn’t keep pace with the growth of the web, and demand grew for searching of indexes. This posed the problem of how to rank pages, and development of a series of ranking algorithms, some of which were patented. The first to use links (‘hyperlinks’) was Robin Li’s RankDex, patented in 1996, two years before Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s PageRank that brought their success in Google.

Ranking search results wasn’t new. In the late twentieth century, sciences started measuring the ‘impact’ of published papers by counting their citations in other papers, and university departments and scientific journals laid claim to their greatness by quoting citation and impact indexes. Early search ranking used features such as the frequency of occurrence of the words in the search term, which proved too crude and was manipulated by those trying to promote pages for gain. The obvious replacement was incoming links from other sites, which also quickly became abused and misused.

Research into networks was limited before 1998, when Jon Kleinberg and the two founders of Google entered the field. As with citation indexes before, they envisaged link-based ranking as a measure of popularity, and popularity as a good way of determining the order in which search results should be presented. They also recognised some of the dangers, and the need to weight incoming links to a page according to the total number of such links made by each linking site. Oddly, Kleinberg’s prior work wasn’t incorporated into a search engine until 2001, by which time Brin and Page were powering Google to dominance, and in June 2000 provided the default search engine for Yahoo!

This is Yahoo! Search seen in Firefox in 2007, by which time it was using its own indexing and search engine.

PageRank and algorithms

Google grew prodigiously, and became rich because of its sales of advertising across the web, a business dependent on promotion of its clients, something that could be achieved by adjusting its PageRank algorithm.

Although it’s hard to find now, at one time Google’s Advanced Search was widely used, as it gives more extensive control. Here it’s seen in Safari of 2011.

Google Scholar gives access to published research in a wide range of fields, and was introduced in late 2004. Here it’s seen in use in 2011, listing work that’s recently become topical again. Scholar doesn’t use the same PageRank-based algorithm for ranking its results, but does give substantial weight to citation counts.

When Apple replaced Sherlock with Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in April 2005, web search defaulted to newly-arrived Safari and Google’s search engine. Its major redesign, in OS X 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, merged web and local search into Global Spotlight, the search window that opens from the Spotlight icon at the right end of the menu bar. That in turn brought Spotlight Suggestions, which became Siri Suggestions in macOS Sierra.

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

Apple has never explained how Siri Suggestions works, although it appears to use machine learning and includes partial results from web search probably using Google. It offers a taste of what is to come in the future of Internet search.

Summarising

Google started the transition to using Artificial Intelligence in 2024, and that September introduced Audio Overview to provide spoken summaries of documents. This year has brought full AI overviews, in which multiple pages are summarised succinctly, and presented alongside links to the pages used to produce them. Although some can be useful, many are vague and waffly, and some blatantly spurious.

We’ve come a long way from Tim Berners-Lee’s curated directories, and PageRank in particular has transformed the web and more besides.

References

Wikipedia:
Gopher
Web directory
Search engine
Google Scholar

Amy N Langville and Carl D Meyer (2006) Google’s PageRank and Beyond: the Science of Search Engine Rankings, Princeton UP. ISBN 978 0 691 12202 1.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 314. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Expedition for a panther now in visionOS too.

2: Polished plate is now 1’s most serious competitor.

3: Web pet only lasted a year before the exploder.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Expedition for a panther now in visionOS too.

2: Polished plate is now 1’s most serious competitor.

3: Web pet only lasted a year before the exploder.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

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.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 313. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Light and lenses control a car inside Macs until 2013.

2: Splendid campaign originally for airs until last August.

3: Cupertino’s Roman 400 in South Carolina was the first in 1988.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Light and lenses control a car inside Macs until 2013.

2: Splendid campaign originally for airs until last August.

3: Cupertino’s Roman 400 in South Carolina was the first in 1988.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 312. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Border lake claims it’s both 10 and 1A.

2: Clearly a new material comes with concentricity.

3: Patented in 1876, it’s finally on its way to our Macs.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Border lake claims it’s both 10 and 1A.

2: Clearly a new material comes with concentricity.

3: Patented in 1876, it’s finally on its way to our Macs.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 311. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Shines a beam of light into files and the web.

2: The detective who found for Apple from 1998.

3: His faithful assistant came from Karelia and went to Java.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: Shines a beam of light into files and the web.

2: The detective who found for Apple from 1998.

3: His faithful assistant came from Karelia and went to Java.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

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.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 310. Here are my solutions to them.

1: London to Pontarddulais in Macs for six months.

2: Jupiter’s flash now reaches 80 for the Pros.

3: Very long run from the Thames to Eastleigh came to the workshop in March.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: London to Pontarddulais in Macs for six months.

2: Jupiter’s flash now reaches 80 for the Pros.

3: Very long run from the Thames to Eastleigh came to the workshop in March.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.

With strong rumours that Apple intends changing its version numbering system for the next major release of macOS and its other operating systems, it’s a good time to see how we got to macOS 15.

Early Classic Mac OS

The first version of Classic Mac OS released with the original Macintosh 128K naturally came with System 1.0 and Finder 1.0. Within a few months, version numbering was already becoming confusing, when the successor System Software 0.1 had apparently started at 0.0, but the System itself had reached 1.1. This worsened when System Software 1.0 was released two years later, and came with System 3.1 and Finder 5.2.

Apple then adopted its first triplet numbering scheme that resembled modern Semantic Versioning in System 6.0 of June 1988. Over the following three years that worked its way steadily up to version 6.0.8, then handed over to System 7 on 13 May 1991 without any minor versions being released.

System 7

The first full use of the triplet numbering scheme came with System 7. That had four minor versions, 7.0, 7.1, 7.5 and 7.6, with each having patch releases such as 7.0.1 in between. This scheme followed the rules:

• the first number gives the major version;
• the second number gives the minor version that should remain backward-compatible in its changes;
• the third number gives the patch version denoting backward-compatible bug fixes.

It was then that Apple started to release special versions of Mac OS to support new models, for example 7.1P5 for Performa models, complicating the numbering. This was even worse with System 7.1.2, which was only supplied with some early Power Macs and a few 68K Quadra models. That was accompanied by System 7.1.2P, a special version for models released around the time that Apple also released System 7.5, in September 1994.

System 7.5 brought a different numbering scheme to deal with exceptions. For example:

• System 7.5.3 Revision 2 followed 7.5.3 without any Revision 1, and made various improvements;
• System 7.5.3 Revisions 2.1 and 2.2 were released on the same day to address problems with Revision 2 on different models;
• System 7.5.4 was never released at all, and the next release was 7.5.5.

Fortunately, the remaining versions of Classic Mac OS were conventional in their numbering, until the last in Mac OS 9.2.2 in December 2001.

Mac OS X

The public beta of Mac OS X introduced build numbers to supplement their triplet version numbering. At this time, the build number was based broadly on three components:

• the first number or build train gives the major version, starting from 4 for 10.0, as this includes NeXTSTEP up to version 3;
• the letter gives the minor version number, starting from A, which can also be bumped for hardware-specific builds, so may not match the triplet minor version number;
• the remaining number is the sequential build number within that minor version, usually incremented daily. That’s normally three digits, but an additional digit can be prefixed to indicate specific hardware platforms.

Triplet versions and build numbers were surprisingly well behaved until 2010, although separate build numbers were used during the transition from PowerPC to Intel architecture in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The first signs of complications came with Mac OS X 10.6.3, in March-April 2010, which came in three different builds and a v1.1, and 10.6.8 also had a v1.1 released a month after the original update. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion set a trend for a final Supplemental Update to 10.7.5, and frequent Security and Supplemental Updates became the rule by 2018, with macOS 10.12 Sierra and its successors.

By 2019, these updates had become uncontrollable. macOS 10.14 Mojave, for example, had three Supplemental Updates in the two months after its final release, named as 10.14.6 Supplemental Update, 10.14.6 Supplemental Update (a second time), and 10.14.6 Supplemental Update 2 (really 3).

macOS 11

The first version of macOS to support Apple silicon Macs, macOS 11 Big Sur, had been generally expected as macOS 10.16, but shortly before its announcement at WWDC in June 2020 the decision was made for it to become macOS 11, incrementing the major version number for the first time in almost 20 years. As that reset the minor version number from 15 to 0, there was the potential for chaos, as many scripts and much code had come to ignore the major version number, and to rely on the minor version to determine which release was running.

To cater for this, when those checked ProcessInfo.processInfo.operatingSystemVersion.minorVersion (or its equivalent), Big Sur identified itself as macOS 10.16. Apps ported to Xcode 12 used the 11.0 SDK; when they checked ProcessInfo.processInfo.operatingSystemVersion.minorVersion (or its equivalent), Big Sur identified itself as macOS 11.0. Those who relied on command tools were provided with a workaround, as
sw_vers -productVersion
returned 10.16 when running in Big Sur on an Intel Mac, but 11.0 on an Apple Silicon Mac.

This enabled Apple to return to a triplet scheme without the complications of Supplemental Updates or other vagaries. Each year’s major version of macOS has thus been x.0, with scheduled minor versions numbered from x.1 to x.5 or x.6, and intermediate patch releases (usually security updates) from x.x.1 upwards. At the end of its year as the current release of macOS, x.6 marked the start of its first year of security-only support, and x.7 for the second and final year. The exception to this has been Sonoma, which started its first year of security-only support with version 14.7, so its security updates have coincided in their minor and patch numbers with the older Ventura.

The only complication to this much clearer system was introduced in Ventura with Rapid Security Responses (RSRs). Those didn’t change the triplet version, as macOS proper remained unchanged, but added a letter to form, for example, macOS 13.4.1 (c). That proved clumsy, and when reflected in a resulting Safari version number it broke a lot of major websites that were unable to identify the browser version correctly. Since RSRs have fallen out of favour, this proved to be a passing phase.

When I wrote about the unexpected change in version numbering brought in Big Sur, I claimed that “no matter what Apple may eventually settle on, I shouldn’t have to change that again for many years.” I’m not sure that five counts as many, but here we go again.

References

Semantic Versions, SemVer
Apple package version numbering
Robservatory Mac OS X versions and release dates
System updates, including security data etc., since 2016

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 309. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Glazed opening floats over desktop but not in the plural here.

2: Representative symbol venerated by the orthodox.

3: À la carte bar to top it all with commands.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 308. Here are my solutions to them.

1: One of two of the three at the start, he left for 12 years with the successor before returning for one more thing.

2: Writer for Bannister and Crun who originated and named it without a mouse.

3: First to copy and paste, then changed Pascal and Newton, but was always modeless.

The common factor

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

Here are this weekend’s Mac riddles to entertain you through family time, shopping and recreation.

1: One of two of the three at the start, he left for 12 years with the successor before returning for one more thing.

2: Writer for Bannister and Crun who originated and named it without a mouse.

3: First to copy and paste, then changed Pascal and Newton, but was always modeless.

To help you cross-check your solutions, or confuse you further, there’s a common factor between them.

I’ll post my solutions first thing on Monday morning.

Please don’t post your solutions as comments here: it spoils it for others.