© Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 325. Here are my solutions to them.
Not quite a dogcow (the name has an uncanny resemblance to Clarus the Dogcow) functions (works) in six modules (what it contained) from 1991 (when it was first released for the Mac).
Suite in three movements (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) replacing 1 from 2004 (when Apple started replacing AppleWorks, successor to ClarisWorks, with iWork).
Yoga position (lotus) with syncopated music (jazz), but it wasn’t the sequel to 1-2-3 (an early attempt from Lotus to reproduce the success it had with Lotus 1-2-3 for PCs on the Mac, it flopped badly).
They were each ‘office’ suites for Mac OS.
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: Not quite a dogcow functions in six modules from 1991.
2: Suite in three movements replacing 1 from 2004.
3: Yoga position with syncopated music, but it wasn’t the sequel to 1-2-3.
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 324. Here are my solutions to them.
Last (final) edit (cut) from KeyGrip (its original name when it was being developed by Macromedia) but not for the amateur (pro).
Movement (motion) to accompany 1 (it’s part of the suite) for its titles and effects (what it’s used for).
Opening (an aperture) that closed for your photos a decade ago (it was Apple’s equivalent of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but was discontinued in 2015).
They have each been among Apple’s ‘pro’ apps for those working with still and moving images, and competitors for Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
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: Last edit from KeyGrip but not for the amateur.
2: Movement to accompany 1 for its titles and effects.
3: Opening that closed for your photos a decade ago.
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.
Few other companies have had as much influence on the Mac and its success as Adobe. Founded just over a year before Apple launched the Mac, its original mission was to develop and market its new PostScript page description language, originally designed and written by Adobe’s co-founders, John Warnock (1940-2023) and Charles Geschke (1939-2021). Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was an early enthusiast who shared their vision. After an unsuccessful bid to buy Adobe, Apple bought a 19% stake in it and paid in advance for a five-year licence for PostScript. When Apple introduced its first PostScript laser printer, the LaserWriter, in March 1985 the partnership launched the Desktop Publishing (DTP) revolution.
The same year the LaserWriter brought PostScript and its fonts to the first DTP designers, Adobe started development of its first retail software product, Illustrator, released two years later in 1987. This is a vector graphics editor aimed initially at creating in Encapsulated PostScript Format (EPSF), so had to render the bézier curves of PostScript into the Mac’s QuickDraw graphics.
Illustrator wasn’t offered for Windows for another two years, and even then was widely criticised for lagging behind its Mac version. It wasn’t until 1997 that the Windows version achieved parity. Adobe’s major competitor, Aldus FreeHand, was preferred by many professionals until Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, following which it was quietly suffocated.
This is Adobe Illustrator running in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in early 2003.
In 1988, Adobe bought the distribution licence to a raster graphics editor already named Photoshop by its original developers, brothers Thomas and John Knoll. The first Adobe version was released for Macs only in February 1990. It has the distinction of being the major app developed using Apple’s MacApp class library, and wasn’t released for Windows until late 1992, by which time it was establishing itself as the standard, particularly for pro photographers. In 2007 it was joined by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, an image management app that became the standard when Apple discontinued Aperture in 2015.
This is Adobe Photoshop in Mac OS 9.2, in late 2002.
And this is its matching Mac OS X version in 10.2 Jaguar.
Digital non-linear video editing was in its infancy in 1991, when SuperMac Technology developed a QuickTime-based app to support its Video Spigot capture card. Adobe purchased the whole project, and four months later at the end of 1991 released the first version of Adobe Premiere. Although severely constrained by hardware of the time, it proved another successful Mac-only product until its Windows version was released almost two years later, and the product was renamed Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003.
In 1995, Premiere was joined by After Effects following Adobe’s acquisition of Aldus the previous year. After Effects provides digital effects including motion graphics and compositing. In 1999, Apple released Final Cut Pro, whose early development had been by the first Premiere development team working for Macromedia, and has since added Motion and other apps to form its Pro suite. They successfully competed against Adobe’s video products on the Mac.
I have already given a fuller account of the history of PDF and Adobe Acrobat on Macs.
This is Acrobat Distiller 4.0 running on Mac OS 9.1 in early 2001, showing some of its bewildering array of options for turning PostScript files into PDF.
Adobe provided its free Acrobat Reader for Mac OS X, here seen in 10.0 Cheetah.
FrameMaker, originally developed by Frame Technology, is a high-end technical publishing system bought by Adobe in 1995. It was then offered in a premium version with extensive support for SGML, seen here in 2002, two years before Adobe dropped this Mac version.
From its launch in 1985, the leading page layout app for Macs had been Aldus PageMaker, which Adobe acquired when it purchased Aldus in 1994. By this time, PageMaker was under increasing pressure from QuarkXPress, which had become preferred by many professionals. As a result, Aldus had already started to develop what it claimed would be its “Quark killer”, and Adobe continued that. It then discontinued support for PageMaker in a final version released in 2001, which notoriously didn’t support Mac OS X and was never ported to Intel Macs either.
Early development on what was to become Adobe InDesign had started in Aldus before it was swallowed up by Adobe, and its first version was released in 1999, for both Windows and Mac OS. When Mac OS 10.0 Cheetah was released in March 2001, InDesign was its first native page layout app, as well as the first to support Unicode and advanced features of OpenType fonts. As QuarkXPress entered a decline, InDesign became the DTP product of choice.
This is Adobe InDesign in its early days, seen here editing Christmas cards in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in December 2002.
Dreamweaver is a website development app that originated in Macromedia in 1997, and was acquired by Adobe with its purchase of that company in 2005.
Adobe Dreamweaver is seen here running in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009.
Another of Macromedia’s products that Adobe acquired in 2005 was Flash, a rich multimedia software platform that became enormously popular in websites including YouTube and many corporate sites. Flash came with its own scripting language ActionScript, but proved a security nightmare because of its long series of exploited vulnerabilities. Although Flash Player was almost universal on Macs, Apple refused to allow Flash support on its devices, leading to a bitter standoff between Steve Jobs and Adobe. About a year later, much to the relief of security staff around the world, Adobe announced it would cease Flash development; it was deprecated in 2017, and all support stopped at the end of 2020.
‘Shockwave Flash’ and the Flash Player plagued Mac OS X Tiger in 2006.
There have been and still are many other apps from Adobe. One of my favourites was LaserTalk, first released by Emerald City Software in 1988. This was a PostScript debugger acquired by Adobe and bundled in its PostScript SDK. Finally, there was Adobe Streamline, a tool for converting bitmap graphics into Adobe Illustrator vector graphics, first released in 1989, and absorbed into Illustrator in about 2001. No doubt you will also have your own favourites.
Apple sold its 19% stake in Adobe in 1989, and in 2011 Adobe introduced its Creative Cloud subscription service, that two years later replaced its popular Creative Studio DVD distributions with perpetual licences.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 323. Here are my solutions to them.
Well-guarded (secure) like West Berlin was (an enclave surrounded by East Germany), it holds your greatest secrets (what it does).
Motor (engine) nerve (neural) processes your images (what it does).
Cloth or worsted (both are fabrics) to connect it all together (what it does).
They are relatively new features in Apple silicon chips.
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: Well-guarded like West Berlin was, it holds your greatest secrets.
2: Motor nerve processes your images.
3: Cloth or worsted to connect it all together.
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.
Inside every Intel Mac with a T2 chip, and every Apple silicon Mac, is a secure enclave, originally referred to as its security enclave. The subject of a flurry of Apple’s patents from 2012 onwards, this was introduced in the A7 chip inside the iPhone 5s and iPad mini 3, 12 years ago in September 2013, where it brought biometric authentication in Touch ID.
Protecting the most important secrets in a computer is a great challenge. No matter how secure you try to make the main processor and memory, as they’re exposed to direct attack, isolation can only be relative and temporary. An alternative approach is to move the most secure data and its processing into a secure enclave and its processor, and that’s the architectural solution chosen by Apple in what it patented as a security enclave, filed in September 2012, a year before its release in the iPhone 5s. Engineers credited for that patent are Manu Gulati, Michael J Smith and Shu-Yi Yu.
Successive iPhone chips steadily improved their secure enclaves, and by the time the iPhone 7 was introduced in September 2016, with its A10 Fusion chip, its secure enclave was handling encryption and authentication but not replay prevention. It also had EEPROM secure storage, and an AES engine with DPA protection and lockable seed bits. When the first Intel Mac with a T1 chip was released a couple of months later, that was based not on the A10 but the S2 used in the Apple Watch Series 2. The T1 thus doesn’t really have a secure enclave as such, although it supports Touch ID.
An early and thorough account of these secure enclaves was presented by Tarjei Mandt, Mathew Soling and David Wang at Black Hat USA in 2016. This appears to be the only such account apart from the section in Apple’s Platform Security Guide, most recently updated in December 2024. Apple’s engineers continued to gain new patents, covering trust zone support (filed in 2012), key management (filed in 2014), and most relevant to Macs, Pierre Olivier Martel, Arthur Mesh and Wade Benson’s patent for multi-user storage volume encryption, filed in 2020.
The first Macs with a true secure enclave are those with a T2 chip, starting with the iMac Pro in December 2017. Those are based on the same A10 Fusion chip from the previous year, and were already lagging the iPhone 8 in this respect.
The T2 secure enclave is another co-processor system, run by a Secure Enclave Processor (SEP), a 32-bit ARM CPU running its own operating system, sepOS, based on a specialised L4 microkernel completely different from those used by Macs and Apple’s devices. It has its own secure storage (EEPROM), and a Public Key Accelerator for signing and encryption/decryption using RSA and ECC methods. Outside the enclave is a dedicated AES256 encryption/decryption engine built into the data transfer path between the internal SSD and main system memory.
The big leap forward for Macs was the release of the first models featuring M1 chips, which caught up with the features of late versions (after autumn 2020) of the A12 and A13, with Apple’s second generation Secure Storage Component.
Perhaps the most significant of its improvements are measures to prevent replay attacks. Those are best illustrated with FileVault. Let’s say that you didn’t enable FileVault at first, but left your Apple silicon Mac to handle the encryption of its internal Data volume without the added protection of your password. That would mean that its volume encryption key (VEK) was generated internally by the Secure Enclave, and stored there. If you then turned FileVault on, the VEK would be encrypted using your password and the hardware key. In the T2 chip, it might be possible to use the old VEK to decrypt the volume. In the secure enclave of an M-series chip, that type of replay attack is prevented by the revocation of all previous events and records.
Other improvements include the use of second generation secure storage incorporating counter lockboxes to enforce limits on the number of passcode attempts allowed, instead of an EEPROM, and a better Public Key Accelerator.
Currently, the secure enclave is known to protect the following:
Communication between the CPU and SEP is performed using a dedicated mailbox whose function is detailed in Apple’s patents. Further information is also provided in the Platform Security Guide.
It has been stated widely (even here) that the secure enclave in T2 and Apple silicon chips contains a hardware encryption/decryption unit and acts as the internal SSD’s storage controller. In fact, as shown in the original patent of Martel and others, and now in the Platform Security Guide, the AES engine responsible is located outside the secure enclave, together with the Flash controller, and has a secure link to the enclave.
During SEP boot, it generates an ephemeral key to wrap keys to be used by the AES engine for encryption and decryption. That key is sent from the secure enclave to the AES engine over the dedicated connection between them, then used to protect keys transferred from the enclave to the AES engine. That ensures an unprotected key is never exposed outside the enclave and AES engine.
The Apple silicon secure enclave is by no means unique. ARM TrustZone, other Trusted Execution Environments, and Trusted Platform Modules offer similar features and facilities. However, the secure enclave is unusual because it has been integrated into all Macs with T2 or Apple silicon chips, and all Apple’s recent devices, and can’t be disabled or bypassed.
Manu Gulati, Michael J Smith and Shu-Yi Yu, US Patent 8,832,465 B2, Security enclave processor for a system on a chip, filed 25 September 2012, granted 9 September 2014.
R Stephen Polzin, James B Keller, Gerard R Williams, US Patent 8,775,757 B2, Trust zone support in system on a chip having security enclave processor, filed 25 September 2012, granted 8 July 2014.
R Stephen Polzin, Fabrice L Gautier, Mitchell D Adler, Conrad Sauerwald and Michael LH Brouwer, US Patent 9,419,794 B2, Key management using security enclave processor, filed 23 September 2014, granted 16 August 2016.
Pierre Olivier Martel, Arthur Mesh and Wade Benson, US Patent 11,455,432 B1, Multi-user storage volume encryption via secure processor, filed 8 June 2020, granted 27 September 2022.
Tarjei Mandt, Mathew Soling and David Wang (2016), Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor, Black Hat USA 16 (PDF)
Apple, Platform Security Guide
Wikipedia’s overview of Apple silicon chips.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 322. Here are my solutions to them.
It’s about evolution (when Steve Jobs announced Darwin as open source in 1999, he said this to link it with Charles Darwin), and open source for 25 years (first released as open source in 2000, and still being posted on GitHub). (Darwin consists of the open source components in macOS, and includes its kernel.)
If the kernel isn’t Unix, this is it (XNU is the open source kernel within Darwin, and is available as part of the GitHub distribution. Its name is an abbreviation for X isn’t Unix).
Mud puddles in Pittsburgh misheard (it was originally intended to be called Muck in honour of these, but was misheard and incorrectly written down as Mach) as the basis for 2 (the Mach microkernel, developed by Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian, formed the basis of XNU. Tevanian went on to work at Apple, then NeXT, where he designed NeXTSTEP).
They are all open source elements in macOS.
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’s about evolution, and open source for 25 years.
2: If the kernel isn’t Unix, this is it.
3: Mud puddles in Pittsburgh misheard as the basis for 2.
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.
When Mac OS X 10.0 was released in March 2001, privileges, permissions and security adopted a conventional model based on BSD and Unix. Those sufficed for 15 years until the release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan in September 2015, when System Integrity Protection, SIP, was introduced. This article outlines its history over the last decade.
The first public account of SIP was presented by Pierre-Olivier Martel at WWDC 2015 in June, and documented in Apple’s System Integrity Protection Guide that September, which hasn’t been revised since. These changes were justified as adding a further layer of security protection to prevent attackers from gaining full control by escalating privileges to root.
Three types of protection were promised:
Each Mac’s SIP configuration was stored in NVRAM, and controlled by the csrutil command used in Recovery mode.
When released, the csrutil command provided some degree of separate control over six groups of features: file system protections, debugging protection, DTrace protection, kext signing requirement, NVRAM and ‘Apple internal’ protection. One immediate beneficial side-effect was that SIP prevented permissions being changed for system files, and that made the practice of repairing permissions on them unnecessary, allowing removal of support for that procedure from Disk Utility.
Press reviews of the SIP feature were divided, with some claiming it was a sign that OS X was being closed down and moved to the iOS security model, while others considered that few users would notice much difference.
Problems resulting from SIP were reported soon after El Capitan’s release. For example, some older Mac models intentionally prevented their use with Apple USB SuperDrives. One workaround to address that had been to modify one of the files now protected by SIP, which consequently required the user to disable SIP to make that change.
As kernel extensions hadn’t previously been required to be signed at all, other early casualties were all older unsigned kexts, making some apps unusable unless a new version was provided with a correctly signed kext.
Late in 2016, it became clear that Apple had shipped a substantial batch of new MacBook Pro systems with SIP disabled. At that time, System Information was unable to report SIP status, and the only way to enable protection was to start that Mac up in Recovery mode and use the csrutil command in the Terminal app there. That applied to macOS Sierra 10.12 to 10.12.1.
To make this easier, Apple changed csrutil so that it could enable SIP when invoked in normal running mode, provided it was run with elevated privileges obtained using sudo. Despite that, some of those affected MacBook Pro models didn’t have SIP enabled correctly for several months.
Over the following years, SIP continued to cause irritations that infuriated some users.
Bundled apps in the main Applications folder were protected by SIP, and that prevented the user from modifying them. As the handling of kexts changed, it was discovered that SIP made it awkward to remove old kexts the user had installed. That was because the folder /Library/StagedExtensions was put under the protection of SIP by attaching a com.apple.rootless extended attribute to it.
One reading of that extended attribute is that only Apple’s KernelExtensionManagement service can give permission for changes to be made within that folder, and the folders within it.
Apple later used SIP to lock down individual extended attributes (xattrs) attached to regular unprotected files. The first example of this was the undocumented com.apple.macl xattr that macOS started to attach widely to all user documents. Presence of that xattr was implicated in some problems in which those documents became locked down and unable to save changes, despite permissions and other visible attributes showing that the user had full ownership of the file. The only workaround for this has been to copy the file to another volume, where the xattr no longer has the protection of SIP, and can be stripped.
When Apple later introduced another undocumented xattr com.apple.provenance, that too was sometimes but not always protected by SIP, although that hasn’t been implicated in problems visible to the user.
Launch constraints were introduced in macOS 13 Ventura and iOS 16 in 2022. Every executable binary in the system now has a set of rules determining the requirements for that binary to be launched. These include self constraints that the binary itself must meet, parent constraints that must be met by its parent process, and responsible constraints that must be met by the process requesting the launch. Together these form that code’s launch constraints. To make those constraints simpler, they come in different categories, ranging from 0, in which there are no constraints at all, to combinations that prevent launch by processes that aren’t themselves part of the system and require the code itself to be on the System volume.
Although Apple has documented these for developers, they can cause unexpected behaviour for users, who haven’t been given any explanation. Testing has demonstrated that launch constraints are dependent on SIP, so must be assumed to have been added to its list of protections.
Many users have reported slowing app launch times in recent versions of macOS. In February 2024, Jeff Johnson investigated these, and concluded that the cause was the macOS security system repeatedly performed malware scans against a growing set of Yara rules. These stopped when SIP was disabled, implying that this is yet another protection that has been added to those controlled by SIP.
Current user documentation for SIP explains only its file system protection, csrutil‘s man page refers to its usage information, but from that and XNU it’s possible to separate out its controls to include the following, at least:
Login
csrutil to kextcsrutil authenticated-root disable and enablecsrutil include: CSR_ALLOW_TASK_FOR_PID, CSR_ALLOW_DEVICE_CONFIGURATION, CSR_ALLOW_ANY_RECOVERY_OS and CSR_ALLOW_EXECUTABLE_POLICY_OVERRIDE. Those should be disabled when SIP is fully disabled.Over the last decade, many vulnerabilities have been discovered in SIP that have allowed parts of its protections to be bypassed. Among the most recent is CVE-2024-44243 discovered by Jonathan Bar Or (@yo_yo_yo_jbo) of Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Mickey Jin (@patch1t), and fixed in the update to macOS 15.2 Sequoia. However, this wasn’t fixed in Sonoma until the following round of updates (14.7.3), and appears to remain unpatched in Ventura 13.7.8.
Microsoft’s report explains how bypassing just one of SIP’s many protections can give access to bypasses of more or all of SIP’s other protections. Note also how Apple’s description of the vulnerability in its security release notes refers to StorageKit but doesn’t reveal that this affected SIP.
Over the last decade, SIP has grown like Topsy from three protections that seemed worthwhile and simple, into a protean collection of many parts that remain largely undocumented and pervade much of modern macOS security.
Wikipedia’s account, still largely based on SIP in 2015
This blog on csrutil controls
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 321. Here are my solutions to them.
Where to sell (a shop) an image (a photo) of the Knolls (originally developed by brothers Thomas and John Knoll, and licensed by Adobe) in a two-year exclusive (from February 1990 until its release on Windows in November 1992, it was exclusive to Mac).
Rembrandt, Claude Monet, JMW Turner (all three were painters) and Corel (originally released in 1991 by Fractal Design, Painter was eventually bought by Corel).
One of the first two (together with MacWrite, it was one of the two apps bundled with the 128K Mac), it could be beige acrylic (paint the same colour as the 128K Mac) and written by Bill (Atkinson, 1951-2025, who wrote the app).
They have all been major raster graphics editors on the Mac.
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: Where to sell an image of the Knolls in a two-year exclusive.
2: Rembrandt, Claude Monet, JMW Turner and Corel.
3: One of the first two, it could be beige acrylic and written by Bill.
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.
Before the arrival of Mac OS X, our Macs had remained almost free from the property lists and other XML files that now seem to fill them. Those owe their origin to the grandfather of markup languages, SGML, originally known as Generalised Markup Language. That was invented by Charles Goldfarb, Ed Mosher and Ray Lorie in 1969, when they were working at IBM, as a means of structuring text semantically, and first used a different form of markup, as in:h1.Chapter 1: Introduction
to set that text as a top-level headline. Ordered lists should look familiar to anyone who writes HTML::ol
:li.Item one.
:li.Item two.
:eol.
SGML was flexible as to markup formatting, but has become most widely seen using the angle brackets <> common to HTML, XML, and other markup languages.
Although it has never been popular in its own right, SGML still features in some products where markup is required to impart structure and meaning.
FrameMaker, originally developed by Frame Technology, is a high-end technical publishing system bought by Adobe in 1995. It was then offered in a premium version with extensive support for SGML, seen here in 2002, two years before Adobe dropped this Mac version.
In 1996, a working group of W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) started developing a profile of SGML that became known as Extended Markup Language, or XML. Work continued through 1997, and in February 1998 XML 1.0 was adopted as a W3C Recommendation. While there’s also a slightly different version 1.1, published in 2004, and various editions of 1.0, in its fundamentals the XML we use today is still version 1.0, with 1.1 only recommended for special purposes.
Unlike traditional implementations of Unix, NeXTSTEP used its own property lists to contain serialised objects including settings. When Mac OS X was introduced, those were replaced by a new XML format using a public Document Type Declaration (DTD) still used today.
Although intended to be expressed in plain text, binary representations of XML developed during the early years of the new millennium, and Apple decided to adopt its own, bplist, in the early days of Mac OS X. This brought improved parsing speed, as well as being more compact, and has acted as a deterrent to those who might make casual changes to critical property lists. These were introduced in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002, and have been used as standard for property lists since Mac OS X 10.4. They are described well in this Wikipedia article.
A typical modern property list coded in XML might read<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<array>
<date>2017-10-10T13:13:43Z</date>
</array>
</plist>
That specifies a datestamp in an extended attribute.
Bundled tools to create and edit property lists have remained disappointingly primitive, but there has been no shortage of contenders from third parties.
This is the ElfData XML Editor, one of the first to be released in 2001, seen two years later in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar editing DocBook XML format.
In 2004, David Reitter created a version of GNU Emacs with an Aqua interface and named it Aquamacs. It’s seen here in 2006, in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, with its XML tools for editing a property list.
Another early entrant, from 2002, that has blossomed into one of the most extensive and sophisticated XML development environments is cross-platform Oxygen, from SyncRO Soft. Although written in Java its Mac versions have been sensitively implemented. It’s seen here in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2006, viewing an XML rendition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
This is Syntext Serna in 2007, again in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, seen editing an XML version of my PhD thesis that had originally been written in Adobe FrameMaker+SGML.
Other editors came and went, such as XML Editor, here in the last few days of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger in 2007. This is a table from my thesis.
Major text editors also gained XML powers. These are Safari’s preferences in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, seen rendered by Rich Siegel’s BBEdit. He first distributed this text editor for System 6 back in 1992, and over 30 years later it remains one of the few high-end text editors for macOS.
My final example returns to the specialist features in Oxygen, seen here in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in 2012, where it’s being used with a botanical flora.
Today XML and property lists remain at the heart of macOS, something I doubt that Charles Goldfarb ever dreamed of back in 1969.
Charles F Goldfarb (1996) The Roots of SGML – A Personal Recollection, Wayback Machine
SGML on Wikipedia
XML on Wikipedia
Property lists on Wikipedia
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 320. Here are my solutions to them.
What ET wants (to phone home) is a call (a phone call) coming to the Mac (macOS Tahoe is bringing the Phone app).
A glass (a magnifying glass) to enlarge (what it does) among the liquid (Tahoe’s Liquid Glass interface feature).
Daybook (a journal) you might already have started elsewhere (it was released in iOS 17.2, and is coming to macOS in Tahoe).
They are all new apps coming to macOS 26 Tahoe.
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.
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.
Successor to 3 (Adobe developed it to replace the ailing PageMaker) inside (in) a scheme (a design) was part of a popular atelier (for many years it was one of the leading apps in Adobe’s Creative Studio).
High speed (express) subatomic particle (a quark) took the lead in the 1990s (by the mid-1990s it had taken around 90% of the desktop publishing market on Macs).
Creator (maker) of a squire’s assistant (a page) was the first (released in July 1985 for the Mac), but died before Mac OS X (by 2000, it was moribund as Adobe was replacing it with InDesign, released in 1999, and it was never ported to Mac OS X).
They have all been leading desktop publishing apps for Macs.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
Karelia Software released Watson.
Mac OS X Jaguar brought Sherlock 3, which many considered had an uncanny resemblance to Watson. That resulted in acrimonious debate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From PageRank (Google Search was founded on the patented PageRank algorithm for ranking search results) and 10^100 (its name is derived from the very large number googol, 10 to the power of 100) to a set of letters (in 2015 it restructured under the ownership of Alphabet Inc.).
A hooligan (a yahoo) went from directory (it started as a curated web directory) to search (followed by a search engine) then declined into finance and news (what now remains).
After changing name three times (originally GnuHoo, it then became NewHoo, almost ZURL, next Open Directory Project, before becoming DMOZ), this directory (it was a human-curated web directory) has gone wavy (DMOZ was superseded by Curlie in 2018).
They have been web directories or search engines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It came with a tumbler (an acrobat) from Camelot (its original internal name) in 1993 (first released on 15 June 1993), then opened in 2008 (when it was adopted as an open ISO standard).
Replacement for 3 (it was developed by Thomas Boutell and others to replace GIFs) to avoid royalties (those were imposed on GIFs because of their use of LZW compression) with transparency (it supports a transparency layer) has just turned three (its latest version 3.0 was released in June this year).
CompuServe (released by CompuServe in 1987) animated (it supports animated images) its palette with 256 colours (it only supports palettes with 256 colours) but we still can’t agree how to say it (there has been a long-running dispute as to whether its ‘g’ is hard like ‘gift’ or soft like ‘gin’).
They were each intended to be portable, universal file formats.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Expedition (a safari) for a panther (it was first bundled with Mac OS X Panther in 2003) now in visionOS too (it’s now bundled in visionOS).
Polished plate (chrome) is now 1’s most serious competitor (on Apple’s platforms, it is Safari’s main competitor).
Web (cyber) pet (dog) only lasted a year before the exploder (released in 1996, it was dropped the following year, for Microsoft Internet Explorer to become the bundled web browser in Mac OS X).
They’ve each been web browsers for Mac OS.
I look forward to your putting alternative cases.
