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First Apple.com homepage, from 1996

web.archive.org — From the web archive's, Apple's first ever homepage, October 1996!

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  • theiggy, on 10/12/2007, -9/+51http://web.archive.org/web/19970725111853/www.mae.apple.com/

    hahahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahhahhaha...

    ...

    hahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahaha
    • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24Oh, that is truly frightening. MAE sounds like a great thing but what the hell is up with that horrific image in the upper corner? Gah!
    • mrFREEZE, on 10/12/2007, -40/+2"From the web archive's, Apple's first ever homepage, October 1996!"

      Looks exactly the same as it does today, what's the big deal? ;p
    • crash999, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16Whoah! Hard to believe that was only 9 years ago. Wonder what the interwebs will look like in 10 years from now.
    • WhoDey, on 10/12/2007, -13/+49 years? It's 2006. Try 10.
    • Rigbymatt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Ajax and round corners for all!
    • sych0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12I can't wait till 10 years from now when we look back at digg.com and think of how ugly it was. What does the future hold?!

      Hahah
    • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6"Ajax and round corners for all!"
      Except on MySpace/whatever the hell they will use in 10 years.
      Unless 100% of the next generation is a geek
    • ajskhan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Response to old Microsoft Frontpage?
    • macgabriel87, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ sych0: we can get even with the future now by making fun of IT in the present!

      To the Future:
      You can take that Microsoft.3dcom with Bill Gates as your greeter or your MacPro 3's and iPod peceño and shove it up your as... ohh i take it back send me to the future!
  • Tanbo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I'm wondering if this was around the time Jobs came back, maybe just before I'm guessing.
    • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Jobs came back in 1997 but didn't fully take over until 1998, IIRC.
    • velocitychannel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Apple bought NeXT in Dec 1996. Jobs booted Amelio from the CEO position in July 1997 and took the helm as an interim CEO (iCEO).
  • DIGGerPhelpsND, on 10/12/2007, -2/+54I don't think that this was Apple's first homepage. 1996 was just when archive.org started.
    • DIGGerPhelpsND, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15"The Apple PowerBook 1400 will be available in four different configurations. Three of the systems use a 117MHz PowerPC 603e processor. One of the systems uses a higher-performance version of the chip running at 133MHz with level two cache. Depending on configuration, the PowerBook 1400 series features 11.3" dual-scan or active-matrix displays, two PC card slots, 12 or 16MB of RAM (expandable to 64MB), 750MB or 1.0GB hard drives, and a floppy and/or 6X-speed CD-ROM drive. The PowerBook 1400 series also comes with built-in infrared technology for easy, wireless file sharing with similarly equipped systems. U.S. estimated selling prices for the four configurations range from $2,500 to $4,000."
    • ThankTheCheese, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15yeah, i find it hard to believe apple didnt have a Web presence until 1996.
    • bluethundr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I agree. I think it was earlier. I remember my friend introducing me to this "new thing" called the web, but bringing me into the computer labs at Rutgers University. First thing I did was go to Apple's homepage. I was a huuuge Applehead going all the way back to '93! And I'm pretty sure he was well graduated by '96. I'll have to ask him just when he did, that will clear it up in my mind for me.
    • bluethundr, on 10/12/2007, -14/+2...
    • toby34a, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9Digger, what's even funnier is the price of a Powerbook 1400 on eBay currently:

      http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-PowerBook-1400-Laptop-WORKS-GREAT_W0QQitemZ140030109720QQihZ004QQcategoryZ4606QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

      Would a PC laptop from 1996 still be going for $20?

      Better yet, here's one that's going for $76.

      http://cgi.ebay.com/POWERBOOK-1400-1400c-133-MHz-64MB-2GB-WIRELESS_W0QQitemZ150033437389QQihZ005QQcategoryZ4606QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
    • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2Hey that's SPAM!
    • Xeth, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Powerbooks from 1996 have greater value now simply because there's fewer of them around than old PC notebooks.
    • gooru, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Agreed, especially since the whois data for apple.com shows it was first registered in 1987.
    • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wow I broke a personal record with -14 diggs. In reality I just had posted something on the wrong thread, and quickly edited to make it say "This is Spam!" instead of "Wrong thread, digg this down".

      So I'm sorry guys, the only thing that was spam was my own message :(

      Oh and by the way gooru, the web was invented in 1992...
  • kevnaca, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8This was before he came back in 1997. OMG they ruined what Jobs put a lot of pride in. The site is fugly. It looks completely different in every way than in the following years when Steve came back.
  • dotcom101010, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5oh memory lane
  • bennyboy371, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Granted thats an ugly old apple, but look what google grew up with.

    http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
  • Carbito, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12Yes, we all know about the way back machine...yet why is it that every few months these sort of stories make it to the front page?
    • theMurdocVolta, on 10/12/2007, -7/+40Because you touch yourself at night.
  • MiG39, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16Apple has a website LONG before 1996.
    • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5All WayBack machines go back to a max of somewherew in mid October, 1996. This is in NO WAY Apple's first website
  • inkswamp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Gotta love the Apple ships 7.5.5 headline. Is that a celebration or a threat? ;^)

    It's was system 7 and a circa-1996 Performa that almost made a Windows user of me. Not Apple's proudest years, by any stretch.

  • bgii2000, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Check THIS out (Apple's site, FEB 2000):

    http://web.archive.org/web/20000226101337/http://apple.com/

    Their site hasn't been through a redesign in 6 years!
    • astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Actually, the design is almost 9 years old. It goes all the way back to early 1998:
      http://web.archive.org/web/19980509035420/http://www.apple.com/

      Compare it to the current apple.com:
      1 Large image, Hot (RSS) News Items, 3 (or 4) small images, and the navigation bar. The only change is that they moved the navigation bar to the top, in 2000.

    • gb506, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6And yet it's in the top 15 most popular sites on the net... If it ain't broke...

      Actually I have to give kudos to apple for sticking with a design that works and resisting the temptation to change it for the sake of change. Being in web dev myself, I see it all too often that the people in charge of the sites become too close to them and demand changes more frequently than is necessary.
  • trogdoor, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3from http://duggmirror.com/apple/First_Apple_com_homepage_from_1996/


    "Sorry, a mirror of First Apple.com homepage, from 1996 is not available.

    This is because the site is using a robots.txt file to block DuggMirror.

    * Try the page itself at http://web.archive.org/web/19961022105458/www.apple.com/
    * View Digg summary and comments at http://digg.com/apple/First_Apple_com_homepage_from_1996
    * Google cache
    * Coral Cache 8080 8090
    * Archive.org Wayback Machine"
  • boohoo, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1so apple's first webpage was 5 months after microsoft's first webpage.

    lol. stats dont lie.
  • edwinm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I'm certain Apple had a webpage in 1994, like all big computer companies did. Apple was also one of the first companies with it's own IP-range.
    • andre3000, on 10/12/2007, -12/+7Yeah and Apple invented the first mp3 player. rly. We all know that.
    • h3xley, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7It's true, Apple owns anything starting with 17.x.x.x. That's 1/256th of the IPv4 space.
    • Ikioi, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7@h3xley

      That's not so special, I own all of 10.x.x.x. I got a 99 year lease for it from some guy in Russia who sold it to me for the low price of 1/2 my income every week. I'm just waiting to cash in when all the other IPs run out.

      1. IP subnet
      2. ...
      3. Profit! $$$
    • richbradshaw, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I have all of 192.x.x.x, apparently its worth 19.2 times as much as 10.x.x.x
    • igraham09, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2... i was going to reply to andre3000's comment on the first mp3 player.

      but i dont want to start a flame war :D
  • xshaisu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Apple.com website was around before 1996. I remember visiting it in 1994.
  • AceTracer, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4I remember this website particularly for its horrible design, and the one that followed also with the same entirely graphic intensive curvy brushed gradient look. It took ***** forever to load the page on my 14.4 modem.

    I think it was even listed as one of the worst websites on the internet for that reason. Also, we're digging old broken versions of websites from Archive.org now? Really?

    And before I get any crap from the Apple fanboys, here's a website I built in 1997.

    http://applemuseum.bott.org
  • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6The earliest reference to the Apple web site in a usenet post is from April 29th 1994:

    http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.system/browse_frm/thread/121b43c16498d99f/b8dfaad78de95021?lnk=st&q=%22www.apple+com%22&rnum=35&hl=en#b8dfaad78de95021

    Funny thing, the parent poster asked if there was a MOSAIC system running at Apple so he could get info and news about the Mac, instead of simply asking for the website address. Its also funny that he had to ask in the first place :)

    Apple had an early presence on the web, at a time when the whole web would have fit in a 150GB HD. In 1994, many big companies didn't even have websites. Something like 20% of web users were on Macs, as most people on the PC side were still running DOS, and there was no usable graphic web browser for DOS.

    Most of the commercial websites were done on Macs at the time, and if those look crappy to you, remember that at the time, most were running 9600Bauds modems, and basic HTML was limiting. Some sites done on PCs in 1998 look like Mac sites from 1994 :)
    • Ikioi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"there was no usable graphic web browser for DOS"

      I don't remember what year it was, but back in the days of BBS, there were ANSI designed BBS pages (which were non-linear, and not mouse enabled), and a little later, there were full graphical (mouse enabled, windowed) BBS software packages. Most were much like early AOL, but most were centered around forum boards. I downloaded BBS software and ran a few test boards with friends (Spitfire and Wildcat being the top 2 in my book... Wildcat being slightly easier to use), including full graphical packages (non-ANSI). Full graphical BBS's never really took off, unless you count AOL. If you look at the BBS community, it was a real hodge podge of users. I knew a guy that ran a one line board on a Commodore all the way through 1993.

      But, there were graphical "community" networking products for DOS. My first modem which connected to Compuserve was 300baud on a Commodore 64/128, and you could do Prodigy which was graphical on Tandy computers which ran its own custom GUI software.

      You are right about the first sites though. For a long time, I found BBS's FAR better designed, graphically and functionally, than most websites (who didn't love ACiD Art?). Today's best websites are just beginning to do what those original BBS's couldn't (besides not being limited by phone lines). Remember, in the 80's, we already had live computer chat, email, forums, file sharing (including pictures, music, software, and movies), and only interactive gaming (door games; my favorite was Legend of the Red Dragon). The web had to, and is still, reinventing all those wheels. Only now do we really see wheels being invented that BBS's couldn't do, such as the once hyped "push" technology, which is now being realized as "AJAX".
    • LValance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Don't forget, back in the mid-90's Apple was focused on its ill-fated eWorld (http://www.scottconverse.com/apple's_eworld.htm, yes that apostrophe really is there, although digg doesn't like it, just copy and paste the link), its answer to online communities like AOL. eWorld actually had a big advantage over AOL at the time in that it also served as a portal to the internet, while AOL did not. Apple didn't realize the potential of eWorld and it was officially scrapped in March of 1996. While it was in existance, eWorld had a lot of great GUI features and was much more advanced than their apple.com website.

      While I'm not defending the poorly designed Apple website from late 1996, it is important to remember that Apple had focused all of its online resources on eWorld up until that point and the apple.com website was really just thrown together to provide some sort of online presence.
    • DelMonte, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1 Ikioi my point still stands, you didn't provide any example of a graphical WEB browser for DOS from 1994, and that was my point. Other DOS based online services or applications with a GUI don't count.

      Sure there were programs with GUIs running on DOS at the time, but no GUI oriented WEB browser for DOS in 1994.
  • CarzorStelatis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7It talks about upgrades to a 28.8kbps modem. Try downloading your 8Gb BitTorrent dvd rips on THAT!
  • brewno2k, on 10/12/2007, -18/+0Apple hacked in 1997:
    http://static.flickr.com/10/14909783_675edf3ec9_o.gif
  • cannibaljp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3and from that seed grew a mighty tree...
  • SLH06, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Microsoft's site is still organized in this archaic way!
  • CarolJude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2OMG - my 6360 is almost paid off (Curse you, Sear's Card!)

    Much better than Microsoft's first homepage
  • carldec, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well, there is some argument about what was the first web site at Apple. The big problem early on was that you had to have some kind of Unix box at your disposal to put up a web site as well as a pretty hearty connection to the net. The first Mac Web Server, MacHTTP written by Chuck Shotton did not become available until early 2004.

    I put up what became www.drc.support.apple.com on a Sun Sparc 10 in June of 1994. I dont remember the original domain name (you may have had to use the ip address). The DRC was the telephone tech support group for MacX and since there was no mac web browser until later that year, the only way to get to a web site on the Mac was to X-window into a Unix box running NCSA mosaic or its equivelent. Since we supported MacTCP, A/UX and the Apple Internet Router, we were one of the few groups at Apple to have really good net connectivity at the time. It was a gray page with no graphics and only contained links to a few technical support documents about MacX and A/UX. Very few people knew about this site but it was cool to tell callers that there was a web site.

    The folks in the Technical Communications group (techcomm) put a site up around the same time using A/UX. The Advanced Technology Group (Apples scientists) brought up quicktime.apple.com and became one of the first sites that took money on the web. There were also a couple of other sites up by the fall of 1994.

    Right around Thanksgiving the Apple Assistance center started working on putting the Tech info library (about 60,000 tech articles) up on the web. This went live in the spring of 1995. It was featured in the first issue of WebWeek Magaine that was launched at Internet World in the summer of 1995.

    In May 1995 the Apple Libary brought up the first www.apple.com with just a few links so that the people that went to the Mallia graphics show in italy that year would have something to show.

    There were at least 75 websites at Apple by the summer of 1995 and all of them had a different user interface and design and they did not even point at each other. I was involved in a project that was the first redesign of all the sites so that they would look the same. I wrote the proposal that lead to the hiring of KMG (later became MarchFirst) to do a complete site design. All Apple sites were required to use the same design by May 1996.

    What your seeing in the archived link for this digg is kind of wierd. Its probably the Macs run by the Apple Library and it is before the complete unification. What's funny is that it seems to have some of the elements of the redesign, but not all of them. This happened during this period because the WebMasters at the library were deeply involved in the redesign prosses.

    By 1997 www.apple.com was being served off of over 30 Macs in a RAIC (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers). These were replaced in late 1997 by two very expensive Sun UltraSpac's.

    www.support.apple.com, was for years was Apples largest site and was run on an array of around 25 Macs until well after 2001.

    I left the company in 1998 and I dont know much about how things evolved from there.

    Carl de Cordova
    Apple Comuter Inc. 1992-1998
    • Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2That is a great post but this is clearly wrong:

      "Mac Web Server, MacHTTP written by Chuck Shotton did not become available until early 2004. "

      I think you meant 1994, as OS X has always shipped with Apache since 2001.
  • stevekeller, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1That design scheme is actually web 2.5, apple is just way ahead of everyone else.
  • tblanchard, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I recall seing apple.com in 1994-5 and that isn't it. The page was mostly white background with large rainbow apple logo.
  • jackdaniels06, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Speaking of yesteryear here's Google back in 1998. They have kept true to there simple elegant homepage.
    http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/
  • ragonamuffin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0the first web server was an apple (legally at least, it was a NeXTcube)
  • vikala, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I wanted to see the comparison of how much it cost to print with the apple laser printer!
  • bigjovy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0some things change (apple) and some things stay the same (google). its amazing how things have evolved with the internet, including function, images and use. some of us paid by the hour!? i sometimes smile at aol's troubles.
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