In case anyone ever needs to peek at an old Mac book, these folks in the article managed to scan a bunch. I think some are on my shelves, too, used to buy whatever I could find…
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Oh, man, talk about nostalgia. I used to own a physical copy of the human interface guidelines that I think pre-dated the one they’ve got scanned. I don’t have it now. My recollection was it had the white cover, but I don’t think it was the 1987 edition. The content I recall reading is more like the 1992 version on this repository.
Not that I had any use for it in my work. My code isn’t really intended to be used by the public, but I toyed with producing stuff as a hobbyist or for my own use. What I found inspiring by the HIG, as I read the text, was that Apple’s software design principles were driven by elegance at a level that was obviously well beyond the bad habits of interface design on the Windows side.
(Edit: Well, maybe it was the 1987 edition: Here’s what I kind of remember: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*Z_OWZGwoliq4-RpfcrSYvg.png from Rediscovering Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1987 | by Bryant Hodson | Prototypr)
Over time, the guidelines evolved and were seemingly abandoned by Apple and the industry, as far as I can tell. The need was originally for people who used to use text-based or command-line interfaces to become accustomed to GUIs, but with GUIs and their metaphors being ubiquitous, the dividing line between the Mac and everything else (from iPhones and iPads to Windows and Android) is a lot less stark, a lot fuzzier, and the separation between elegant interface and good-enough is smaller than it used to be.
-awlabrador
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Ahh, so many books, bought many, even earlier Apple ][ books, disks from User Groups, typed in many Nasic programs, then spent a lot of time chasing errors… Fun times.. Still have a couple copies of the Red Book, tried a bit of 6502 coding, too, but found it tedious… Was sad when they didn’t keep MacBasic, spooked by Microsoft pulling the rug on 'em… The pot was stirred, for sure, many new careers were spun off of those early days…
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