The Apple ][ is celebrating it's 35th birthday. Originally demoed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at a computer fair on April 16 and 17, 1977, the Apple II was the machine that put Apple on the map and then went on to catapult the personal computer revolution. What better way to celebrate one of the original PC's monumental birthdays than to use an Apple II simulator in Mac OS X?

Bundled within the XScreenSaver for Mac collection, the standalone Apple2 application is actually a completely usable VT100 Terminal emulator in the lovably awful Apple ][ style, complete with screen noise, random color flickers, a permanent caps lock, and other peculiarities unique to technologies of a bygone era. Whether you have distant memories of the ][ or never even used one, the simulator is a fun look at what computers behaved like 35 years ago.

• Download the XScreenSaver pack DMG, mount the disk image, and launch Apple2.app

Optionally, you can install the Apple2.saver screen saver as well. Not the most useful thing in the world, but it sure is fun.

Tired of all the OS X default screen savers? Breathe a ton of new retro life into your screen saver collection with the XScreenSaver pack for Mac. The free bundle includes over 200 old school screen saver classics, including an Apple II emulator, Flying Toasters, The Matrix, Blue Screen of Death, Missile Command, Phosphor BBS emulator, Rubiks cube, bouncing cow, and tons of other once-upon-a-time-was-fancy and hilarious screen savers from computing days of yesteryear.

• Download XScreenSavers from JWZ (free)

Individual screen savers can be manually installed by double clicking the .saver file, or you can install the entire pack of 201 by doing the following:

• Hit Command+Shift+G, enter “~/Library/Screen Savers/” as the path and hit return
• Copy all of the .saver files into that directory
• Open System Preferences and click on “Desktop & Screen Saver” to find them under the “Other” category

Being a retro Apple geek, my personal favorite is the Apple II simulator, which does a great job of emulating a terribly noisy TV screen and even lets you specify a terminal command to display continuously as the screensaver. Here is Apple II showing the output of “top” in it’s wonderfully distorted glory:

If you come from a unix background, many in the XScreenSaver collection will be familiar to you. The first version adorned X11 in 1992 and has been gradually adding more screen savers to the collection ever since.

Apple was busy dreaming about the future 29 years ago, long before the days of the iPhone, touch screens, cell phones, and even cordless phones. As this Apple product concept from 1983 shows, the company envisioned an Apple phone complete with a Mac-like OS, touch screen, touch keyboard, and even a stylus to navigate the onscreen elements. Of course this particular phone never went anywhere, but it does show Apple’s tradition of dreaming big and being years ahead of their rivals in imagination alone.

These particular concepts were created by one of Apple’s famous first industrial designers, Hartmut Esslinger of frogdesign. You can see more old Apple product concept pictures at fudder.de alongside a fascinating article about Apple’s early design, though it’s in German so the English translation is a bit rough.

Conceptually this one looks much more useful than the silly looking literal Apple phone from 1985, which was shaped like an actual Apple logo.

Many years ago before OS X, the Mac OS Finder was much more simple. There was no toolbar, no sidebar, no drop shadows, and each folder opened in it’s own window showing you only the icons in that Folder. That was basically the default desktop experience from Mac OS 1.0 through Mac OS 9, and you can bring much of that traditional simplified Finder styling to OS X with a few minor adjustments:

• Simplify the Finder – Open a Finder window and right-click on the toolbar, select “Hide Toolbar”, while at the same Finder window, hit Command+/ to show the status bar
• Ditch Drop Shadows – Use a free third party tool like ShadowKiller to remove shadows from OS X windows and menus
• Use Graphite Appearance – In System Preferences’s Appearance panel, choose the Graphite theme to remove the color stoplights and dull down the OS appearance
• Use Gray Wallpaper – Select the classic “Solid Gray Medium” desktop background color from System Preferences’s Desktop panel
• Hide the Dock – From the OS X desktop, hit Command+Option+D to enable automatic Dock hiding, move the cursor near the bottom of the screen to reveal the Dock

Suddenly OS X Finder looks more akin to retro versions of Mac OS from long ago, and each folder will open in a new window too, behaving like Mac OS System 9 and prior.

Mac OS 7 and OS X Lion are now not so far apart.

So going retro is fun and all, but is there a practical reason to simplify the OS X appearance? In some cases, yes. Disabling window shadows and using a plain color background uses less system resources and can actually help to speed up older Macs, though they’d be best combined with some other tips to breathe new life into an old OS X machine.

Remember the old flip phones? Of course you do, they were huge and ugly and half of them wouldn’t fit in a pocket even when folded up, but oh were they cutting edge in 1998.

Soon you’ll be able to have that same terrible user experience with the iPhone. From the company who brought you the ridiculous 80′s block iPhone case comes a late 1990′s early 2000′s giant flip-phone case for the iPhone. It’s both hideous and hilarious, and it will certainly be popular in that laughably retro stupid way.

Unfortunately it’s not available quite yet, we’ll all have to wait until later in the year to grab the flip case for about $24, so put it on your Christmas list.
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Remember that retro iOS ’86 concept theme for iPhone that popped up recently? We were hoping it would become an iOS theme, and it has. To use the iOS 86 theme you’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 5.0.1, here is how to do that with absinthe for iPhone 4S, or use redsn0w for jailbreaking other iOS 5 devices.

After you have jailbroken, do the following:

1. Launch Cydia and add the source repo: http://repo.ithemes.it
2. Search Cydia for “iOS 86″ and install it
3. Search Cydia for “Winterboard” and download that
4. Launch Winterboard to find and activate iOS ’86 theme (complete the look with a white wallpaper)

I haven’t had the time to test this quite yet, but apparently the theme doesn’t change other UI elements or any icons outside of the iOS 5 native set, so if an app isn’t bundled with iOS don’t expect a nice retro black and white icon. Nonetheless, this is a great first start and it’s pretty cool for those of us who were impressed with the original concept.
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Update 2/22/2012: Want your iPhone to look like this? Here’s how to install the iOS 86 theme on an iPhone and iPod touch!

What would iPhone’s iOS look like had it been made in 1986? Maybe this, and it looks awesome in that retro sort of way. This is just concept art from a few designers who posted their ideas to LiveJournal, but I know I’m not the only one secretly hoping that someone will make a jailbreak skin or theme that matches the concept art, and if it happens we’ll certainly let you know.

Check out some more pictures below:

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This is a classic picture of a young Steve Jobs giving the finger to an IBM sign in 1983, it’s been circulating again after all these years thanks to Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld who posted the high res copy to Google+. Here’s the text that was posted along with the amusing image:

In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here’s one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit. In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time. Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.

The book is his “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made“, which tells the story of how the original Macintosh was created. That subject was briefly discussed in the recent Steve Jobs biography as well.

The picture demonstrates the competitive nature of Jobs and early Apple, and although the image has been around a while this is the first higher resolution copy to surface. In the early days of Apple, IBM was largely considered the companies biggest competitor and enemy of sorts, as is demonstrated in the Ghostbusters spoof and of course the classic 1984 Superbowl commercial that launched the first Mac.

In 1984, Apple spoofed the classic Ghostbusters song by Ray Parker Jr, and this outrageously cheesy video is the result.

The video apparently played as the introduction to an Apple corporate event held in Hawaii to rally the international sales team. Instead of Ghostbusters, it’s “Blue Busters”, with Blue of course being a reference to Big Blue, or IBM. John Sculley and Steve Wozniak even make appearances in the video, and supposedly Steve Jobs is somewhere in there too as a Ghostbuster along with a few other Apple execs, although I couldn’t identify who was who.

Hilarious find by TheNextWeb, who also found a few more details from a YouTube commenter that happened to be at the event:

I was there in Oct. 1984. This was not an internal ad. I was a 1984 state of the art multimedia slide show with audio by Ray Parker Jr. who sang the original. There were also live dancers on the stage.

This was the opening presentation of the International Sales Meeting that introduced the Lightwriter later renamed Laserwriter.

Apple always used a current movie as a them for the sales meetings. in 1985 it was Back to the Future.

So, anyone found that 1985 video yet?

Apple history at it’s finest, or funniest at least.

Just in time for the holidays, Fireplace is a totally awesome interactive 8-bit fireplace app that fills your Macs screen with a pixelated fireplace. But don’t stop there, you can add logs, roast hotdogs and marshmallows, and even burn papers and photos. Each log ‘burns’ for about 30 minutes of pixel torching glory, and although it won’t heat up the room, it’s another great retro addition to your Mac app list.

• Download Fireplace for free here (Mac OS X & Windows)

The basic commands are: log, match, paper, marshmallow, smore, hotdog, eat, blow, water. You can lower and raise the hotdogs and smores to roast them using the arrow keys, and they actually char and turn black if you keep them too close to the fire. Typing ‘water’ or hitting the Escape key will quit the app.
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