David Emery Online
Frame of preference
10 July 2025
Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
This would be a wonderful trip down memory lane just by itself — and I say this as someone who remembers well everything from about 1991 onwards, which is far too long a go to consider.
But! You realise after a moment that the computer screens throughout aren’t static images, they’re fully working emulators of the damn Macs. The whole thing, Finder, ancient versions of iTunes, Control Strip — history in a bottle, through the narrative of system settings.
Sometimes I struggle a little with everything that the internet has become, but then every once in a while something like this comes along, a piece of art that could only be born on the web, like a pearl in a river of sludge. It’s not all bad.
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