[HN Gopher] Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font
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Apple's history is hiding in a Mac font
Author : rbanffy
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-08-04 17:31 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spacebar.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spacebar.news)
| plorg wrote:
| I'm assuming this came up in reference to this post from
| yesterday:
|
| https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-echoes-i...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819962
| rbanffy wrote:
| I absolutely love the way Windows computers show up as a beige
| low-budget monitor with a BSOD. I wonder how they show up these
| days - I no longer have Windows boxes on my network.
| pdntspa wrote:
| They still show up that way, same with linux servers running
| Samba.
|
| To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit
| old. They could at least update the graphic. But Windows has
| not been that crashy since Windows ME.
|
| Maybe they could update it with something that pokes fun at
| how much Windows spies on you by default.
| runjake wrote:
| _> Maybe they could update it with something that pokes fun
| at how much Windows spies on you by default._
|
| The issue there is that Apple collects just about as much
| telemetry on end users. I'm unsure how much data either
| give or sell to third parties.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Something that has haunted me for many years is how much
| Apple has built a brand around "we don't let anyone touch
| your data!"
|
| And I don't mean just as a branding that "normal people"
| (ones who aren't interested in or involved with tech)
| believe
|
| They even manage to sell it to people who know how things
| work behind the curtain!
|
| I have had people I once respected that are as deep into
| the weeds of technology as I am ask me, point blank to my
| face. "Can you prove it?" when I snark that things like
| iCloud in China are obviously backdoored. This was before
| they bent the knee to the UK as well [1]
|
| Is there something in the water for Apple users?
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122234
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Windows has not been that crashy since Windows ME.
|
| Windows was still crashy, most frequently due to poorly
| written drivers.
|
| What changed was that Microsoft altered the default setting
| so that Windows silently rebooted the computer when it
| crashed instead of displaying the BSOD information on what
| caused the crash until the system was manually rebooted.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > They could at least update the graphic.
|
| What does a BSOD look like these days. That one is from the
| pre-XP era. No NT-based OS used that screen.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| > To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit
| old.
|
| The real joke is Apple shipping a buggy, DIY'd version of
| SMB because they ditched Samba over some GPL3 quibble, and
| they abandoned AFP. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still the
| reference implementation of SMB...
|
| I assume the icons are still there because there is nobody
| left at Apple that knows how they got there and where the
| code is that controls it.
| quitit wrote:
| There's a lot of nuance in there. From the way the beige is
| tinged yellow, to the loathed sliding mount.
| sgt wrote:
| How do I paste the gid* fonts into TextEdit, for example? Only
| UTF8 fonts seem to work.
| pimlottc wrote:
| As mentioned in yesterday's article [0], they can't be used
| because they haven't been mapped to a Unicode code point:
|
| > (A note on most of these characters is that they don't
| actually map to any defined Unicode code point; they are
| unconnected glyphs. Font Book will show them but you can't
| really copy them anywhere. A tool like Ultra Character Map will
| let you at least grab a graphical representation and paste it
| somewhere, as I have done here.)
|
| 0: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2025/08/mac-history-
| echoes-i...
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can open them in a tool such as FontForge and force an
| encoding. You might need to add some padding at the beginning
| so that you get the symbols on a usable range.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| From a time when apple had soul
| rbanffy wrote:
| Don't be so harsh. There's a lot of great people working there,
| committed to make great computers and software. It's not an
| easy task.
| NoSalt wrote:
| They are probably talking about the company as a whole. Back
| when there were easter eggs and the UI was more raw, yet more
| "approachable".
|
| I stopped using Apple Macintosh OS after Snow Leopard, aftger
| they started making it more difficult than necessary to
| access the full power of the Unix underpinnings. In some way,
| I miss Macintosh OS 7.5, 8, and 9 more than OS X.
| reaperducer wrote:
| You're mad about lack of Unix power, but pine for OS 7.5?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Remember the NeXT OS didn't come with X support. Not being
| like mainstream UNIX has always been a core design
| principle.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I'm sure there's lots of creative people there, but
| unfortunately they work for a company that seems to
| determined to just keep going back to the well over and over
| chaos_a wrote:
| The old text to speech voices are still around in Sequoia. Some
| have been changed to a generic "my name is x". But most still
| make their fun little jokes.
|
| Found in the voice over utility app.
|
| Accessibility > Voice Over > Voice Over Utility > Speech > Add
| Voice
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk
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(page generated 2025-08-08 23:00 UTC)