Tangerine Apple is usually very particular about its colours, favouring a strict monochromatic policy ruled with an iron – or more likely a brushed aluminium – fist. From 1984 to 1990 just about every Apple product (except for its lurid logo) had to conform to the Snow White design language, which pinpointed exactly the correct tone of white or near beige the casing should be in. This was all down to Steve Jobs’ severe notion of perfect aesthetic beauty.
So it was more than a small surprise when on his return he launched a series of translucent, vibrantly coloured computers that shocked the tech world, and went on to revolutionise all sorts of consumer gadgetry.
First up was the Bondi Blue iMac – actually quite subdued (and not really that nice a blue) compared to what would follow: blueberry, strawberry, tangerine, grape, key lime, graphite, ruby, sage, snow and indigo. The colour adventure ended with a sickening splash: patterned Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power. After these way-out tints Apple retreated to solid white and black, apart from some sporadic colour bursts in the iPod lines.
Tangerine was apparently the least successful of the colours, but was used on not only the iMac G3 but also the first iBook laptop. (The design company co-founded by Apple wiz Jony Ive before he worked for the Mac maker was called Tangerine. Coincidence? Yes.)
Terrell Paul Terrell was the founder and owner of the Byte Shop, one of the earliest PC retailers and the first to sell any Apple product when it ordered 50 units of the fledgling company’s Apple I. Without that initial order from a trusting Terrell Apple might not have got off the ground in the first place.
Tesler Larry Tesler worked at Xerox PARC (where he invented the modeless text-editing engine for Smalltalk) from 1973 to 1980. He was one of the demonstrators at Apple’s famous Xerox PARC visit in December 1979 when Steve Jobs and his team came to gawp at the graphical user interface they were working on.
He soon quit Xerox to work at Apple (on 17 July, 1980) as the manager of the Lisa applications team.
His work on the Lisa team led to many contributions to the final Macintosh user interface.
Tevanian When Steve Jobs sold his NeXT Computer company to Apple in 1996 he brought with him its software boffin Avadis (‘Avie’) Tevanian as the company’s new senior vice president of software engineering. Avie’s job was to turn the NeXT OS into Mac OS X, and he was one of Jobs’ most-trusted lieutenants as well as a close personal friend.
Think Different On his return to Apple in 1997 Steve Jobs knew the first thing the company had to do was prove it was still “alive” and that it still stood for “something special”. He called up his old advertising pal Lee Clow, who came up with the idea of the ‘Think Different’ campaign – a concept so pure that it made Jobs weep. It would make you weep, too, to know that the original idea was to have the ads blasting out the song Crazy by Seal. Thankfully they couldn’t get the rights to use it.
Grammarians argued that it should be ‘Think Differently’, but Jobs stuck to his guns: “It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”
Robin Williams was the first choice for the Crazy Ones ad narration but he wouldn’t do ad voiceovers, and Jobs couldn’t get chum Bill Clinton to persuade Tom Hanks – so they ended up with Close Encounters’ Richard Dreyfus, although it was trialled with Steve’s own voice as well.
Tiger Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was the longest running version of the X operating system big cats. It was also the last to work with OS 9 applications in Classic emulation mode. Tiger saw the first version of search tool Spotlight (abysmal) and Dashboard widgets (cool).
Tribble Dr Guy (Bud) Tribble, who is still Apple’s vice president of software technology, was the manager of the original Macintosh software development team. With Steve Jobs he was the co-founder of NeXT, where he was vice president of software engineering and a key architect of the NeXTStep operating system that later was the basis of Mac OS X.
Tribble came up with the idea for the Mac’s ‘Hello’ screen that instantly gave the new computer a friendly personality. He also wrote the initial code to drive the Mac’s mouse. He dreamed up the idea for ‘desk ornaments’, little apps that mimicked things you’d find on a real desktop, such as the calculator and notepad. He even named The Finder.
As if these feats weren’t awesome enough Bud coined the legendary phrase ‘Reality Distortion Field’ to describe Steve Jobs’ charismatic anti-reality energy force: “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.”
TrueType Apple buddied up with Microsoft at the end of the 1980s to blow apart Adobe’s expensive proprietary PostScript Type 1 font business. When Apple and Microsoft announced their collaboration on stage at the 1989 Seybold conference a tearful Adobe founder John Warnock stormed: “That’s the biggest bunch of garbage and mumbo jumbo. What those people are selling you is snake oil!”
Adobe was forced to open up its format, and introduced the legendary Adobe Type Manager to better scale Type 1 fonts for anti-aliased onscreen output.
Mr T Nothing to do with Apple really, but an outside bet to play founder Steve Jobs in the upcoming movie biopic. Fool!
Macworld’s complete Apple A – Z – your total guide to the Cupertino-based company
Author: Simon Jary, Contributing writer
Simon was Editor of Macworld from the dark days of 1995 to the triumphant return of Steve Jobs and the launch of the iPhone. His desk is a test bench for tech accessories, from USB-C and Thunderbolt docks to chargers, batteries, Powerline adaptors and Fitbits.