apple – MediaArchaeologyLab

Entries, Fall 2024, Newsletter

Media Archeology Newsletter Week 19: Alien Screening Tomorrow @ 7pm!

Hello all!

We hope you’re doing well and surviving midterms! It has been a busy two weeks for us at the lab.

Alien Screening on October 1st!

Tomorrow, located in ATC 3.705 at 7p.m., The Media Archeology Lab is once again collaborating with the Games & Media Library to host a movie screening! You will need your Comet Card to enter, so make sure you remember to bring it with you!

We hope to see you there.

Demo of the Week

The demo of the week is Unreal Tournament on our Dell PC!

Stop by during our open hours and enjoy a session of this classic game.

Object of the Week

The object of the week this week is the Apple Lisa!

If you are not already aware of it, the Apple Lisa is an extremely historically important computer. The computer cost $9,995 USD in 1983 upon its release, which is roughly equivalent to $32,171.64 today according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ online inflation calculator. Its operating system was called Lisa OS, and featured a very early graphical user interface (as opposed to being an Apple DOS or another command-line based operating system). You can read more about it from its article on computerhistory.org by clicking here.

The Lisa: Apple’s Most Influential FailureCHM publicly releases the source code to Apple’s Lisa computer, including its system and applications software.computerhistory.org

Lab Hours and Room Number

We are located in ATEC 1.705, right next to ATEC’s welcome center. Our open lab hours are:

Monday: 2:00pm-4:00pm

Tuesday: 2:00pm-4:00pm

Wednesday: 2:00pm-4:00pm

Thursday: 1:00pm-3:00pm

Friday: 2:00pm-4:00pm

Thank you for reading our newsletter! We hope to see you soon and wish you a stress-free week.

Sincerely,

The Media Archeology Lab

The University of Texas at Dallas

Archive, Collection

Apple //c Advertisement

One of our vintage advertisements for the Apple //c. Stored digitally.

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

PowerMac G4

Originally released in 1997, the PowerMac is an interesting line of computers. These computers were being released roughly alongside the iMac G3s, which you may recognize as the colorful “jellybean” computers living in our lab. You would think PowerMac G3 would refer to a single computer, but the G3 editions were actually a whole line of computers; their cases originally shared the beige design seen in machines such as the Apple //c or the Macintosh 128k but starting in January 1999, when the Blue and White model was released, they were completely redesigned. You can check out apple-history.com’s entries for the original beige PowerMac G3, the Blue and White model, and the PowerMac G4 by clicking any of these links! The PowerMac G4 included multiple different versions, including the G4 Cube which, in our opinion, has a very fun design.

Collection, Computing Machines, Object of the Week

Apple eMate 300

It was one of the earlier examples of a touchscreen laptop; released in 1997 (which you might notice is extremely close to the release date of the iMac G3 in 1999), it is kind of similar to a Microsoft Surface laptop today. However, unlike the Surface, the eMate was not all that powerful, and was actually intended mostly for use in schools by young children. This is the main reason for its striking appearance, which even back in the time it was originally released looked more like a plastic toy than a laptop.

You may be surprised to learn that despite looking like a cheap toy, the Florida police department had plans to replace their computers with the eMate due to it being cheap and user friendly, as described in this article from MacWorld by Benj Edwards.

(Psst. You might also be interested to learn about the rest of the Apple Newton line of devices; where the eMate 300 is an early predecessor for a touchscreen laptop, the other Newtons were a predecessor for what we would call a tablet today. 😉)