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A history of Mac settings [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-07-09
Frame of preference is a history of the settings available on the Apple Macintosh through and just beyond the classic era. "As a designer, I'm meant to dislike settings," writes author Marcin Wichary. "As a user, I love them." The story begins in 1984 (though there was a prelude) but the idea is older still.
The Control Panel is a handsome and tight design, put together by Susan Kare as the last desk accessory, just weeks before the Mac's announcement. It feels alive, depicting a perhaps surprising amount of movement sometimes via animation, and sometimes via comic book-inspired conventions: soundwaves exiting the speaker, menus blinking upon activation, a finger pressing a key, the mouse rolling on the desk. It's also a playground of sorts for early GUI experiments: there is an early slider here, some steppers for date and time, a custom cursor, and a mini map showing a miniature desktop.
The web presentation of the article is uncommonly good; Wichary is a master. See what those old Macs can do! 🥚 What's your zweimalklickenintervall? It is 1997: "Using Mac OS is starting to feel like operating an unstable nuclear reactor."
Previously:
• Typewriter simulator even lets you change the ribbon
• Gorton: a ubiquitous typeface you may never have heard of
• How Medium designed its underlines
• Unnervingly vague error messages from 1976
About 3m in to this video, you can see Kare demonstrate the control panel.
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