From “Classic” Mac OS 8.1 in 1998 through Mac OS X 10.2 Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (for Mac) was the default web browser Apple chose for Mac OS. The very fist iMac? It came with IE:mac, just like the first version of Mac OS X.

And IE:mac wasn’t so bad, for it’s era. (It was the first browser to have color correcting PNGs, by the way!) There was one really neat feature that I think is worth calling out: it would match your iMac’s color, automagically.

Technical Details That I Only Half Remember

If you have a better understanding of how this worked, please let me know! I couldn’t find any details online. Mostly, I’m writing down what I remember before I forget.

The poorly named Gestalt function lets you check information about the Mac OS runtime, like “what version of Mac OS is this?“. You pass it a FourCharCode, and replies with a 32-bit value or an error code — old stuff from the “Classic” Mac OS days.

There was an undocumented code, 'yum!' ¹, that returned the color of an the iMac or iBook case. IE:mac would check this when it first started, and choose a color scheme to match the operator’s Mac. It was a seamless personal touch that really impressed me.

It’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of on today’s multi-colored iPods and iPhones.

¹It might have been 'Yum!', I don’t remember exactly, and Gestalt() returns gestaltUndefSelectorErr, -5551, for all of variations on my MacBook Pro under Snow Leopard.

AT THE Vanguard Computing Center – in Washington, D. C, I watched a young woman present a machine with an extremely complex problem in ballistics involving hundreds of variables. At once lights on a control panel twinkled and winked as the computer checked to see that all equipment was operating properly. Then it set briskly to work. Magnetic tapes spun in their shiny glass-and-steel vacuum cabinets, the high-speed printer muttered. Suddenly the machine stopped and the electric typewriter wrote: “Last entry improperly stated!”

A little embarrassed, the young operator corrected her error, and the machine started again. Four minutes later it gave an answer that had required several million individual calculations.

“This is a wonderful machine” the girl said, “but it makes you shiver sometimes, especially when you give it a wrong figure. Once in a while we give it an incorrect figure on purpose—just to see it sneer at us.”

– THINKING MACHINES ARE GETTING SMARTER (Oct, 1958)

I’d never discourage anyone from making the most fun error messages and interactions possible. But when being sneered at by the machine gives operators more of a connection to it than using it normally, I think something is broken. I can’t imagine that fostering a healthy operator-machine relationship. Honestly though, I don’t know that it’s worse than the same boring regular interactions, but with boring error messages instead.

“I felt like I was sticking my hands right through the display and actually touching the information structures directly.”

I had no idea this sort of interface was done so early.