Apple.com Through The Years

A cool photoset on flickr: "Apple's Front Pages Along The Years". Going back to 1996, it includes a couple of captures from the Amelio years. I remember that site. Apple at that time was quite large and sprawling and many sites were off on their own subdomain with their own look and feel. There was a trove of information out there on projects like the Dylan Programming Language as well as OpenDoc, Cyberdog, and a browser plug-in called "HotSauce" which could fly through MCF - Meta Content Format - data in 3D. MCF would go on to eventually become RDF.

The photoset includes NeXT's page at the time of the Apple-NeXT merger, which was a very exciting day for me. That merger literally set fire to the company. All of the excess was trimmed, and eventually Apple started the "Think Different" campaign and launched a new web site in 1997. By the time the iMac was announced (with the campaign of "Pro. Go. Whoa."), Apple's home page has stayed pretty much the same in the time since then. There's the big picture, the "hot news" scroller, and now four cells underneath (there used to be just three). It's interesting to see such consistency on a major corporate web site.