Egg Freckles

Tue 6/18 California Codenames

OS X Mavericks¹ wasn’t the first Apple product with a California code name. Just off the top of my head I can think of at least three other Apple products that were inspired by California with a codename to match.

Yosemite

Released in January 1999, the Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) was codenamed Yosemite after the famous National Park with the same name located 200 miles east of San Francisco Bay. As one for the first products Steve Jobs oversaw from the ground up after returning to Apple, the Power Macintosh G3 featured a novel Blueberry colored case that swung open to allow easy access to the computer’s insides. The case itself was codenamed El Capitan after the ultimate climber’s challenge in Yosemite National Park. In addition to its pleasant color and easy access case, the Power Macintosh G3 was also notable for being the first Mac to feature FireWire.

Lombard Released in May 1999, the third generation of the PowerBook G3 may have been better known for its bronze colored keyboard than its famous street inspired codename.

Lombard Street is an east–west street in San Francisco, California. It is famous for having a steep, one-block section that consists of eight tight hairpin turns. The street was named after Lombard Street in Philadelphia by San Francisco surveyor Jasper O’Farrell.

The Lombard was notable for being the first New World ROM PowerBook, and the first PowerBook with built-in USB.

Pismo

The fourth generation of PowerBook G3, was introduced in February 2000. It was codenamed “Pismo” after the City of Pismo Beach, California.

The original Pismo was rumored to be a latchless design, akin to the iBook, which is similar in specification. Apple settled on fitting the Pismo board into the form factor of the previous Lombard G3 PowerBook, but with many improvements. The Pismo was available at CPU speeds of 400 MHz or 500 MHz, with a front side bus speed of 100 MHz (one-third swifter than the Lombard’s front side bus); it also implemented a unified motherboard architecture, and replaced SCSI with the newer FireWire interface.

In addition to being the first PowerBook with built-in FireWire, the Pismo was also the first PowerBook with built-in Airport. It was the last PowerBook G3.

While researching this article I found three other Apple codenames that are distinctly California.

• Big Sur was the codename for the Apple Font Pack for LaserWriter, that combined with the 21 fonts that came with System 7, brought Apple’s font offering for the Macintosh up to 64. The name “Big Sur” refers to a sparsely populated region of the Central Coast of California where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean.
• Eastwood was the codename for the original Apple Keyboard, the first keyboard to be sold separately from the system, giving the customer a choice of the basic or advanced keyboards offered by Apple. Eastwood is also the name of a ghost town San Diego County, California. The name is fitting considering the original Apple Standard Keyboard had no PC-style Function keys.
• Half Dome was the codename for the original Apple OneScanner. Introduced in 1991 to replace the earlier Apple Scanner, it offered 8-bit (256 shades) greyscale scanning. Half Dome is of course a large granite dome in Yosemite National Park.

That is all of the California codenames I can think of for now. If you dig up anymore let me know and I will add them to my list.