When writing posts about old Apple hardware I like to include links to relevant Apple Knowledge Base / Technical Information Library articles created during the 80s and 90s. Until recently (2023) these articles were still available on Apple’s Support Site. Earlier this week I discovered that Apple has now removed these old articles from their site (direct links do not work), and they are no longer returned in the search. (Note to reader, if they were simply moved let me know in the comments). So I decided to make the articles, I have copies of, available on my site.
NOTE: see my Macintosh Reference Documentation post for other information sources.
About
Unfortunately, because the articles were always behind a “search” feature on Apple’s site, the majority were not cached by the way back machine, the exception are the few that were directly linked from within Apple’s site, or from some other site. Luckily I found backups on an Apple published CD of all the articles up to December 1997, and I downloaded several articles past that date from Apple’s site.
Apple’s Technical Library Articles (TIL) up to December 1997
Also know as Apple’s Knowledge Base Articles (KB), these document contain technical information and guides for using Apple’s products. Apple started publishing these document in 1985 on Apple’s AppleLink site (dial-up, BBS), on services such as CompuServe, then later on CD-ROMs, initially as a HyperCard stack, with the last version being released on Apple’s Service Source v2.5 disk 2 CD-ROM in December 1997 as PDFs. On that CD was the announcement that all future articles would only be available on Apple’s website. I was able to find KB1 to KB28039, KB32014, and KB45026 in PDF format on the CD-ROM, for a total of 14,859 unique Knowledge base articles:
- Text file with the articles grouped by topic (see below)
- Text file with the articles sorted by article number,
- Zip file with all 14,859 articles as PDFs (sorted by article number).
- Articles captured by the way back machine (sorted by article number, some gaps)
The articles on the CD-ROM were grouped under the following main topics (with additional sub-folders/sub-topics)
- A UX
- About the Tech Info Library
- Apple II Hardware
- Apple II Software
- Apple III Software and Hardware
- DataComm Neting-Cnct
- DOS and Windows Environment
- Early Language Connection
- Hardware Interface Information
- HW Trblsht-Srvc Issue
- International Issues
- Lisa Software and Hardware
- Mac OS Compatible Hardware
- Macintosh Hardware
- Macintosh Software
- Multimedia
- Newton
- Online Services
- Peripherals
- Pippin
- PowerPC Platform
- Printers – Plotters
- Spec Sheets
- Support Programs
- Third-Party Company Directory
- White Papers
I used Basilisk II to view the CD-ROM, then Drop Rename 3.5 to rename the files to names that would work on Windows, copied the files to my Windows machine, then used Win2PDF to rename all the PDFs using the title from the PDF and the Article Number.
Apple’s Technical Library Articles (TIL) after December 1997
Unfortunately I do not have a complete collection of these. I did manage to download (from Apple’s site) a lot of the articles prepended with TA (I assume TA = Technical Article), they duplicate a lot of the Articles above, and I plan to see if I can match the TA numbers to the KB numbers and then share any TA articles published after December 1997 that reference 68k Macintosh Systems.
Apple’s Technical Information Library (TIL) online
Note: the link on the date links to the WayBack Machine’s cached version of the search screen on Apple’s site at the time. The URL links to a list of all files cached by the WayBack Machine under that domain. Useful for finding the articles that were cached due to direct links to the articles.
- 1997-12-24: http://til.info.apple.com:80/swupdates.nsf/artnum/ and http://til.info.apple.com:80/techinfo.nsf/artnum/
- 1999-10-13: Developer Notes: https://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/Developer_Notes/, 68k systems,
- 2001-08-05: Renamed the AppleCare Archive, http://karchive.info.apple.com/ (filter by “artnum” or by “artnum=###”)
- 2002-06-03: Renamed AppleCare Knowledge Base Guided Search, http://kbase.info.apple.com/ (filter by “artnum” or by “artnum=###”)
- 2009-01-22: Renamed Search Support, http://support.apple.com/kb/, TA articles
- Present: https://support.apple.com/