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Apple’s Technical Information Library (TIL, KB, TA) 1985 to 2018

Published December 20, 2023

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 published the copies I have to the Internet Archive.

NOTE: see my Macintosh Reference Documentation post for other information sources.

Where to find

I have published copies of the Technical Information Library / Knowledge Based / Technical Articles on the Internet Archive.

There are two versions of these files:

  • The TIL files (TIL00001-TIL60496) were taken from Apple’s Services Source CDs v2.5 and v.3, with additional Articles found on the Wayback Machine.
  • The TA files (TA20315-TA48312) were scraped from Apple’s website in 2018 and converted to PDF.   They duplicate/update some of the information found in the TIL articles and also include articles not found on the Service Source CDs

I have uploaded zip files for both the TIL files and the TA files containing individual PDFs for each article (for linking to specific articles), I have also uploaded 6 large PDFs that contain a collection of articles concatenated together in a single file (to simplify searches)

In addition to the TIL and TA files I included TS files that are the technical specification pages for various Apple products, some of these pages are still on Apple’s site, but the format has changed and is harder to read.

The byTopic.txt file lists the TIL articles grouped by category.  These groupings were created by Apple in the early 90s.

Additionally someone has created a mirror of Apple’s KB articles that contain many of the articles found in the TIL files and the TA files, but with different names and a different numbering convention. One article they have that is missing from the TIL/TA files I uploaded is the Macintosh: File System Specifications and Terms KB8647 that describes the limitation of the Mac OS Standard format (HFS).

About these Articles

These document contain information about software and hardware released by Apple and Apple’s partners. Apple started publishing these document in 1985 on Apple’s AppleLink site (dial-up, BBS), and on services such as CompuServe, then later on CD-ROMs, initially as a HyperCard stack on Apple’s Technical Information Source CDs from 1990 to 1992, with the last complete version (TIL Articles 1 to 28039, 32014, and 45026) being released on Apple’s Service Source v2.5 disk 2 CD-ROM in December 1997 as PDFs, with an announcement that future updates will be available on Apple’s website.

I did find an additional 94 articles (30034 to 60496) in HTML format on the Service Source v3 CD-ROM that I converted to PDF, giving at total of almost 15,000 articles that I have uploaded to the internet archive.

Apple’s Technical Library Articles (TIL) up to December 1997

Luckily I found backups on an Apple’s Service Source CDs for the majority of TIL/KB articles up to December 1997, and used those as a starting point for creating my library.

The articles on the CD-ROM were grouped under the following main topics (with additional sub-folders/sub-topics), I have included a text file on the internet archive that lists the articles in these groups:

  • 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

In 2009 Apple migrated from the old TIL/KB article numbers to the TA naming / numbering convention, and in 2018 I downloaded the majority of the TA files (TA20315 to TA48312), unfortunately I didn’t notice at the time that the script failed to download some of the files in the TA28000 to TA30000 range. Hopefully the TIL files I found on CD fill in most of that gap.

I’ve converted the HTML files to PDF and uploaded them to the internet archive. I used NotePad++ with regular expressions to remove the header and footer menus and javascript, then used Weeny free HTML to PDF to convert to PDF, then use bulkRenamer to clean up the files names.

Apple’s Technical Information Library (TIL) online

Unfortunately, because the articles were always behind a “search” feature on Apple’s site some were not cached by the way back machine.

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.

Published in Apple Documents, Macintosh 68k and Old Computers and Games

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