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 some were not cached by the way back machine, or you need to know the article ID in order to find them. Luckily I found backups on an Apple published CD of the majority of TIL/KB articles up to December 1997, and I downloaded the majority of the TA articles past available on Apple’s site in 2018. Note: unfortunately I have discovered these sources are not complete and there were additional articles published, some of which can be found on the way back machine (see below)
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 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, and additional 94 articles from 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.
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 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
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=###”)
- 2002-08-05: Another copy of the articles, http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html (filter by “artnum” or by “artnum=###”)
- 2009-01-22: Renamed Search Support, http://support.apple.com/kb/, TA articles
- Present: https://support.apple.com/