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Very few know about Apple’s Icon Garden, a garden full of statues with cl assic Mac icons that only lasted 5 years.
Few know but for a period of about 5 years Apple had 8 large pixelated statues in front of its R&D campus at its Cupertino headquarters of various classic icons used on Macs of the time. This little garden was a rather secret and hidden place which, overnight, disappeared forever.
we will tell you the story of this small garden of icons from Apple headquarters and everything we know about his sudden disappearance. A decision that came from Steve Jobs himself after returning to the company in 1997.
It was Apple’s icon garden
In 1993, Apple had just completed construction of its research and development campus in De Anza Plaza, Cupertino, California. this location became the famous “Infinite Loop” and Apple’s headquarters for years
In front of the R&D buildings, there was a large garden in which Apple officials, deciding to place 8 huge pixelated sculptures with original Mac system icons. We had several MacPaint icons and the famous Dogcow Clarus.
What icons were in the icon garden
The bone 8 icons were scattered in the garden, having a size of up to 3 meters in height. The icons had been originally designed by Susan Kare in the early 1980s and could still be seen in the operating system interface of Macs at the time.
Here are the icons represented in Apple’s icon garden:
- The pointer or cursor.
- The cursor with a clock.
- The hand.
- The brush.
- The paint bucket.
- The eraser.
- The pencil.
- Famous, the “dogcow”.
What happened to the Garden of Icons and its statues?
Apple’s Icon Garden stood in front of the company’s R&D headquarters from 1993 to 1998, specifically until May 30, 1998. That day, the workers who came to work as usual realized that the icons had disappeared, in their place there remained only the marks on the grass.
The The decision to remove this garden was made by Steve Jobs himself., who returned to Apple in 1997 and wanted to get rid of everything that reminded him of the past, without giving too many explanations. At the same time, Apple’s internal museum was also closed and all the material was donated to Stanford University, but not the sculptures.
Let’s invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday
According to David Schlesinger, who worked at Apple for a decade and lived in first person when the Icon Garden disappeared overnightthe statues of the icons were kept in a warehouse in Santa Clara.
“It happened while I was at Apple. We came home one evening, I don’t think it was even a Friday, and the icon garden was there, when we arrived the next morning it was gone, just a few little bare circles in the grass where the parts had been mounted.
I cornered Steve at a party shortly after to ask him if he was responsible for Icon Garden’s nightly disappearance, because until then what happened was pretty much a mystery to the people. He admitted he found them “too pixelated”, and that at the time they were stored in a warehouse in Santa Clara“.
Not much else is known, not even if the icons are saved or if they were destroyed. It’s been over 20 years since Apple’s Icon Garden disappeared without a trace, and Of course it would be great if the company had these statues in stock in an interior room. But little or nothing is known about the fate of these 8 pixelated icons.
Related Topics: Apple
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