How QuickTime survived ’90s Apple to become invisible and ubiquitous (Macworld/Jason Snell)

The late 1980s and early to mid 1990s were Apple’s weirdest and wildest era. Wedged between the triumph of the original Macintosh and the return of Steve Jobs were a sort of Wilderness Years where the company flailed all over the place, ultimately flaming out and requiring the now-famous rescue by its co-founder.

To be sure, 1990s Apple was a company with a load of problems, from out-of-control research labs building unsellable products to fruitless quests for software stacks that would reinvent documents and replace Mac OS itself. But that era of calamity and excess was also the source of some real gems, including the product that debuted 34 years ago, on Dec. 2, 1991: QuickTime.

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