This is an amazing article and website by Marcin Wichary, the man behind the excellent Shift Happens book.

…I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only settings screen ever brought up in casual conversation.

I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.

Indeed, Wichary goes through multiple versions of Mac operating systems and performs digital paleontology, uncovering long lost Settings minutiae. It's also a great lesson in UI along the way. Be sure to click in the Mac screens.