About traditional Bitcoin mining I'm curious about traditional bitcoin mining, before pooling.  Did an older version of the bitcoin wallet found on sourceforge have a mining feature built in which worked on a simple macbook?  if so was this later removed in favor of pooling software?

From what I've read the traditional bitcoin wallet had a mining feature which could be used on a macbook, and I'm wondering if that code would still be possible to use, even if it never wins any bitcoin..
The official Bitcoin full node software always had the mining feature built in, and will probably always have. If you have the line gen=1 in your .conf file, then you will start confirming transactions when you open the wallet. Take a look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_Bitcoin