Mac Folklore Radio
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Comfort food for Macintosh users of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Épisodes 144
MacAdvocate - Why People Prefer Macintosh (1996)
Original text from the MacAdvocate Kit: “Why People Prefer Mac”. Apple politely trash talking Windows ‘95 for half an hour. Counterpoint to the random SCSI controller bug story: data loss on SCSI ID 5 on first …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text from the MacAdvocate Kit: “Why People Prefer Mac”.
Apple politely trash talking Windows ‘95 for half an hour.
Counterpoint to the random SCSI controller bug story: data loss on SCSI ID 5 on first generation Power Macs.
Hands up if you ever did guerilla marketing for Apple at a computer store or other public venue in the 1990s.
The Macintosh Numbers Nobody Knows (1996)
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld July 1996. Macworld Boston 1997: “Who is the largest education company in the world?” … [dead silence] Macworld Boston 2004: “Where are the market share numbers coming …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld July 1996.
Macworld Boston 1997: “Who is the largest education company in the world?” … [dead silence]
Macworld Boston 2004: “Where are the market share numbers coming from? .. 3% market share–the first time Phil Schiller heard [that, it] came from Dell!”
WWDC 2004: “Redmond, start your photocopiers!” banners.
What Steve Jobs Thinks of Your Industry (1996)
Original text by Steve Hayman. Steve Jobs demos WebObjects at Microsoft PDC 1996. Xserve (with free WebObjects server license) introduction from WWDC 2002. WebObjects FedEx and Chrysler demo clips from OpenStep …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Steve Hayman.
Steve Jobs demos WebObjects at Microsoft PDC 1996.
Xserve (with free WebObjects server license) introduction from WWDC 2002.
WebObjects FedEx and Chrysler demo clips from OpenStep Day 1995, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Avie Tevanian and Jon Rubinstein on Jobs’ discomfort re: talking to enterprise customers.
WebObjects retrofit for the IBM Eclipse IDE: WOLips.
Did you know there’s a WorldWide WebObjects Developers Conference (WOWODC), and that iMessage still uses WebObjects as part of its foundation?
The Quix Fix (1995)
Original text by Charles Piller, Macworld October 1995. A lot more about Quix Daydream, the Macintosh environment for NeXT hardware: YouTube: booting into Daydream YouTube: a more detailed look at Daydream a …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Charles Piller, Macworld October 1995.
A lot more about Quix Daydream, the Macintosh environment for NeXT hardware:
- YouTube: booting into Daydream
- YouTube: a more detailed look at Daydream
- a brief NeXTWORLD product review of Daydream
- NeXT FAQ section 5.21: “I want to emulate a Macintosh. How?”
- kevra.org’s Daydream box shot
- John Rubinstein: “There was a kid in Switzerland who … figured out how to build a layer on top of CHRP that would allow you to run Mac OS.”
IBM officially cancelled plans to ship Mac OS on any hardware, and in particular on IBM-branded machines weeks before this story ran.
Jon Rubinstein explains FirePower’s accidental connection with Apple’s turnaround. Also, the stagnating PowerPC G4 is superfast, no, really: The Megahertz Myth. Jon retired in 2006 along with Avie Tevanian, and Apple has never really been the same since. Palm/HP coaxed Jon out of retirement in 2007 to work on the Palm Pre/Plus, putting him in direct competition with the iPhone. “I’m definitely off [Steve’s] Christmas card list,” he said in 2010.
I don’t know about you but I find these Mac OS clone bureaucracy articles really boring and depressing. This is the last one!
The Forgotten Mac OS Licensee (1991)
Original text by Dan Littman, Tom Moran, and Charles Piller. Apologies for my rough voice in this one. It’s been a difficult year. “Apple and IBM will work together on architecture-independent multimedia …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Dan Littman, Tom Moran, and Charles Piller.
Apologies for my rough voice in this one. It’s been a difficult year.
“Apple and IBM will work together on architecture-independent multimedia products and license them to other vendors.” IBM never so much as bothered to license QuickTime, and allegedly stopped distributing its multimedia tools to discourage people from using AIX for multimedia delivery.
The stupefyingly vague and dull Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance press conference. Warning: do not consume while driving or operating heavy machinery.
Get to know your new IBM RS/6000 system!
David Barnes talking about Taligent and Workplace/OS, because why not transplant your current computing environment on top of an environment that runs all environments that will be shipping Real Soon Now for … reasons?
WWDC 1997 Q&A: What’s holding back CHRP? Is Apple afraid of (gasp) being undercut by Macintosh clone makers?
clabretro: RS/6000 startup sequence and 1990s GeoCities animé fan page font in the System Management Services console. Installing and running CorelDraw, Netscape 1.0, and Quake on an RS/6000.
Remnants of CHRP in the AIX netinstall configuration assistant.
Running Windows NT on a G3? More likely than you think.
Cameron Kaiser’s extremely detailed look at Netware Server on a Power Mac 6100. How about that artwork?
That weird point in time where the highest performance AppleShare solution was a giant Apple box running AIX.
Get a load of the chonky Motorola PowerStack systems.
Guy Kawasaki - Who Should Apple's Next CEO Be? (1994)
Original text by Guy Kawasaki, Macworld, November 1994. Who should be the next CEO of Apple? Acquire NeXT and let it be Steve Jobs, obviously. This was intended as satire but became a case of “truth is stranger …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Guy Kawasaki, Macworld, November 1994. Who should be the next CEO of Apple? Acquire NeXT and let it be Steve Jobs, obviously. This was intended as satire but became a case of “truth is stranger than fiction” when it actually happened two years later!
Gary Davidian on Michael Spindler’s product visionary status.
Steve Jobs: “Tim [Cook] is not a product person per se” at 2m22s.
Both Canon and Ross Perot were major investors in NeXT.
Bill Atkinson (1951-2025)
Original text from The Complete HyperCard Handbook (Expanded 2nd Edition with HyperCard 1.2 supplement!!!) Open HyperCard Stacks with just 512K RAM via HyperDA. If copying HyperCard was such an obvious idea …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text from The Complete HyperCard Handbook (Expanded 2nd Edition with HyperCard 1.2 supplement!!!)
Open HyperCard Stacks with just 512K RAM via HyperDA.
If copying HyperCard was such an obvious idea, where did all the AmigaVision productions go? What happened to all the Asymmetrix Toolbook-ware?
David Greelish “Before Macintosh” interviews with Bill Atkinson: Parts 1, 2, 3
Make beautiful Atkinson-dithered images with HyperDither, GraphicConverter (Effects => Dithering => Atkinson) or in your browser with DitherIt! More than you could ever possibly want to read about dithering and an undergrad lecture on Floyd-Steinberg dithering.
Bill Atkinson’s Rolodex, a.k.a. Casady & Greene QuickDEX (v1.4, II).
Bill Atkinson’s 10 Rules for Making Interfaces More Human
Quotes from:
- Bill Atkinson Presents HyperCard at the Apple Corps of Dallas (1987)
- Legacy of HyperCard Event (2017)
- HyperCard Training Solutions (1987)
- Bill Atkinson on PhotoCard and HyperCard at the Eyeo Conference (2013)
- Bill and Andy Hertzfeld demonstrating oldmac stuff at the Computer History Museum (2010)
- David Pogue hosts “The Macintosh at 20” (2004)
- Triangulation Interview with Bill Atkinson, 2016 (part 1, 2)
- Triangulation Interview with Atkinson, 2018 (part 1, 2)
- CHM - Bill Atkinson on how Apple obviously doesn’t do user testing anymore (2022)
- CHM - The Macintosh at 40
- Churchill Club - Steve Jobs’ Legacy (2011)
- Asymmetrix Toolbook Demo - Computer Chronicles on Windows 3.0 (1990)
- Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age - “People don’t read encyclopedias cover to cover. It just doesn’t happen! But …”
- Designing Interactions interviews: Bill Atkinson
- Unused 1984 Macintosh commercials: “I think of myself as a cross between an artist and an inventor”
R.I.P. uliwitness, a.k.a. Uli Kusterer, longtime Macintosh programmer and HyperCard enthusiast. We will miss you too.
Fun fact: I recognized Uli’s name when it popped up in the podcast Discord. Back in the late 1990s a friend and I used “Uli’s Panes” as the playlist interface for a classic MacOS MOD player. Remember Uli, HyperCard and Bill with:
- Myst Reverse Engineering
- Write Your Own XCMD with CodeWarrior
- Other HyperCard streams
- hypercard.org
- Stacksmith
- Classic MacOS programming streams
- “Why programming sucks and how to make it better” (SwiftConf 2015) with references to what made HyperCard a uniquely intuitive development environment. Get a load of Uli’s HyperCard stack icon shirt!
- Partial HyperCard stack file format documentation
Uli’s Moose, an updated version of The Talking Moose for classic MacOS. Uli told me he tried to submit a new version of Mac OS X to the App Store but it was rejected several times and he eventually gave up. Thanks, Apple!
MFR Housekeeping, Spring 2026
Order David Pogue’s “Apple: The First 50 Years”. Watch the livestreamed Apple 50th event at the Computer History Museum.
KON and BAL's Puzzle Page II (1992, 1993)
Original text by Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak for Apple’s develop! magazine, December 1992, March 1993, and June 1993. Apple’s MicroBug documentation: Technote TN1136. Running MacsBug on an alternate …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak for Apple’s develop! magazine, December 1992, March 1993, and June 1993.
Apple’s MicroBug documentation: Technote TN1136.
Running MacsBug on an alternate monitor: “Using Touch and Go Breakpoints with Two Monitors”.
Spaceward Ho! for iPad and Classic MacOS. Original product website (broken).
Watch a Let’s Play of Spaceward Ho! by Effing Controller who also has hilarious playthroughs of F/A-18 Hornet and Marathon.
See also: Debugging Macintosh Software with Macsbug by Konstantin Othmer and Jim Straus.
Frank Casanova Interview - Maclopedia (1996)
Original text from Maclopedia. While I wasn’t looking, Frank Casanova parted ways with Apple in 2024. Whoops. John Buck’s book on Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Inventing the Future, is worth your while …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text from Maclopedia.
While I wasn’t looking, Frank Casanova parted ways with Apple in 2024. Whoops.
John Buck’s book on Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, Inventing the Future, is worth your while. John is also on the fediverse. Stick around and you might pick up some extra dirt.
Unedited versions of the Macintosh Quadra 700/900 launch, the Macintosh IIfx launch, and the WWDC 2004 announcement of QuickTime 7’s support for H.264.
Steve Hayman - Great Idea (2025)
Original text by Steve Hayman. NeXT Mail clips from the NeXT launch event in Tokyo and the NeXTSTEP Release 3.0 demo VHS tape.
Jecel on the Unitron 512 Macintosh Clone (1998)
Original text by Jecel Mattos de Assumpçao Jr, 1998. Rainer Brockerhoff, who also participated in the Unitron 512 project, provides additional background at Low End Mac. More about Brazil’s reserved market …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Jecel Mattos de Assumpçao Jr, 1998.
Rainer Brockerhoff, who also participated in the Unitron 512 project, provides additional background at Low End Mac.
More about Brazil’s reserved market policy, a.k.a. the National Policy of Informatics.
More about Jecel’s projects in this 2019 presentation about SmallTalk-oriented hardware and the Merlintec website.
Our Friend The Computer discusses the political and financial circumstances surrounding the Unitron 512.
As so often happens in weird corners of the Internet, people have somehow obtained copies of Unitron’s ROMs and put them under the microscope.
Power 100 Review and Mac OS Clone Commentary (1995)
Original text by Tim Warner, Macworld, August 1995. Additional clone cancellation fallout information from Macworld, October 1997. Original Power Computing magazine ad. Clearly the Mac OS clone program failed …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Tim Warner, Macworld, August 1995. Additional clone cancellation fallout information from Macworld, October 1997.
Original Power Computing magazine ad.
Clearly the Mac OS clone program failed due to the absence of discount furniture warehouse-style radio advertising.
Gary Davidian: “As far as I know, nobody ever made a CHRP machine.”
“Mr. OS/2” David Barnes talking about IBM’s intention to support Mac applications running on top of Workplace OS.
IBM’s repeated attempts to run all existing OSes on top of one OS and one hardware architecture lead to the incorrect assumption that PowerPC Macintoshes would run DOS and Windows right out of the box. Insignia Solutions’ SoftWindows marketing department did what came naturally.
The Motorola StarMax 4000-series motherboard, designed and manufactured entirely by Apple.
Jean-Louis Gassee: “We used PReP as the basis for the design of the BeBox…”
KON and BAL's Puzzle Page (1992, 1994)
Original text by Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak for Apple’s develop! magazine, May 1992 and June 1994. “These problems are supposed to be tough. If you don’t get a high score, at least you’ll learn …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak for Apple’s develop! magazine, May 1992 and June 1994.
“These problems are supposed to be tough. If you don’t get a high score, at least you’ll learn interesting Macintosh trivia.”
More about Bruce Leak’s time on the original QuickTime team.
Gary Davidian PRAM stories from his CHM oral history (video, transcript).
See also: Debugging Macintosh Software with Macsbug by Konstantin Othmer and Jim Straus.
Glider 4.0 Reviews (1991)
Game Hall of Fame text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1992. Review of Glider 4.0 by Toni Thompson, Macworld February 1992. I wonder if that’s the Toni Thompson who did the graphics for the Apple II version of …
Notes de l’épisode
Game Hall of Fame text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1992.
Review of Glider 4.0 by Toni Thompson, Macworld February 1992. I wonder if that’s the Toni Thompson who did the graphics for the Apple II version of Temple of Apshai?
John Calhoun interview by Richard Moss at MacScene. Buy Richard’s book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming.
Tanara Kuranov, a.k.a. Gamer Mouse covers games that helped make the Mac (and only the Mac) special. Glider Pro and Glider 4 playthroughs.
The Desktop Critic Secret Reviewer's Notebook (1996)
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld June 1996. The database review mentioned in this article might be one of these two. Review of the hilariously terrible Brother HL-8 printer and two (yes, two) attempts at …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld June 1996.
The database review mentioned in this article might be one of these two.
Review of the hilariously terrible Brother HL-8 printer and two (yes, two) attempts at Macintosh drivers for the HL-8.
Review of the smoking hot Envisio Notebook Display Adapter (1992). Audio version.
“If you’ve worked for the company, can you write the review? No.” Pogue found himself in a similar conundrum. His review of Finale 1.0 included the disclaimer, “Since writing this review in September 1988, David Pogue has become a paid consultant for Coda Music Software.” One reader applauded Macworld for this disclosure but still argued it was a conflict of interest. Pogue stated, “My future reviews for Macworld will not include music software,” though that was not to last very long. See his 1994/1995 reviews of AutoScore, Practica Musica, MOTU’s Performer, and Opcode Vision.
I don’t recall and was unable to dig up any rebuttal ads targeting David Pogue. If anyone out there is in the know and feels like naming names, drop me a line and I’ll update this episode. David, are you reading this? :-)
John Calhoun on Casady and Greene (2024)
Original text by John Calhoun. MacScene’s interview with John re: The History of Glider. Part 1, Part 2. Mr. Advisador for the Newton has been revived! Told you it was creepy. Original Newton version. The …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by John Calhoun.
MacScene’s interview with John re: The History of Glider. Part 1, Part 2.
Mr. Advisador for the Newton has been revived! Told you it was creepy. Original Newton version.
The Computer Chronicles covers Glider at Macworld Boston 1994. Today, as back then, you’re not supposed to notice that the game was first released five years prior to this show airing; you’re supposed to be amazed that anyone is saying anything positive about the Mac at all.
Yes indeed, Jeffrey Robbin, an Apple employee, wrote SoundJam, the Classic environment for Mac OS X, and Conflict Catcher.
Casady and Greene turned out the lights in 2003. In their own words.
Casady & Greene’s website in happier times.
Charles Piller: Is Apple Serious About Macintosh Clones? (1995)
Actions speak louder than words: a look at Apple’s extremely quiet Mac OS licensing program. Original text by Charles Piller. Macworld Boston 1994, Tim Bajarin: Apple has to either start licensing, or lower …
Notes de l’épisode
Actions speak louder than words: a look at Apple’s extremely quiet Mac OS licensing program.
Original text by Charles Piller.
Macworld Boston 1994, Tim Bajarin: Apple has to either start licensing, or lower their prices. A DTK PowerPC 601 box running Windows NT/PowerPC at PC Expo 1994. TNPC and Mitac showing off PowerPC systems at COMDEX 1994.
Heads of Mac OS licensing: Don Strickland’s website. In memoriam. Larry Lightman’s other business: Waffle-Crete. Do you suppose any Waffle Houses have been constructed with Waffle-Crete?
Jon Rubinstein talks about disbanding NeXT and founding FirePower Systems, only to have IBM pull the rug out from underneath the whole PowerPC personal systems scene. (transcript, pages 53-58)
Phil Schiller used to work for Macromedia?
The Pioneer MPC-GX1 Macintosh clone lands in Mac84tv’s workshop.
Windows NT/PowerPC on Macintosh PowerBook G3/G4 and iMac hardware: source code, video demos.
Gary Davidian, developer of the 68K emulator that underpinned the Power Mac’s success, talks about CHRP and his time at Power Computing. (transcript, pages 33-41)
Jim Black on John Carmack and Steve Jobs (2018)
Original text by Jim Black. Previous John Carmack episode: The Steve Jobs Rollercoaster. Peter Graffagnino’s appearance at NeXTEVNT 2015. Peter is interviewed by fellow Pixar veteran Michael Johnson. Some of …
Notes de l’épisode
Previous John Carmack episode: The Steve Jobs Rollercoaster.
Peter Graffagnino’s appearance at NeXTEVNT 2015. Peter is interviewed by fellow Pixar veteran Michael Johnson.
Some of the original Mac team demonstrating Steve Jobs’ favourite hand gesture (scroll down).
John Carmack’s appearance at Macworld San Francisco 1999. “The only thing you want to do with the Mac as a serious gamer is you wanna pull out the silly one button mouse and plug in a three button mouse pretty quick.”
Steve Jobs Deer Hunter quote from Macworld New York 1998.
The Iconoclast - Send In The Clones (1995)
Apple’s licensing approach (ca. 1994-1997) is a bad idea. Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1995. Andy Bechtolscheim quote about SPARC licensing and Macintosh clones: “Sun had a unified business… …
Notes de l’épisode
Apple’s licensing approach (ca. 1994-1997) is a bad idea.
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1995.
Andy Bechtolscheim quote about SPARC licensing and Macintosh clones: “Sun had a unified business… it wasn’t really selling separate software. … that whole notion of defining success [as] ‘other people adopt your thing’… Apple was criticized for being a closed system, then they licensed SuperMac … to build clones …. and the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was he killed all the clones, right? ‘cause if you cannot build a better system yourself, you don’t need the clones for sure, right?” Transcript.
Guerrino de Luca’s time with Apple goes back to at least 1992 (appearance at 1m52s), included a stint at Claris, and ended shortly after Steve Jobs returned in 1997. Guerrino’s last appearance with Apple. Don’t worry; he did fine for himself–he went to Logitech and was its president and CEO until 2008.
Guerrino bookending Apple’s System 7.5 promo video.
Given Apple’s tendency to undergo frequent reorgs throughout the ’90s, Don Strickland did not last as head of licensing operations. Unfortunately Don passed away in 2022 though his website is still up.
Compaq was a much more creative and technically significant company in its early days before it was forced to produce bargain basement PCs. Rod Canion’s excellent and highly entertaining (for nerds) book “Open” recounts the story.
Power Computing only made it halfway to its goal of selling 100,000 Macs in its first year.
Wise Guy - 1984 Redux (1994)
How Macintosh could have taken over the world. Original text by Guy Kawasaki, Macworld February 1994. Various 1993ish Apple commercials courtesy of RetroByte.
Steven Levy - One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, ... (1996)
Why does System 7.5 take so long to start up? Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld April 1996. Avoid conflating Moore’s Law with Dennard scaling. 65scribe has an easily-digested summary of Dennard scaling in …
Notes de l’épisode
Why does System 7.5 take so long to start up?
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld April 1996.
Avoid conflating Moore’s Law with Dennard scaling.
65scribe has an easily-digested summary of Dennard scaling in his extensive Power Mac G5 coverage.
The Desktop Critic - How to Become a Millionare Overnight (1996)
Eight best-selling Mac products that don’t exist–yet. Original text by David Pogue, Macworld April 1996. More on the history of DiskDoubler. John V. Holder’s TakeABreak has recently been uncovered from the …
Notes de l’épisode
Eight best-selling Mac products that don’t exist–yet.
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld April 1996.
More on the history of DiskDoubler.
John V. Holder’s TakeABreak has recently been uncovered from the depths of archive.org.
A hybrid of the imaginary Concatenator Pro and PocketBoot might be Startup Doubler, which gloms together all your extensions (internally, not on the filesystem) to accelerate startup. Apple sort of tried to make extensions management easier by including Ricardo Batista’s Extensions Manager with System 7.5 and later.
I’ve lost track of the number of Uninstaller-type software that’s been produced for the Mac since this article was written, not that I would ever touch any of them.
MacBreakZ is an awful lot like the imaginary Carpal Diem.
From ~2010-2014, I always thought of NexTag as a real-world PriceDex. It’s a shame it disappeared. CamelCamelCamel fills the void for those who haven’t yet separated themselves from Amazon.
Nobody ever went so far as to produce an INIT magazine but Symbionts will give you more technical insight into your System Folder. My all-time favourite feature: a file-by-file breakdown of how much memory is allocated by each INIT and cdev.
Things I don’t miss about the old days: holding my breath while capturing analog video, and waiting for machines with mechanical HDDs to boot. The PocketBoot would nearly useless today anyhow–not because of SSDs, but because Apple is actively striving to make it impossible to boot from external media. Thanks, Tim Cook! Super useful, good job. All because SECURITY. …except in the UK and everywhere else, shortly. Mmmkay, how about you let us boot from external devices again while you’re at it? Better yet, throw out the current version of Mac OS, fork Snow Leopard, and start things over from there, kthxbai
Scott Joplin “Maple Leaf Rag” clip courtesy of ConcertWare.
PPG Wave 2.3 demo courtesy of RetroSound.
More about CANYON.MID, composer George Stone, and how his work ended up shipping with most copies of Windows from 1991-1996. Composed on a Mac running Passport Designs’ Master Tracks Pro.
Live performance of CANYON.MID…?
The canyon.mid Simulator and hard rock cover (pun not intended).
Jonathan Schwartz - Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal (2010)
What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you. Original text by Jonathan Schwartz. More about Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance. Sun famously sued Microsoft over their …
Notes de l’épisode
What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you.
Original text by Jonathan Schwartz.
More about Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance.
Sun famously sued Microsoft over their incompatible Java implenentation variant in 1997. Microsoft settled by paying Sun a bunch of money. Please enjoy this Flash animation shown at JavaOne 2004 retelling the story.
Steve Jobs quotes from Triumph of the Nerds, WWDC 1997 Q&A, and Macworld San Francisco 2003.
In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and its StarOffice product, which Sun open sourced and renamed OpenOffice. After some entirely predictable grief from Oracle, the community forked the project and delivered what we know today as LibreOffice.
Apple adopted Sun’s dynamic system-wide tracing and performance profiling framework DTrace, known as Instruments in Xcode’s collection of tools.
Apple announced Snow Leopard Server would ship with Sun’s ZFS but that ultimately never happened for licensing and patent reasons. Whether Sun’s soon-to-be-acquisition by Oracle and the Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison relationship would have helped or hindered this, we’ll never know. Either way, Apple, I know you’re reading this and I’d like APFS to checksum my data blocks too, not just the metadata. Thank you.
Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy quotes from Sun’s NC03-Q3 (2003) keynote and JavaOne 2004.
James Thomson - Mac OS X Dock History (2025)
Original text by James Thomson. DragThing, one of many Dock-like tools for classic Mac OS. PCalc for classic and modern Mac OS/iOS. Some PCalc history. The One True Place for the Dock may be at the bottom of …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by James Thomson.
DragThing, one of many Dock-like tools for classic Mac OS.
PCalc for classic and modern Mac OS/iOS. Some PCalc history.
The One True Place for the Dock may be at the bottom of the screen, but ever since the advent of widescreen everything, it always made more sense–at least to me–to put it on the right. This frees up what precious little vertical screen real estate there is on a 16:9 display. Sorry, James!
Jon Rubinstein on the iMac’s early days as an “Internet Appliance”, a.k.a. a diskless web terminal.
Darin Adler: 20 Years of Computer Software (1996)
Original text by Darin Adler. An overview of the Motorola MEK6800D2 single board computer/development kit. Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = …
Notes de l’épisode
An overview of the Motorola MEK6800D2 single board computer/development kit.
Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Podcast.
The General Magic documentary is a good hard look at how General Magic fizzled out, though it somehow managed to survive long enough to power the General Motors OnStar service.
Darin Adler later joined the Nautilus (a.k.a. the GNOME desktop file manager) development team with Andy Hertzfeld at Eazel. Demonstration.
Bryan Cantrill recounts the object-oriented operating system craze of the 1990s and counts the corpses: Spring, Taligent, Copland, and JavaOS.
Lisa Melton recounts crisis management at Eazel and the history of the Safari and WebKit project on episode 11 of the Debug podcast.
Waldemar Horwat went on to head JavaScript development at Netscape. Like many other eerily smart math and programming language types, he now works at Google.
Craig Hickman - The History of Kid Pix (2013)
How a little paint program became a worldwide phenomenon. Original text by Craig Hickman. Craig talks about his 8-bit Atari projects on episode 378 of the ANTIC Podcast. Apple honoured Craig in their …
Notes de l’épisode
How a little paint program became a worldwide phenomenon.
Original text by Craig Hickman. Craig talks about his 8-bit Atari projects on episode 378 of the ANTIC Podcast.
Apple honoured Craig in their already-zapped-from-history Macintosh 30th Anniversary website.
John Sculley demonstrating Kid Pix on stage in 1991. John loves talking about “objects” the way Apple loves talking about “machine learning”. In Love Notes to Newton, Sculley claims the Newton project spurred ARM’s support for “floating point and objects”. Okay, John. OOP is a software abstraction, and no MessagePad ever shipped with a hardware FPU–not even the StrongARM in the MessagePad 2000. More about ARM’s relationship with hardware floating point units.
Macintosh Garden has copies of Fido, Camera, and Hickman’s 2005 art project Beautiful Dorena. Let Craig lead you on a guided tour through Beautiful Dorena.
Greg Maletic on OpenDoc (2006)
Original text by Greg Maletic who is now at Panic, one of the few companies still making beautiful native non-Electron, non-Flutter Mac desktop applications–an endangered species. A technical walkthrough of …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Greg Maletic who is now at Panic, one of the few companies still making beautiful native non-Electron, non-Flutter Mac desktop applications–an endangered species.
A technical walkthrough of OpenDoc from co-architect Kurt Piersol. Best comment: “… it’s telling just how much talking is happening in this presentation and how little ‘actually showing OpenDoc working’ there is.”
Kurt still works at Apple!
Apple’s Macromedia Director slideshow that attempts to explain OpenDoc. The phrase “show, don’t tell” once again springs to mind.
Marketing fluff and download for WAV, the OpenDoc word processor component–one of the few components that made it to market, or more skeptically, one of the few OpenDoc components fullstop.
Apple's 1989 Year In Review (1990)
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1990. The sad story of dBASE Mac, which was quickly sold off and briefly revived as nuBASE. Followup article. MindWrite and how it relates to the collapse of mail …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1990.
The sad story of dBASE Mac, which was quickly sold off and briefly revived as nuBASE. Followup article.
MindWrite and how it relates to the collapse of mail order house Icon Review.
Useless product of the year: WristMac, as shown at Macworld Expo San Francisco 1989.
Watch Jean-Louis Gassee assemble a Macintosh IIcx live on stage. (Tim Cook take note: once in a while, you should actually touch and use the miserably buggy products you’re overseeing.)
FlashTalk vs DaynaTalk. As they say, you haven’t heard of it for a reason.
Macworld ran an excellent series on PostScript and TrueType font design in 1991.
John Warnock and Chuck Geschke talk about the early days of Adobe and the Font Wars of the late 1980s/early 1990s.
The spreadsheet package Trapeze disappeared after a few years. Lead Trapeze developer Andrew Wulf demonstrating Trapeze on TV in a brilliant white suit. Andrew also worked on DeltaGraph.
The AppleFax modem required a ROM update for inter-modem compatibility and was lumbered with many other hardware and software problems that were never addressed.
After trying to sell you “Apple Business Graphics” (read: “graphics are not for games and kids, we swear”) and Apple Desktop Publishing, here comes “Apple Desktop Media” (read: “you can only create multimedia with the Mac, please buy our hardware”). According to the video, Apple Desktop Media is mostly about violently plopping things onto the Apple Scanner. Bonus Wilfred Brimley.
ImageWriter LQ press release, review, complaints and “frequent mechcanical problems”, followed by Apple grudgingly upgrading larger customers to LaserWriters if they complained enough about faulty ImageWriter LQs. Version 1.0 of “running to the media doesn’t help”?
That Time I Had Steve Jobs Keynote at Unix Expo (1991)
Original text by Chris MacAskill at the now-defunct cake.co. “Team FDA” jean jacket pictures in the comments (scroll down). Steve Jobs with the 1991 Unix Expo keynote audience under hypnosis. (scroll down) …
Notes de l’épisode
Original text by Chris MacAskill at the now-defunct cake.co.
“Team FDA” jean jacket pictures in the comments (scroll down).
Steve Jobs with the 1991 Unix Expo keynote audience under hypnosis. (scroll down)
Lotus Improv tutorial VHS tape, Lotus technical talk about Improv and NeXTSTEP, and Moose O’Malley’s Improv Guided Tour.
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