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 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”?