Comfort food for Macintosh users of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
The podcast Mac Folklore Radio is created by Derek. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
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.
How Macintosh could have taken over the world.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
Original text by Steve Hayman.
Humungous Entertainment’s CD-ROM titles for classic Macs.
The infamous Power Mac 5200 featured the horrendously slow PowerPC 603 (not the 603e). As if that wasn’t bad enough, a recycled motherboard design fed the 603’s 64-bit memory bus with a 32-bit wide memory subsystem, exacerbating the 603’s los performance. Add some reliability issues, bring to a boil, simmer to distaste.
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld May 1994.
Products mentioned in this article:
Interplay’s “Star Trek: 25th Anniversary” adventure game download, CD-ROM download with voice acting, complete playthrough on YouTube.
David Landis’ Stak Trek episode guide HyperCard stacks.
David Pogue interviewed Mark Okrand, creator of Klingon and other conlangs, for the Unsung Science podcast.
Sound Source Interactive’s audio clip collection.
Bitstream Star Trek Font Packs and AkBKukU on the legality of Bitstream’s copying of typefaces.
Star Trek Omnipedia CD-ROM and updated edition.
A little about Phil Farrand, author of the Nitpicker’s Guides and the Finale scorewriting software for the Macintosh. David Pogue/Phil Farrand interface design story from the 2005 Mac OS X Conference.
A broader look at the circumstances surrounding the demise of BeOS.
Original text by me. Text version available.
No links here this time; they’re all inside the text version.
MFR will be off its usual schedule while your host recovers from a brutal flu.
Sound effect from MacPuke/MacBarfX.
A snapshot of Be’s direction in 1998 post-Apple merger talks and pre-bankruptcy.
Original text by Henry Bortman.
Selected Jean-Louis Gassée quotes:
“Who could have put a date on not getting fired for using Linux?”
“One of my role models is Michael Dell. […] He looks like a sage in the industry now, but he didn’t always look like this.”
“The simple fact is, today if you write a line of C++ code, chances are you’re competing with Microsoft.”
The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.
JLG refers to striking a deal with “a Japanese PC maker”, resulting in preinstalls of BeOS on the Hitachi Flora Prius (not that Prius).
Yes, Apple’s marketing slogan for the Macintosh really was “it does more and it costs less” in the early 1990s. Related comic.
In audio as in video applications, the talk-to-shipping-products ratio was extremely poor. Back in the day I only heard of one video editor shipping on BeOS, Adamation (ex-NeXT!) personalStudio. The BeBits software catalog reflects this as of mid-2000 when third-party application development seemed to stop altogether. I’m not counting the Edirol DV-7 because, like the Otari RADAR system, it was an expensive custom hardware appliance built on top of BeOS, priced mostly out of the reach of casual home users.
A short story about long cables.
Original text by Steve Riggins.
Macworld San Francisco 1999: Steve Jobs pokes fun at legacy parallel SCSI-1 versus FireWire.
Original text from SunWorld, February 1996 by Michael McCarthy and Mark Cappel.
This was such a bad idea that in the very same issue it was announced a potential Sun/Apple deal had fallen through.
CHM Sun Microsystems Founders Panel in which they discuss close encounters with acquiring Apple.
I’m glad Sun didn’t buy Apple because by the turn of the century Sun was in serious trouble. UltraSPARC III was delayed by two years, x86 caught up, the dotcom bust happened, everyone was broke, and Linux had matured to a point where it began creeping into the enterprise. Andy Bechtolsheim quote to that effect.
This was the second significant time Sun’s CPU group had difficultly keeping up with the Groveses: Microprocessor Report outlines the troubled design and production behind the “constipated” performance of SuperSPARC (1992).
In Bolo’s world, players form alliances, pilot tanks and command little green men.
Original text by Steve Silberman.
GlobalTalk Overview, or how to run AppleTalk over TCP/IP around the world. Gursharan Sidhu quote at the end of this episode: “It worked across very large multi-segment networks… Apple’s own corporate network [for example]. You could print on a printer in Sweden from Cupertino, and all those constructs were there [in the 1980s], on shipping products, not in a lab.”
GlobalTalk hijinks: the initial hard disk image was infected with nVIR A, an AppleTalk zone named “KennyLoginsDangerZone”, “World’s Fastest ImageWriter”, “We’ve been trying to reach you”, heresy, and of course people started playing network Spectre before I finished production of this episode.
Watch things unfold in realtime: search for #globaltalk anywhere(?) in the fediverse.
Stuart Cheshire talks about DNS-SD, a.k.a. Zeroconf, a.k.a. Rendezvous, a.k.a. Bonjour, with introduction by AppleTalk architect Gurshsran Sidhu! The same thing at Google with terrible audio, but without Microsoft.
Stuart Cheshire’s list of Bolo links from the mid-1990s. Naturally they’re all dead, but archive.org has you covered in most cases.
Ladmo, the Bolo brain that impressed all your nerd friends.
“Acorn: A World In Pixels”, a book covering BBC Micro games, documents some early Bolo history.
There are, as of this writing, only two Macintosh Bolo videos on YouTube. You should fix that.
Avie Tevanian on Apple-versus-NeXT snobbery, and motivating engineers to improve TCP/IP usability.
Original text by Henry Bortman.
Be’s roller coaster ride from 1990-1998: the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, Commodore’s Irving Gould, a thirty-mile hike to the sea, headhunting disgruntled Apple employees, and what to do when Apple says you’re not allowed to exhibit at WWDC 1996.
Pictures of an AT&T Hobbit BeBox motherboard from ex-Be-er Jean-Baptiste Quéru.
Jean-Louis Gassée’s story about having dinner with John Sculley from the 2011 Steve Jobs Legacy event at the Churchill Club.
The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.
Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser reflecting on Larry Tesler choosing ARM over the AT&T Hobbit.
Guy Kawasaki on corporate offsite retreats.
The Computer Chronicles stops by the Be, Inc. booth at Macworld Boston 1996.
Steve Sakoman left Be for Silicon Graphics in 1994, then returned to Be in 1996. He went back to Apple in 2003, and according to Jon Rubinstein, was supposed to be Avie Tevanian’s successor in 2006 but “didn’t get the tap on the shoulder”.
Original text by Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser, January 1997.
How does BeOS measure up to System 7.5, and could it have become the next-generation Mac OS? The authors examine why Copland would not have been the crashproof operating system we had all hoped for.
Official BeOS demo video from … I’ll have to guess 1998, the year the x86 port of BeOS shipped. An extremely rudimentary port of Cinema 4D is shown. Maxon appears to have dropped all plans to complete their BeOS port of Cinema 4D after Be decided to focus on the Internet appliance market in late 1999.
BeOS demo video intro music: Virtual (void) Remix from the Cotton Squares, a.k.a. Be Engineering. BeOS, it’s The OS. More on the Cotton Squares. Standing In The Death Car!
AFAIK a pure software multitrack digital audio recording and editing suite never shipped for the BeOS. Otari’s RADAR doesn’t count since that was a hardware/software bundle, and an expensive one at that. Second version. If you can find a DAW for BeOS that was available in 2000 right before everything imploded, I’d like to hear from you. :-) I have a sample track from one but I don’t think it was ever published. GrooveMachine doesn’t count since it’s geared towards short samples and phrases. BeBits lists Qua as a hard disk recorder, but the author’s website states its audio functionality is also centered on short samples.
Printing support was not a priority for BeOS. Hey, this was supposed to be an OS for the multimedia future, not dead tree prepress! I tried the third-party BInkjet printer support package with a DeskJet 680C and it worked well.
Nitin Ganatra of iOS Contacts and Mail.app fame worked in Apple Developer Technical Support through the 1990s. He talked about working with developers and the perils of letting Apple marketing loose on Copland in the Debug podcast, episode 39.
The Cotton Squares/BeOS Demo Video: Where Are They Now?
Baron Arnold: Danger (early 2000s, now: ???)
Frank Boosman: AWS
Jeff Bush: ???
Jean-Louis Gassée: The Monday Note, Grateful Geek
Ficus Kirkpatrick: Google, Meta
Scott Paterson: making the world a better place
Doug Wright: ???
Original text by Dave Mark, MacTech, January 1997.
Bryan Cantrill on interviewing at Be, Inc. (perhaps with Dominic Giampolo?) and inadvertently buying a VFS architecture at the Be bankruptcy auction.
Apple wouldn’t have gone OS shopping if Copland had worked out.
CodeWarrior for BeOS was a thing.
Naturally, IBM made the most use of their System Object Model.
Menu Tasking Enabler for MacOS might have been preserved on MacFormat cover disc #4.
BeOS, it’s The OS (5038). (Try it in a mirror.) Also from the Cotton Squares: Standing in the Death Car.
Ivan Richwalski walks you through the BeBox, a few funny BeOS APIs, and BFS metadata indexing and queries.
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld December 1994.
Watch the CD3 compact disc storage and retrieval box in action.
Photos of the salami-like CD3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The product lasted into the 2000s and the companion DiscGear website is still up, featuring no less than three CD3-like units on its front page.
Decorate your classic Mac desktop: Holiday Lights, Xmas Lights, Snow.
YesterYear’s Mac Games review of “After Dark: The Simpsons Collection”.
LabelOnce is still around, having wisely chosen not to focus exclusively on floppy disk labels.
Simplicity, sophistication, oversimplification, and At Ease.
I rant about the usability of modern Apple software, Steven Levy rants about the complexity of the Mac and the oversimplified environment provided by At Ease, and Josef Morell rants about the damage At Ease does to first impressions of the Macintosh in retail channels.
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld December 1992 and Josef Morell, MacFormat March 1995.
datagubbe.se laments the usability of modern desktop computer software.
Product manager for At Ease, Dave Pakman, demonstrates At Ease for a user group in ~1992. Bruce Tognazzini on the user-centered design philosophy of the Macintosh. R.I.P. (The philosophy, not Bruce.) Thanks as always to the Unofficial Apple VHS Archive for both of these.
Phrases I never expected to learn while producing a computer history podcast: “spoiling the ship for a hap’orth of tar” (pronunciation).
You definitely need to install the Talking Moose on your old Mac right now and/or Uli’s Moose on your Mac OS X 10.1-10.7 machines.
Original text by Erfert Fenton, Macworld September 1991.
Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Podcast. Engineer interviews from “Apple of the Future”, preserved and uploaded by The Byte Cellar.
Apple campus decor in the 1980s was pretty ugly, though less so in the cube farms.
A significant chunk of Apple’s internal TV studio productions have been uploaded to YouTube by the Apple VHS Archive and The ReDiscovered Future.
Original text by Deke McClelland, Macworld February 1994.
RayDream Designer and Infini-D merged into a new product called Carrara, which is still marketed by Daz3D. It must still be Carbon under the hood since it only runs on macOS 10.14 and earlier. 27 years is a pretty good life for a personal computer software product.
StrataVision 3D evolved into Strata Design 3D CX. Myst was a walking (spinning?) advertisement for StrataVision, and was featured in at least one Strata ad.
Alien Soup walks you through the AT-AT model and animation he assembled in 1995 with Infini-D.
Update: The 3D rendering posse on the MFR Discord sent this video of Specular International co-founder Adam Lavine demonstrating Infini-D at what looks like a MacWorld Expo booth.
People are still using older 3D modeling and rendering software to reticulate splines in the RetroCGI subreddit.
More olden 3D animation: the ElectricImage Animation System 1.0 demo tape circa 1988. ElectricImage development appears to have ceased in the early 2010s.
QuickDraw GX, meet unfinished developer tool prototype.
Original text by Cameron Esfahani who is still at Apple today, ~30 years later.
Chris Espinosa replied to the original: “Cam, with this thread you got maybe 500 people interested in SK8, which is a lot more than Jim Spohrer and I ever did.”
Someone resurrected the SK8 section of www.research.apple.com as it stood in 1997.
Download SK8, the source code, look at a screenshot of it, or read the user guide.
In addressing QuickDraw’s deficiencies by completely uprooting it, QuickDraw GX was naturally a bit of a compatibility nightmare. Like virtual memory and A/UX, you heard about it somewhat frequently through shareware README files, usually followed by “disable it” and/or “you’re out of luck”. Like many things at Apple in the ’90s, it also shipped years behind schedule: “QuickDraw GX will start shipping as an optional part of System 7.5 installs starting in September 1994“.
Note that while three developers personally confronted Steve Jobs about OpenDoc at his famous WWDC 1997 Q&A session, nobody even mentioned QuickDraw GX in passing.
Why didn’t Apple’s Unix-based A/UX become the Mac OS of the future?
Original text by Basal Gangster.
UniSoft mentions A/UX exactly once in the darker recesses of its website.
A/UX 1.0 demo on the Computer Chronicles, 1989. Demo starts at ~19 minutes.
Watch the announcement of Carbon at WWDC 1998. Sean Parent describes how Carbon almost didn’t happen, a classic case of sticking to your guns until Steve Jobs adopts your idea.
The fight over multiuser features and authentication requirements for Mac OS X as told by Avie Tevanian and (separately) Steve Jobs.
Bill Warner tells his story about founding Avid and switching from Apollo workstations to the Macintosh. Individual parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (the Mac part). Cropped 16:9 in one piece. Watch Bill Warner demonstrate the Avid/1 Media Composer on a Macintosh II in 1989 for an Avid promo tape and for WBZ TV Massachusetts.
If an IBM PC can see the light, why not a Mac? Original text by Joel Snyder, SunWorld July 1993.
This review calls A/UX “complete”, but that’s meaningless until another Vancouverite demonstrates that it is possible to port Doom (sans audio) to it! The moment it worked.
The usual emulators won’t run A/UX since it requires an MMU. You’ll need Shoebill (abandoned by the developer now that he works at Apple) or QEMU’s Quadra 800 emulation.
Watch someone else suffer so you don’t have to: netfreak walks you through installing, patching, and configuring A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30. Boy is it slow. netfreak maintains some useful A/UX resources and a knowledge base.
Mr. TenFourFox/OldVCR Cameron Kaiser has documented some interesting MachTen hacks and notes. If you find MachTen crashes shortly after launch, you might have a faulty 68LC040 CPU. I hope you bought AppleCare.
“[X11 performance was] … about six times faster than a Sun 3/50.” Six times as fast as slow is still slow. Macworld November 1992 reports “Even on a [Quadra] 950, please note, A/UX is slow–three times slower than Unix on a midrange Sun workstation.”
A/UX Product Manager Richard Finlayson’s unabridged demo of A/UX 2.0 from the April 1990 Apple VHS User Group Connection tape. Apple’s self-running Macromedia Director demo of A/UX 2.0, complete with simulated Extended Keyboard II typing sounds. Spot the two errors in the simulated CommandShells. The example user might be a play on Richard Finlayson’s name.
The Macintosh’s year in review for 1988: some reached milestones, some threw stones, and some wished they’d stayed at home. Original text by the late Charles Seiter, Macworld, January 1989. Macworld: In Memoriam.
Charles was just 58 when he passed. If you ever spotted a heavy math, science, or programming and development tool-related article in Macworld, you could be certain to find Charles’ name nearby. I believe this particular article was, unfortunately, his only excursion into humorous editorials.
I had a little contact with Charles back in 2004 after I thanked Macworld’s team of contributing editors for teaching me that, contrary to what I had been taught in school, writing could be fun.
Clip of Jean-Louis Gassee’s story about having dinner with John Sculley from the 2011 “Steve Jobs’ Legacy” event at the Churchill Club. Even the Newton marketing team acknowledged people sort of looked down upon John Sculley’s technical background. Gassee’s new book “Grateful Geek” is out now. His old book is too.
nVIR clip from Don Swaim interview with Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo’s Egg. The WayBack Machine does not have the source file but I do.
The Computer Chronicles’ whirlwind tour of Boston Macworld Expo 1988.
Bill Gates’ observation about borrowing ideas from Xerox.
Mainframe and VAX connectivity makes up a fairly large percentage of the marketing material coming out of Apple in the late ‘80s, as you can see from The ReDiscovered Future and the Apple User Group VHS Archive. As told by Bob Supnik and many others, DEC was already thoroughly doomed by the late 1980s.
Pre-QuickTime Video production on the Mac II was, by today’s standards, weird and expensive. WordPerfect 1.0 and 2.0 weren’t heralded as very Mac-like, unlike v3.5, which shipped around the time Microsoft Word 6 ate everyone else’s lunch.
Not all early CD-ROM titles were as compelling as Myst: About Cows v3.09, $40USD.
How AutoCAD was ported to the Macintosh II–with a dirty hack.
Apple and Stephen Wolfram pushing Mathematica 1.0.
The first few years of fax software on the Macintosh were a bit of a disaster. Apple’s entry was particularly embarrassing. Macworld even called the AppleFax software/hardware package “beleaguered”.
1989 was the year John Norstad’s Disinfectant began to spread like wildfire. We usually received a new version every 3-6 months via my father’s employer. It’s remarkable software distribution at that scale happened at all when you think about how few people people had modems back then.
Sometimes it’s difficult to envision what a new category of products will be used for as Apple’s marketing department discovered. Jeff Walden takes an extremely database-centric view of HyperCard in Macworld, April 1988, so I hope he found Activision’s Reports! utility.
ADDmotion, a VideoWorks/Director/Flash-like animation extension for HyperCard, is a ton of fun to play with.
Bill Atkinson mentions developing new sorting and compression algorithms (1h24m57s) to “achieve [performance he deems acceptable] on the Macintosh”. I was unable to dig up the patents he mentioned. He also spoke to CHM about the necessity of saving changes on-the-fly when working with large HyperCard stacks on small machines.
Bill Atkinson talks about inspiration, the birth of HyperCard and the fight over MacBASIC. (Why bother with guests if you’re just going to talk overtop of them constantly?)
The reasons for HyperCard’s color extensions poor speed explained by M. Uli Kusterer.
Pro tip: using the word “capabilities” eight times in a 1,500 word article is fatiguing.
Multitasking on the Macintosh evolves beyond Switcher. MultiFinder review by Bruce Webster, Macworld, April 1988. Commentary by Jerry Borrell, Macworld, January 1988.
Correction: Declaring an application’s memory requirements through a SIZE -1 resource began in the days of Switcher. (source: MacTech Spring 1989)
Charismatic IBM evangelist David Barnes selling OS/2 Steve Jobs-style at a 1993 meeting of the HAL-PC Users Group. David’s presentation is in the second half of the meeting.
Memory prices were a hot topic in computer magazines during the DRAM crisis of 1988-1989.
CE Software’s DiskTop: helping you fake multitasking since 1986.
Rick Chapman’s “In Search Of Stupidity” covers the fall of dBase, Borland, OS/2, WordStar, and other things people under the age of 50 have never heard of.
Steve Crutchfield of BeamWars fame has (in the year 2023–I am not making this up) backported Mac OS 8’s relative dates feature to System 6! Download “Today’s The Day” from Macintosh Garden. (discussion, Let’s Play BeamWars)
A spontaneous port of MacPaint to the Apple II. No vertical blanking interrupt? No problem!
Original text by Andy Hertzfeld at folklore.org.
Andy discusses micro-optimization and the earliest days of colour graphics on the Macintosh.
Original text by Chester Peterson Jr., MacTutor, June 1988.
This Adobe Illustrator ‘88 instructional video gives you a sense of how slow 8-bit colour was back then. Illustrator ‘88 shipped in 1987, well before the advent of QuickerDraw, but I wonder whether drawing was intentionally slowed down for this video to create a more aesthetically pleasing result. How about that cold digital Fairlight CMI-heavy soundtrack? Discogs link for when that YouTube link dies. “Heatseeker” is the library music featured twice in the video.
Bookbound interview with Andy Hertzfeld from January 2005, just after the MWSF 2005 keynote and the announcement of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the iPod Shuffle, and the G4 Mac mini.
Landon Dyer on the joys of subversive sticker placement at Apple’s then new Infinite Loop campus.
A tour of Apple’s Fremont and Singapore factories. Remember when we used to manufacture stuff in North America?
Written by Cheryl England Spencer, Macworld, September 1990. Cheryl was also the founder of MacAddict. Unfortunately Cheryl passed away in September 2022. :-( We miss you, Cheryl. Obligatory MacAddict attitude clip from Macworld Boston 1996.
Watch Cheryl giving us a tour of her office at MacAddict in 1997 in 160x120 Road Pizza (QuickTime 1.0 “Apple Video Codec”) quality.
Jean-Louis Gasée assembled a Macintosh IIcx live on stage (eat your heart out, Tim Cook) to demonstrate Apple’s design-for-manufacturing prowess. DRAM joke courtesy of the DRAM crisis of 1989.
1988: NeXT factory tour: The Machine to Build the Machines. I’ll bet Steve even critiqued the unnecessarily epic musical score.
1990: Apple: “We Are Manufacturing”, the Fremont, California factory as it stood when the article was written. Notably less epic than NeXT’s tour and distributed on the User Group Connection VHS tapes.
1987: Apple: “World Class Manufacturing Around the World”, a factory tour from three years prior to this article. The first half is Apple II-centric–that’s what kept Apple afloat during the Mac’s first few horrible years, after all.
Despite what Steve Jobs would have us believe, humans were present in the PowerPC G5 CPU factory. Don’t believe anything Steve tells you, in particular because he passed away 12 years ago.
Apple’s Fremont factory closed in 2004.
A prison Macintosh Users Group gives as good as it gets at the Massachussetts Corrections Institute, Lancaster Prerelease Facility (1x 5-star review).
Written by Deborah Branscum, Conspicuous Consumer, Macworld April 1990.
A clue for those who missed the April Fools joke.
Music from the Myst soundtrack. Looking for the most detailed lore-rich playthrough of Myst, Riven, etc. ever? dilandau3000 has you covered.
Did you know there’s a VR version of Myst now? Yes, climbing up and down ladders is extremely tedious. Scott Forstall is laughing at you for laughing at him re: skeumorphism right now.
“The gang at Apple Computer does its best work when its collective back is against the wall.” Oh 1997 David Pogue, if only you knew. :-(
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld December 1997.
Clip of Apple’s Jim Gable talking about Mac OS 8 “Tempo” from the 1997 OS Strategy VHS tape, feat. cheesy music.
After the System 7 switch, some users are wondering what got into them.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld May 1992.
Stanford University System 7.0 segment from The Computer Chronicles.
Randall Rothenberg (whom I’m sure is reading this 31 years later) should check out System Picker, which eases the confusion of maintaining multiple System Folders by automatically blessing and unblessing them at your command.
Watch Macworld Tips & Tricks columnist Lon Poole take you on a tour of System 7 features. Lon wrote Apple help books for the Apple II series all the way through the early days of Mac OS X.
Revisiting the design decisions and constraints behind the original Macintosh 128.
Original text by Andy Hertzfeld at folklore.org.
Steven Levy on “unauthorized” modifications to the original Mac: “A Shut and Open Case” (PDF, MP3).
Dan Winkler (yes, that Dan Winkler) relaying his experience with a serial port Tecmar MacDrive hard disk in 1984.
Dog Cow: “All About MFS: The Macintosh File System”.
Dog Cow’s detailed discussion of early Macintosh hard drive systems including the Tecmar MacDrive.
In an interview conducted shortly before the dawn of the Macintosh II, Andy Hertzfeld talks about product design, NeXT, leadership, PostScript, designing products for the broadest possible audience, Windows 1.0, copyrighted code, graphics accelerators, unsung heroes of the Mac team, growing up, and Macintosh Servant.
Original text from Macworld, February 1987.
Unison World/Print Shop lawsuit (casetext) clip from the 1986 “Second Hand Computers” episode of the Computer Chronicles.
Early days of Radius clip from Andy Hertzfeld speaking at the 2004 Mac OS X Conference.
Windows 1.0 was allegedly going to do overlapping windows at first. As explained in “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates” (Edstrom and Eller, 1998) the product nearly died in its early years before two guys at a drunken company party unintentionally to transformed it into a 32-bit protected mode OS/2 killer. (The 32-bit part wasn’t accidental, just the OS/2 part.)
How the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, GNU Emacs, and the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop converged.
Written by Landon Dyer at dadhacker.com in 2009.
Gary Davidian quote from his CHM Oral History (video 1, 2; transcript 1, 2).
Some MPW history, some funny MPW error messages, an overview of the famous Projector revision control system, and MPW’s funky About Box animation. I miss About Boxes. :-(
Of Newton MessagePad data store resilience and Mars Rover reboot loops.
Written by Landon Dyer at dadhacker.com in 2004.
Excerpt of Steve Capps (ex-Newton) and Donna Dubinsky, former CEO of Palm and ex-Claris VP, from the Computer History Museum’s Computing In Your Pocket panel discussion.
If Unix workstations were cars, what kind of cars would they be?
Written by Chris MacAskill at cake.co (defunct, 2021).
Watch a bakeoff between Sun’s DevGuide and NeXTSTEP, InterfaceBuilder, and Objective-C.
Apple’s 45-minute video pushing Macintosh Quadras to engineers. “Now with a Macintosh user interface, [AutoCAD] Release 11…” … no longer feels like a hastily-ported DOS product!
The complete Bill Gates talk from 1989 at the University of Waterloo’s Computer Science Club.
John Walker’s fascinating history of Autodesk and AutoCAD: The Autodesk File. Macintosh story and awesome kludge. I can’t believe that worked, and that they shipped it! More Autodesk history.
AutoCAD coverage in Macworld: initial announcement (single window-only and no clipboard support!), advert, one user’s opinion, user hostility, and gaining a friendlier user interface before Macintosh support was dropped altogether until 2010.
Deborah Branscum’s Conspicuous Consumer column puts Apple’s active matrix LCD defect apathy under the microscope. At 77dpi in pure black and white–no greyscale, and no RGB subpixels–you definitely noticed dead pixels!
Original text from Macworld, July 1992.
Dead pixels are nothing new today, but they presented a novel public relations problem in 1991 as active matrix LCDs began to appear in top-of-the-line mass market laptops. Apple, of course, chose to keep completely silent unless asked.
This is yet another aspect of ancient computing that goes completely unnoticed by the likes of Wikipedia and thus younger “YouTubers”. Passive matrix LCDs didn’t have this issue, but then again, they didn’t have the fast response time, high contrast, or wide viewing angles of an active matrix LCD either.
Macworld January 1993 contains a diagram showing the difference in construction between passive and active matrix LCDs.
If Apple considering dead pixels “bad” and voided pixels “acceptable” seems totally arbitrary, that’s because it probably was. It may just have been Apple’s way of quietly cutting the number of complaints it had to act on by 50%. :-) Just my two cents.
Deborah Branscum interview clips from the Digital Riptide technology journalism history project.
True story: through my dad’s job, we knew a guy who ran an Apple dealership in the early 1990s. When I was 10 years old, I was at a conference with my dad and while he and the dealer chatted, I got a chance to play with the dealer’s personal PowerBook 170 for a few minutes. I confirmed his 170’s display was completely free of dead pixels. I didn’t have the guts to ask, but I always wondered how many 170s he had to open before finding a perfect one–or did he get lucky on his first try? Barry Underwood of BMH Computer Solutions, are you still out there somewhere? :-)
Hello listeners who found me via Michael Tsai!
David Pogue reviews a smoking hot new video output product for the PowerBook 100/140/170. And you thought your laptop-and-projector troubles were bad…
Original text from Macworld, September 1992.
Very dark photo of an Envisio Notebook Display Adapter in the wild.
Macworld reviews the state of LCD projection pads in 1993, from the days before integrated LCD projectors existed.
Apple’s apology for the gigantic expensive Macintosh Portable. Original text from Macworld, December 1991.
Audio clips courtesy of The Unofficial Apple VHS Archive’s collection of Apple User Group Connection tapes, which covered Apple’s PowerBook 1xx launch event for employees in 1991. Got all that?
Television commercials: it attracts mates somehow, it runs everything in 4MB of RAM somehow, and the predecessor to the Yao Ming/Verne Troyer 12-inch PowerBook G4 ad.
Apple telling you how great the design is.
Apple telling you how great the product is.
John Sculley telling you how great he is. Useful if you’re having trouble falling asleep.
Apple demonstrating the Microsoft Jump Rope and the Microsoft Wart.
John Medica: R.I.P., press release and tribute by Wake Forest University, also on YouTube.
Computer History Museum - Apple Industrial Design Event (2007) featuring Robert Brunner, Manager of Industrial Design during the PowerBook 1xx era, and Jerry Manock, industrial designer on the Apple II through the Mac 128.
Original text from Macworld, February 1991, page 73.
Macworld published a correction confirming the Outbound 2000 series was indeed FCC-certified for home use.
If you’re just gagging to experience the IsoPoint/TrackBar, you can buy one today from Contour Design! HCI guru Bill Buxton on the IsoPoint. Contour Design on YouTube is all RollerMouse, all the time.
Ad for the Outbound 2000-series notebooks, and another where they push the Outbound’s upgradability advantage to PowerBook shoppers.
Outbound 2000-series notebook reviews: [Dec 1991, Sep 1992]. MacUser only did capsule reviews of the 2000 series. :-(
March 1993 obituary for Outbound. September 1993: PerFit service and upgrades available.
Enjoy some gorgeous photos of the original Outbound Laptop System and 2000s from applerooter.net.
From the days before the hot-selling PowerBook 100 series, David Pogue reviews a sleeker, less expensive alternative to Apple’s 1989 Macintosh Portable.
Original text from Macworld, September 1990.
Enjoy some gorgeous photos of the original Outbound Laptop System from applerooter.net.
NuTek’s years of labour finally bear fruit–kind of. The trail of NuTek coverage stops cold after early 1994. We don’t know exactly what happened but this review provides some strong hints.
Original text from Macworld, February 1994.
The review states you can toggle between the Duet’s Mac and PC modes from the front panel. Nothing is labelled “Mac/PC” in the advertisements. Did they change the silkscreen for production models? Wouldn’t it be funny if they just wired up the turbo button or the keyboard lock switch and left the labels as is to cut costs?
Benjamin Chou is still around, helping startups.
NuTek’s plan for Macintosh World Domination: a clean room implementation of the ROMs and System 6, cheap hardware, and enough investor money to survive the inevitable legal assault from Apple.
Macworld speculated a Macintosh clone with a 68030 CPU, colour monitor and hard disk could cost just $600USD at a time when lowly Macintosh LC systems sold for $2700USD. The faster 32-bit data path IIsi sold for $3700 in complete configurations, and the more expandable IIci, $6,000USD and up.
Original text from Macworld, April 1991.
Advertisements for the NuTek One and Duet.
Why use custom chips instead of off-the-shelf parts?
IBM PC clone production went into high gear thanks to PC-compatible BIOS vendors like Phoenix and chipset manufacturers like Chips and Technologies. Did you know C&T founder Gordon Campbell went on to co-found 3dfx, the Voodoo company?
Savour the varying quality of different IBM PC compatible chipsets.
John Warnock gave Apple a good needling in this article, likely because of the ongoing Font Wars. See Chuck Geschke and John Warnock retelling the story.
ARDI Executor was open sourced in 2008.
Lee Lorenzen speaking about Apple’s lawsuit against Digital Research, and Bill Gates admitting he intended this to serve as a distraction while work progressed on Windows. Lee’s “sick cow” story.
Steve Jobs WWDC 1997 Q&A: “I was hoping that you would venture an opinion this morning on how you see the future evolution of the Macintosh compatible market.”
InfoWorld (13-May-1985) profiles Andy Hertzfeld one year after his departure from Apple. Original text by Kevin Strehlo.
Steve Jobs says of the Mac’s logic board “The lines are too close together!” while Burrell Smith surreptitiously adds some means of expansion.
Original text from folklore.org: PC Board Aesthetics, Diagnostic Port.
Jef Raskin: Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer
Jerry Manock/Jef Raskin/Bill Atkinson “convection enhancement device” quote from “The Macintosh at 20” panel hosted at Macworld Boston 2004.
Fiennes on management’s tentative request for iPhone motherboard layout refinement.
Pixar on attention to detail: “We sand the undersides of the drawers.”
Adrian Black showing the 512k expansion decoder circuit to the left of the 68000.
MacGUI’s detailed history of Mac 128K memory upgrades: the Dr. Dobbs article, the early 128k adopter outrage, the high list prices for the Apple 512k upgrade kit.
MacGUI’s collection of original Macintosh memory upgrade boards.
Steve from Mac84TV tries out a 3DFX Voodoo2 card for the Rev A iMac’s Mezzanine slot.
Burn a NeXT Cube, they said. It’ll be easy, they said.
Original text from Simson Garfinkel. Simson maintains a complete NeXTWorld archive on his website.
Photos from the actual burning.
Rich Page quote from Part 1 of his CHM Oral History.
CHM interview with Dan Ruby, NeXTWORLD Magazine’s driving force and editor-in-chief.
Steve Hayman and diskzero recall the death and unlikely rebirth of NeXT.
Original text from blog.hayman.net (Remembering NeXT’s Black Monday, Apple & Next 25 Years Ago Today). Additional text from diskzero on the orange website. Thanks to thj for the submission!
Audio clips from these interviews packed with insight into Apple’s resurgence in the 2000s:
Avie Tevanian: CHM interview video (1, 2) and transcript (1, 2)
Jon Rubinstein: CHM interview video (1, 2) and transcript
NeXTEVNT 2015 with Michael Johnson, Doug Menuez, Peter Graffagino and Don Melton
Scott Forstall at CHM’s iPhone Tenth Anniversary panel (second half)
What happened to Dell’s WebObjects-based online store? (left/right channels out of phase; use headphones)
Watch perhaps the coldest crowd ever put in front of Steve Jobs as they take in a demonstration of a flight booking web application built in WebObjects running on Windows NT in 1996–at a Microsoft conference, no less. [originally hosted at Microsoft until 2019, now purged]
Sheldon Breiner (1936-2019) gives Apple a taste of its own medicine.
Sheldon’s bio at breiner.com. Stanford Alumni Magazine on Sheldon’s quest to find a giant 3,000 year-old Olmec head.
Yes, that’s the late Gerry Davis mentioned in Triumph of the Nerds. Gerry Davis on his relationship with Gary Kildall in his own words.
Not very much ado about Symantec’s Bedrock: [1, 2, 3, 4]
Original website for Altura Software’s Mac2Win framework. Lee Lorenzen CHM interview covering Xerox PARC, Digital Research, GEM, Ventura Publisher, Fractal Design Painter and the birth of Mac2Win.
Developer Jonathan Hoyle on a Mac2Win easter egg. Jonathan Hoyle grilling Steve Jobs about Apple’s developer predicament in 1997. (Hoyle identifies himself in other WWDC 1997 sessions.)
Original text from Macworld, November 1992.
Don Melton, former WebKit and Safari team lead at Apple, recalls some close encounters with Steve Jobs.
Original text from Don’s website.
Don did a wonderful interview about his computer journey before, during, and after heading the Safari project on episode 11 of the Debug podcast.
Steve Jobs Quote Compilation Index
WWDC 2004: “Our competitors buy the panels we reject”
All Things D 2007, Bill Gates: “He’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance… I’d do a lot to have Steve’s taste”
Game Changers, Guy Kawasaki: “It’s a perfect match because he’s a showman who can really introduce a product, and he has great products to introduce”
WWDC 1997 Keynote: “The line of code that a developer can write the fastest, the line of code the developer can maintain the cheapest, and the line of code that never breaks for the user is the line of code the developer never had to write.”
MWSF 2001 (Titanium PowerBook G4 intro): “We have the most powerful notebooks in the world … but they have the sex. We want both!”
MWSF 1999: “Our relationship with Microsoft, it’s kind of like a marriage … it’s terrific about 99% of the time… about 1% of the time we argue over stuff, usually having to do with multimedia. Y’know, in life, that’s not a bad ratio.”
MWSF 2001: “We very much appreciate the applause but you shouldn’t be applauding because this is how it ought to work!”
MWSF 1999: “We don’t think design is just how it looks; we think design is how it works. … We think we’ve got the most incredible access story in the business. And you know what’s it’s called? It’s called a door.”
WWDC 2004: “The back of these displays looks better than the front of most of our competitors’. … First time I saw one of these I couldn’t talk for the first minute.”
WWDC 1999: “We’re giving away fifty of these new PowerBooks… and the winner of the first PowerBook is… oh! Steve Jobs! No…”
iBook Dual USB Intro, 2001: “Michael Dell said some disparaging things about us lately, publicly. We’re not going to engage in that sort of thing, but let me show you their product. … It looks like this and you can see it’s about that thick, and it’s got some nice fans in the back so you can keep an eye on them…”
CAUSE 1998 on “digital convergence”: “I converged myself last week, actually. Can you tell? I don’t know what it means. Here’s what it means: it means your television’s gonna make toast. Y’know? That’s what it means. […] People go their TVs to turn their brain off […] I used to think like many you might have thought that there was this giant conspiracy of the networks to put mediocrity on television and dumb us down! … But I then found out the truth which is far more depressing, which is the networks give people precisely what they want!”
Apple 2003 Q4 investors call: “We’re gonna integrate toasters and computers. We think people want toast when they’re working on their computers. We can have computer control, just get it exactly how you–we can put up pictures of toast, and you pick the one that looks like what you want, and it’ll come right out the side!”
CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: Scott Forstall’s Steve Jobs cafeteria payment story
Xserve Launch Event/WWDC 2002: (on Apple’s extremely poor record of committing to enterprise products) “I wasn’t here when Apple did a lot of those … I look at that as a dream when, you know, Apple was in a coma.”
CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: “My interview at NeXT was funny because .. I’d been there 10 minutes… Steve barges into the room, grabs the guy …”
New Pathways Into the Library of Congress: “Bicycle for our minds” bit
CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: “You’re a billionaire, you don’t understand!”
MWSF 1999: “Maybe it’s telling you to revert back to a Macintosh”
CAUSE 1998: “The goal used to be to make the best computers in the world… goal 2 we got from Hewlett-Packard, which is we have to make a profit! .. along the way somewhere, those two got reversed. … It’s very subtle at first but it turns out it’s everything.”
CAUSE 1998: (on user interface design) “we’ve just stuck warts on the side of what we had 10 years ago instead of rethinking everything”
Seybold 1999 Keynote: John Warnock: “The wonderful thing about having Apple back is that this industry is no longer boring. Thank you, Steve.”
Guy suggests Christmas gifts for figures in the Macintosh world circa 1993.
Apple Board of Directors interview clip from the Macworld Boston 1997 keynote, the most depressing Apple keynote on record excluding every smarmy self-congratulatory Tim Cook keynote ever.
Hard Drive by David Pogue is out of print but available from used booksellers.
Original text from Macworld, January 1994.
Chris Espinosa on…
Original text from the “Making the Macintosh” exhibit at Stanford University Library. Original tape available if you’re in the neighbourhood and feel like preserving it and uploading it to archive.org. :-)
More Chris Espinosa: on Twitter and Tumblr with some early Apple history tidbits [1, 2, 3].
My favourite: Chris gently walking you through an upgrade to System 7 while highlighting its advantages over Windows 3.0.
Chris Espinosa tries to build a Steve Jobs-approved calculator.
Original text from folklore.org.
My favourite classic MacOS calculator was ProCalc. While trying to find ProCalc, I found PowerCalc by John Mauro who went on to co-invent Gorilla Glass, used in every iPhone and iPad.
Testing software on real world users often yields surprising results.
Origin of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines video with Chris Espinosa reading Bruce Tognazzini’s “Apple Presents Apple” user testing post-mortem.
Original text from folklore.org.
Early Macintosh developer documentation had a bit of a rocky start.
Caroline Rose also did some technical documentation work for NeXT. Caroline’s website is hosted by Andy Hertzfeld/differnet.com.
Outro clip from Joanna Hoffman’s delightful interview with the Computer History Museum which you should at least read through, if only for the story of her sneaking into and out of Russia without official clearance. [video 1/2/3, transcript 1/2/3]
Original text from folklore.org.
Apple’s marketing poets meet Mercedes-Benz, Latin, and Sylvester Stallone.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, August 1993.
Which Mac is the current bestseller?
Is Apple giving up on industrial design?
Why did you screw Quadra 900 customers by introducing the 950 just five months after the 900?
Editor-in-Chief of Macworld Jerry Borrell sits down for some questions and answers with Eric Harslem, Apple’s Vice President of Desktop Computers in 1992.
Simpler times: an Apple VP discussing future product plans and openly admitting mistakes, in this case with the Mac Portable. You don’t see Tim Cook apologizing for the butterfly keyboard or the abysmal state of OS X from 2009 onwards, do you? Come back, Eric!
Original text from Macworld Magazine, September 1992.
Eric in 2012 speaking about his donation to the Mathworks Endowment at Texas State University.
Some months after this interview was published, Eric, along with Apple’s head of PowerBook development, jumped ship to Dell in 1993 to help turn around its notebook division.
The Apple New Product Process (ANPP) lives on even though Jonathan Ive did his best to prioritize thinness and visual aesthetics over structural integrity, keyboard durability, and battery life.
Guy boils down your Macintosh purchase decision to three choices from Apple’s bloated 1993 product lineup.
Apple has arguably suffered from The Ginza Syndrome(tm) since the days of the Apple II. :-)
Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1993.
This is not Macintosh-related whatsoever but it’s Guy Kawasaki, it was in Macworld, and he had some fun flying in an F-15 fighter jet.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, July 1993.
Get your own copy of The Macintosh Way at used booksellers.
Watch a Let’s Play of F/A-18 Hornet in an emulator or play it on your iOS device. I had a copy back in the day. I knew nothing about flight simulators and could not figure out how to do anything, not even exit the game. Flailing at the keyboard, I went from zero to takeoff because I accidentally hit Delete which fired up the afterburners. That was pretty cool.
It’s late 1993, Apple is sinking, PowerPC Macs haven’t arrived yet, the Macintosh system software is showing its age, and John Sculley is out. Incoming CEO Michael Spindler to the rescue! Guy Kawasaki’s advice for Apple’s then-new leader.
If you’re having trouble falling asleep, Sculley and Spindler talking about Apple’s plan for the 1990s should help.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, October 1993.
Spindler introduction clip from the Power Macintosh Reseller Training video.
Listener request from Charkes (not a typo): more Guy Kawasaki! Here’s Guy on the pros and cons of working from home.
Remember that in 1994, there was no way any MIS/IT manager would be caught dead letting Macintoshes in the door and onto their corporate network, there was not one but 20 major online electronic mail services worldwide, and Apple quoted PowerBook battery life at 2-3 hours.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1994.
Steven Levy on why Macintosh developers aren’t scared of Claris, the software company backed by Apple Computer.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1992.
ClarisWorks and other seemingly Macintosh-only products did indeed ship on Windows.
Claris’ first product on Windows: Hollywood. Press coverage.
A big thank you to Blake Patterson of The Byte Cellar for preserving the Claris promotional video heard in this episode. Watch the full VHS video on YouTube.
Andy Hertzfeld’s first task as an employee of Apple Computer.
Original text from folklore.org.
The story of how “the best-loved application for the Mac” took on Microsoft Works as told by programmer [Bob Hearn in 2003][bob].
Read Macworld’s roundup of integrated packages to see how ClarisWorks 1.0 stacked up against its competition.
Watch Symantec GreatWorks in action courtesy of hirudov2d on YouTube: Version 1.0.1, 2.0.1
Watch Bob Hearn talking about AlphaGo starting at 4m50s.
Steve Jobs temporarily forbid the Macintosh team from working with Sony.
Original text from folklore.org.
Bill Gates Twiggy drive clip from All Things D5, 2007, 3m54s. Alternate source.
The FBI’s attempted investigation of the nuPrometheus League.
I wish there was a dramatic conclusion to this 1990 editorial, but we’ve heard nothing from the nuPrometheus League since their first and only dispatch.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, September 1990.
The early days of Apple’s culture of secrecy. If you had people digging through the garbage bins outside your corporate headquarters, you would be paranoid too!
Original text from Macworld Magazine, November 1989.
Introductory news clip from The Computer Chronicles with bonus crazy background saxophone for some reason.
Hugo Fiennes quote from the Computer History Museum’s iPhone development team panel discussion.
Steve Jobs’ “Super Secret Apple Rumours” podcast from the MWSF 2006 GarageBand demo.
Alleged insider comments on the damage Apple’s internal secrecy has done to Mac OS X at Michael Tsai’s blog, one of the few Macintosh news sources worth reading these days.
Steven Levy on a little-known Macintosh clone project from 1989. Original text from Macworld Magazine, April 1989.
Our sponsor for April 1st: The Mac Zone!
Is it too late for Apple’s lightweight laptops? Steven Levy’s summary of the awkward PowerBook Duo situation.
Original text from Macworld Magazine, December 1993.
PowerBook Duo commercials courtesy of the RetroMacCast on YouTube (1, 2). Watch the Duo and Dock in action (insert, eject).
PowerBook Duo commercial in Swedish
Titanium PowerBook G4 introduction at Macworld San Francisco 2001
12-inch PowerBook G4 introduction at Macworld San Francisco 2003
David Pogue reviews the PowerBook Duo 210/230 and the companion Duo Dock. NuBus and SCSI weren’t hot pluggable, meaning you had to shut down the machine every time you docked or undocked!
Original text from Macworld Magazine, March 1993.
PowerBook Duo Dock sounds courtesy of the RetroMacCast on YouTube (insert, eject).
Happy Birthday, Macintosh! Andy Hertzfeld and company rush to complete the first release of the Macintosh system software, then cobble together a demo before launch day.
Original text at folklore.org: Real Artists Ship, It Sure Is Great To Get Out of That Bag, and The Times They Are A-Changin’
Make your own four-voice 256-byte wavetable music, sine wavey or otherwise, with ConcertWare or MusicWorks.
Andy Hertzfeld “six person hours of testing” quote from his 2005 NerdTV interview. (video, transcript)
The entire January 24th, 1984 Apple Shareholders Meeting on YouTube.
Try Software Automatic Mouth in your browser or Macintalk in Mini vMac.
Two interviews with StuffIt creator Raymond Lau, conducted during Apple’s darkest days (Maclopedia 1996, AppleWizards 1998).
StuffIt Deluxe 2.0 review. Yes, people were already complaining about software bloat in 1991.
Raymond’s palmpilotfiles/palmcentral.com
Raymond’s PhD Dissertation: “Subword Lexical Modelling for Speech Recognition”
Today, Leonard Rosenthol is a PDF Architect at Adobe.
StuffIt End-of-Life Announcement
Michael Dell’s “appearance” at November 1997 Steve Jobs Keynote
Wikipedia claims PackIt III development stopped after Harry Chesley went to work at Apple.
Rumor Monger, part of Harry Chesley’s output in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group
The story behind Apple’s big RISC. Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld, May/June 1994.
Watch a special Christmas message from MFR.
The Alberta Goat Breeders Association (and the reason for linking to them)
Half-Moon Bay Review article on Jack McHenry
Apple’s extremely terrible internal marketing video for the Power Mac
The Digital Antiquarian’s take on the PowerPC transition
Gary Davidian Oral History (video 1, 2; transcript 1, 2)
Richard Lary’s highly entertaining (but not Mac- or PowerPC-related) career highlights (video, transcript)
Metrowerks CodeWarrior for PowerPC was ready in late 1993. Eat that, Symantec!
CPUShack: A look back at the Motorola 88000 family
The Computer Chronicles visits the Somerset Design Center
Andy Bechtolsheim on Motorola’s slow development cycle (CHM video, transcript)
Rich Siegel: interview podcast with iMore and The Mac Observer; Apple’s “Meet the Developer” on Rich; Rich on Twitter, still developing for the Mac 36 years on
Intro from Power Mac Reseller Training VHS tape with guest appearance from Jack McHenry
Regarding the introductory paragraph: keep in mind that in 1994, the longest QuickTime video I had ever seen was 15 seconds.
A shakeup in Apple II engineering frees up Andy Hertzfeld to work on the Macintosh.
Original text from folklore.org. Jef Raskin and Andy Hertzfeld audio excerpts from “The Macintosh at 20” panel hosted at Macworld Boston 2004. Highly recommended!
The Newton MessagePad soap opera from product launch to cancellation, and all that could have been.
Check out “Love Notes to Newton” for even more history, interviews, and a great soundtrack. The director, Noah Leon, was interviewed on embedded.fm #262 and the RetroMacCast #440.
Steve Jobs quotes: WWDC 1997, EDUCAUSE 1998, Borg-like compliance and audience hissing at Internet Explorer at MWNY 1998
Hermann Hauser on Intel inadvertently inspiring the ARM: video, transcript
Avie Tevanian on the business decision we didn’t want to hear: direct quote, video (1, 2), transcript (1, 2)
Bob Supnik on Dan Dobberpuhl’s brilliant StrongARM: video (1, 2), transcript (1, 2)
On the memory leak that caused higher than normal recognition failure rates in early OS releases: “I can’t even get my unit to recognize the word ‘Newton’”
The very first image displayed on the very first prototype Macintosh, an Apple II expansion card with a Motorola 6809E.
Original text at folklore.org.
Audio excerpts from Andy Hertzfeld’s keynote speech at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2000. Listen to the full keynote, preserved in 2004 by yours truly from a long-gone RealAudio streaming server.
“Mask ROM” means something a little different in 2020.
E-mail your article and topic suggestions to derek at macfolkloreradio.com.
Surf the Web, deal with e-mail, crunch spreadsheets, write real documents, and keep your life together with this 1.4-pound wonder.
Written by Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser June 1997.
Of Newton and Magic Link, Marco and Envoy. The Newton and its competition continue to make progress… sort of.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld April 1995.
Newton will be great if it can live down its beginnings.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld January 1994.
Audio from the Newton TV Commercial Collection.
From the days before flash ROM and easy firmware updates, the tale of Landon Dyer’s accidental inspiration for what to do when your ROMs are truly read-only.
Non-techies may wish to skip the middle bit and go straight to Landon’s Newton post-mortem at 12m10s.
Original text from dadhacker.com.
Intro audio clip from Michael Tchao at the Apple User Group Breakfast, Boston MacWorld 1993. Patch talk from the questions and answers section at 1h23m25s.
Outro audio clip of Steve Capps (ex-Newton) and Donna Dubinsky, former CEO of Palm and ex-Claris VP, from the Computer History Museum’s Computing In Your Pocket panel discussion.
Landon Dyer describes how he made the Newton storage architecture crash-resistant at the last minute before the Newton shipped.
Steve Chamberlin tells the story of the birth, death, and afterlife of the slickest shareware Tetris for the Macintosh.
Hear Steve’s interviews about Floppy Emu, Tetris Max and more on the RetroMacCast episodes 317, 351, and 358.
More about Steve’s various projects and items for sale at bigmessowires.com: Floppy Emu, Mac ROMinator II, Plus Too FPGA Macintosh, and homebrew CPU.
Visit famed Tetris Max music composer Peter Wagner and check out his 2020 remake of Bricklayer/T-Maxx.
Join the MFR discord: https://discord.gg/WB4tJHw
Create a free account and verify your e-mail address to start chatting.
Why did the original Macintosh team disband immediately after 1984–and where were they five years later? Checking in on Steve Jobs, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Randy Wigginton, Steve Capps, and Bill Atkinson.
From Macworld February 1989.
Andy Hertzfeld’s Frox Demo (1990)
Bill Atkinson talking about PhotoCard
Buy gorgeous nature photography work by Bill Atkinson
Atkinson Interview - Triangulation 244, 247
Don Melton Safari stories: text, podcast
Andy Hertzfeld demonstrating Eazel’s file manager for Linux
The Machine that Changed the World - The Paperback Computer
Douglas Adams’ delightfully irreverent take on HyperCard from MacUser December 1987.
As elegant and intuitive as the classic Mac environment may have been, life went downhill fast if you needed more than two serial ports or your SCSI chain went south. The one and only Douglas Adams shares a personal horror story. Source: MacUser, November 1991.
[Full text available at Douglas’ website][html].
From Doug Clapp’s The Macintosh Reader, PDF page 171-176, a rare interview with original Macintosh hardware designer/wizard Burrell Smith. An extra special thanks to vintageapple.org for scanning and uploading this and many other old Macintosh books.
Burrell’s contrary statement on PC Board Aesthetics at folklore.org.
A bonus episode to keep my tiny listener base company while they’re stuck inside because of you-know-what. Stay safe.
From folklore.org: I’ll Be Your Best Friend, We’ll See About That, and Pineapple Pizza.
Interview with Collette Askeland, PCB design and layout sorceress, at Drop III Inches.
Steve Jobs threatens to pull the sound hardware out of the original Macintosh design.
Original text available at folklore.org.
Download SoundLab, Talk Demo, and Hendrix at Macintosh Garden.
R.I.P. Larry Tesler, 1945-2020. With audio from Larry’s presentation on the development and testing of the Lisa user interface, and Bill Atkinson speaking about making modal interfaces useful.
You can hear more about Larry’s days at Apple from the Steve Jobs Legacy Panel, 2011.
Written by Larry Tesler, Macworld September 1985.
The problem with HyperCard isn’t HyperCard, it’s what people are saying about it.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld February 1988.
Bonus video! Watch Bill Atkinson demo HyperCard live on stage in 1987.
My copy of some kind soul’s long-lost Google Video upload from 2008.
1987: Knowledge Navigator marketing hype
1990: Bill Atkinson leaves Apple for General Magic
1993: Myst: HyperCard as rapid application development tool, plus XCMDs like HyperTint
2004: “The Macintosh at 20” Panel, Macworld Boston 2004
2010: CHM Interview with Hertzfeld and Atkinson: HyperCard, Alice, MacPaint, General Magic
2011: Bill Atkinson on the Jobs Legacy Panel
2013: Eyeo 2013 Presentation on Bill Atkinson PhotoCard
2017: Bill Atkinson on The Legacy of HyperCard
Bill Atkinson PhotoCard for iOS
Computer Chronicles - HyperCard (1989, 1990)
Triangulation Interview with Atkinson, 2016 (part 1, 2)
Triangulation Interview with Atkinson, 2018 (part 1, 2)
HyperDither for Mac OS X - Atkinson’s take on Floyd-Steinberg
A humorous look at a typical Macintosh User Group meeting.
Written by Ted Jones, BMUG Newsletter Summer/Fall 1988.
Text available in [HTML][html] and [ePub][epub] format.
Behind Apple’s first multitasking system software is a controversy that cuts to Apple’s core.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld January 1988.
David Pogue’s Macintosh holiday gift guide.
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld December 1992.
You know you want a Macintosh II. But wouldn’t it be wiser to wait?
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld November 1987.
The little things that Macintosh pilgrims can be thankful for.
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld November 1996.
The co-founder of id Software shares his collection of Steve Jobs stories. Published by John Carmack at F—book.
Audio from the Macworld San Francisco 2000 keynote, October 1999 iMac DV launch event, and WWDC 2007 keynote.
The grassroots, cloak-and-dagger effort that brought NeXT and Intel together. Written by Chris MacAskill at cake.co.
Intro audio from Steve Jobs’ 2010 appearance at All Things D with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.
An in-depth look at the beginning of Apple mismanaging itself into oblivion in the early 1990s.
Written by Cheryl England, Macworld September 1991. Fun fact: Cheryl England founded MacAddict magazine in 1996.
Audio from the Computer Chronicles’ coverage of Macworld Boston 1996. Steve Jobs inventory management quote from the WWDC 1999 keynote.
The twisted tale of the Macintosh LC, or “how Apple did almost everything it could to stay out of the entry-level computer market”.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld December 1990.
Some stats to celebrate MFR 2.0’s first birthday.
I welcome your old-time Mac stories and reading requests by e-mail: derek at macfolkloreradio.com
An iTunes podcast directory review or star rating would also be nice. Think of it as paying your shareware fee. :-)
The worldwide DRAM shortage of 1988 encourages back-door deals and money grubbing.
Audio clips from The Computer Chronicles (Laptop Peripherals, 1988) and the Macintosh IIcx product introduction (Jean-Louis Gassee, March 7, 1989).
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld January 1989.
A backstage look at the creation of the Macintosh II and the unsung heroes who designed it.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld May 1987.
Ten years on, a look at why some software is still standing, and why other products have died off. From the Macworld 10th anniversary issue.
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld February 1994.
The trials and tribulations of working with Apple’s first portable Macintosh. Audio excerpt from the Macintosh Portable press event in 1990.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld March 1990.
David Pogue goes through the harrowing process of installing an accelerator board in a compact Mac.
Text available in [HTML][html] and [ePub][epub] formats.
The story of the Macintosh’s very first multitasking environment as told by the programmer himself, Andy Hertzfeld, at folklore.org.
Audio excerpt from the “Macintosh at 20” panel hosted at Macworld Boston 2004. Highly recommended!
Full text available at folklore.org.
Bill Atkinson, well-known for QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard, reflects on the 40th anniversary of his start at Apple.
Audio excerpt from the Churchill Club’s 2011 event discussing the legacy of Steve Jobs.
Text available at folklore.org.
Taking the upgrade path is costly and confusing but ultimately satisfying. Steven Levy documents his upgrade journey from a Macintosh 512k to a Mac Plus.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld October 1986.
Welcome back, Mac Folklore Radio Listeners–both of you. Some rambling from your podcast host after a nine year absence.
Thanks again to vintageapple.org and the mysterious “SteveM” for all the new reading material.
Cheap and cheery gifts to put under the Apple tree.
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld December 1993.
How “unauthorized” modifications to the Mac became commonplace.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld January 1987.
The DiskDoubler Story: How to succeed by really trying.
Written by Guy Kawasaki, Wise Guy, Macworld December 1993.
Guy Kawasaki’s take on the PDA: the Personal Telephone Assistant.
Written by Guy Kawasaki, Wise Guy, Macworld September 1993.
Journalists are summoned to a preview of the NeXT cube.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld March 1989.
One man’s quest to eliminate the keyboard.
Written by David Pogue, The Desktop Critic, Macworld August 1995.
Passing the time with Apple’s StyleWriter.
Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld December 1991.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.
