Mac Folklore Radio

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. BeOS lives.

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. Macworld readers respond to QuickDraw GX. A Quick Look At QuickDraw GX and another quick look.

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. On the DRAM crisis of 1988. 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) “Damn!” is a registered trademark of 65scribe.

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. Original text from dadhacker.com. The button in question, photographed in 2013.

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.