Macintosh Folklore Radio

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-

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 o

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 Gurshuran Sidhu! The same

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

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 1

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. 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 OpenDo

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.