Mac Folklore Radio

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. Original text by Guy Kawasaki, Macworld February 1994. Various 1993ish Apple commercials courtesy of RetroByte.

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. See Project Looking Glass in action.

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. Macworld San Francisco 2000 keynote video.

Original text by Darin Adler. An overview of the Motorola MEK6800D2 single board computer/development kit. Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = 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”?