Macintosh Folklore Radio

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 o

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. nV

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 (FISH!). Pro tip: using the word “capabilities” eight

Multitasking on the Macintosh evolves beyond Switcher. MultiFinder review by Bruce Webster, Macworld, April 1988. Commentary by Jerry Borrell, Macworld, January 1988. 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 Hertzfeld on the joys of micro-optimization in 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: App

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 of 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, tha

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… 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? 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.