Mac 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-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.

Windows NT on PowerPC did exist… briefly.

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).