Mac Folklore Radio

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).

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: ???