Mac Folklore Radio

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.

Update: The 3D rendering posse on the MFR Discord sent this video of Specular International co-founder Adam Lavine demonstrating Infini-D at what looks like a MacWorld Expo booth.

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 OpenDoc at his famous WWDC 1997 Q&A session, nobody even mentioned QuickDraw GX in passing.

Macworld readers respond to QuickDraw GX.

A Quick Look At QuickDraw GX and another quick look.

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 on a [Quadra] 950, please note, A/UX is slow–three times slower than Unix on a midrange Sun workstation.”

A/UX Product Manager Richard Finlayson’s unabridged demo of A/UX 2.0 from the April 1990 Apple VHS User Group Connection tape. Apple’s self-running Macromedia Director demo of A/UX 2.0, complete with simulated Extended Keyboard II typing sounds. Spot the two errors in the simulated CommandShells. The example user might be a play on Richard Finlayson’s name.

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.

nVIR clip from Don Swaim interview with Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo’s Egg. The WayBack Machine does not have the source file but I do.

The Computer Chronicles’ whirlwind tour of Boston Macworld Expo 1988.

Bill Gates’ observation about borrowing ideas from Xerox.

On the DRAM crisis of 1988.

Mainframe and VAX connectivity makes up a fairly large percentage of the marketing material coming out of Apple in the late ‘80s, as you can see from The ReDiscovered Future and the Apple User Group VHS Archive. As told by Bob Supnik and many others, DEC was already thoroughly doomed by the late 1980s.

Pre-QuickTime Video production on the Mac II was, by today’s standards, weird and expensive. WordPerfect 1.0 and 2.0 weren’t heralded as very Mac-like, unlike v3.5, which shipped around the time Microsoft Word 6 ate everyone else’s lunch.

Not all early CD-ROM titles were as compelling as Myst: About Cows v3.09, $40USD.

How AutoCAD was ported to the Macintosh II–with a dirty hack.

Apple and Stephen Wolfram pushing Mathematica 1.0.

The first few years of fax software on the Macintosh were a bit of a disaster. Apple’s entry was particularly embarrassing. Macworld even called the AppleFax software/hardware package “beleaguered”.

1989 was the year John Norstad’s Disinfectant began to spread like wildfire. We usually received a new version every 3-6 months via my father’s employer. It’s remarkable software distribution at that scale happened at all when you think about how few people people had modems back then.

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.

Pro tip: using the word “capabilities” eight times in a 1,500 word article is fatiguing.

Multitasking on the Macintosh evolves beyond Switcher. MultiFinder review by Bruce Webster, Macworld, April 1988. Commentary by Jerry Borrell, Macworld, January 1988.

Correction: Declaring an application’s memory requirements through a SIZE -1 resource began in the days of Switcher. (source: MacTech Spring 1989)

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 discusses micro-optimization and 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.