Mac Folklore Radio

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: Apple: “World Class Manufacturing Around the World”, a factory tour from three years prior to this article. The first half is Apple II-centric–that’s what kept Apple afloat during the Mac’s first few horrible years, after all.

Despite what Steve Jobs would have us believe, humans were present in the PowerPC G5 CPU factory. Don’t believe anything Steve tells you, in particular because he passed away 12 years ago.

Apple’s Fremont factory closed in 2004.

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 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.