Mac Folklore Radio

Steve Hayman and diskzero recall the death and unlikely rebirth of NeXT.

Original text from blog.hayman.net (Remembering NeXT’s Black Monday, Apple & Next 25 Years Ago Today). Additional text from diskzero on the orange website. Thanks to thj for the submission!

Audio clips from these interviews packed with insight into Apple’s resurgence in the 2000s:

Avie Tevanian: CHM interview video (1, 2) and transcript (1, 2)

Jon Rubinstein: CHM interview video (1, 2) and transcript

NeXTEVNT 2015 with Michael Johnson, Doug Menuez, Peter Graffagino and Don Melton

Scott Forstall at CHM’s iPhone Tenth Anniversary panel (second half)

What happened to Dell’s WebObjects-based online store? (left/right channels out of phase; use headphones)

Watch perhaps the coldest crowd ever put in front of Steve Jobs as they take in a demonstration of a flight booking web application built in WebObjects running on Windows NT in 1996–at a Microsoft conference, no less. [originally hosted at Microsoft until 2019, now purged]

Sheldon Breiner (1936-2019) gives Apple a taste of its own medicine.

Sheldon’s bio at breiner.com. Stanford Alumni Magazine on Sheldon’s quest to find a giant 3,000 year-old Olmec head.

Yes, that’s the late Gerry Davis mentioned in Triumph of the Nerds. Gerry Davis on his relationship with Gary Kildall in his own words.

Not very much ado about Symantec’s Bedrock: [1, 2, 3, 4]

Original website for Altura Software’s Mac2Win framework. Lee Lorenzen CHM interview covering Xerox PARC, Digital Research, GEM, Ventura Publisher, Fractal Design Painter and the birth of Mac2Win.

Developer Jonathan Hoyle on a Mac2Win easter egg. Jonathan Hoyle grilling Steve Jobs about Apple’s developer predicament in 1997. (Hoyle identifies himself in other WWDC 1997 sessions.)

Original text from Macworld, November 1992.

Don Melton, former WebKit and Safari team lead at Apple, recalls some close encounters with Steve Jobs.

Original text from Don’s website.

Don did a wonderful interview about his computer journey before, during, and after heading the Safari project on episode 11 of the Debug podcast.

Steve Jobs Quote Compilation Index

WWDC 2004: “Our competitors buy the panels we reject”

All Things D 2007, Bill Gates: “He’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance… I’d do a lot to have Steve’s taste”

Game Changers, Guy Kawasaki: “It’s a perfect match because he’s a showman who can really introduce a product, and he has great products to introduce”

WWDC 1997 Keynote: “The line of code that a developer can write the fastest, the line of code the developer can maintain the cheapest, and the line of code that never breaks for the user is the line of code the developer never had to write.”

MWSF 2001 (Titanium PowerBook G4 intro): “We have the most powerful notebooks in the world … but they have the sex. We want both!”

MWSF 1999: “Our relationship with Microsoft, it’s kind of like a marriage … it’s terrific about 99% of the time… about 1% of the time we argue over stuff, usually having to do with multimedia. Y’know, in life, that’s not a bad ratio.”

MWSF 2001: “We very much appreciate the applause but you shouldn’t be applauding because this is how it ought to work!”

MWSF 1999: “We don’t think design is just how it looks; we think design is how it works. … We think we’ve got the most incredible access story in the business. And you know what’s it’s called? It’s called a door.”

WWDC 2004: “The back of these displays looks better than the front of most of our competitors’. … First time I saw one of these I couldn’t talk for the first minute.”

WWDC 1999: “We’re giving away fifty of these new PowerBooks… and the winner of the first PowerBook is… oh! Steve Jobs! No…”

iBook Dual USB Intro, 2001: “Michael Dell said some disparaging things about us lately, publicly. We’re not going to engage in that sort of thing, but let me show you their product. … It looks like this and you can see it’s about that thick, and it’s got some nice fans in the back so you can keep an eye on them…”

CAUSE 1998 on “digital convergence”: “I converged myself last week, actually. Can you tell? I don’t know what it means. Here’s what it means: it means your television’s gonna make toast. Y’know? That’s what it means. […] People go their TVs to turn their brain off […] I used to think like many you might have thought that there was this giant conspiracy of the networks to put mediocrity on television and dumb us down! … But I then found out the truth which is far more depressing, which is the networks give people precisely what they want!”

Apple 2003 Q4 investors call: “We’re gonna integrate toasters and computers. We think people want toast when they’re working on their computers. We can have computer control, just get it exactly how you–we can put up pictures of toast, and you pick the one that looks like what you want, and it’ll come right out the side!”

CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: Scott Forstall’s Steve Jobs cafeteria payment story

Xserve Launch Event/WWDC 2002: (on Apple’s extremely poor record of committing to enterprise products) “I wasn’t here when Apple did a lot of those … I look at that as a dream when, you know, Apple was in a coma.”

CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: “My interview at NeXT was funny because .. I’d been there 10 minutes… Steve barges into the room, grabs the guy …”

New Pathways Into the Library of Congress: “Bicycle for our minds” bit

CHM iPhone Event w/Fiennes, Ganatra, Hertz, Forstall: “You’re a billionaire, you don’t understand!”

MWSF 1999: “Maybe it’s telling you to revert back to a Macintosh”

CAUSE 1998: “The goal used to be to make the best computers in the world… goal 2 we got from Hewlett-Packard, which is we have to make a profit! .. along the way somewhere, those two got reversed. … It’s very subtle at first but it turns out it’s everything.”

CAUSE 1998: (on user interface design) “we’ve just stuck warts on the side of what we had 10 years ago instead of rethinking everything”

Seybold 1999 Keynote: John Warnock: “The wonderful thing about having Apple back is that this industry is no longer boring. Thank you, Steve.”

Guy suggests Christmas gifts for figures in the Macintosh world circa 1993.

Apple Board of Directors interview clip from the Macworld Boston 1997 keynote, the most depressing Apple keynote on record excluding every smarmy self-congratulatory Tim Cook keynote ever.

Hard Drive by David Pogue is out of print but available from used booksellers.

Original text from Macworld, January 1994.

Chris Espinosa on…

Original text from the “Making the Macintosh” exhibit at Stanford University Library. Original tape available if you’re in the neighbourhood and feel like preserving it and uploading it to archive.org. :-)

More Chris Espinosa: on Twitter and Tumblr with some early Apple history tidbits [1, 2, 3].

My favourite: Chris gently walking you through an upgrade to System 7 while highlighting its advantages over Windows 3.0.

Chris Espinosa tries to build a Steve Jobs-approved calculator.

Original text from folklore.org.

My favourite classic MacOS calculator was ProCalc. While trying to find ProCalc, I found PowerCalc by John Mauro who went on to co-invent Gorilla Glass, used in every iPhone and iPad.

Testing software on real world users often yields surprising results.

Origin of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines video with Chris Espinosa reading Bruce Tognazzini’s “Apple Presents Apple” user testing post-mortem.

Original text from folklore.org.

Early Macintosh developer documentation had a bit of a rocky start.

Caroline Rose also did some technical documentation work for NeXT. Caroline’s website is hosted by Andy Hertzfeld/differnet.com.

Outro clip from Joanna Hoffman’s delightful interview with the Computer History Museum which you should at least read through, if only for the story of her sneaking into and out of Russia without official clearance. [video 1/2/3, transcript 1/2/3]

Original text from folklore.org.

Apple’s marketing poets meet Mercedes-Benz, Latin, and Sylvester Stallone.

Original text from Macworld Magazine, August 1993.

Which Mac is the current bestseller?

Is Apple giving up on industrial design?

Why did you screw Quadra 900 customers by introducing the 950 just five months after the 900?

Editor-in-Chief of Macworld Jerry Borrell sits down for some questions and answers with Eric Harslem, Apple’s Vice President of Desktop Computers in 1992.

Simpler times: an Apple VP discussing future product plans and openly admitting mistakes, in this case with the Mac Portable. You don’t see Tim Cook apologizing for the butterfly keyboard or the abysmal state of OS X from 2009 onwards, do you? Come back, Eric!

Original text from Macworld Magazine, September 1992.

Eric in 2012 speaking about his donation to the Mathworks Endowment at Texas State University.

Some months after this interview was published, Eric, along with Apple’s head of PowerBook development, jumped ship to Dell in 1993 to help turn around its notebook division.

The Apple New Product Process (ANPP) lives on even though Jonathan Ive did his best to prioritize thinness and visual aesthetics over structural integrity, keyboard durability, and battery life.