Mac Folklore Radio

Steven Levy on a little-known Macintosh clone project from 1989. Original text from Macworld Magazine, April 1989.

Our sponsor for April 1st: The Mac Zone!

Is it too late for Apple’s lightweight laptops? Steven Levy’s summary of the awkward PowerBook Duo situation.

Original text from Macworld Magazine, December 1993.

PowerBook Duo commercials courtesy of the RetroMacCast on YouTube (1, 2). Watch the Duo and Dock in action (insert, eject).

PowerBook Duo commercial in Swedish

Titanium PowerBook G4 introduction at Macworld San Francisco 2001

12-inch PowerBook G4 introduction at Macworld San Francisco 2003

MacBook Air introduction at Macworld San Francisco 2008

David Pogue reviews the PowerBook Duo 210/230 and the companion Duo Dock. NuBus and SCSI weren’t hot pluggable, meaning you had to shut down the machine every time you docked or undocked!

Original text from Macworld Magazine, March 1993.

PowerBook Duo Dock sounds courtesy of the RetroMacCast on YouTube (insert, eject).

Happy Birthday, Macintosh! Andy Hertzfeld and company rush to complete the first release of the Macintosh system software, then cobble together a demo before launch day.

Original text at folklore.org: Real Artists Ship, It Sure Is Great To Get Out of That Bag, and The Times They Are A-Changin’

Make your own four-voice 256-byte wavetable music, sine wavey or otherwise, with ConcertWare or MusicWorks.

Andy Hertzfeld “six person hours of testing” quote from his 2005 NerdTV interview. (video, transcript)

The entire January 24th, 1984 Apple Shareholders Meeting on YouTube.

Try Software Automatic Mouth in your browser or Macintalk in Mini vMac.

A Macintalk mini-documentary.

Two interviews with StuffIt creator Raymond Lau, conducted during Apple’s darkest days (Maclopedia 1996, AppleWizards 1998).

StuffIt Deluxe 2.0 review. Yes, people were already complaining about software bloat in 1991.

Raymond’s personal website

Raymond’s palmpilotfiles/palmcentral.com

Raymond’s PhD Dissertation: “Subword Lexical Modelling for Speech Recognition”

Today, Leonard Rosenthol is a PDF Architect at Adobe.

StuffIt End-of-Life Announcement

Michael Dell’s “appearance” at November 1997 Steve Jobs Keynote

Barry Diller

Wikipedia claims PackIt III development stopped after Harry Chesley went to work at Apple.

Rumor Monger, part of Harry Chesley’s output in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group

The story behind Apple’s big RISC. Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld, May/June 1994.

Watch a special Christmas message from MFR.

The Alberta Goat Breeders Association (and the reason for linking to them)

Half-Moon Bay Review article on Jack McHenry

Apple’s extremely terrible internal marketing video for the Power Mac

The Digital Antiquarian’s take on the PowerPC transition

Gary Davidian Oral History (video 1, 2; transcript 1, 2)

Richard Lary’s highly entertaining (but not Mac- or PowerPC-related) career highlights (video, transcript)

Metrowerks CodeWarrior for PowerPC was ready in late 1993. Eat that, Symantec!

CPUShack: A look back at the Motorola 88000 family

The Computer Chronicles visits the Somerset Design Center

Andy Bechtolsheim on Motorola’s slow development cycle (CHM video, transcript)

Rich Siegel: interview podcast with iMore and The Mac Observer; Apple’s “Meet the Developer” on Rich; Rich on Twitter, still developing for the Mac 36 years on

Intro from Power Mac Reseller Training VHS tape with guest appearance from Jack McHenry

Regarding the introductory paragraph: keep in mind that in 1994, the longest QuickTime video I had ever seen was 15 seconds.

A shakeup in Apple II engineering frees up Andy Hertzfeld to work on the Macintosh.

Original text from folklore.org.

The Newton MessagePad soap opera from product launch to cancellation, and all that could have been.

Check out “Love Notes to Newton” for even more history, interviews, and a great soundtrack. The director, Noah Leon, was interviewed on embedded.fm #262 and the RetroMacCast #440.

Steve Jobs quotes: WWDC 1997, EDUCAUSE 1998, Borg-like compliance and audience hissing at Internet Explorer at MWNY 1998

Hermann Hauser on Intel inadvertently inspiring the ARM: video, transcript

Avie Tevanian on the business decision we didn’t want to hear: direct quote, video (1, 2), transcript (1, 2)

Bob Supnik on Dan Dobberpuhl’s brilliant StrongARM: video (1, 2), transcript (1, 2)

On the memory leak that caused higher than normal recognition failure rates in early OS releases: “I can’t even get my unit to recognize the word ‘Newton’”

The very first image displayed on the very first prototype Macintosh, an Apple II expansion card with a Motorola 6809E.

Original text at folklore.org.

Audio excerpts from Andy Hertzfeld’s keynote speech at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) 2000. Listen to the full keynote, preserved in 2004 by yours truly from a long-gone RealAudio streaming server.

“Mask ROM” means something a little different in 2020.

E-mail your article and topic suggestions to derek at macfolkloreradio.com.