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 performance problems. Add some reliability issues , bring to a boil, s...

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 Sour...

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++ co...

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 I...

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...

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...

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...

Original text by Dave Mark , MacTech, January 1997. Bryan Cantrill on interviewing at Be, Inc. (perhaps with Dominic Giampolo?) and inadvertently buying a VFS architecture at the Be bankruptcy auction . Apple wouldn’t have gone OS shopping if Copland had worked out . CodeWarrior for BeOS was a thing . Naturally, IBM made the most use of their System Object Model . Menu Tasking Enabler for MacOS mi...

Original text by David Pogue , Macworld December 1994. Watch the CD3 compact disc storage and retrieval box in action . Photos of the salami-like CD3: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 . The product lasted into the 2000s and the companion DiscGear website is still up , featuring no less than three CD3-like units on its front page . Decorate your classic Mac desktop: Holiday Lights , Xmas Lights , Snow . YesterYea...

Simplicity, sophistication, oversimplification, and At Ease. I rant about the usability of modern Apple software, Steven Levy rants about the complexity of the Mac and the oversimplified environment provided by At Ease, and Josef Morell rants about the damage At Ease does to first impressions of the Macintosh in retail channels. Original text by Steven Levy , Macworld December 1992 and Josef Morel...

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 T...

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 (spi...

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...

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 unt...

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...

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’ nam...

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 men...

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 m...

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 v...

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...