Mac Folklore Radio

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...

“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 unbl...

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 Syst...

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 ( ca...

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 complet...

Deborah Branscum’s Conspicuous Consumer column puts Apple’s active matrix LCD defect apathy under the microscope. At 77dpi in pure black and white–no greyscale, and no RGB subpixels–you definitely noticed dead pixels! Original text from Macworld, July 1992 . Dead pixels are nothing new today, but they presented a novel public relations problem in 1991 as active matrix LCDs began to appear in top-o...

Hello listeners who found me via Michael Tsai ! David Pogue reviews a smoking hot new video output product for the PowerBook 100/140/170. And you thought your laptop-and-projector troubles were bad… Original text from Macworld, September 1992 . Very dark photo of an Envisio Notebook Display Adapter in the wild . Macworld reviews the state of LCD projection pads in 1993 , from the days before integ...

Apple’s apology for the gigantic expensive Macintosh Portable . Original text from Macworld, December 1991 . Audio clips courtesy of The Unofficial Apple VHS Archive ’s collection of Apple User Group Connection tapes, which covered Apple’s PowerBook 1xx launch event for employees in 1991. Got all that? Television commercials: it attracts mates somehow , it runs everything in 4MB of RAM somehow , a...

Original text from Macworld, February 1991, page 73 . Macworld published a correction confirming the Outbound 2000 series was indeed FCC-certified for home use. If you’re just gagging to experience the IsoPoint/TrackBar, you can buy one today from Contour Design ! HCI guru Bill Buxton on the IsoPoint . Contour Design on YouTube is all RollerMouse, all the time. Ad for the Outbound 2000-series note...

From the days before the hot-selling PowerBook 100 series, David Pogue reviews a sleeker, less expensive alternative to Apple’s 1989 Macintosh Portable. Original text from Macworld, September 1990 . Enjoy some gorgeous photos of the original Outbound Laptop System from applerooter.net .

NuTek’s years of labour finally bear fruit–kind of. The trail of NuTek coverage stops cold after early 1994. We don’t know exactly what happened but this review provides some strong hints. Original text from Macworld, February 1994 . The review states you can toggle between the Duet’s Mac and PC modes from the front panel. Nothing is labelled “Mac/PC” in the advertisements. Did they change the sil...

NuTek’s plan for Macintosh World Domination: a clean room implementation of the ROMs and System 6, cheap hardware, and enough investor money to survive the inevitable legal assault from Apple. Macworld speculated a Macintosh clone with a 68030 CPU, colour monitor and hard disk could cost just $600USD at a time when lowly Macintosh LC systems sold for $2700USD. The faster 32-bit data path IIsi sold...

InfoWorld (13-May-1985) profiles Andy Hertzfeld one year after his departure from Apple. Original text by Kevin Strehlo.

Steve Jobs says of the Mac’s logic board “The lines are too close together!” while Burrell Smith surreptitiously adds some means of expansion. Original text from folklore.org: PC Board Aesthetics , Diagnostic Port . Jef Raskin: Design Considerations for an Anthropophilic Computer Jerry Manock/Jef Raskin/Bill Atkinson “convection enhancement device” quote from “The Macintosh at 20” panel hosted at...

Burn a NeXT Cube, they said. It’ll be easy, they said. Original text from Simson Garfinkel . Simson maintains a complete NeXTWorld archive on his website . Photos from the actual burning . Rich Page quote from Part 1 of his CHM Oral History . CHM interview with Dan Ruby, NeXTWORLD Magazine’s driving force and editor-in-chief .

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 (...

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 we...

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...

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… discovering computers in high school the Homebrew Computer Club unusual user group personalities “after school Apple II demo time” at Apple headquarters the mad dash to rewrite the Apple II manual the product documentation conundrum the open secret about the LaserWriter driver in early 1985 how Caroline Rose and others drove simplicity in Macintosh software development Original...

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 .