Mac Folklore Radio

“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.

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-of-the-line mass market laptops. Apple, of course, chose to keep completely silent unless asked. This is yet another aspect of ancient computing that goes completely unnoticed by the likes of Wikipedia and thus younger “YouTubers”. Passive matrix LCDs didn’t have this issue, but then again, they didn’t have the fast response time, high contrast, or wide viewing angles of an active matrix LCD either. Macworld January 1993 contains a diagram showing the difference in construction between passive and active matrix LCDs. If Apple considering dead pixels “bad” and voided pixels “acceptable” seems totally arbitrary, that’s because it probably was. It may just have been Apple’s way of quietly cutting the number of complaints it had to act on by 50%. :-) Just my two cents. Deborah Branscum interview clips from the Digital Riptide technology journalism history project. True story: through my dad’s job, we knew a guy who ran an Apple dealership in the early 1990s. When I was 10 years old, I was at a conference with my dad and while he and the dealer chatted, I got a chance to play with the dealer’s personal PowerBook 170 for a few minutes. I confirmed his 170’s display was completely free of dead pixels. I didn’t have the guts to ask, but I always wondered how many 170s he had to open before finding a perfect one–or did he get lucky on his first try? Barry Underwood of BMH Computer Solutions, are you still out there somewhere? :-)

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 integrated LCD projectors existed.

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, and the predecessor to the Yao Ming/Verne Troyer 12-inch PowerBook G4 ad. Apple telling you how great the design is. Apple telling you how great the product is. John Sculley telling you how great he is. Useful if you’re having trouble falling asleep. Apple demonstrating the Microsoft Jump Rope and the Microsoft Wart. John Medica: R.I.P., press release and tribute by Wake Forest University, also on YouTube. Computer History Museum - Apple Industrial Design Event (2007) featuring Robert Brunner, Manager of Industrial Design during the PowerBook 1xx era, and Jerry Manock, industrial designer on the Apple II through the Mac 128.

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 notebooks, and another where they push the Outbound’s upgradability advantage to PowerBook shoppers. Outbound 2000-series notebook reviews: [Dec 1991, Sep 1992]. MacUser only did capsule reviews of the 2000 series. :-( March 1993 obituary for Outbound. September 1993: PerFit service and upgrades available. Enjoy some gorgeous photos of the original Outbound Laptop System and 2000s from applerooter.net.

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 silkscreen for production models? Wouldn’t it be funny if they just wired up the turbo button or the keyboard lock switch and left the labels as is to cut costs? Benjamin Chou is still around, helping startups.

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 for $3700 in complete configurations, and the more expandable IIci, $6,000USD and up. Original text from Macworld, April 1991. Advertisements for the NuTek One and Duet. Why use custom chips instead of off-the-shelf parts? IBM PC clone production went into high gear thanks to PC-compatible BIOS vendors like Phoenix and chipset manufacturers like Chips and Technologies. Did you know C&T founder Gordon Campbell went on to co-found 3dfx, the Voodoo company? Savour the varying quality of different IBM PC compatible chipsets. John Warnock gave Apple a good needling in this article, likely because of the ongoing Font Wars. See Chuck Geschke and John Warnock retelling the story. ARDI Executor was open sourced in 2008. Lee Lorenzen speaking about Apple’s lawsuit against Digital Research, and Bill Gates admitting he intended this to serve as a distraction while work progressed on Windows. Lee’s “sick cow” story. Steve Jobs WWDC 1997 Q&A: “I was hoping that you would venture an opinion this morning on how you see the future evolution of the Macintosh compatible market.”

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 Macworld Boston 2004. Fiennes on management’s tentative request for iPhone motherboard layout refinement. Pixar on attention to detail: “We sand the undersides of the drawers.” Adrian Black showing the 512k expansion decoder circuit to the left of the 68000. MacGUI’s detailed history of Mac 128K memory upgrades: the Dr. Dobbs article, the early 128k adopter outrage, the high list prices for the Apple 512k upgrade kit. MacGUI’s collection of original Macintosh memory upgrade boards. Steve from Mac84TV tries out a 3DFX Voodoo2 card for the Rev A iMac’s Mezzanine slot.

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 (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… 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 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.

Guy boils down your Macintosh purchase decision to three choices from Apple’s bloated 1993 product lineup. Apple has arguably suffered from The Ginza Syndrome(tm) since the days of the Apple II. :-) Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1993.

This is not Macintosh-related whatsoever but it’s Guy Kawasaki, it was in Macworld, and he had some fun flying in an F-15 fighter jet. Original text from Macworld Magazine, July 1993. Get your own copy of The Macintosh Way at used booksellers. Watch a Let’s Play of F/A-18 Hornet in an emulator or play it on your iOS device. I had a copy back in the day. I knew nothing about flight simulators and could not figure out how to do anything, not even exit the game. Flailing at the keyboard, I went from zero to takeoff because I accidentally hit Delete which fired up the afterburners. That was pretty cool.

It’s late 1993, Apple is sinking, PowerPC Macs haven’t arrived yet, the Macintosh system software is showing its age, and John Sculley is out. Incoming CEO Michael Spindler to the rescue! Guy Kawasaki’s advice for Apple’s then-new leader. If you’re having trouble falling asleep, Sculley and Spindler talking about Apple’s plan for the 1990s should help. Original text from Macworld Magazine, October 1993. Spindler introduction clip from the Power Macintosh Reseller Training video.

Listener request from Charkes (not a typo): more Guy Kawasaki! Here’s Guy on the pros and cons of working from home. Who the heck is Guy Kawasaki? Remember that in 1994, there was no way any MIS/IT manager would be caught dead letting Macintoshes in the door and onto their corporate network, there was not one but 20 major online electronic mail services worldwide, and Apple quoted PowerBook battery life at 2-3 hours. Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1994.

Steven Levy on why Macintosh developers aren’t scared of Claris, the software company backed by Apple Computer. Original text from Macworld Magazine, June 1992. ClarisWorks and other seemingly Macintosh-only products did indeed ship on Windows. Claris’ first product on Windows: Hollywood. Press coverage. A big thank you to Blake Patterson of The Byte Cellar for preserving the Claris promotional video heard in this episode. Watch the full VHS video on YouTube.

Andy Hertzfeld’s first task as an employee of Apple Computer. Original text from folklore.org.

The story of how “the best-loved application for the Mac” took on Microsoft Works as told by programmer [Bob Hearn in 2003][bob]. Read Macworld’s roundup of integrated packages to see how ClarisWorks 1.0 stacked up against its competition. Watch Symantec GreatWorks in action courtesy of hirudov2d on YouTube: Version 1.0.1, 2.0.1 Watch Bob Hearn talking about AlphaGo starting at 4m50s.

Steve Jobs temporarily forbid the Macintosh team from working with Sony. Original text from folklore.org. Bill Gates Twiggy drive clip from All Things D5, 2007, 3m54s. Alternate source.

The FBI’s attempted investigation of the nuPrometheus League. I wish there was a dramatic conclusion to this 1990 editorial, but we’ve heard nothing from the nuPrometheus League since their first and only dispatch. Original text from Macworld Magazine, September 1990.

The early days of Apple’s culture of secrecy. If you had people digging through the garbage bins outside your corporate headquarters, you would be paranoid too! Original text from Macworld Magazine, November 1989. Introductory news clip from The Computer Chronicles with bonus crazy background saxophone for some reason. Hugo Fiennes quote from the Computer History Museum’s iPhone development team panel discussion. Steve Jobs’ “Super Secret Apple Rumours” podcast from the MWSF 2006 GarageBand demo. Alleged insider comments on the damage Apple’s internal secrecy has done to Mac OS X at Michael Tsai’s blog, one of the few Macintosh news sources worth reading these days.

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. Jef Raskin and Andy Hertzfeld audio excerpts from “The Macintosh at 20” panel hosted at Macworld Boston 2004. Highly recommended!

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.

Surf the Web, deal with e-mail, crunch spreadsheets, write real documents, and keep your life together with this 1.4-pound wonder. Written by Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser June 1997.

Of Newton and Magic Link, Marco and Envoy. The Newton and its competition continue to make progress… sort of. Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld April 1995.

Newton will be great if it can live down its beginnings. Written by Steven Levy, The Iconoclast, Macworld January 1994. Audio from the Newton TV Commercial Collection.