Mac Folklore Radio

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 Swed

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

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 extremel

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

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. Yeste

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

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

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

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.

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 stickin