Mac Folklore Radio

Mar 17 2025 123 ep. 18 mins 149
Mac Folklore Radio Podcast artwork

Comfort food for Macintosh users of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

  Technology
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Steven Levy - One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, ... (1996)

Mar 17 2025 7 mins  
Why does System 7.5 take so long to start up? Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld April 1996. Avoid conflating Moore’s Law with Dennard scaling. 65scribe has an easily-digested summary of Dennard scaling in his extensive Power Mac G5 coverage.

The Desktop Critic - How to Become a Millionare Overnight (1996)

Mar 09 2025 13 mins  
Eight best-selling Mac products that don’t exist–yet. Original text by David Pogue, Macworld April 1996. More on the history of DiskDoubler. John V. Holder’s TakeABreak has recently been uncovered from the depths of archive.org. A hybrid of the imaginary Concatenator Pro and PocketBoot might be Startup Doubler, which gloms together all your extensions (internally, not on

Jonathan Schwartz - Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal (2010)

Mar 05 2025 11 mins  
What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you. Original text by Jonathan Schwartz. More about Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance. Sun famously sued Microsoft over their incompatible Java implenentation variant in 1997. Microsoft settled by paying Sun a bunch of money. Please enjoy this Flash animation shown at JavaOne 2004 retelling the sto

James Thomson - Mac OS X Dock History (2025)

Feb 27 2025 14 mins  
Original text by James Thomson. DragThing, one of many Dock-like tools for classic Mac OS. PCalc for classic and modern Mac OS/iOS. Some PCalc history. The One True Place for the Dock may be at the bottom of the screen, but ever since the advent of widescreen everything, it always made more sense–at least to me–to put it on the right. This frees up what precious little verti

Darin Adler: 20 Years of Computer Software (1996)

Jan 26 2025 42 mins  
Original text by Darin Adler. An overview of the Motorola MEK6800D2 single board computer/development kit. Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Podcast. The General Magic documentary is a good hard look at how General Magic fizzled out, though it somehow managed to survive long enough to power the Ge

Craig Hickman - The History of Kid Pix (2013)

Dec 11 2024 27 mins  
How a little paint program became a worldwide phenomenon. Original text by Craig Hickman. Craig talks about his 8-bit Atari projects on episode 378 of the ANTIC Podcast. Apple honoured Craig in their already-zapped-from-history Macintosh 30th Anniversary website. John Sculley demonstrating Kid Pix on stage in 1991. John loves talking about “objects” the way Apple loves talki

Greg Maletic on OpenDoc (2006)

Nov 10 2024 28 mins  
Original text by Greg Maletic who is now at Panic, one of the few companies still making beautiful native non-Electron, non-Flutter Mac desktop applications–an endangered species. A technical walkthrough of OpenDoc from co-architect Kurt Piersol. Best comment: “… it’s telling just how much talking is happening in this presentation and how little ‘actually showing OpenDoc

Apple's 1989 Year In Review (1990)

Oct 19 2024 34 mins  
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1990. The sad story of dBASE Mac, which was quickly sold off and briefly revived as nuBASE. Followup article. MindWrite and how it relates to the collapse of mail order house Icon Review. Useless product of the year: WristMac, as shown at Macworld Expo San Francisco 1989. Watch Jean-Louis Gassee assemble a Macintosh IIcx live on st

That Time I Had Steve Jobs Keynote at Unix Expo (1991)

Oct 05 2024 11 mins  
Original text by Chris MacAskill at the now-defunct cake.co. “Team FDA” jean jacket pictures in the comments (scroll down). Steve Jobs with the 1991 Unix Expo keynote audience under hypnosis. (scroll down) Lotus Improv tutorial VHS tape, Lotus technical talk about Improv and NeXTSTEP, and Moose O’Malley’s Improv Guided Tour.

Steve Hayman - A Different Apple/NeXT Story (1995)

Sep 09 2024 4 mins  
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 los performance. Add some reliability issues,