Folgen
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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 stage. (Tim Cook take note: once in a while, you should actually touch and use the miserably buggy products youâre overseeing.)
FlashTalk vs DaynaTalk. As they say, you havenât heard of it for a reason.
Macworld ran an excellent series on PostScript and TrueType font design in 1991.
John Warnock and Chuck Geschke talk about the early days of Adobe and the Font Wars of the late 1980s/early 1990s.
The spreadsheet package Trapeze disappeared after a few years. Lead Trapeze developer Andrew Wulf demonstrating Trapeze on TV in a brilliant white suit. Andrew also worked on DeltaGraph.
The AppleFax modem required a ROM update for inter-modem compatibility and was lumbered with many other hardware and software problems that were never addressed.
After trying to sell you âApple Business Graphicsâ (read: âgraphics are not for games and kids, we swearâ) and Apple Desktop Publishing, here comes âApple Desktop Mediaâ (read: âyou can only create multimedia with the Mac, please buy our hardwareâ). According to the video, Apple Desktop Media is mostly about violently plopping things onto the Apple Scanner. Bonus Wilfred Brimley.
ImageWriter LQ press release, review, complaints and âfrequent mechcanical problemsâ, followed by Apple grudgingly upgrading larger customers to LaserWriters if they complained enough about faulty ImageWriter LQs. Version 1.0 of ârunning to the media doesnât helpâ?
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Original text by Chris MacAskill at the now-defunct cake.co.
âTeam FDAâ 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 OâMalleyâs Improv Guided Tour.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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Original text by Steve Hayman.
Humungous Entertainmentâs CD-ROM titles for classic Macs.
The infamous Power Mac 5200 featured the horrendously slow PowerPC 603 (not the 603e). As if that wasnât bad enough, a recycled motherboard design fed the 603âs 64-bit memory bus with a 32-bit wide memory subsystem, exacerbating the 603âs los performance. Add some reliability issues, bring to a boil, simmer to distaste.
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Original text by David Pogue, Macworld May 1994.
Products mentioned in this article:
Interplayâs âStar Trek: 25th Anniversaryâ adventure game download, CD-ROM download with voice acting, complete playthrough on YouTube.
David Landisâ Stak Trek episode guide HyperCard stacks.
David Pogue interviewed Mark Okrand, creator of Klingon and other conlangs, for the Unsung Science podcast.
Sound Source Interactiveâs audio clip collection.
Bitstream Star Trek Font Packs and AkBKukU on the legality of Bitstreamâs copying of typefaces.
Star Trek Omnipedia CD-ROM and updated edition.
A little about Phil Farrand, author of the Nitpickerâs Guides and the Finale scorewriting software for the Macintosh. David Pogue/Phil Farrand interface design story from the 2005 Mac OS X Conference.
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A broader look at the circumstances surrounding the demise of BeOS.
Original text by me. Text version available.
No links here this time; theyâre all inside the text version.
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MFR will be off its usual schedule while your host recovers from a brutal flu.
Sound effect from MacPuke/MacBarfX.
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A snapshot of Beâs direction in 1998 post-Apple merger talks and pre-bankruptcy.
Original text by Henry Bortman.
Selected Jean-Louis Gassée quotes:
âWho could have put a date on not getting fired for using Linux?â
âOne of my role models is Michael Dell. [âŠ] He looks like a sage in the industry now, but he didnât always look like this.â
âThe simple fact is, today if you write a line of C++ code, chances are youâre competing with Microsoft.â
The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.
JLG refers to striking a deal with âa Japanese PC makerâ, resulting in preinstalls of BeOS on the Hitachi Flora Prius (not that Prius).
Yes, Appleâs marketing slogan for the Macintosh really was âit does more and it costs lessâ in the early 1990s. Related comic.
In audio as in video applications, the talk-to-shipping-products ratio was extremely poor. Back in the day I only heard of one video editor shipping on BeOS, Adamation (ex-NeXT!) personalStudio. The BeBits software catalog reflects this as of mid-2000 when third-party application development seemed to stop altogether. Iâm not counting the Edirol DV-7 because, like the Otari RADAR system, it was an expensive custom hardware appliance built on top of BeOS, priced mostly out of the reach of casual home users.
Windows NT on PowerPC did exist⊠briefly.
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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.
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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.
Iâm glad Sun didnât buy Apple because by the turn of the century Sun was in serious trouble. UltraSPARC III was delayed by two years, x86 caught up, the dotcom bust happened, everyone was broke, and Linux had matured to a point where it began creeping into the enterprise. Andy Bechtolsheim quote to that effect.
This was the second significant time Sunâs CPU group had difficultly keeping up with the Groveses: Microprocessor Report outlines the troubled design and production behind the âconstipatedâ performance of SuperSPARC (1992).
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In Boloâs 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: âIt worked across very large multi-segment networks⊠Appleâs own corporate network [for example]. You could print on a printer in Sweden from Cupertino, and all those constructs were there [in the 1980s], on shipping products, not in a lab.â
GlobalTalk hijinks: the initial hard disk image was infected with nVIR A, an AppleTalk zone named âKennyLoginsDangerZoneâ, âWorldâs Fastest ImageWriterâ, âWeâve been trying to reach youâ, heresy, and of course people started playing network Spectre before I finished production of this episode.
Watch things unfold in realtime: search for #globaltalk anywhere(?) in the fediverse.
Stuart Cheshire talks about DNS-SD, a.k.a. Zeroconf, a.k.a. Rendezvous, a.k.a. Bonjour, with introduction by AppleTalk architect Gurshsran Sidhu! The same thing at Google with terrible audio, but without Microsoft.
Stuart Cheshireâs list of Bolo links from the mid-1990s. Naturally theyâre all dead, but archive.org has you covered in most cases.
Ladmo, the Bolo brain that impressed all your nerd friends.
âAcorn: A World In Pixelsâ, a book covering BBC Micro games, documents some early Bolo history.
There are, as of this writing, only two Macintosh Bolo videos on YouTube. You should fix that.
Avie Tevanian on Apple-versus-NeXT snobbery, and motivating engineers to improve TCP/IP usability.
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Original text by Henry Bortman.
Beâs roller coaster ride from 1990-1998: the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, Commodoreâs Irving Gould, a thirty-mile hike to the sea, headhunting disgruntled Apple employees, and what to do when Apple says youâre not allowed to exhibit at WWDC 1996.
Pictures of an AT&T Hobbit BeBox motherboard from ex-Be-er Jean-Baptiste Quéru.
Jean-Louis GassĂ©eâs story about having dinner with John Sculley from the 2011 Steve Jobs Legacy event at the Churchill Club.
The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.
Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser reflecting on Larry Tesler choosing ARM over the AT&T Hobbit.
Guy Kawasaki on corporate offsite retreats.
The Computer Chronicles stops by the Be, Inc. booth at Macworld Boston 1996.
Steve Sakoman left Be for Silicon Graphics in 1994, then returned to Be in 1996. He went back to Apple in 2003, and according to Jon Rubinstein, was supposed to be Avie Tevanianâs successor in 2006 but âdidnât get the tap on the shoulderâ.
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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 ⊠Iâll have to guess 1998, the year the x86 port of BeOS shipped. An extremely rudimentary port of Cinema 4D is shown. Maxon appears to have dropped all plans to complete their BeOS port of Cinema 4D after Be decided to focus on the Internet appliance market in late 1999.
BeOS demo video intro music: Virtual (void) Remix from the Cotton Squares, a.k.a. Be Engineering. BeOS, itâs The OS. More on the Cotton Squares. Standing In The Death Car!
AFAIK a pure software multitrack digital audio recording and editing suite never shipped for the BeOS. Otariâs RADAR doesnât count since that was a hardware/software bundle, and an expensive one at that. Second version. If you can find a DAW for BeOS that was available in 2000 right before everything imploded, Iâd like to hear from you. :-) I have a sample track from one but I donât think it was ever published. GrooveMachine doesnât count since itâs geared towards short samples and phrases. BeBits lists Qua as a hard disk recorder, but the authorâs website states its audio functionality is also centered on short samples.
Printing support was not a priority for BeOS. Hey, this was supposed to be an OS for the multimedia future, not dead tree prepress! I tried the third-party BInkjet printer support package with a DeskJet 680C and it worked well.
Nitin Ganatra of iOS Contacts and Mail.app fame worked in Apple Developer Technical Support through the 1990s. He talked about working with developers and the perils of letting Apple marketing loose on Copland in the Debug podcast, episode 39.
The Cotton Squares/BeOS Demo Video: Where Are They Now?
Baron Arnold: Danger (early 2000s, now: ???)
Frank Boosman: AWS
Jeff Bush: ???
Jean-Louis Gassée: The Monday Note, Grateful Geek
Ficus Kirkpatrick: Google, Meta
Scott Paterson: making the world a better place
Doug Wright: ???
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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 wouldnât 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 might have been preserved on MacFormat cover disc #4.
BeOS, itâs The OS (5038). (Try it in a mirror.) Also from the Cotton Squares: Standing in the Death Car.
Ivan Richwalski walks you through the BeBox, a few funny BeOS APIs, and BFS metadata indexing and queries.
BeOS lives.
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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.
YesterYearâs Mac Games review of âAfter Dark: The Simpsons Collectionâ.
LabelOnce is still around, having wisely chosen not to focus exclusively on floppy disk labels.
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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 Morell, MacFormat March 1995.
datagubbe.se laments the usability of modern desktop computer software.
Product manager for At Ease, Dave Pakman, demonstrates At Ease for a user group in ~1992. Bruce Tognazzini on the user-centered design philosophy of the Macintosh. R.I.P. (The philosophy, not Bruce.) Thanks as always to the Unofficial Apple VHS Archive for both of these.
Phrases I never expected to learn while producing a computer history podcast: âspoiling the ship for a hapâorth of tarâ (pronunciation).
You definitely need to install the Talking Moose on your old Mac right now and/or Uliâs Moose on your Mac OS X 10.1-10.7 machines.
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Original text by Erfert Fenton, Macworld September 1991.
Roger Heinen âengineers are a dime a dozenâ story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Podcast. Engineer interviews from âApple of the Futureâ, 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 Appleâs internal TV studio productions have been uploaded to YouTube by the Apple VHS Archive and The ReDiscovered Future.
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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 (spinning?) advertisement for StrataVision, and was featured in at least one Strata ad.
Alien Soup walks you through the AT-AT model and animation he assembled in 1995 with Infini-D.
Update: The 3D rendering posse on the MFR Discord sent this video of Specular International co-founder Adam Lavine demonstrating Infini-D at what looks like a MacWorld Expo booth.
People are still using older 3D modeling and rendering software to reticulate splines in the RetroCGI subreddit.
More olden 3D animation: the ElectricImage Animation System 1.0 demo tape circa 1988. ElectricImage development appears to have ceased in the early 2010s.
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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: âCam, with this thread you got maybe 500 people interested in SK8, which is a lot more than Jim Spohrer and I ever did.â
Someone resurrected the SK8 section of www.research.apple.com as it stood in 1997.
Download SK8, the source code, look at a screenshot of it, or read the user guide.
In addressing QuickDrawâs deficiencies by completely uprooting it, QuickDraw GX was naturally a bit of a compatibility nightmare. Like virtual memory and A/UX, you heard about it somewhat frequently through shareware README files, usually followed by âdisable itâ and/or âyouâre out of luckâ. Like many things at Apple in the â90s, it also shipped years behind schedule: âQuickDraw GX will start shipping as an optional part of System 7.5 installs starting in September 1994â.
Note that while three developers personally confronted Steve Jobs about OpenDoc at his famous WWDC 1997 Q&A session, nobody even mentioned QuickDraw GX in passing.
Macworld readers respond to QuickDraw GX.
A Quick Look At QuickDraw GX and another quick look.
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Why didnât Appleâs 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 didnât happen, a classic case of sticking to your guns until Steve Jobs adopts your idea.
The fight over multiuser features and authentication requirements for Mac OS X as told by Avie Tevanian and (separately) Steve Jobs.
Bill Warner tells his story about founding Avid and switching from Apollo workstations to the Macintosh. Individual parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (the Mac part). Cropped 16:9 in one piece. Watch Bill Warner demonstrate the Avid/1 Media Composer on a Macintosh II in 1989 for an Avid promo tape and for WBZ TV Massachusetts.
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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 âcompleteâ, but thatâs meaningless until another Vancouverite demonstrates that it is possible to port Doom (sans audio) to it! The moment it worked.
The usual emulators wonât run A/UX since it requires an MMU. Youâll need Shoebill (abandoned by the developer now that he works at Apple) or QEMUâs Quadra 800 emulation.
Watch someone else suffer so you donât have to: netfreak walks you through installing, patching, and configuring A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30. Boy is it slow. netfreak maintains some useful A/UX resources and a knowledge base.
Mr. TenFourFox/OldVCR Cameron Kaiser has documented some interesting MachTen hacks and notes. If you find MachTen crashes shortly after launch, you might have a faulty 68LC040 CPU. I hope you bought AppleCare.
â[X11 performance was] ⊠about six times faster than a Sun 3/50.â Six times as fast as slow is still slow. Macworld November 1992 reports âEven on a [Quadra] 950, please note, A/UX is slowâthree times slower than Unix on a midrange Sun workstation.â
A/UX Product Manager Richard Finlaysonâs unabridged demo of A/UX 2.0 from the April 1990 Apple VHS User Group Connection tape. Appleâs self-running Macromedia Director demo of A/UX 2.0, complete with simulated Extended Keyboard II typing sounds. Spot the two errors in the simulated CommandShells. The example user might be a play on Richard Finlaysonâs name.
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