Macintosh Folklore Radio

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 of 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, tha

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… 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? 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 ongoin

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

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 wan

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.