Mac Folklore Radio
Comfort food for Macintosh users of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Episodes
Original text by Konstantin Othmer and Bruce Leak for Apple’s develop! magazine, May 1992 and June 1994.
“These problems are supposed to be tough. If you don’t get a high score, at least you’ll learn interesting Macintosh trivia.”
More about Bruce Leak’s time on the original QuickTime team.
Gary Davidian PRAM stories from his CHM oral history (video, transcript).
See also: Debugging Macintosh Software with Macsbug by Konstant...
Game Hall of Fame text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1992.
Review of Glider 4.0 by Toni Thompson, Macworld February 1992. I wonder if that’s the Toni Thompson who did the graphics for the Apple II version of Temple of Apshai?
John Calhoun interview by Richard Moss at MacScene. Buy Richard’s book, The Secret History of Mac Gaming.
Tanara Kuranov, a.k.a. Gamer Mouse covers games that helped make the Mac (and only the Mac) spe...
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld June 1996.
The database review mentioned in this article might be one of these two.
Review of the hilariously terrible Brother HL-8 printer and two (yes, two) attempts at Macintosh drivers for the HL-8.
Review of the smoking hot Envisio Notebook Display Adapter (1992). Audio version.
“If you’ve worked for the company, can you write the review? No.” Pogue found himself in a similar conund...
Original text by John Calhoun.
MacScene’s interview with John re: The History of Glider. Part 1, Part 2.
Mr. Advisador for the Newton has been revived! Told you it was creepy. Original Newton version.
The Computer Chronicles covers Glider at Macworld Boston 1994. Today, as back then, you’re not supposed to notice that the game was first released five years prior to this show airing; you’re supposed to be amazed that anyone is ...
Actions speak louder than words: a look at Apple’s extremely quiet Mac OS licensing program.
Original text by Charles Piller.
Macworld Boston 1994, Tim Bajarin: Apple has to either start licensing, or lower their prices. A DTK PowerPC 601 box running Windows NT/PowerPC at PC Expo 1994. TNPC and Mitac showing off PowerPC systems at COMDEX 1994.
Heads of Mac OS licensing: Don Strickland’s website. In memoriam. Larry Lightman’s o...
Previous John Carmack episode: The Steve Jobs Rollercoaster.
Peter Graffagnino’s appearance at NeXTEVNT 2015. Peter is interviewed by fellow Pixar veteran Michael Johnson.
Some of the original Mac team demonstrating Steve Jobs’ favourite hand gesture (scroll down).
John Carmack’s appearance at Macworld San Francisco 1999. “The only thing you want to do with the Mac as a serious gamer is you wanna p...
Apple’s licensing approach (ca. 1994-1997) is a bad idea.
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1995.
Andy Bechtolscheim quote about SPARC licensing and Macintosh clones: “Sun had a unified business… it wasn’t really selling separate software. … that whole notion of defining success [as] ‘other people adopt your thing’… Apple was criticized for being a closed system, then they licensed SuperMac … to build clones …. and...
How Macintosh could have taken over the world.
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.
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 the filesystem) to accelerate startup. Apple sort of tr...
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 story.
Steve Jobs quotes from Triumph of the Nerds, W...
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 vertical screen real estate there is on a 16:9 display. So...
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 General Motors OnStar service.
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 talking about “machine learning”. In Love Notes to Newton,...
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 working’ there is.”
Kurt still works at Apple!
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 sh...
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.
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, bring to a boil, simmer to distaste.
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld May 1994.
Products mentioned in this article:
Interplay’s “Star Trek: 25th Anniversary” adventure game download, CD-ROM download with voice acting, complete playthrough on YouTube.
David Landis’ Stak Trek episode guide HyperCard stacks.
David Pogue interviewed Mark Okrand, creator of Klingon and other conlangs, for the Unsung Science podcast.
Sound Source Interactive’s audio clip collec...
A broader look at the circumstances surrounding the demise of BeOS.
Original text by me. Text version available.
No links here this time; they’re all inside the text version.
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