Mac Folklore Radio
Comfort food for Macintosh users of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
Episodes
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.
MFR will be off its usual schedule while your host recovers from a brutal flu.
Sound effect from MacPuke/MacBarfX.
A snapshot of Be’s direction in 1998 post-Apple merger talks and pre-bankruptcy.
Original text by Henry Bortman.
Selected Jean-Louis Gassée quotes:
“Who could have put a date on not getting fired for using Linux?”
“One of my role models is Michael Dell. […] He looks like a sage in the industry now, but he didn’t always look like this.”
“The simple fact is, today if you write a line of C++ code, chances are you’re competing w...
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.
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.
I’m glad Sun didn’t buy Apple because by the turn of the century Sun was in serious trouble. UltraSPARC III was delayed by two years, x8...
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 Sweden from Cupertino, and all those constructs were there ...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Come hang with Amy Poehler. Each week on her podcast, she'll welcome celebrities and fun people to her studio. They'll share stories about their careers, mutual friends, shared enthusiasms, and most importantly, what's been making them laugh. This podcast is not about trying to make you better or giving advice. Amy just wants to have a good time.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.