Steven Levy - One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, ... (1996)
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.
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7:03
The Desktop Critic - How to Become a Millionare Overnight (1996)
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 tried to make extensions management easier by including Ricardo Batista’s Extensions Manager with System 7.5 and later.
I’ve lost track of the number of Uninstaller-type software that’s been produced for the Mac since this article was written, not that I would ever touch any of them.
MacBreakZ is an awful lot like the imaginary Carpal Diem.
From ~2010-2014, I always thought of NexTag as a real-world PriceDex. It’s a shame it disappeared. CamelCamelCamel fills the void for those who haven’t yet separated themselves from Amazon.
Nobody ever went so far as to produce an INIT magazine but Symbionts will give you more technical insight into your System Folder. My all-time favourite feature: a file-by-file breakdown of how much memory is allocated by each INIT and cdev.
Things I don’t miss about the old days: holding my breath while capturing analog video, and waiting for machines with mechanical HDDs to boot. The PocketBoot would nearly useless today anyhow–not because of SSDs, but because Apple is actively striving to make it impossible to boot from external media. Thanks, Tim Cook! Super useful, good job. All because SECURITY. …except in the UK and everywhere else, shortly. Mmmkay, how about you let us boot from external devices again while you’re at it? Better yet, throw out the current version of Mac OS, fork Snow Leopard, and start things over from there, kthxbai
Scott Joplin “Maple Leaf Rag” clip courtesy of ConcertWare.
PPG Wave 2.3 demo courtesy of RetroSound.
More about CANYON.MID, composer George Stone, and how his work ended up shipping with most copies of Windows from 1991-1996. Composed on a Mac running Passport Designs’ Master Tracks Pro.
Live performance of CANYON.MID…?
The canyon.mid Simulator and hard rock cover (pun not intended).
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13:09
Jonathan Schwartz - Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal (2010)
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, WWDC 1997 Q&A, and Macworld San Francisco 2003.
In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and its StarOffice product, which Sun open sourced and renamed OpenOffice. After some entirely predictable grief from Oracle, the community forked the project and delivered what we know today as LibreOffice.
Apple adopted Sun’s dynamic system-wide tracing and performance profiling framework DTrace, known as Instruments in Xcode’s collection of tools.
Apple announced Snow Leopard Server would ship with Sun’s ZFS but that ultimately never happened for licensing and patent reasons. Whether Sun’s soon-to-be-acquisition by Oracle and the Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison relationship would have helped or hindered this, we’ll never know. Either way, Apple, I know you’re reading this and I’d like APFS to checksum my data blocks too, not just the metadata. Thank you.
Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy quotes from Sun’s NC03-Q3 (2003) keynote and JavaOne 2004.
See Project Looking Glass in action.
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11:59
James Thomson - Mac OS X Dock History (2025)
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. Sorry, James!
Jon Rubinstein on the iMac’s early days as an “Internet Appliance”, a.k.a. a diskless web terminal.
Macworld San Francisco 2000 keynote video.
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14:57
Darin Adler: 20 Years of Computer Software (1996)
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 General Motors OnStar service.
Darin Adler later joined the Nautilus (a.k.a. the GNOME desktop file manager) development team with Andy Hertzfeld at Eazel. Demonstration.
Bryan Cantrill recounts the object-oriented operating system craze of the 1990s and counts the corpses: Spring, Taligent, Copland, and JavaOS.
Lisa Melton recounts crisis management at Eazel and the history of the Safari and WebKit project on episode 11 of the Debug podcast.
Waldemar Horwat went on to head JavaScript development at Netscape. Like many other eerily smart math and programming language types, he now works at Google.
New Zealand