Mac Folklore Radio

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! Apple’s Macromedia Director slideshow that attempts to explain OpenDoc. The phrase “show, don’t tell” once again springs to mind. Marketing fluff and download for WAV, the OpenDoc word processor component–one of the few components that made it to market, or more skeptically, one of the few OpenDoc components fullstop.

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 you’re overseeing.) FlashTalk vs DaynaTalk. As they say, you haven’t 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 “Apple Business Graphics” (read: “graphics are not for games and kids, we swear”) and Apple Desktop Publishing, here comes “Apple Desktop Media” (read: “you can only create multimedia with the Mac, please buy our hardware”). 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 “frequent mechcanical problems”, followed by Apple grudgingly upgrading larger customers to LaserWriters if they complained enough about faulty ImageWriter LQs. Version 1.0 of “running to the media doesn’t help”?

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.