Mac Folklore Radio

Original text by Guy Kawasaki, Macworld, November 1994. Who should be the next CEO of Apple? Acquire NeXT and let it be Steve Jobs, obviously. This was intended as satire but became a case of “truth is stranger than fiction” when it actually happened two years later! Gary Davidian on Michael Spindler’s product visionary status. Steve Jobs: “Tim [Cook] is not a product person per se” at 2m22s. Both Canon and Ross Perot were major investors in NeXT.

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 other business: Waffle-Crete. Do you suppose any Waffle Houses have been constructed with Waffle-Crete? Jon Rubinstein talks about disbanding NeXT and founding FirePower Systems, only to have IBM pull the rug out from underneath the whole PowerPC personal systems scene. (transcript, pages 53-58) Phil Schiller used to work for Macromedia? The Pioneer MPC-GX1 Macintosh clone lands in Mac84tv’s workshop. Windows NT/PowerPC on Macintosh PowerBook G3/G4 and iMac hardware: source code, video demos. Gary Davidian, developer of the 68K emulator that underpinned the Power Mac’s success, talks about CHRP and his time at Power Computing. (transcript, pages 33-41)

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 the first thing Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple was he killed all the clones, right? ‘cause if you cannot build a better system yourself, you don’t need the clones for sure, right?” Transcript. Guerrino de Luca’s time with Apple goes back to at least 1992 (appearance at 1m52s), included a stint at Claris, and ended shortly after Steve Jobs returned in 1997. Guerrino’s last appearance with Apple. Don’t worry; he did fine for himself–he went to Logitech and was its president and CEO until 2008. Guerrino bookending Apple’s System 7.5 promo video. Given Apple’s tendency to undergo frequent reorgs throughout the ’90s, Don Strickland did not last as head of licensing operations. Unfortunately Don passed away in 2022 though his website is still up. Compaq was a much more creative and technically significant company in its early days before it was forced to produce bargain basement PCs. Rod Canion’s excellent and highly entertaining (for nerds) book “Open” recounts the story. Power Computing only made it halfway to its goal of selling 100,000 Macs in its first year.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.