Frontier and Apple in the early 90s
About this episode
Dave Winer discusses the history of Frontier and its connection to Apple in the early 90s.
As with previous podcasts I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this. Additionally, I refer to the Think Different piece as revealing the big missing piece in web apps, the problem I hope to solve with WordLand and the competitive products that I want to encourage. Dave Winer reaches back nearly four decades to tell the story of Frontier, his scripting system for the Macintosh, and draws a direct line from that experience to what he's working on today. The backstory begins with Winer's company riding the Mac wave in the mid-1980s. While most developers abandoned the platform during its lean early years, his team stuck it out, kept their revenue flowing through a PC product, and were perfectly positioned when Apple removed the hardware limitations in January 1986. That loyalty paid off in relationships — Winer had contacts throughout Apple, including Jean-Louis Gassée , the top product executive just below the CEO level. After selling his company and taking a well-deserved winter off…
Topics covered
- technology
- history
- business
- scripting
- Apple
- software development
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