Frontier and Apple in the early 90s

Frontier and Apple in the early 90s

From Scripting News podcast by Dave Winer

February 10, 2026

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…

People in this episode

Host: Dave Winer

Topics covered

  • technology
  • history
  • business
  • scripting
  • Apple
  • software development

Keywords

  • Frontier
  • Apple
  • scripting system
  • Macintosh
  • software development
  • Jean-Louis Gassée
  • WordLand

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Apple

Products: Frontier, WordLand

Places: Macintosh

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