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 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 .…

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.…

How a little paint program became a worldwide phenomenon. Original text by Craig Hickman . Craig talks about his 8-bit Atari projects on episode 378 of the ANTIC Podcast . Apple honoured Craig in their already-zapped-from-history Macintosh 30th Anniversary website . John Sculley demonstrating Kid Pix on stage in 1991 . John loves talking about “objects” the way Apple loves talking about “machine learning”. In Love Notes to Newton , Sculley claims the Newton project spurred ARM’s support for “floating point and objects”. Okay, John. OOP is a software abstraction, and no MessagePad ever shipped with a hardware FPU–not even the StrongARM in the MessagePad 2000 . More about ARM’s relationship with hardware floating point units . Macintosh Garden has copies of Fido , Camera , and Hickman’s 2005 art project Beautiful Dorena . Let Craig lead you on a guided tour through Beautiful Dorena .…

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.…

Original text by David Pogue , Macworld May 1994. Products mentioned in this article: Interplay’s “Star Trek: 25th Anniversary” adventure game download , CD-ROM download with voice acting , complete playthrough on YouTube . David Landis’ Stak Trek episode guide HyperCard stacks . David Pogue interviewed Mark Okrand, creator of Klingon and other conlangs, for the Unsung Science podcast . Sound Source Interactive’s audio clip collection . Bitstream Star Trek Font Packs and AkBKukU on the legality of Bitstream’s copying of typefaces . Star Trek Omnipedia CD-ROM and updated edition . A little about Phil Farrand , author of the Nitpicker’s Guides and the Finale scorewriting software for the Macintosh. David Pogue/Phil Farrand interface design story from the 2005 Mac OS X Conference .…

A broader look at the circumstances surrounding the demise of BeOS. Original text by me. Text version available . No links here this time; they’re all inside the text version .

MFR will be off its usual schedule while your host recovers from a brutal flu. Sound effect from MacPuke /MacBarfX.

A snapshot of Be’s direction in 1998 post-Apple merger talks and pre-bankruptcy. Original text by Henry Bortman . Selected Jean-Louis Gassée quotes: “ Who could have put a date on not getting fired for using Linux? ” “ One of my role models is Michael Dell. […] He looks like a sage in the industry now, but he didn’t always look like this. ” “ The simple fact is, today if you write a line of C++ code, chances are you’re competing with Microsoft. ” The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian . JLG refers to striking a deal with “a Japanese PC maker”, resulting in preinstalls of BeOS on the Hitachi Flora Prius (not that Prius). Yes, Apple’s marketing slogan for the Macintosh really was “ it does more and it costs less ” in the early 1990s. Related comic . In audio as in video applications, the talk-to-shipping-products ratio was extremely poor. Back in the day I only heard of one video editor shipping on BeOS, Adamation (ex-NeXT!) personalStudio . The BeBits software catalog reflects this as of mid-2000 when third-party application development seemed to stop altogether. I’m not counting the Edirol DV-7 because, like the Otari RADAR system , it was an expensive custom hardware appliance built on top of BeOS, priced mostly out of the reach of casual home users. Windows NT on PowerPC did exist… briefly .…

A short story about long cables. Original text by Steve Riggins . Macworld San Francisco 1999: Steve Jobs pokes fun at legacy parallel SCSI-1 versus FireWire .

Original text from SunWorld, February 1996 by Michael McCarthy and Mark Cappel. This was such a bad idea that in the very same issue it was announced a potential Sun/Apple deal had fallen through . CHM Sun Microsystems Founders Panel in which they discuss close encounters with acquiring Apple. I’m glad Sun didn’t buy Apple because by the turn of the century Sun was in serious trouble. UltraSPARC III was delayed by two years , x86 caught up, the dotcom bust happened, everyone was broke, and Linux had matured to a point where it began creeping into the enterprise. Andy Bechtolsheim quote to that effect . This was the second significant time Sun’s CPU group had difficultly keeping up with the Groveses: Microprocessor Report outlines the troubled design and production behind the “constipated” performance of SuperSPARC (1992) .…

In Bolo’s world, players form alliances, pilot tanks and command little green men. Original text by Steve Silberman . GlobalTalk Overview , or how to run AppleTalk over TCP/IP around the world. Gursharan Sidhu quote at the end of this episode: “It worked across very large multi-segment networks… Apple’s own corporate network [for example]. You could print on a printer in Sweden from Cupertino, and all those constructs were there [in the 1980s], on shipping products, not in a lab.” GlobalTalk hijinks: the initial hard disk image was infected with nVIR A , an AppleTalk zone named “ KennyLoginsDangerZone ”, “ World’s Fastest ImageWriter ”, “ We’ve been trying to reach you ”, heresy , and of course people started playing network Spectre before I finished production of this episode. Watch things unfold in realtime: search for #globaltalk anywhere(?) in the fediverse . Stuart Cheshire talks about DNS-SD, a.k.a. Zeroconf, a.k.a. Rendezvous, a.k.a. Bonjour , with introduction by AppleTalk architect Gurshsran Sidhu! The same thing at Google with terrible audio, but without Microsoft . Stuart Cheshire’s list of Bolo links from the mid-1990s . Naturally they’re all dead, but archive.org has you covered in most cases. Ladmo , the Bolo brain that impressed all your nerd friends. “Acorn: A World In Pixels”, a book covering BBC Micro games, documents some early Bolo history . There are, as of this writing, only two Macintosh Bolo videos on YouTube . You should fix that. Avie Tevanian on Apple-versus-NeXT snobbery, and motivating engineers to improve TCP/IP usability .…