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. Gurshuran 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 “KennyLoginsDanger ..read more

Original text by Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser, January 1997. How does BeOS measure up to System 7.5, and could it have become the next-generation Mac OS? The authors examine why Copland would not have been the crashproof operating system we had all hoped for. Official BeOS demo video from … I’ll have to guess 1998, the year the x86 port of BeOS shipped. An extremely rudimentary port of Cinema 4D is shown. Maxon appears to have dropped all plans to complete their BeOS port of Cinema 4D after Be decided to focus on the Internet appliance market in late 1999. BeOS demo video intro mu ..read more

Original text by Dave Mark, MacTech, January 1997. Bryan Cantrill on interviewing at Be, Inc. (perhaps with Dominic Giampolo?) and inadvertently buying a VFS architecture at the Be bankruptcy auction. Apple wouldn’t have gone OS shopping if Copland had worked out. CodeWarrior for BeOS was a thing. Naturally, IBM made the most use of their System Object Model. Menu Tasking Enabler for MacOS might have been preserved on MacFormat cover disc #4. BeOS, it’s The OS (5038). (Try it in a mirror.) Also from the Cotton Squares: Standing in the Death Car. Ivan Richwalski walks you through the BeBox, a f ..read more

Original text by David Pogue, Macworld December 1994. Watch the CD3 compact disc storage and retrieval box in action. Photos of the salami-like CD3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The product lasted into the 2000s and the companion DiscGear website is still up, featuring no less than three CD3-like units on its front page. Decorate your classic Mac desktop: Holiday Lights, Xmas Lights, Snow. YesterYear’s Mac Games review of “After Dark: The Simpsons Collection”. LabelOnce is still around, having wisely chosen not to focus exclusively on floppy disk labels ..read more

Simplicity, sophistication, oversimplification, and At Ease. I rant about the usability of modern Apple software, Steven Levy rants about the complexity of the Mac and the oversimplified environment provided by At Ease, and Josef Morell rants about the damage At Ease does to first impressions of the Macintosh in retail channels. Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld December 1992 and Josef Morell, MacFormat March 1995. datagubbe.se laments the usability of modern desktop computer software. Product manager for At Ease, Dave Pakman, demonstrates At Ease for a user group in ~1992. Bruce Tognazzi ..read more

Original text by Erfert Fenton, Macworld September 1991. Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs Podcast. Engineer interviews from “Apple of the Future”, preserved and uploaded by The Byte Cellar. Apple campus decor in the 1980s was pretty ugly, though less so in the cube farms. A significant chunk of Apple’s internal TV studio productions have been uploaded to YouTube by the Apple VHS Archive and The ReDiscovered Future ..read more

Original text by Deke McClelland, Macworld February 1994. RayDream Designer and Infini-D merged into a new product called Carrara, which is still marketed by Daz3D. It must still be Carbon under the hood since it only runs on macOS 10.14 and earlier. 27 years is a pretty good life for a personal computer software product. StrataVision 3D evolved into Strata Design 3D CX. Myst was a walking (spinning?) advertisement for StrataVision, and was featured in at least one Strata ad. Alien Soup walks you through the AT-AT model and animation he assembled in 1995 with Infini-D. People are still using o ..read more

QuickDraw GX, meet unfinished developer tool prototype. Original text by Cameron Esfahani who is still at Apple today, ~30 years later. Chris Espinosa replied to the original: “Cam, with this thread you got maybe 500 people interested in SK8, which is a lot more than Jim Spohrer and I ever did.” Someone resurrected the SK8 section of www.research.apple.com as it stood in 1997. Download SK8, the source code, look at a screenshot of it, or read the user guide. In addressing QuickDraw’s deficiencies by completely uprooting it, QuickDraw GX was naturally a bit of a compatibility nightmare. Like vi ..read more

Why didn’t Apple’s Unix-based A/UX become the Mac OS of the future? Original text by Basal Gangster. UniSoft mentions A/UX exactly once in the darker recesses of its website. A/UX 1.0 demo on the Computer Chronicles, 1989. Demo starts at ~19 minutes. Watch the announcement of Carbon at WWDC 1998. Sean Parent describes how Carbon almost didn’t happen, a classic case of sticking to your guns until Steve Jobs adopts your idea. The fight over multiuser features and authentication requirements for Mac OS X as told by Avie Tevanian and (separately) Steve Jobs. Bill Warner tells his story about found ..read more

If an IBM PC can see the light, why not a Mac? Original text by Joel Snyder, SunWorld July 1993. This review calls A/UX “complete”, but that’s meaningless until another Vancouverite demonstrates that it is possible to port Doom (sans audio) to it! The moment it worked. The usual emulators won’t run A/UX since it requires an MMU. You’ll need Shoebill (abandoned by the developer now that he works at Apple) or QEMU’s Quadra 800 emulation. Watch someone else suffer so you don’t have to: netfreak walks you through installing, patching, and configuring A/UX on a Macintosh SE/30. Boy is it slow. netf ..read more