#applelore — Public Fediverse posts

@Savagejen

At Apple in the "Before Times" there were Staff Engineers who had that definition in their job description and were put there if they demonstrated they were capable of multi-tasking across projects. If you were a God-Level SE, like Ron Hochsprung, they made you a DEST.

I don't know if they really survived His return, since that required the company not being siloed to the point where you knew who to ask and could go over and visit them without making them sign an "internal NDA" (don't ask...)

#AppleLore

@carnage4life

"At this point tech companies need AI to be able to replace workers."

Unfortunately, the press confuses "intelligence" with "experience" and "wisdom"

You get neither with the tech bro's wet dream.

A LOT of my cow-orkers at Apple are leaving or have left.

The other part left unsaid is the rampant ageism in these companies that has existed for decades.

Loss of experience is NOT a new phenomenon

#AppleLore

@foone

and that GUI APIs are constructed by corporations to lock you onto their platform, and they are free to mutate at will to only work on their latest shiny

obligatory 🖕 Apple here

#AppleLore

@isonno

Those who can't remember George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" in 1905
will claim this was written in the 19th century.

I have been told Apple doesn't actually speak of the "between times" in their internal museum that starts with His return in 1997.

Jobs had an exhibit destroyed that used to live in a display case that was near Town Hall when he returned that contained an Apple I, Lisa and the wooden mockup of the Apple III case.

and his destruction of the Apple Library
https://annamancini.substack.com/p/how-the-apple-archive-ended-up-at

#AppleLore

I also just had the chance to spend three hours with Joe Britt, who I met when working on Apple's RISC cpus, and there is a huge undocumented story about all of the startups that spun out of early 90s Apple after the downsizing and big layoffs

#AppleLore

I just downloaded the latest epub version of Buck's Apple ATG book "Inventing the Future Bit by Bit" It is somewhat better than the original because he has talked to more people, but it still really needs to be gone over by an editor.
https://books.by/john-buck/

#AppleLore

CHM has an original Al Alcorn inspired "My other computer is a Cray" T-shirt that your received if you used the machine. Here is a hacked up picture of the front and back. I was thinking of buying the one on eBay, but I'd have no use for it since I don't wear T-shirts ever.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/atg/aquarius/MyOtherComputerIsACray.jpg

the original
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102741687/

The original rationale for Apple buying the Cray and Sam Holland's whole organization within ATG was just weird. One little lie about "Pencil Test" being rendered on Macs was that the ending title sequence was actually done on the Cray. I was the person who did the frame by frame transfers though the Abekas frame store, then copied all the frames out to Sony D1 tape.

Here is a better quality "Pencil Test Behind the Scenes" than what is on YouTube, done from my VHS copy a long time ago.

https://bitsavers.org/aek/PENCIL_TEST_BEHIND_THE_SCENES512K_Stream.mp4

#AppleLore

A walking tour of original Apple Buildings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCVETsmtoM

It was the "Good Earth" building because the Good Earth resturant (aka The Bad Dirt) was next door.

Catapult, started by ex Apple people, was in that building in the 90s and were somewhat infamous for making "cryo-bombs" with dry ice and liter soda bottles.

#AppleLore

A rabbit-hole on message boards and corporate culture...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1

to

https://skipwalter.net/2012/01/13/the-making-of-enterprise-software-all-in-1/

to
https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/2012/12/14/vax-notes/

who was also the author of a bunch of out of print books on AI1

to

The case of VAX Notes

https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vaxnotes.pdf

which just got me thinking (again) about how inter-office communications
is directly tied to corporate culture

Sun and SGI had internal USENET groups, with all of the internal hacker ethic flames
that implies

Apple NEVER had unmoderated company-wide employee discussion lists while I was there,
going back to the days of AppleLink

USENET rarely came up in discussions, then it was at beer busts between Unix people.

I wonder how long before every web "discourse" like channel is "moderated" by some
all-knowing invisible LLM "moderator" in the background.

#AppleLore

I spent way too much money obtaining this on eBay, because I couldn't find my copy. Must have thrown it out decades ago because it didn't match any prototype we built.

The Jaguar System ERS, ca. 1989

Jaguar/Hurricane was the 88110 RISC desktop system Apple never shipped. Tessaract was a 601 system with BLT bus slots. TNT (The New Tessaract) was the 2nd gen PowerMac with PCI instead of BLT slots. We only ever had a couple of semi-functional 88110s for Hurricane before the PPC Deal of the Century happened in summer 1991.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/risc_products/jaguar

Sad that most of the "advanced" stuff in Jaguar, like pre-Quicktime "multimedia" woudn't have made much difference in the marketplace and it was too early for ubiquitous high-speed networking. It also was going to support up to four 88110 processors.

Oh.. it was also tied at the hip to Pink 😞

About the only architectural thing that survived was descriptor-based DMA that was part of the Mazda I/O engine.

I need to write the whole history of this someday. You can find tons of info on PDM (the first PPC Mac to ship) in places like Gary Davidian's CHM oral history. This is the system he talks about that he thought would never ship because it was incompatible with existing Mac software.

We could have ported Unix to it, but that was never even considered either by us, or the team that was working on a 88110 server in Networking and Communications. Theirs was called "Shiner" and was obviously different from what they eventually shipped with a PPC in it.

#AppleLore

Knee deep right now in scanning DTS draft documents of all those comm products Buzz Dean's N&C group did for interoperability on Macs in the late 80s that no one remembers.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/communications

and the light bulb came on while scanning the MacX document why the code name was "Malcolm"

#AppleLore #Bitsavers

APDA Macintosh Smalltalk-80 v0.4
http://bitsavers.org/bits/Apple/APDA/KMSST4_Macintosh_Smalltalk-80_0.4_19870609

#AppleLore #bitsavers

so right about now, someone is going to tell me "I didn't know you were looking for that!"

https://www.ebay.com/itm/197127951636

I have never seen a copy before this.

#bitsavers #AppleLore

January 2025 is the 20th anniversary of my quitting Apple (Oct86-Jan05) and next year will be the 20th anniversary of me being software curator at the Computer History Museum.

Choosing which of the two was less stressful and having an impact on the world is easy.

#AppleLore #bitsavers

@aka_pugs

Apple bought Sun's implementation of 100mb Ethernet which was integrated into Power Macintosh ASICs

#AppleLore

Most of the 1988 issues of VLSI Systems Design
https://bitsavers.org/magazines/VLSI_Systems_Design

Apple ran a full page ad for ASIC designers that feature a die plot of Pete Foley's sound chip

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102164746/http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-macintosh/

This brought back memories for me. Pete was working on the same floor in VG6 as I did. He developed it with VTI tools on a Ridge32 computer. The display was an AED 1280 graphics terminal that I helped design before coming to Apple along with James Lundblad, who co-designed the JMFB Nubus graphics ASIC.

#bitsavers #AppleLore

after looking for a copy for thirty years, the APDA LocalTalk PC driver reference is on bitsavers
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/networking/localtalk/LocalTalk_PC/APDA_M7055_LocalTalk_PC_Card_and_Driver_Preliminary_Notes_198708.pdf

#AppleLore #bitsavers

@billgoats

At the time, the guys working on wireless inside Apple were a small team. No point in wheel reinvention and certification to get something out the door. From memory, it was mostly just Art Astrin (RIP)
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102737980
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102724544

#AppleLore

@aka_pugs

I remember the event when that happened.
The crowd booed when Gate's face appeared.
There was also an anoucement that Jobs was ending the ongoing MSFT vs AAPL lawsuit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-what-happened-when-microsoft-saved-apple.html

#AppleLore

@atomicpoet

I worked on the APPLE Jaguar project. The OTHER 88K RISC system that never shipped that everyone, including John Buck, got the details wrong about
in his book about Apple ATG. He says it was 29K based. The only thing he got right was Jaguar was the high end machine and RLC was the low end. RLC eventurally morphed into the first generation Power Macs. The hardware team for Jaguar split, some leaving for 3DO, the rest doing the second generation PCI Powermac (TNT, "The New Tessaract") Jaguar prototypes were Hurricane (done at the same time as Cyclone, the 840AV) and Tessaract, 88110. The 88110 was VERY late coming from Moto and we never got one that completely worked. I found out years later that NeXT was working on a 88110 machine when I saw a prototype at Moto when I was working on bringing up the PPC750.

#AppleLore

@Phyxis @Bas

No love from Jobs.
He had them all removed.
Part of the deal with letting them build IL was the city wanted a park, so they created the "Icon Garden" which "He" hated.

#AppleLore

@jimluther

dug out what I have
the friend that scanned 'big pink' also did the
two volume Blue Book.
I'll push it out under 'blue' on
bitsavers since 'big pink' is already there
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/blue

#AppleLore

512K mac proto pcb number 122
five of the six PALs were readable
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/prototypes/1983_512K_Proto_No_122/

#AppleLore

Exponential X704 advanced info tech summary

http://bitsavers.org//components/exponential

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/exponential_technology/x704

Mike Dhuey and I put together the water-cooled prototype that was shown at MacWorld in 1997

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mac-speed-factor-exponential/

the L1 2K I and D cache was way too tiny

#AppleLore

@NanoRaptor

AKA the "Before Times" when He was still there

#AppleLore

This was the second reunion and they have the poster picture at
https://applereunion2020.com/about

Worker, storm clouds and red flag to the left.
Strong jawed Apple firmly advancing in blue skies to the right

"Iron Mike" Spindler was CEO in 1994

https://pixel77.com/empowering-illustrations-artist-john-mattos/
about the artist, John Mattos

@rl_dane

Some day, I will find the internal Apple version of TM called "Talking Barney" that replaced the moose with a picture of Bjarne Stroustrup

#AppleLore

Modula-2 for Macintosh from Modula Corporation in Provo, UT ca. 1985
Not much has survived from them.
http://bitsavers.org/bits/ModulaCorporation/MacModula-2/

#AppleLore

@me_

the digibarn picture is the same machine
it is an early prototype

more pictures under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/hardware/1981_proto

there is also a youtube video with Rich Page talking about it
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792814

#AppleLore

Star Trek
and Shiner
and NetWare

Oh my!

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/12/when-power-macintosh-ran-netware.html

iguana iguana powersurgius

#AppleLore

@mihaip

amazing! thanks

"'Chore Boy' is our lab mascot. He is a lemon-scented scrubbing sponge. "

#AppleLore