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.

Original text by Henry Bortman.

Be’s roller coaster ride from 1990-1998: the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, Commodore’s Irving Gould, a thirty-mile hike to the sea, headhunting disgruntled Apple employees, and what to do when Apple says you’re not allowed to exhibit at WWDC 1996.

Pictures of an AT&T Hobbit BeBox motherboard from ex-Be-er Jean-Baptiste Quéru.

Jean-Louis Gassée’s story about having dinner with John Sculley from the 2011 Steve Jobs Legacy event at the Churchill Club.

The 1996 BeOS vs. NeXTSTEP bakeoff story as told by Avie Tevanian.

Acorn co-founder Hermann Hauser reflecting on Larry Tesler choosing ARM over the AT&T Hobbit.

Guy Kawasaki on corporate offsite retreats.

The Computer Chronicles stops by the Be, Inc. booth at Macworld Boston 1996.

Steve Sakoman left Be for Silicon Graphics in 1994, then returned to Be in 1996. He went back to Apple in 2003, and according to Jon Rubinstein, was supposed to be Avie Tevanian’s successor in 2006 but “didn’t get the tap on the shoulder”.