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”.

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 music: Virtual (void) Remix from the Cotton Squares, a.k.a. Be Engineering. BeOS, it’s The OS. More on the Cotton Squares. Standing In The Death Car!

AFAIK a pure software multitrack digital audio recording and editing suite never shipped for the BeOS. Otari’s RADAR doesn’t count since that was a hardware/software bundle, and an expensive one at that. Second version. If you can find a DAW for BeOS that was available in 2000 right before everything imploded, I’d like to hear from you. :-) I have a sample track from one but I don’t think it was ever published. GrooveMachine doesn’t count since it’s geared towards short samples and phrases. BeBits lists Qua as a hard disk recorder, but the author’s website states its audio functionality is also centered on short samples.

Printing support was not a priority for BeOS. Hey, this was supposed to be an OS for the multimedia future, not dead tree prepress! I tried the third-party BInkjet printer support package with a DeskJet 680C and it worked well.

Nitin Ganatra of iOS Contacts and Mail.app fame worked in Apple Developer Technical Support through the 1990s. He talked about working with developers and the perils of letting Apple marketing loose on Copland in the Debug podcast, episode 39.

The Cotton Squares/BeOS Demo Video: Where Are They Now?

Baron Arnold: Danger (early 2000s, now: ???)

Frank Boosman: AWS

Jeff Bush: ???

Jean-Louis Gassée: The Monday Note, Grateful Geek

Ficus Kirkpatrick: Google, Meta

Scott Paterson: making the world a better place

Doug Wright: ???

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 few funny BeOS APIs, and BFS metadata indexing and queries.

BeOS lives.

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.

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 Tognazzini on the user-centered design philosophy of the Macintosh. R.I.P. (The philosophy, not Bruce.) Thanks as always to the Unofficial Apple VHS Archive for both of these.

Phrases I never expected to learn while producing a computer history podcast: “spoiling the ship for a hap’orth of tar” (pronunciation).

You definitely need to install the Talking Moose on your old Mac right now and/or Uli’s Moose on your Mac OS X 10.1-10.7 machines.

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.