Apple Developer CD Codenames (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Apple Developer CD Codenames (1999)

mackido.com

54 pointscedaratlas17 comments

I miss the days when the developers at Apple were allowed to express a sense of humour.

I've been digging through these old CDs to find the necessary magical incantations for writing an Ethernet driver for the SE/30 10/100Mbit Ethernet card I'm developing.

https://www.mactothefuture.org/

Just yesterday, I was telling a coworker about the history of the Sosumi system sound. [0] And how the crayon color picker had an easter egg where the crayons would start to look worn down as time passed. [1 not a good link, read the comments] After System 8.5, there seems to be a change of the light hearted-ness of the OS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi [1] http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2006/04/colour_me_picked

Not to mention the "Butt Head Astronomer" product model name! The best part is when the offended astronomer sued Apple for defamation, but was put in the unenviable position to argue he was the "butt head" in question. Even the court decision (in Apple's favor) was hilarious.

That astronomer was none other than Carl Sagan.

Article covering the snafu in detail: https://www.engadget.com/2014/02/26/when-carl-sagan-sued-app...

I think the rule of thumb for any project is, the more people there are involved, the less the project is allowed to be cultured or express any specific culture that’s not inherent to itself. I think it’s this way because diversity of cultures means they don’t always align with each other. Because I even see it in open source projects like Emacs.

I can understand this to a certain degree. Especially when working internationally where things don't translate well. I'm currently working with a code base created by a person no longer at the company. There are many things where the original developer did something because he thought it was funny and amused him, but for someone not aware of that, I've spent way too much time trying to track things down that don't exist. However, easter eggs like the crayons wearing down over time needs no translation. Anybody that has ever used any non-ink based writing utensil will understand.

Well, speaking broadly, computers became big business. No longer was it going to be engineers creating the product for engineers.

I have an old issue of "Inside Apple" (the developers' newsletter) that was an April Fool's issue. Maybe circa 1989 or so.

The entire 15-20 pages or so was entirely devoted to joke articles and parodies. I need to find that again and scan it.

Please do!

Very cool, I hadn't seen your project before! I've been (slowly) updating MacSSH to support modern SSH servers/crypto, it's actually working pretty well now. Just need to finish some features and clean up the UI.

I also have an SE/30, luckily I was able to find an Ethernet card for a reasonable price.

Do you have ”Designing Cards and Drivers for the Macintiosh”? (https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1235-designing-cards-and...)

It is hardware oriented, but explains how declaration ROMs work. The 3rd edition knows about the SE/30.

Yes, I do indeed! That's what we used to design the actual PCB, figure out how the address space works, etc.

I've got some MPW scripts for building the declaration ROM. I'm working on the actual Ethernet driver part just now, and hopefully I'll be able to embed that in the declaration ROM too.

The great thing about classic macOS is that you can talk to hardware from userspace by just reading & writing the appropriate addresses in memory.

Of course, this is also a terrible thing :-)

Is there anything out there like this for consumer Apple CDs? I'm talking about demo CDs and other retail media that came packaged with Macintosh computers and accessories from the day.

I distinctly remember browsing through an incredible multimedia CD that came packaged with one of the first consumer CDROM drives that Apple put out. In addition to some cheesy video presentations this CD had a bunch of Bloom County comics and some games to boot. I wish I could find my old copy but I think it's been lost to time at this point.

Here are some videos featured on the "Multimedia CD-ROM Starter Kit" that came with our Apple CD-ROM drive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d38FTdo6_eE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkVeUejPo6k

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

Hmm these are interesting but not quite the Apple CD I'm remembering. When the multimedia application automatically loaded I remember some kind of video feature that included a country music band along with a lot of image and videos included on the disc. Of course this was a long time ago, I might be misremembering some details, but I'm surprised more archives of this kind of thing do not exist. I hope I can find a copy of this CD online someday and relive some of those glossy childhood Mac memories

“The Winter of our Disc Content” (January 1992).

Brilliant!

Wow - MacKiDo is as much of a blast from the past for me as these codenames are!

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