An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91

true – and also Macs, specifically Macintosh Quadra 700.

This movie brought me to Linux ("The Free Unix") and Mac.

Front end. I was a Mac programmer.

It was basically AOL. I am pretty sure that AppleLink became the basis for the first AOL clients (or vice-versa). We had the exact same "You've Got Mail!" sound, and a lot of the same graphic assets.

My claim to fame, was disassembling Finder, to nail a mistake in Apple documentation.

Back then, processes could communicate directly with each other. Security folks would absolutely defecate masonry, if they saw what it was like.

The issue was that we used Pascal strings, and one of the structures that was used to share information between processes, had a Pascal string (one-byte length, followed by up to 255 bytes of ASCII string).

Their docs said it was optimized (no padding beyond word), so a 2-character string would take 4 bytes (1 length, 2 string, 1 pad).

In fact, they always reserved the entire 256 bytes, and ignored the bytes beyond the end of the string.

I had to actually disassemble Finder, to figure that out.

This is neither here, nor there, but GEIS was the most dysfunctional organization I ever worked for. In the 18 months I worked for them, they had 3 reorgs.

Possibly. That sounds familiar. Most of the backend folks actually worked on EDI stuff. Lot of money movement, so we weren't involved that much.

(author) Both GEnie and AppleLink used the same backend, which GE called the Mark III network, so there were some operational similarities.

Maturing industry is a form of technological development. Better tech = better manufacturing techniques, from resource gathering up to the retailing system. Mining and manufacturing are more and more mechanized and automated, and lots of the retail end is online, complete with automated logistics.

To say nothing of the fundamentally better chip designs we have.

We're making better things, in a better way, faster and cheaper; and each improvement reverberates through the system making everything else cheaper, better, and faster.