It was 1991 and we at The Voyager Company had been working on a CD-ROM titled “Baseball’s Greatest Hits” in HyperCard when our Apple evangelist contacted us about testing something called “QuickTime.” I cannot recall if there was a code name, but I do recall the first compressor (CODEC) was named “road pizza”, as it… Continue reading A Short Story About QuickTime 1.0
Category: Musings
A Short Story about Network Interference
It was 1989ish at The Voyager Company in Santa Monica. Amongst my duties was ad-hoc network admin. We had a LocalTalk network that ran over telephone wire, across several floors, using PhoneNet connectors at each Macintosh, and meeting in a closet at a Star repeater. One day the employees started to notice that printing to… Continue reading A Short Story about Network Interference
Happy 40th, Mac!
Happy Anniversary, Mac! As I sit here with 9 sleeps until the Vision Pro ships, of which you are the progenitor, I wanted to reflect on what you and the people who built you have meant to me. I was 17 when you were born which means I grew up with the first pong, the… Continue reading Happy 40th, Mac!
A Short Story About Sears Kenmore Support
In 1992 our family moved to San Jose. We rented a duplex that had its own laundry so we bought a washer and dryer from Sears and had them delivered and installed. (That Sears at Vallco Mall had a clothing display called “The Mainframe” and I loved all of it) The installers left and I… Continue reading A Short Story About Sears Kenmore Support
A Short Story about Muscle Memory
The original Macintosh famously shipped with a sharp (at the time) 72 dpi (Dots Per Inch) black and white display. Every Mac with a built-in display was the same, and being the first consumer computer with a mouse, it quickly became very easy to move the mouse to a specific button or menu, because the… Continue reading A Short Story about Muscle Memory
A Short Story About My First BBS
My grandfather gifted my first Macintosh, a Mac 128, to me in March of 1984 as a graduation gift. I spent the remainder of my senior year messing around with MacWrite and MacPaint, and writing software in MS BASIC. That summer I bought a Novation 300 baud modem and learned to call a movie times… Continue reading A Short Story About My First BBS
A Short Story About How I Got Started In Computers
It was around 1980, I was 14 and arcades were all the rage. I figured I could save myself some money if I learned how to develop games myself, as quarters went quickly! I had some simple home game systems, basically Atari Pong knockoffs that were black and white only that I had earned by… Continue reading A Short Story About How I Got Started In Computers
A Short Story about SCSI
Back in 1991, I had a lot of SCSI equipment for my Mac. SCSI was fast for the day, but it was also finicky. You could daisy chain devices, but the chain always had to end with a terminator. I had two Syquest drives, which were 40 megabyte removable hard drives(!), an Apple flatbed scanner,… Continue reading A Short Story about SCSI
A Short Story about Macs with Strange Hardware Issues
We used a wide variety of computers at The Voyager Company. One of those was a Macintosh Iici, which was used in the art department. The computer started crashing one day while doing random tasks. The folks using the machine tried the various tricks of the day, such as fixing the disk, removing extraneous “inits”… Continue reading A Short Story about Macs with Strange Hardware Issues
A Short Story about CD-ROMs
Back in 1989 we (The Voyager Company) released Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on floppy disk with an audio CD. The software played sections of the symphony on the CD as the user clicked buttons or navigated the stack. It was awesome! Later, we were working on version 2 which was super fancy in that we were… Continue reading A Short Story about CD-ROMs
Apple Pay all the way to Canada and back
We just finished a three day, four hundred mile round trip to British Columbia. We paid with Apple Pay at: Three Chevron stationsTwo McDonaldsOne Burger KingLondon DrugsTommy’s Cafe The places Apple Pay did not work was Stanley Park parking (they declined it) and the duty free shop. 80% is a pretty good acceptance rate! It… Continue reading Apple Pay all the way to Canada and back
Life is short
Don’t wait for the moments to happen.