1988: Apple's Year In Review (1989)

Mac Folklore Radio

The Macintosh’s year in review for 1988: some reached milestones, some threw stones, and some wished they’d stayed at home. Original text by the late Charles Seiter, Macworld, January 1989. Macworld: In Memoriam.

Charles was just 58 when he passed. If you ever spotted a heavy math, science, or programming and development tool-related article in Macworld, you could be certain to find Charles’ name nearby. I believe this particular article was, unfortunately, his only excursion into humorous editorials.

I had a little contact with Charles back in 2004 after I thanked Macworld’s team of contributing editors for teaching me that, contrary to what I had been taught in school, writing could be fun.

Clip of Jean-Louis Gassee’s story about having dinner with John Sculley from the 2011 “Steve Jobs’ Legacy” event at the Churchill Club. Even the Newton marketing team acknowledged people sort of looked down upon John Sculley’s technical background. Gassee’s new book “Grateful Geek” is out now. His old book is too.

nVIR clip from Don Swaim interview with Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo’s Egg. The WayBack Machine does not have the source file but I do.

The Computer Chronicles’ whirlwind tour of Boston Macworld Expo 1988.

Bill Gates’ observation about borrowing ideas from Xerox.

On the DRAM crisis of 1988.

Mainframe and VAX connectivity makes up a fairly large percentage of the marketing material coming out of Apple in the late ‘80s, as you can see from The ReDiscovered Future and the Apple User Group VHS Archive. As told by Bob Supnik and many others, DEC was already thoroughly doomed by the late 1980s.

Pre-QuickTime Video production on the Mac II was, by today’s standards, weird and expensive. WordPerfect 1.0 and 2.0 weren’t heralded as very Mac-like, unlike v3.5, which shipped around the time Microsoft Word 6 ate everyone else’s lunch.

Not all early CD-ROM titles were as compelling as Myst: About Cows v3.09, $40USD.

How AutoCAD was ported to the Macintosh II–with a dirty hack.

Apple and Stephen Wolfram pushing Mathematica 1.0.

The first few years of fax software on the Macintosh were a bit of a disaster. Apple’s entry was particularly embarrassing. Macworld even called the AppleFax software/hardware package “beleaguered”.

1989 was the year John Norstad’s Disinfectant began to spread like wildfire. We usually received a new version every 3-6 months via my father’s employer. It’s remarkable software distribution at that scale happened at all when you think about how few people people had modems back then.