9 ms·

Mister Macintosh (2004)

118 points by HypnoticOcelot 1y ago

neilv 1y ago
Also interesting about this story is that maybe this is how Susan Kare started working on the Mac? > I also asked my high school friend Susan Kare, who hadn't started with Apple yet, to try to draw some Mr. Macintosh animations. (For those who haven't yet seen it, here's a video of Susan Kare introducing contemporaraneous influencers to the Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso )
mindhunter 1y ago
Texaco Towers was an Apple office above a Texaco gas station: https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html
- Stratoscope 1y ago
  Strictly speaking, it was a two-story building behind the Texaco station: > There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers". I also enjoyed the reference to Cicero's Pizza: > Burell and I [Andy] liked to have lunch at Cicero's Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant that was just across the street. They had a Defender video game, which we'd play while waiting for our order. We'd also go to Cicero's around 4pm almost every day for another round of Defender playing; Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (see Make a Mess, Clean it Up!). Now I get to admit my age. When I worked at Tymshare in the 1970s, we often went there when it was still named Coppola's Pizza. It had previously been part of the Pee Wee's Pizza chain founded by Albert "Pee Wee" Proietti and Nunzio "Spike" Spacone. The Cupertino location was sold to Carmen and Palma Coppola, who named it Coppola's. They in turn sold it to their mother and father-in-law, Angelina and Nunzio Cicero. (Yes, another Nunzio.) Nunzio Cicero kept the Coppola's name out of respect to Angelina's family name, and only after she passed in 1973 he named it after himself. Cicero's Pizza moved a couple of times after that and is still in business on Bollinger Road in Cupertino. Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634476667765/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634... One fun thing about Coppola's/Cicero's is that they brought out the sliced pizza on a big round tray, but did not give out individual plates. Instead, you put a few napkins on the table and that was your plate! As you can imagine, the tables got a fine layer of pizza grease over time. Another Cupertino landmark around the corner from Coppola's/Cicero's was the R. Cali Brothers Mill on Stevens Creek. This was a huge animal feed mill and drive-through store. The front entrance sign said: “R. Cali & Bro. — Cupertino Feed Store, Ranch Spray Service, General Truck Hauling, Wood • Coal, Hay • Grain.” You could drive your truck through to load it up with farm supplies, or take your car through as I did to get dog food.
  - mwcremer 1y ago
    And the baby food jars of Parmersan and chili flakes, with nail holes poked in the lid.
  - classichasclass 1y ago
    Tymshare! What kind of work did you do for them?
    - Stratoscope 1y ago
      Programming of various sorts, mostly on the PDP-10, XDS Sigma 7, Datapoint 2200, and TI 990. I'm out of time for today, but if you have HN Replies, I will drop you another reply later this week with some details.
atommclain 1y ago
I remember reading this years ago and hoped a retro programmer would create a rom patch to implement this functionality. Maybe someday.
- toast0 1y ago
  Toasty! -- Dan Forden
- KerrAvon 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose This used MrMacHook, IIRC.
turnsout 1y ago
I bring this story up all the time. It's tragic that it was never implemented! I know you could read it as a story about CEO capriciousness, but to me it highlights how far Steve was willing to go to make the Mac playful and enjoyable. Back then, even the idea of dragging a file into a little trashcan was delightful.
- fzzzy 1y ago
  they could’ve implemented it in the 128k rom but I think jobs was gone by then
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    Imagine the rumors that a remnant of Steve still lived on in the Mac, via some as yet unidentified unremoved OS code.
    - diskzero 1y ago
      Steve lived on for quite some time in an undocumented key command you could use in the Finder. I forget the exact sequence; ctl-alt-cmd-shift space or something. It has become more broken over releases and may be gone now. We added it to make all animations go very slow. We would invoke it at Steve’s request in demo to him and he would open and close windows, show and hide sidebars, enter and exit TimeMachine and more. This shipped in numerous version of OSX.
charliewallace 1y ago
I think Mr. Macintosh should have vaguely resembled Jef Raskin...
esafak 1y ago
Sort of like a reverse Clippy, which you do find easily and wish you wouldn't. Generally speaking, programs used to have more Easter eggs. I can't recall a single one in the cloud era. The only one remotely whimsical is PostHog.
- rsync 1y ago
  "I can't recall a single one in the cloud era ..." Our PCI compliance page is an easter egg: https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    I envy you having written this, because I've wanted to do the same. I'm the adhoc IT guy / CISO / etc. for a small medical practice. I have to jump through the PCI hoops quarterly because it's an ancient junk relic of a time where Infinite Trust Networking and monthly forced password rotation were en vogue. And why do I have to do PCI stuff? Because we have a credit card scanner that patients use to pay for things. In any sane world, compliance would be on the manufacturer of the scanner: "hey, make devices that actually, you know, encrypt stuff reliably". But since we don't live in that world, I have to have a separate Ethernet drop to the card scanner, which plugs into its own dedicated port on the firewall, which completely segregates it from the rest of the LAN traffic. That isn't horrible in concept, but why? Our servers which store PHI don't have those stringent requirements, because the servers are secured. They don't have to trust that the network is kind and gentle, because they're designed with the idea that it's not. But not so the credit card scanner! For extra fun, we also have to pay someone to run a PCI compliance scan against our external IP. Said IP listens on exactly one port: the one that doctors use to VPN into the office so that they can check their schedule from home. We got a failing score one year because the VPN appliance supported — not required, but supported — some less-than-perfect crypto algorithm. None of our clients were configured to use those protocols. I know. I configured them. But because the server supported them, we were temporarily[0] judged to be noncompliant because some attacker could, I don't know, hack in and pivot in to the firewall appliance and from their pivot to attack the poor downtrodden credit card scanner which, of course, can't be expected to defend itself from the hostile environment of doctor's office LAN. PCI's a joke. [0]It would be against the scanner's ToS to temporarily block that port in our inbound firewall long enough to get them to shut up about it, so I totally did not do that.
hollerith 1y ago
I wouldn't have liked this. I don't want any part of my computer to be eerie or mysterious. I also don't want there to be anything romantic or mysterious about my bank account. If this had been deployed and its existence has been widely publicized and described right after its deployment (which seems likely to me even if Apple tried to suppress it) the only deleterious effect on me would have been my wasting a little time learning about it. If I got glimpses of Mr Macintosh before news about its existence had reached me, the effect on me would have probably been much worse. I'm a huge fan of the Mac and of the research and development which led to it at Doug Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, then at Xerox PARC, then at Apple.
- synack 1y ago
  If you wanted safe and predictable you could buy an IBM PC. Apple was trying to be something different.
- fzzzy 1y ago
  definitely seems like some people would have perceived it as a virus having infected their computer, although 1984 was pretty early for virii
  - mortenjorck 1y ago
    This was definitely the "no arrow keys because we have a mouse" era of Apple. Everything we take for granted today was still in flux, and I can certainly imagine that even by the Macintosh 512k, just enough dust had settled that Jobs had reconsidered the idea of intentionally non-deterministic OS behavior.
  - projektfu 1y ago
    True, after enough floppy swaps, your Mac probably was doing something like this. Hopefully removed the next time Disinfectant was run.
Doctor_Fegg 1y ago
The artist, Folon, also made this gorgeous close-down animation for French TV channel Antenne 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t... Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
  Tracking-free YouTube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI
- NoSalt 1y ago
  And here is Mr. Macintosh, himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:Folon_crop_%28DSC_2917%29.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:...
markus_zhang 1y ago
Sorry for my nonsense...I always get excited when I saw a post about a classic/PowerPC Macintosh (I don't like the colorful ones, though). I have never owned, used, or seen other people used one in real life. I have only seen them in YouTube videos and in articles such as this one. I don't know why I'm so excited about these cuboid machines. I need to grab an emulator and install some toolchain to work on it.
- wk_end 1y ago
  Just visit Infinite Mac and use them in your browser: https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/
  - markus_zhang 1y ago
    Thanks, I used it a few times but not sure how good it persists data -- I guess it's fine since it gives users some extra space. This is a good option for exploration.
    - xp84 1y ago
      They use local storage for persistence, and a bunch of other really neat tricks, like being able to upload zip files to get files into the emulated universe without mucking about with weird disk images and things.
stevage 1y ago
The idea of getting Mr Macintosh instead of a menu occasionally would be UX nightmare. But there could be other cute places to include it, like occasionally it's present inside About My Mac or whatever.
- qn9n 11mo ago
  This is a near perfect implementation as it doesn't actually affect the UX in anyway at all. Perhaps in more modern version he could appear behind a widget or something in the notification centre.
kasperset 1y ago
It is fun to read these small stories about Mac OS/Apple. I think for Windows world we have https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthing https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin... Not sure if other OS are covered in such a "storyful" ways or have tidbits like this?
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
He lives inside of http://mrmacintosh.com http://mrmacintosh.com , too (I use this site to download official Mac OS updates for stand-alone installations).
m463 1y ago
The talking moose did that kind of thing. "How come we don't go out anymore" "would you like to play a game?" ...

Also interesting about this story is that maybe this is how Susan Kare started working on the Mac? > I also asked my high school friend Susan Kare, who hadn't started with Apple yet, to try to draw some Mr. Macintosh animations. (For those who haven't yet seen it, here's a video of Susan Kare introducing contemporaraneous influencers to the Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso )

mindhunter 1y ago

Texaco Towers was an Apple office above a Texaco gas station: https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html

Stratoscope 1y ago
Strictly speaking, it was a two-story building behind the Texaco station: > There was a Texaco gas station at the corner, and a two-story, small, brown, wood paneled office building behind it, the kind that might house some accountants or insurance agents. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between "Taco" and "Texaco", the building quickly became known as "Texaco Towers". I also enjoyed the reference to Cicero's Pizza: > Burell and I [Andy] liked to have lunch at Cicero's Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant that was just across the street. They had a Defender video game, which we'd play while waiting for our order. We'd also go to Cicero's around 4pm almost every day for another round of Defender playing; Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (see Make a Mess, Clean it Up!). Now I get to admit my age. When I worked at Tymshare in the 1970s, we often went there when it was still named Coppola's Pizza. It had previously been part of the Pee Wee's Pizza chain founded by Albert "Pee Wee" Proietti and Nunzio "Spike" Spacone. The Cupertino location was sold to Carmen and Palma Coppola, who named it Coppola's. They in turn sold it to their mother and father-in-law, Angelina and Nunzio Cicero. (Yes, another Nunzio.) Nunzio Cicero kept the Coppola's name out of respect to Angelina's family name, and only after she passed in 1973 he named it after himself. Cicero's Pizza moved a couple of times after that and is still in business on Bollinger Road in Cupertino. Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634476667765/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/SanJoseHistory/posts/3134634... One fun thing about Coppola's/Cicero's is that they brought out the sliced pizza on a big round tray, but did not give out individual plates. Instead, you put a few napkins on the table and that was your plate! As you can imagine, the tables got a fine layer of pizza grease over time. Another Cupertino landmark around the corner from Coppola's/Cicero's was the R. Cali Brothers Mill on Stevens Creek. This was a huge animal feed mill and drive-through store. The front entrance sign said: “R. Cali & Bro. — Cupertino Feed Store, Ranch Spray Service, General Truck Hauling, Wood • Coal, Hay • Grain.” You could drive your truck through to load it up with farm supplies, or take your car through as I did to get dog food.
- mwcremer 1y ago
  And the baby food jars of Parmersan and chili flakes, with nail holes poked in the lid.
- classichasclass 1y ago
  Tymshare! What kind of work did you do for them?
  - Stratoscope 1y ago
    Programming of various sorts, mostly on the PDP-10, XDS Sigma 7, Datapoint 2200, and TI 990. I'm out of time for today, but if you have HN Replies, I will drop you another reply later this week with some details.

atommclain 1y ago

I remember reading this years ago and hoped a retro programmer would create a rom patch to implement this functionality. Maybe someday.

toast0 1y ago
Toasty! -- Dan Forden
KerrAvon 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Moose This used MrMacHook, IIRC.

turnsout 1y ago

I bring this story up all the time. It's tragic that it was never implemented! I know you could read it as a story about CEO capriciousness, but to me it highlights how far Steve was willing to go to make the Mac playful and enjoyable. Back then, even the idea of dragging a file into a little trashcan was delightful.

fzzzy 1y ago
they could’ve implemented it in the 128k rom but I think jobs was gone by then
- Nevermark 1y ago
  Imagine the rumors that a remnant of Steve still lived on in the Mac, via some as yet unidentified unremoved OS code.
  - diskzero 1y ago
    Steve lived on for quite some time in an undocumented key command you could use in the Finder. I forget the exact sequence; ctl-alt-cmd-shift space or something. It has become more broken over releases and may be gone now. We added it to make all animations go very slow. We would invoke it at Steve’s request in demo to him and he would open and close windows, show and hide sidebars, enter and exit TimeMachine and more. This shipped in numerous version of OSX.

charliewallace 1y ago

I think Mr. Macintosh should have vaguely resembled Jef Raskin...

esafak 1y ago

Sort of like a reverse Clippy, which you do find easily and wish you wouldn't. Generally speaking, programs used to have more Easter eggs. I can't recall a single one in the cloud era. The only one remotely whimsical is PostHog.

rsync 1y ago
"I can't recall a single one in the cloud era ..." Our PCI compliance page is an easter egg: https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/regulatory/pci.html
- kstrauser 1y ago
  I envy you having written this, because I've wanted to do the same. I'm the adhoc IT guy / CISO / etc. for a small medical practice. I have to jump through the PCI hoops quarterly because it's an ancient junk relic of a time where Infinite Trust Networking and monthly forced password rotation were en vogue. And why do I have to do PCI stuff? Because we have a credit card scanner that patients use to pay for things. In any sane world, compliance would be on the manufacturer of the scanner: "hey, make devices that actually, you know, encrypt stuff reliably". But since we don't live in that world, I have to have a separate Ethernet drop to the card scanner, which plugs into its own dedicated port on the firewall, which completely segregates it from the rest of the LAN traffic. That isn't horrible in concept, but why? Our servers which store PHI don't have those stringent requirements, because the servers are secured. They don't have to trust that the network is kind and gentle, because they're designed with the idea that it's not. But not so the credit card scanner! For extra fun, we also have to pay someone to run a PCI compliance scan against our external IP. Said IP listens on exactly one port: the one that doctors use to VPN into the office so that they can check their schedule from home. We got a failing score one year because the VPN appliance supported — not required, but supported — some less-than-perfect crypto algorithm. None of our clients were configured to use those protocols. I know. I configured them. But because the server supported them, we were temporarily[0] judged to be noncompliant because some attacker could, I don't know, hack in and pivot in to the firewall appliance and from their pivot to attack the poor downtrodden credit card scanner which, of course, can't be expected to defend itself from the hostile environment of doctor's office LAN. PCI's a joke. [0]It would be against the scanner's ToS to temporarily block that port in our inbound firewall long enough to get them to shut up about it, so I totally did not do that.

hollerith 1y ago

I wouldn't have liked this. I don't want any part of my computer to be eerie or mysterious. I also don't want there to be anything romantic or mysterious about my bank account. If this had been deployed and its existence has been widely publicized and described right after its deployment (which seems likely to me even if Apple tried to suppress it) the only deleterious effect on me would have been my wasting a little time learning about it. If I got glimpses of Mr Macintosh before news about its existence had reached me, the effect on me would have probably been much worse. I'm a huge fan of the Mac and of the research and development which led to it at Doug Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, then at Xerox PARC, then at Apple.

synack 1y ago
If you wanted safe and predictable you could buy an IBM PC. Apple was trying to be something different.
fzzzy 1y ago
definitely seems like some people would have perceived it as a virus having infected their computer, although 1984 was pretty early for virii
- mortenjorck 1y ago
  This was definitely the "no arrow keys because we have a mouse" era of Apple. Everything we take for granted today was still in flux, and I can certainly imagine that even by the Macintosh 512k, just enough dust had settled that Jobs had reconsidered the idea of intentionally non-deterministic OS behavior.
- projektfu 1y ago
  True, after enough floppy swaps, your Mac probably was doing something like this. Hopefully removed the next time Disinfectant was run.

Doctor_Fegg 1y ago

The artist, Folon, also made this gorgeous close-down animation for French TV channel Antenne 2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5tD https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t... Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon

ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago
Tracking-free YouTube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI
NoSalt 1y ago
And here is Mr. Macintosh, himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:Folon_crop_%28DSC_2917%29.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:...

markus_zhang 1y ago

Sorry for my nonsense...I always get excited when I saw a post about a classic/PowerPC Macintosh (I don't like the colorful ones, though). I have never owned, used, or seen other people used one in real life. I have only seen them in YouTube videos and in articles such as this one. I don't know why I'm so excited about these cuboid machines. I need to grab an emulator and install some toolchain to work on it.

wk_end 1y ago
Just visit Infinite Mac and use them in your browser: https://infinitemac.org/ https://infinitemac.org/
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  Thanks, I used it a few times but not sure how good it persists data -- I guess it's fine since it gives users some extra space. This is a good option for exploration.
  - xp84 1y ago
    They use local storage for persistence, and a bunch of other really neat tricks, like being able to upload zip files to get files into the emulated universe without mucking about with weird disk images and things.

stevage 1y ago

The idea of getting Mr Macintosh instead of a menu occasionally would be UX nightmare. But there could be other cute places to include it, like occasionally it's present inside About My Mac or whatever.

qn9n 11mo ago
This is a near perfect implementation as it doesn't actually affect the UX in anyway at all. Perhaps in more modern version he could appear behind a widget or something in the notification centre.

kasperset 1y ago

It is fun to read these small stories about Mac OS/Apple. I think for Windows world we have https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthing https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin... Not sure if other OS are covered in such a "storyful" ways or have tidbits like this?

ProllyInfamous 1y ago

He lives inside of http://mrmacintosh.com http://mrmacintosh.com , too (I use this site to download official Mac OS updates for stand-alone installations).

m463 1y ago

The talking moose did that kind of thing. "How come we don't go out anymore" "would you like to play a game?" ...