CHM has an original Al Alcorn inspired "My other computer is a Cray" T-shirt that your received if you used the machine. Here is a hacked up picture of the front and back. I was thinking of buying the one on eBay, but I'd have no use for it since I don't wear T-shirts ever.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/atg/aquarius/MyOtherComputerIsACray.jpg

the original
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102741687/

The original rationale for Apple buying the Cray and Sam Holland's whole organization within ATG was just weird. One little lie about "Pencil Test" being rendered on Macs was that the ending title sequence was actually done on the Cray. I was the person who did the frame by frame transfers though the Abekas frame store, then copied all the frames out to Sony D1 tape.

Here is a better quality "Pencil Test Behind the Scenes" than what is on YouTube, done from my VHS copy a long time ago.

https://bitsavers.org/aek/PENCIL_TEST_BEHIND_THE_SCENES512K_Stream.mp4

#AppleLore

A walking tour of original Apple Buildings.

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

It was the "Good Earth" building because the Good Earth resturant (aka The Bad Dirt) was next door.

Catapult, started by ex Apple people, was in that building in the 90s and were somewhat infamous for making "cryo-bombs" with dry ice and liter soda bottles.

#AppleLore

A rabbit-hole on message boards and corporate culture...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALL-IN-1

to

https://skipwalter.net/2012/01/13/the-making-of-enterprise-software-all-in-1/

to
https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/2012/12/14/vax-notes/

who was also the author of a bunch of out of print books on AI1

to

The case of VAX Notes

https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/vaxnotes.pdf

which just got me thinking (again) about how inter-office communications
is directly tied to corporate culture

Sun and SGI had internal USENET groups, with all of the internal hacker ethic flames
that implies

Apple NEVER had unmoderated company-wide employee discussion lists while I was there,
going back to the days of AppleLink

USENET rarely came up in discussions, then it was at beer busts between Unix people.

I wonder how long before every web "discourse" like channel is "moderated" by some
all-knowing invisible LLM "moderator" in the background.

#AppleLore

I spent way too much money obtaining this on eBay, because I couldn't find my copy. Must have thrown it out decades ago because it didn't match any prototype we built.

The Jaguar System ERS, ca. 1989

Jaguar/Hurricane was the 88110 RISC desktop system Apple never shipped. Tessaract was a 601 system with BLT bus slots. TNT (The New Tessaract) was the 2nd gen PowerMac with PCI instead of BLT slots. We only ever had a couple of semi-functional 88110s for Hurricane before the PPC Deal of the Century happened in summer 1991.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/risc_products/jaguar

Sad that most of the "advanced" stuff in Jaguar, like pre-Quicktime "multimedia" woudn't have made much difference in the marketplace and it was too early for ubiquitous high-speed networking. It also was going to support up to four 88110 processors.

Oh.. it was also tied at the hip to Pink 😞

About the only architectural thing that survived was descriptor-based DMA that was part of the Mazda I/O engine.

I need to write the whole history of this someday. You can find tons of info on PDM (the first PPC Mac to ship) in places like Gary Davidian's CHM oral history. This is the system he talks about that he thought would never ship because it was incompatible with existing Mac software.

We could have ported Unix to it, but that was never even considered either by us, or the team that was working on a 88110 server in Networking and Communications. Theirs was called "Shiner" and was obviously different from what they eventually shipped with a PPC in it.

#AppleLore

Knee deep right now in scanning DTS draft documents of all those comm products Buzz Dean's N&C group did for interoperability on Macs in the late 80s that no one remembers.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/communications

and the light bulb came on while scanning the MacX document why the code name was "Malcolm"

#AppleLore #Bitsavers

APDA Macintosh Smalltalk-80 v0.4
http://bitsavers.org/bits/Apple/APDA/KMSST4_Macintosh_Smalltalk-80_0.4_19870609

#AppleLore #bitsavers

so right about now, someone is going to tell me "I didn't know you were looking for that!"

https://www.ebay.com/itm/197127951636

I have never seen a copy before this.

#bitsavers #AppleLore

January 2025 is the 20th anniversary of my quitting Apple (Oct86-Jan05) and next year will be the 20th anniversary of me being software curator at the Computer History Museum.

Choosing which of the two was less stressful and having an impact on the world is easy.

#AppleLore #bitsavers

Most of the 1988 issues of VLSI Systems Design
https://bitsavers.org/magazines/VLSI_Systems_Design

Apple ran a full page ad for ASIC designers that feature a die plot of Pete Foley's sound chip

https://web.archive.org/web/20190102164746/http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-macintosh/

This brought back memories for me. Pete was working on the same floor in VG6 as I did. He developed it with VTI tools on a Ridge32 computer. The display was an AED 1280 graphics terminal that I helped design before coming to Apple along with James Lundblad, who co-designed the JMFB Nubus graphics ASIC.

#bitsavers #AppleLore