The Desktop Critic - How to Become a Millionare Overnight (1996)

The Desktop Critic - How to Become a Millionare Overnight (1996)

Author: Derek March 9, 2025 Duration: 13:09

Eight best-selling Mac products that don’t exist–yet.

Original text by David Pogue, Macworld April 1996.

More on the history of DiskDoubler.

John V. Holder’s TakeABreak has recently been uncovered from the depths of archive.org.

A hybrid of the imaginary Concatenator Pro and PocketBoot might be Startup Doubler, which gloms together all your extensions (internally, not on the filesystem) to accelerate startup. Apple sort of tried to make extensions management easier by including Ricardo Batista’s Extensions Manager with System 7.5 and later.

I’ve lost track of the number of Uninstaller-type software that’s been produced for the Mac since this article was written, not that I would ever touch any of them.

MacBreakZ is an awful lot like the imaginary Carpal Diem.

From ~2010-2014, I always thought of NexTag as a real-world PriceDex. It’s a shame it disappeared. CamelCamelCamel fills the void for those who haven’t yet separated themselves from Amazon.

Nobody ever went so far as to produce an INIT magazine but Symbionts will give you more technical insight into your System Folder. My all-time favourite feature: a file-by-file breakdown of how much memory is allocated by each INIT and cdev.

Things I don’t miss about the old days: holding my breath while capturing analog video, and waiting for machines with mechanical HDDs to boot. The PocketBoot would nearly useless today anyhow–not because of SSDs, but because Apple is actively striving to make it impossible to boot from external media. Thanks, Tim Cook! Super useful, good job. All because SECURITY. …except in the UK and everywhere else, shortly. Mmmkay, how about you let us boot from external devices again while you’re at it? Better yet, throw out the current version of Mac OS, fork Snow Leopard, and start things over from there, kthxbai

Scott Joplin “Maple Leaf Rag” clip courtesy of ConcertWare.

PPG Wave 2.3 demo courtesy of RetroSound.

More about CANYON.MID, composer George Stone, and how his work ended up shipping with most copies of Windows from 1991-1996. Composed on a Mac running Passport Designs’ Master Tracks Pro.

Live performance of CANYON.MID…?

The canyon.mid Simulator and hard rock cover (pun not intended).


Derek hosts Mac Folklore Radio, a podcast that serves as a warm, nostalgic conversation about the machines that defined personal computing for a generation. This isn't a dry technical history, but rather a collection of stories, memories, and shared experiences centered on the Macintosh ecosystem from its early beige-box days through the colorful iMac era and beyond. Each episode feels like digging through a box of old software manuals and rediscovering the community, the quirks, and the sheer sense of possibility those computers inspired. You'll hear tales of first setups, beloved and baffling peripherals, the games that consumed hours, and the software that felt like magic. It's crafted specifically for those who lived through it-the users, tinkerers, and enthusiasts who remember the hum of a CRT and the distinct scent of a warm motherboard. Tune in for a dose of genuine, fond reminiscence that functions as comfort food for the Apple-centric soul, preserving the personal side of tech history one story at a time. This podcast is a love letter to the culture built around these machines, celebrating the folklore that official manuals never recorded.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

Mac Folklore Radio
Podcast Episodes
Jonathan Schwartz - Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal (2010) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 11:59
What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you. Original text by Jonathan Schwartz. More about Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance. Sun famously sued Microsoft over their incompatible J…
James Thomson - Mac OS X Dock History (2025) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 14:57
Original text by James Thomson. DragThing, one of many Dock-like tools for classic Mac OS. PCalc for classic and modern Mac OS/iOS. Some PCalc history. The One True Place for the Dock may be at the bottom of the screen,…
Darin Adler: 20 Years of Computer Software (1996) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:37
Original text by Darin Adler. An overview of the Motorola MEK6800D2 single board computer/development kit. Roger Heinen “engineers are a dime a dozen” story from episode 40 of the Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs…
Craig Hickman - The History of Kid Pix (2013) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 27:39
How a little paint program became a worldwide phenomenon. Original text by Craig Hickman. Craig talks about his 8-bit Atari projects on episode 378 of the ANTIC Podcast. Apple honoured Craig in their already-zapped-from-…
Greg Maletic on OpenDoc (2006) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:33
Original text by Greg Maletic who is now at Panic, one of the few companies still making beautiful native non-Electron, non-Flutter Mac desktop applications–an endangered species. A technical walkthrough of OpenDoc from…
Apple's 1989 Year In Review (1990) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:51
Original text by Steven Levy, Macworld January 1990. The sad story of dBASE Mac, which was quickly sold off and briefly revived as nuBASE. Followup article. MindWrite and how it relates to the collapse of mail order hous…
That Time I Had Steve Jobs Keynote at Unix Expo (1991) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 11:37
Original text by Chris MacAskill at the now-defunct cake.co. “Team FDA” jean jacket pictures in the comments (scroll down). Steve Jobs with the 1991 Unix Expo keynote audience under hypnosis. (scroll down) Lotus Improv t…
Steve Hayman - A Different Apple/NeXT Story (1995) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 4:28
Original text by Steve Hayman. Humungous Entertainment’s CD-ROM titles for classic Macs. The infamous Power Mac 5200 featured the horrendously slow PowerPC 603 (not the 603e). As if that wasn’t bad enough, a recycled mot…
The Desktop Critic - High Trek (1994) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 18:44
Original text by David Pogue, Macworld May 1994. Products mentioned in this article: Interplay’s “Star Trek: 25th Anniversary” adventure game download, CD-ROM download with voice acting, complete playthrough on YouTube.…
Left Behind: A Be, Inc. and BeOS Post-Mortem (2024) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:39
A broader look at the circumstances surrounding the demise of BeOS. Original text by me. Text version available. No links here this time; they’re all inside the text version.