The Forgotten Mac OS Licensee (1991)

The Forgotten Mac OS Licensee (1991)

Author: Derek July 21, 2026 Duration: 20:41

Original text by Dan Littman, Tom Moran, and Charles Piller.

Apologies for my rough voice in this one. It’s been a difficult year.

“Apple and IBM will work together on architecture-independent multimedia products and license them to other vendors.” IBM never so much as bothered to license QuickTime, and allegedly stopped distributing its multimedia tools to discourage people from using AIX for multimedia delivery.

The stupefyingly vague and dull Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance press conference. Warning: do not consume while driving or operating heavy machinery.

Get to know your new IBM RS/6000 system!

David Barnes talking about Taligent and Workplace/OS, because why not transplant your current computing environment on top of an environment that runs all environments that will be shipping Real Soon Now for … reasons?

WWDC 1997 Q&A: What’s holding back CHRP? Is Apple afraid of (gasp) being undercut by Macintosh clone makers?

clabretro: RS/6000 startup sequence and 1990s GeoCities animé fan page font in the System Management Services console. Installing and running CorelDraw, Netscape 1.0, and Quake on an RS/6000.

Remnants of CHRP in the AIX netinstall configuration assistant.

Running Windows NT on a G3? More likely than you think.

Cameron Kaiser’s extremely detailed look at Netware Server on a Power Mac 6100. How about that artwork?

That weird point in time where the highest performance AppleShare solution was a giant Apple box running AIX.

Get a load of the chonky Motorola PowerStack systems.


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
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Plan Be (1997) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

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Original text by Henry Bortman and Jeff Pittelkau, MacUser, January 1997. How does BeOS measure up to System 7.5, and could it have become the next-generation Mac OS? The authors examine why Copland would not have been t…
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Original text by Dave Mark, MacTech, January 1997. Bryan Cantrill on interviewing at Be, Inc. (perhaps with Dominic Giampolo?) and inadvertently buying a VFS architecture at the Be bankruptcy auction. Apple wouldn’t have…
The Desktop Christmas '94 (1994) [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 17:27
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