Early Macintosh System 7 Docs

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

I see a pair of volumes called the “Blue Book”, from 1989, have appeared
at Bitsavers <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/apple/mac/blue/>.

This is from an early stage in the development of Macintosh System 7. I’m
not sure whether things were falling apart at this stage, but once work
got under way, there was a split into different factions working on
different competing things, with no overall coherent direction.

Eventually a group calling themselves the “Blue Meanies” staged a palace
coup to get things under control, sort out what was achievable, chuck out
the rest, and concentrating on putting together a shipping product. Which
finally appeared, after all the delays, in May 1991.

As I understand it, the codename “Blue” came from a planning meeting where
a long list of future OS features was divided into two groups: those which
were felt to be achievable on top of the existing MacOS framework (still
System 6 I believe, at this stage) were written on blue post-it notes,
while those requiring a more radical OS rework were written on pink ones.

(As for the term “Blue Meanies” ... anybody remember a certain psychedelic
film featuring music from the Beatles?)

So the “Blue” project concentrated on trying to implement was written on
those blue post-its, while the pink ones were gathered into the longer-
term “Pink” project.

[Niklas Karlsson]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
As I understand it, the codename “Blue” came from a planning meeting where
a long list of future OS features was divided into two groups: those which
were felt to be achievable on top of the existing MacOS framework (still
System 6 I believe, at this stage) were written on blue post-it notes,
while those requiring a more radical OS rework were written on pink ones.
(As for the term “Blue Meanies” ... anybody remember a certain psychedelic
film featuring music from the Beatles?)
So the “Blue” project concentrated on trying to implement was written on
those blue post-its, while the pink ones were gathered into the longer-
term “Pink” project.

Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently in-vogue
"agile" workflows.

Niklas

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On 10 May 2024 11:08:53 GMT

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently in-vogue
"agile" workflows.

The principles, as originally conceived (mostly by observation of
successful teams), were pretty good but the dogmatic religion that has been
built from them is rather less so and the actual implementation of that
religion when driven by management guided by "agile coaches" tends to focus
on all the wrong things with the inevitable result that the pot is stirred
with the wrong end of the stick.

[Niklas Karlsson]

Post by Ahem A Rivet's Shot
On 10 May 2024 11:08:53 GMT

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently in-vogue
"agile" workflows.

The principles, as originally conceived (mostly by observation of
successful teams), were pretty good but the dogmatic religion that has been
built from them is rather less so and the actual implementation of that
religion when driven by management guided by "agile coaches" tends to focus
on all the wrong things with the inevitable result that the pot is stirred
with the wrong end of the stick.

Very well put. I have nothing to add or disagree with, really.

Niklas

[John Ames]

On 10 May 2024 11:08:53 GMT

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently
in-vogue "agile" workflows.

*glances at desk*

I never realized I was cutting-edge! I'd like to offer my services as a
consultant; I'm thinking...oh, $10k/wk, for starters?

[Kurt Weiske]

To: John Ames
-=> John Ames wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently
in-vogue "agile" workflows.

JA> *glances at desk*

JA> I never realized I was cutting-edge! I'd like to offer my services as a
JA> consultant; I'm thinking...oh, $10k/wk, for starters?

I remember a "Productivity consultant" who was selling a stand-up
tri-fold posterboard and post-it notes. I believe it was a kanban board,
pre-kanban. Imagine busting that out at a coffee shop with your StarTac
phone.

kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
| http://realitycheckbbs.org
| 1:218/***@fidonet



... Feed the recording back out of the medium
--- MultiMail/Win v0.52
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Win32 NewsLink 1.114
* realitycheckBBS - Aptos, CA - telnet://realitycheckbbs.org

[D]

Post by Niklas Karlsson

As I understand it, the codename “Blue” came from a planning meeting where
a long list of future OS features was divided into two groups: those which
were felt to be achievable on top of the existing MacOS framework (still
System 6 I believe, at this stage) were written on blue post-it notes,
while those requiring a more radical OS rework were written on pink ones.
(As for the term “Blue Meanies” ... anybody remember a certain psychedelic
film featuring music from the Beatles?)
So the “Blue” project concentrated on trying to implement was written on
those blue post-its, while the pink ones were gathered into the longer-
term “Pink” project.

Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently in-vogue
"agile" workflows.
Niklas

Please don't mention the a-word, it makes me throw up. =(

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Planning work by post-its brings to mind the various currently in-vogue
"agile" workflows.

Aren’t you glad we don’t have a “software crisis” any more?

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I see a pair of volumes called the “Blue Book”, from 1989, have appeared
at Bitsavers <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/apple/mac/blue/>.

I’ve been looking into these in a bit more detail. Volume 1 contains major
sections on “Skia”, “Bass” (as in the fish), “Ginsu” and “Boffin”.

“Skia” was the project that created the ill-fated QuickDraw GX. It never
made it into the System 7.0 release, but finally shipped about two years
later.

“Bass” was an early version of the project that became TrueType. This
document mentions both the “Bass” and “Royal” codenames, but also
describes some features (ligatures and reordering) that were never part of
TrueType itself, but were incorporated into the much more extensive
QuickDraw GX typography stack.

Then there was “Ginsu”, a proposed new printing architecture. Again, this
did not ship with System 7.0, but became part of QuickDraw GX instead when
that came out, and then was abandoned not long after that.

“Boffin” was the project that shipped as QuickDraw GX typography. I think
this was the one part of GX that was salvaged when the rest was dumped,
and became “Apple Advanced Typography” in Mac OS X. I recall one of the GX
engineers telling me that their code implementation was used to debug the
Unicode bidirectional layout algorithm.

If this sounds like “OpenType” to you, note that the two technologies took
quite different paths: GX typography built a full state machine into the
font to handle glyph substitution and layout, while OpenType took a more
declarative approach, with a set of rules following a fixed format.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
“Skia” was the project that created the ill-fated QuickDraw GX.

Some may have come across the name “Skia” more recently. A group of the
QuickDraw GX engineers left Apple (laid off?) and founded a company, and
created a product, called “Skia”. This was a 2D graphics API, similar to
QuickDraw in some ways but simpler, intended for embedded use.

Later, Google bought the company and open-sourced the software. Then they
bought another company, called Android, which was working on a complete OS
stack for smartphones. Naturally this would need a graphics API (for 2D
GUI rendering, in addition to OpenGL ES for 3D, of course). So Skia was
brought in to fill the bill.

So there we go: a spiritual descendant of that long-defunct Apple
technology continues to live on in your smartphone. Though, ironically,
not if you have an Apple one.

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

Post by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I see a pair of volumes called the “Blue Book”, from 1989, have appeared
at Bitsavers <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/apple/mac/blue/>.

Some highlights from volume 2:

The “Gestalt” service for doing environment enquiries (and which third-
party developers could hook into) came out very quickly, in System 6.0.4
as I recall.

The “Jaws” project for a “universal ROM” also came out before System 7;
the Mac LC and IIsi machines of 1990 had 512K “Universal” ROMs, and the
System version that came out with them was 6.0.7. (Actually 6.0.6, which
at the last minute was found to have some unspecified nasty bug in it, and
so had to be hastily replaced with 6.0.7.)

There is mention of a backup system called “Calvin and Hobbes”, but I
don’t recall any actual shipping product resembling that description.

The “976” project did finally ship as AppleTalk Remote Access, but not
with System 7.0: instead, it came out in 1992 with the first “PowerBook”
laptops and System 7.0.1. Only those laptop buyers got ARA bundled;
everybody else had to pay for it.