[HN Gopher] Mister Macintosh (2004)
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Mister Macintosh (2004)
Author : HypnoticOcelot
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-10-03 02:03 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (folklore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (folklore.org)
| neilv wrote:
| 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 )
| mindhunter wrote:
| Texaco Towers was an Apple office above a Texaco gas station:
| https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html
| Stratoscope wrote:
| 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/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.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Tymshare! What kind of work did you do for them?
| mwcremer wrote:
| And the baby food jars of Parmersan and chili flakes, with
| nail holes poked in the lid.
| atommclain wrote:
| I remember reading this years ago and hoped a retro programmer
| would create a rom patch to implement this functionality. Maybe
| someday.
| toast0 wrote:
| Toasty! -- Dan Forden
| turnsout wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| they could've implemented it in the 128k rom but I think jobs
| was gone by then
| Nevermark wrote:
| Imagine the rumors that a remnant of Steve still lived on in
| the Mac, via some as yet unidentified unremoved OS code.
| charliewallace wrote:
| I think Mr. Macintosh should have vaguely resembled Jef Raskin...
| esafak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Fail Whale and other 404 messages were decent examples.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The Dogs of Amazon are still a thing. I saw one a few weeks
| ago.
| tpmoney wrote:
| The lack of Easter eggs in programs I feel like is a
| combination of 3 things
|
| 1) more "professionalism" being expected in software. Computers
| aren't quirky things anymore they're "serious business" and
| "serious businesses don't do quirky". Or some other such
| nonsense.
|
| 2) Offense risk, something innocuous has serious potential to
| be taken wrong now or even at some future date. I worked on a
| system where we needed to impose some effectively arbitrary max
| limit on the number of items allowed to be configured. We
| eventually settled on "640k" and originally had an error if you
| exceed that that said "640k ought to be enough for anyone". The
| devs who would have seen that message would have gotten the
| reference and hopefully had a good chuckle. But I've seen
| customers get short about innocuous jokes before and could
| easily have seen someone complaining that we weren't taking
| their needs seriously.
|
| 3) Security liability. A lot of Easter eggs were distinct code
| paths or sometimes even entire tiny embedded applications. In
| an ever connected world where your credit card terminal might
| be the gateway to your entire customer database, any
| unnecessary code path is also a potential security hole and
| risk. No one really wants to be in the news because a cute joke
| their developers put in 4 years ago was the key to a massive
| exploit.
|
| Still I do agree that I miss some the "personality" older
| software could have.
| mwcremer wrote:
| To point 2, even regular user interface can be hazardous:
| https://www.folklore.org/Do_It.html
| xp84 wrote:
| Given that (I think?) the "OK/Cancel" dialog of the
| original Mac is one of those 'foundational' UI conventions
| that was copied pretty directly by every GUI that came
| after it, I am very curious if our world wouldn't be full
| of "Do It" buttons if this episode hadn't taken place. Even
| the Start Menu could have been called the "Do" menu in that
| alternate universe.
| projektfu wrote:
| I remember FoxPro 2.5 said, "Better call MAACO, you just
| crashed!" in some circumstance. Thankfully that seemed to
| improve with resetting the computer the time I saw it.
|
| If the file had been corrupted, I wouldn't have found it as
| funny.
| esafak wrote:
| A LucasArts game called _Day of the Tentacle_ famously
| contained the entirety of its predecessor, _Maniac Mansion_.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "your credit card terminal might be the gateway to your
| entire customer database."
|
| That is not the way it works now. The standard is 4 levels of
| encryption, most have 8. Multiple sign-offs for every single
| code change.
|
| Your credit card terminal is a gateway to the signtors
| transaction database, last transaction, balance, current
| transaction. Every single code path is mapped out
| meticulously, at least on the most popular ones, and crypto
| keys are not padded like the very cheap ones.
| bitwize wrote:
| They're security issues, that's why. Microsoft used to have fun
| ones in Windows and Office (including a Doom-like engine in
| Excel 95) but in the late 90s or early 2000s they were all
| taken out by corporate fiat, because they don't add value and
| may contain security vulnerabilities. Since then, Easter eggs
| in user-facing software were rare (except for maybe Google
| Search's "do a barrel roll" and that).
| lkramer wrote:
| I feel that GNU Terry Pratchett is a cute little harmless
| easter egg that can be easily implemented:
| https://gnuterrypratchett.com/
|
| https://www.theregister.com/ have it for instance.
| comex wrote:
| Discord has lots of Easter eggs, presumably because of its
| gaming origins.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Generally speaking, programs used to have more Easter eggs. I
| can't recall a single one in the cloud era.
|
| The problem with Easter Eggs in the web era is that as soon as
| one person finds it, everyone knows about it. Part of the fun
| in the boxed software era was that you either had to find it
| yourself or hear about it from a friend.
|
| That being said, we did have an easter egg on reddit for a long
| time that very few people noticed. Robots.txt included this:
| User-Agent: bender Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
| User-Agent: Gort Disallow: /earth
| arcfour wrote:
| I know MS put the kibosh on most easter eggs after some
| "trustworthy software" initiative in the early 2000s, which I
| think was to assuage government concerns that they could also
| be sneaking malicious backdoors into their software (silly
| reasoning), or that there could be vulnerabilities caused by an
| easter egg (ehhh...maybe).
| hollerith wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you wanted safe and predictable you could buy an IBM PC.
| Apple was trying to be something different.
| fzzzy wrote:
| definitely seems like some people would have perceived it as a
| virus having infected their computer, although 1984 was pretty
| early for virii
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| True, after enough floppy swaps, your Mac probably was doing
| something like this. Hopefully removed the next time
| Disinfectant was run.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| The artist, Folon, also made this gorgeous close-down animation
| for French TV channel Antenne 2:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI&pp=0gcJCRsBo7VqN5t...
|
| Wikipedia bio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon
| NoSalt wrote:
| And here is Mr. Macintosh, himself:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Folon#/media/File:...
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Tracking-free YouTube link:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mzy9GGbcvSI
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Just visit Infinite Mac and use them in your browser:
|
| https://infinitemac.org/
| markus_zhang wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kasperset wrote:
| 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/oldnewthin...
| Not sure if other OS are covered in such a "storyful" ways or
| have tidbits like this?
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| He lives inside of http://mrmacintosh.com , too (I use this site
| to download official Mac OS updates for stand-alone
| installations).
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