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0K on disk
February 1986
FullPaint
Two full-screen bitmap paintings shipped with FullPaint in early February 1986:
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0K on disk
January 1986
MacWorld Expo 1986 San FranciscoDates: January 16-18, 1986
Cost: $
Attendees: ?
Exhibitors: ?
CEO John Sculley introduced the Macintosh Plus together with a minor revision of Apple’s laser printer, the LaserWriter Plus.
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1K on disk
December 1985
FWB Disk UtilityAmong those who worked with SCSI hard drives and Macs in the 1980s, one question always came up: Silverlining or FWB? The question was one of disk formatters — which utility did you use to erase new disks, set the interleave for the speed of the SCSI bus on your Mac, and otherwise work with mass storage?
Although by the time I used these programs I associated them with their respective hardware bundlers (FWB and LaCie), apparently at least the FWB utility had its origins in pure software. Or that’s the impression I get from this ad found in a December 1985 copy of MacUser:
Apparently in this stage of the game, the real market was for utilities to break disk-based copy-protection so that users could install programs on their serial hard drives.
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2K on disk
September 1985
BMUG and MacRecorderWe take recording audio on personal computers for granted nowadays. Without audio-in, we wouldn’t be able to use Skype, record a video for YouTube, or sing along with GarageBand. But before audio became a standard feature of the personal computer, there was a group of volunteers in Berkeley, California who figured out how to get sound into their Macs.
A graduate student in Math, Michael P. Lamoureux, is credited with the original design of the digitizer hardware. Plans were published in the Fall 1985 BMUG Newsletter, enabling anyone handy with basic electronics to construct the device. The box plugged into the serial port on the back of the Macintosh.
The first comprehensive coverage I can find about building MacRecorder is from the Fall 1985 BMUG Newsletter — but it’s possible the Spring issue of that year, or the 1984 Newsletter (only distributed on floppy disk) have earlier plans. The Fall 1985 Newsletter actually includes three articles about MacRecorder, including the source code of a basic program to receive digitized audio from the device:
Farallon, a company that productized several BMUG inventions (including PhoneNET adapters), released a commercial version of the product in early 1988. MacWeek showed a preview in December 1987:
Intriguingly the article mentions “SoundTrack, a sophisticated sound editor.” This is undoubtably SoundEdit, the famous software written by Steve Capps in 1986. Farallon was perhaps considering renaming it to differentiate their version, but it shipped (as near as I can tell) as SoundEdit, not SoundTrack.
