Mister Macintosh (2004) (folklore.org)

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 )

Texaco Towers was an Apple office above a Texaco gas station: https://www.folklore.org/Texaco_Towers.html

I remember reading this years ago and hoped a retro programmer would create a rom patch to implement this functionality. Maybe someday.

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.

I think Mr. Macintosh should have vaguely resembled Jef Raskin...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

He lives inside of http://mrmacintosh.com , too (I use this site to download official Mac OS updates for stand-alone installations).

The talking moose did that kind of thing.

"How come we don't go out anymore"

"would you like to play a game?"

...