Screaming into Speakers and Time Machines

While listening to MyMac.com podcast 152, driving my daily 45 mile commute to work last Friday, I kept screaming into the car speakers “John Norstad!!!” when the question was raised as to who wrote the venerable freeware Mac anti-virus program “Disinfectant”. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my time machine with me, so my screams went unanswered… What a great flashback for an old-timer like me. Unfortunately for the Mac community, John “retired” Disinfectant way back in 1998.

John rewrote the core code for yet another (old timers will appreciate that pun) great old Mac program, the newsgroup reader “NewsWatcher”, which was originally written by Apple employee Steve Falkenburg. The source code was openly published (though it still officially belongs to Northwestern University), and the core code remains the core for many newsreaders still out there today. I still use Brian Clark’s Thoth, which contains a lot of NewsWatcher code.

Read about John’s exploits here.

That discourse brought back a flood of memories of other Mac shareware authors who go back to the days of dinosaurs and System 6… Andrew Welch is still around in a big way, as president of Ambrosia Software.

Back in the mid 1980s, another Mac pioneer, David Rakowski, began designing new fonts, and bringing back tons of older fonts, using the then new took, Fontographer, from a struggling software company, Altsys, of Plano, Texas, and began publishing huge numbers of PostScript fonts as shareware. David’s were all very well done, and made available literally hundreds of display fonts for designers just getting used to using computers for their design work. View and download here. One of the interesting copyright law loopholes is that a font design cannot be copyrighted–only the name and the computer code used to render the font, so many of these “500 Million TrueType Fonts for $20” CD collections, are based upon older traditional text and display fonts (mostly) scanned from specimen books and redrawn, and are usually poorly done. Others, trying to take a shortcut, rename pirated commercial and shareware (like Rakowski’s) type libraries from Adobe, Agfa, Bitstream, and other companies. Adobe, among others, has been known to put some traceable code in their font files, and successfully went after many of these pirates.

Speaking of old Mac software, for those who don’t remember, Adobe closely-protected the specifications for the “Type 1” format, so products like Fontographer had to use the less-standardized “Type 3” format. Adobe had a major change of attitude when Apple and Microsoft cross-licensed font rendering technologies that eventually became TrueType (in the early days, TrueType fonts were the bane of prepress operators, but modern font creation tools create TrueType formatted fonts that render every bit as well as PostScript Type 1 fonts), and opened the spec to the world. The fact that Altsys had also just announced they had reverse-engineered the Type 1 standard I’m sure had nothing to do with Adobe’s licensing the Type 1 specs to the world. Through a convoluted series of events, one of Altsys’ products, Freehand (a major competitor to Adobe’s Illustrator), was marketed by Aldus, creators of PageMaker. Adobe purchased Aldus, so publishing rights reverted to Altsys. Enter Macromedia, who quickly snapped up little Altsys and successfully marketed Freehand for a few years, and less successfully marketed Fontographer (heck–they ignored it–it only had one major upgrade in the ten years or so they owned the product). When Adobe grabbed Macromedia to get their Flash technology, they killed Freehand and Fontographer. About two years ago, the only other major publisher of font creation software, FontLab, bought the rights to publish Fontographer, which now sits alongside FontLab’s other products, marketed as an entry-level product.

Speaking of shareware, I probably shouldn’t speak of this site at all, as these guys have produced (and continue to produce) some of the wackiest, most irreverent and offensive Mac software ever written. Maybe the best news is that most of these programs have not been updated for OS X, and in some cases require System 6 or earlier to run (Mac Plus, anyone?). The group I’m talking about is Lamprey Systems. As this is a family site, all I can say here is that you have been warned. If this link disappears, I don’t blame the webmaster a bit!