Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce


If you click on the About menu item under System 6, on the right you can see a list of names: Larry, John, Steve, and Bruce. These are the names of the developers of this version of the Finder, the interface of the Macintosh

Finder 6.1.8

At the time Apple still used to give credit to developers by allowing them to appear in the info boxes of the software they had created. Usually, their names appeared in full, sometimes even with pictures, but here all we have are the first names. Let’s see who these four are.

The last two, are the easiest to guess: they are of course Steve Capps and Bruce Horn.
Horn is the creator of the original Finder, a task in which he had the crucial assistance of Capps, who later had a key role in the Newton.

Larry is Larry Kenyon, longtime Apple and Mac developer. Kenyon, among other things, worked on Multifinder, the version of the Finder that starting from System 5 allowed Macintosh users to keep open many applications and switch between them bringing their windows to the front.

John is John Meier, who also worked on the Newton project and would keep on being a developer of subsequent versions of the Finder, the only one of the four names to do so.

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13 Comments

  1. It always bummed me out that my name would never be related to some of the legends of Finder development, like those listed above. The practice of having About boxes stopped right when I came to Apple, which also coincided with the return of Steve.

  2. Here’s to the simpler days and 4 megs of RAM!

  3. Rand Careaga

    Gawd, System 6! Spartan, limited in its capabilities, but a clean, intuitive and–provided one was sparing with the INITs–stable OS compared to the subsequent iterations of the “Classic” system. I brought my first Mac home in September 1984, and beginning three years later made my living on the platform fulltime to the present day. One of my mainstay machines at work was a Macintosh II running System 6 that I used, albeit with gradually decreasing frequency, from 1988 until 1997, when its HD expired, taking some specialty legacy apps with it.

    I’m cool with the “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” bit that NeXT Computing did on Apple, but the sight of that “About” box brings on a spasm of nostalgia.

  4. See, I thought you were going to say Steve is Steve Jobs. This just shows how little I know.

    In other news, I seem to be invested in some sort of fruit company.

  5. Not to mention, a Macintosh II with System 6 (stripped down) would boot to a usable desktop in under 5 seconds…

    es

  6. Strangely enough, in the first versions of OS X, that is NeXTstep, the names of the developpers were in the About too!

  7. Michel: yep, thisis because names in the About box were a common practice at NeXT as you can see in
    www.storiediapple.it/boynton-hullot-serlet-ohlfs-dove-sono-adesso.html
    (sorry, the text is in italian).

    Unfortunately Steve Jobs changed that after his return at Apple.

    nda

  8. More to that, what was news was the image, same as in Mail.app, the first graphical mail application ever.

    Nicola, I’ve always been aware of everything NeXT in real time! ;)
    www.micmac.com/mm07/nextgen.html
    www.micmac.com/mm09/c1.html

  9. Don’t forget that the signatures of the original Mac team were engraved on the inside of the Mac 128K and 512K cases.

  10. Roger: there are also the signatures on the Certificate of authencity of the Apple IIgs “Woz Edition”.
    I’m working on that and will feature an articole with the list of engineers and managers, trying to explain what each one did for the Apple IIgs and for Apple in general. :)

    nda

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