@jimluther@techhub.social

Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · May 08, 2026

Happy 37th Anniversary WWDC! (for those who celebrate). I was in the Apple II Developer Technical Support group at that time, and got a t-shirt 😄

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · May 04, 2026

Replying to @rmondello@hachyderm.io

@rmondello@hachyderm.io thanks. I found and removed a card that was expired.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Apr 18, 2026

Replying to @jerry@infosec.exchange

@jerry@infosec.exchange @briankrebs@infosec.exchange As long as it works with current up to date browser apps, it shouldn’t be a problem.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Apr 13, 2026

Replying to @bitsavers@oldbytes.space

@bitsavers@oldbytes.space When I worked as a field service engineer, I was amazed at all of the crazy products just IBM came up with. IBM printers, let me count the ways they could work.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @rjblaskiewicz@mstdn.social

@rjblaskiewicz My English teacher from 1984 assumed using a computer to write papers was cheating - she thought it was writing papers for me. I explained it was just a writing tool like a typewriter that made editing easier. 42 years later and she is correct.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Apr 11, 2026

Check out this podcast about Atlantic Records and the producers, engineers, songwriters, etc. who worked there. https://offtherecordonthecharts.podbean.com

The hosts are the children of 3 of Atlantic’s most important producers from the late 1940s through the 1970s.

The first full episode is an interview with Jerry Wexler’s son.

The second episode is with Mike Stoller (of Leiber and Stoller).

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 30, 2026

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

@ccgus she got a 41.2/50.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 30, 2026

Replying to @ccgus@mastodon.social

@ccgus My wife would probably do good at this. She used to match colors in a professional photo lab.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 30, 2026

Replying to @GeekAndDad@mastodon.social

@GeekAndDad@mastodon.social I’m stuck at 18.7.3. They really want me to update. ☹️

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 29, 2026

Replying to @Starcade@sfba.social

@Starcade@sfba.social @mac84tv@bitbang.social Steve Sheets would know. I’ll ask him on FB.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 29, 2026

Replying to @Starcade@sfba.social

@Starcade@sfba.social @mac84tv@bitbang.social I was there in the beginning, too. I ran the Apple II programming forum. The Apple II software was code named Samuel. My collection of AppleLink Update magazines (missing a few) are up on the @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Feb 06, 2026

@mdavis@mastodon.social I plan to cancel accounts with several companies whose services are sometimes useful, but I don’t like who the profits are going to. PayPal and Venmo top my list.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Jan 03, 2026

Replying to @octothorpe@mastodon.online

@octothorpe@mastodon.online too late.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 16, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

@savetz@oldbytes.space the other was this thread. https://fosstodon.org/@shawnhooper/115707158049771478

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 16, 2025

Replying to @savetz@oldbytes.space

@savetz@oldbytes.space that’s twice in a day that Bob Bishop has been in my feed.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 16, 2025

Boosted by

CM Harrington @octothorpe@mastodon.online

Replying to on mastodon.social

@Cdespinosa@mastodon.social @scottknaster@hachyderm.io @shawnhooper@fosstodon.org if I remember correctly, Don Lancaster’s “Enhancing Your Apple II” explained some interesting video tricks, too. The Internet Archive has his books available for viewing.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 06, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

@iaincollins@mastodon.social @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @marioguzman@mastodon.social Ram Doubler’s memory compression was a great feature for years because it didn’t require as much disk space for backing storage. However, as disk space became much cheaper and faster, that advantage over Apple’s VM became less of an issue.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 06, 2025

Replying to @iaincollins@mastodon.social

@iaincollins@mastodon.social @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @marioguzman@mastodon.social When I started working in the System 7 update group, I asked users on AOL and CompuServe what features on the Mac they did NOT use because of stability or performance issues. The number one feature not used was virtual memory. As one reply said (as I remember it), “I’d like to use VM but when I turn it on, my Mac runs really slow until it crashes.” So, that’s what I ended up mostly working on from 7.5.5 to 8.1 through 9.2.2.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 04, 2025

Replying to @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @marioguzman@mastodon.social I was told the changes I made to virtual memory for Mac OS 8.1 killed Ram Doubler.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 01, 2025

Replying to @agiletortoise__dup_1676@mastodon.social

@agiletortoise@mastodon.social “proficient on the Lexitron” just wouldn’t be funny.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Dec 01, 2025

Replying to @octothorpe@mastodon.online

@octothorpe@mastodon.online a good reminder that I still have a few apples from our tree to convert into a pie.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 27, 2025

Replying to @octothorpe@mastodon.online

@octothorpe@mastodon.online That’s a very nice gesture!

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 22, 2025

Replying to @cstross__dup_483@wandering.shop

@cstross@wandering.shop I was recording radio and tv audio on a reel to reel tape recorder in the early 70s

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 17, 2025

Replying to @spamsieve@indieapps.space

@spamsieve@indieapps.space keep fighting the good fight

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 17, 2025

Replying to @octothorpe@mastodon.online

@octothorpe@mastodon.online our neighbors use a local service with the initials ELM. I’ve decided the L stands for LOUD. The have the loudest mowers and blowers know to man.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 17, 2025

Replying to @octothorpe@mastodon.online

@octothorpe@mastodon.online I live near the Everett airport and flight paths sometimes go over the house. I woke to a dream the other day that I was looking out the window and missiles were flying over the house. Too much news and jet sounds lately. 😬

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 11, 2025

Replying to @jamesthomson@mastodon.social

@jamesthomson Fancy Fanny Packs

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Nov 10, 2025

Replying to @tveskov@mastodon.social

@tveskov@mastodon.social @marioguzman@mastodon.social Or, just don’t have the meeting and handle the issue in a short email exchange.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Oct 07, 2025

Replying to @samhenrigold@hachyderm.io

@samhenrigold@hachyderm.io I’m reminded again of a change I made in Mac OS 8.1 for HFS Plus. I had to change the Start Manager code that loaded extensions so extensions would continue to load in MacRoman order. To keep Conflict Catcher working, I had to add new API it could use to control the order of extension loading. Another engineer at Apple (IIRC, Mike Pucket) saw the new Start Manager API and changed the boot progress bar code to use the new API to make the progress bar’s updates smoother and more accurate, and that made Mac OS “seem” to boot much faster. It’s funny how small UI changes can fool the mind.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Oct 04, 2025

Help my friend Becky fight her recent cancer diagnosis. Like many, I played games Becky helped create on the Apple II/IIgs, Macintosh, and other personal computing platforms.
@burgerbecky@mastodon.gamedev.place

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Sep 23, 2025

Replying to @dan@discuss.systems

@dan@discuss.systems I take it pretty much daily (a low dose) for arthritis pain. Most other pain relievers make my ears ring.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Sep 18, 2025

Replying to @mtconleyuk@mastodonapp.uk

@mtconleyuk@mastodonapp.uk @spamsieve@indieapps.space I *really* enjoy using “train as spam” on something that gets by because I know I’ll only have to do it once 😀

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Sep 07, 2025

Replying to @haineux@mastodon.social

@haineux @RealJimMurphy @NanoRaptor It was enough floppies that it was difficult to find a working set. Jim, do you remember if 7.5 had the fix for the 660/840 AV floppy disk driver?

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Aug 30, 2025

Replying to @Stattenf@mastodon.social

@Stattenf my tip for the day for online merchants: Make it easy for your customers to update credit card info. Don’t make it hard for your customers to give you more money. A relative had to get a new card today (because of fraud) and I got to help in the game of “find the page on the website where the cc on file could be changed.” I don’t like that game.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Jul 26, 2025

Replying to @thermia__dup_8108@sk.girlthi.ng

@thermia There’s another folder? I thought Desktop was the only folder.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · May 29, 2025

Replying to @mjtsai@mastodon.social

@mjtsai@mastodon.social Hey @siegel@mastodon.social - should this be BBEdit 25?

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Apr 22, 2025

Boosted by

CM Harrington @octothorpe@mastodon.online

To those who hate it when someone posts a news article as an Apple News link, stop posting Flipboard links. Instead, please take the extra few seconds to get the link to the source article and post it. Flipboard doesn’t need the clicks; Apple News doesn’t need the clicks.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

@theirongiant @atax1a if anyone tests performance using the last client with my changes against an old client over an internet connection (not a local connection), I’d be interested in the results. The higher the ping to the server, the more difference it should make.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @pierrenick@hachyderm.io

@pierrenick Apple used to pay much more attention to backwards compatibility. However, getting the testing resources to test changes on older systems is hard, so that's why it isn't done as much as everyone would like. The AppleShare extension code I changed had been tested with systems back to 7.6 (at least I was told that) and the changes I made to the AppleShare extension did not depend on anything new, so I feel fairly safe saying the AppleShare extension v 3.9.2 will work with Mac OS 7.6.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @dgentry@mastodon.social

@dgentry Nope. The Blue Meanies group was around from before System 7.0 to maybe just before 7.5. I was in the Developer Technical Support during that time, and joined the System Update team (which became Mac OS Release Engineering after Copland was cancelled) just as 7.5.3 was being wrapped up.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @theirongiant@hachyderm.io

@theirongiant @atax1a At the time, I was measuring performance gains on local AppleShare servers, and those gains were great. Those changes to enumeration and creating FSSpecs/Refs make reading directories much faster -- especially when multiple directories are being read at the same time which is what happens if you copy of directory that contains subdirectories. Those changes and the ATP buffer changes also reduce the number of network transactions. Over the internet, that makes a HUGE difference because of network latency (ping). Here’s an example. By making the ATP buffers 8x larger, there are up to 8x fewer transactions when copying a file. If the connection to a server has 100ms ping… well, you can do the math to see that reducing transactions can remove LOTS of time.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

@atlauren Anyway, after I quit working on webdavfs, it never really got any faster but we came up with a way for webdavfs to communicate with the Finder to show progress during close on the PUT request to the server. Bill Conway, who had taken over responsibility for webdavfs and implemented that change in webdavfs. The Finder team showed that progress during close to let the user know something was happening during file copies. Sometimes showing something is happening in UI makes users *think* things are faster 😀 2/2

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @atlauren@mastodon.social

@atlauren That probably deserves another thread. The short version of that story is… I was the engineer working on webdavfs from the end of Mac OS X 10.1 through the 10.4 updates. I left the Mac OS X file systems team right as 10.4 shipped because I was told that none of the things I wanted to improve in the code were going to be approved, and I’d be assigned to work on other things. What made the Finder *seem* slow was a limitation of HTTP. Entire files that had been written to had to be pushed up to the server with a PUT request when the file was closed. That time of pushing an entire file up to the server when a file had been written to and closed is what made the Finder seem unresponsive. 1/2

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @tevruden@nonexiste.net

@tevruden Engineering usually sent notes to DTS for what became Technical Notes like this one https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn/tn2010.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003049 There was no 9.2.2 Technical Note. Otherwise, I would have just pointed at it (although the details of why the AppleShare client was faster, or used less network resources wouldn’t have been noted). I remember the changes I made to AppleShare because it was one of the last things I did on 9 and because the performance differences for some operations were so great. (the last 9 code I changed had something to do with how package directories were recognized - I don’t remember any details about that change)

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

From the 9.2.2 CD

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @atax1a@infosec.exchange

@atax1a It was! I was in a very small group tasked with improving performance and stability from 7.5.5 through 9.2.2. We fixed bugs wherever they popped up if there was nobody already working on that code (mostly non-UI code). We also helped other teams find and fix those kinds of problems.

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

I replaced multiple INIT resource with a single INIT resource that loads the other code (now in CUST resources) in the correct order. If the AppleShare client was edited with a resource editor on Mac OS 9.1 or later, those INIT resource might have loaded in the wrong order.
Fixed a few other random bugs I saw that probably wouldn't be noticed by anyone else but they bugged me.

5/5 end of 🧵

#GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

I replaced routines that moved blocks of memory 1-byte at a time in loop with calls to BlockMoveData for improved performance. Someone at sometime thought BlockMove/BlockMoveData couldn't be called at interrupt time and added that slow memory copy routine -- they were wrong.
I replaced BlockMove calls with BlockMoveData wherever possible (BlockMove was only needed when moving code) for improved performance.
I locked out loading on Mac OS versions earlier than 7.6 (this version of AppleShare was only tested with Mac OS 9.1/9.2.x but it should work back to 7.6). That's because code in the AppleShare client had required features only in 7.6 and later.
I removed dead pre-System 7.6 code (much of it still ran during initialization but did nothing).

4/5 🧵

#GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

I made MakeFSSpec much faster. When System 7.0 first shipped, I got a developer bug that showed MakeFSSpec (new in System 7) was very slow on AppleShare. I filed a bug for the developer and even explained what the problem was. The code would enumerate a directory to find a matching filename to the filename passed to MakeFSSpec. If the filename was the last to be seen in a directory enumeration, that resulted in many transactions. With my rewrite, making an FSSpec is accomplished with only one or two transactions with the server. This bug effected creating FSRefs, too.
Increased size of response buffers used for ATP to hold 8 full-sized ATP response packets (it was 1) to increase network performance (reduce the number of transactions with the server). Why was it so small? The code had not changed since 1987.

3/5 🧵

#GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh

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Jim Luther @jimluther@techhub.social · Mar 27, 2025

Replying to @jimluther@techhub.social

I added multiple AFP enumeration caches (16 of them) so when multiple directories are simultaneously being enumerated with GetFInfo or GetCatInfo, those enumerations were not throwing out each other's data. This was the bug I was supposed to fix.
I noticed the enumeration caches were small (512 bytes) -- the same size they'd been since 1987 when memory was very tight on a Mac. I increased size of those enumeration caches. The result is enumerating larger directories is done with fewer transactions with the server.

2/5 🧵

#GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh

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