We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime.
QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more.
QuickTime development was initially led by Apple’s Bruce Leak, who first demonstrated it at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1991 before its release as a separate set of components for System 6 and 7 in December that year. Initially it came with just three Codecs, supporting animated cartoons, regular video and 8-bit still images. Cinepak video and text tracks were added in QuickTime 1.5 the following year, when high-end Macs were capable of playing 320 x 240 video at 30 frames/s, which was groundbreaking at the time.
By the mid-1990s QuickTime was starting to flourish. Hardware support included Apple’s new PowerPC Macs in 1994, and MIDI devices, PCs running Windows, MIPS and SGI workstations. QuickTime VR (for Virtual Reality) allowed the user to navigate the virtual space within panoramic images. QuickTime media were being licensed and distributed on CD-ROMs, innovative games such as Myst depended on it, and the QuickTime project brought in revenue to Apple at a time that it was most needed.
That period also brought conflict. Apple had contracted San Francisco Canyon Company to port QuickTime to Windows, but Intel also hired them to develop a competing product, Video for Windows. Source code developed for Apple ended up in Intel’s product, resulting in a lawsuit in 1994, finally settled three years later.
QuickTime was enhanced through the late 1990s, with version 5 the first to support Mac OS X, and just over a year later, in 2002, that was replaced by version 6. The following year, QuickTime 6.2 only supported Mac OS X, with a slightly older version for Windows.
QuickTime was one of the more used parts of what was then named System Prefs, here seen setting the MIME types to be handled by the QuickTime Plug-in, in 2002.
For most Mac users, bundled QuickTime Player was the standard way to play most types of video, as seen here in 2002.
Apple built apps like iMovie on the strengths of QuickTime. First released in 1999, iMovie is seen here in 2002.
QuickTime version 7 was both the first and last to use the QuickTime Kit (QTKit) Framework in Cocoa.
Apple’s flagship movie editing suite Final Cut Pro started as KeyGrip by Macromedia, but was first released by Apple in 1999; this ‘HD’ was actually version 4.5 in 2004.
Streaming movies in those days (here 2005) had to cope with a range of relatively low transfer rates, down to 56 Kb/s over a fast dial-up connection with a modem.
Users had to pay a small fee to upgrade QuickTime Player to the Pro version, unlocking more features including extensive transcoding options, here in 2007.
Mac OS X Server included a QuickTime Streaming Server, and a separate app, QuickTime Broadcaster (seen here in 2007), could be used to deliver real-time audio and video over a network.
QuickTime X for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in 2009 marked the start of its slow decline, with the removal of support for some media formats, most noticeably MIDI. Internally, it had been converted to a Cocoa framework, AVFoundation, with modern 64-bit audio and video Codecs. This anticipated discontinuation of all support for 32-bit code in macOS Catalina. The impact on Codecs that were never ported to 64-bit is still felt today. While QuickTime is still alive in the AVFoundation framework, it’s very different now from its heyday in the opening years of this century.
By 2011, QuickTime Player was a shadow of its former self, and a far cry from its earlier Pro version.
Its pane in System Preferences, here in Panther of 2015, didn’t reflect the inner changes.
This is iMovie in 2011.
Further reading
Wikipedia, good on version details AppleInsider, long and detailed account by Prince McLean in 2007 Computer History Museum, good background from Hansen Hsu, with a link to YouTube video from three of the creators of QuickTime.
Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.
Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.
The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.
Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.
One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.
In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Gleaners (1854), oil on canvas, 93 × 138 cm, The National Gallery of Ireland/Gailearaí Náisiúnta na hÉireann, Dublin, Ireland. The Athenaeum.
In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.
Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Gleaners (1857), oil on canvas, 83.5 × 110 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.
Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), Calling in the Gleaners (1859), oil on canvas, 90 x 176 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.
Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners (1887), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942), Cowed (1887), media not known, 126 x 152.3 cm, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Odense, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.
The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.
The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.
Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), The Gleaners (1889), oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. WikiArt.
The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.
As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.
Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.
Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912), oil on canvas, 89.5 × 128.9 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaning Women (1920), oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.2 cm, National Museum of Western Art 国立西洋美術館 (Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan), Tokyo, Japan. Wikimedia Commons.
Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.
With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.
As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.
Reference
David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 272. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Used by courting birds with a haven for video and audio to replace the others.
Click for a solution
DisplayPort
Used by courting birds (a courtship display) with a haven (a port) for video and audio (it can carry both) to replace the others (intended to replace the answers to 2 and 3, as well as VGA and others).
2: 506 Romans can handle analogue and digital to display.
Click for a solution
DVI
506 Romans (DVI in Roman numerals = 506) can handle analogue and digital (has both DVI-I for analogue support, and DVI-D digital-only) to display (it’s for video output to displays and TVs).
3: With CTA-861, 19 pins and five connectors, it’ll carry all your media, even HDCP.
Click for a solution
HDMI
With CTA-861 (the standards it uses for video and more), 19 pins (in its connectors) and five connectors (it supports five different connectors now), it’ll carry all your media (it will), even HDCP (a form of DRM for use over HDMI).
The common factor
Click for a solution
They are all video interfaces that have been supported by Macs.
The climax of the year in arable farming is the harvest, when the sustained labour of the previous year pays off. For the farmer, this is the return on that investment, and for the labourers it’s when they hope to get paid their bonus. It’s the one time of the year when everyone turns to and works from before dawn until well after dusk in a united effort to harvest the ripe crop, before the weather breaks and it might be ruined.
The harvest depends on the crop being grown; as cereals, particularly wheat, were the most important across much of Europe, I’ll here concentrate on the processes required to turn them from ripe plants to grain ready for the miller to grind into flour. This article looks at the first step in that, cutting the crop, bundling it into sheaves and stacking those in stooks.
Current accounts of the grain harvest distinguish several tools used to cut the crop:
handheld sickle, lightweight and normally with a serrated blade,
handheld reaping hook, lightweight and with a smooth blade,
handheld bagging or fagging hook, heavier and with a smooth blade, used in conjunction with a hooked stick or metal pick thank,
long-handled scythe, heavy and held with both hands, with a smooth blade.
Some claim that reaping using a handheld sickle or hook was used for wheat and rye, but that barley and oats were more usually mown with a larger scythe. Although that doesn’t appear to be accurate, it’s clear that the use of scythes was considerably more efficient. While it took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, using a scythe typically took only 2 worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.
The tool used also determined the length of straw stalk cut with the head of grain, thus the height of the stubble left on the field. Sickles and hooks were often used when less straw was required, leaving high stubble that might be mown with a scythe later. Low reaping or bagging, or mowing with a scythe, created longer straw that was suitable for thatching.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows men cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525–1569), The Harvesters (detail) (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525–1569), The Harvesters (detail) (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they’re gathered into stooks.
Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818), Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) (1774), oil on canvas, 152.4 x 137.2 cm, National Trust, England. Wikimedia Commons.
Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) from 1774 shows at its left edge a long-handled scythe, and at the right a sickle or reaping hook. Scythes were also used extensively for mowing hay and weeds.
Samuel Palmer (1805-81), The Harvest Moon (c 1833), oil and tempera on paper, laid on panel, 22.1 x 27.7 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.
In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto the oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.
John Linnell (1792–1882), The Harvest Cradle (1859), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, York Museums Trust, York, England. Wikimedia Commons.
Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), Ceres (The Summer) (c 1864-65), oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France. Wikimedia Commons.
Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in that the goddess is shown holding a sickle with a serrated edge, and is surrounded by sheaves of wheat.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), The Harvesters’ Pay (1882), oil on canvas, 215 x 272 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, as they await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.
Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), Harvest (1885), oil on canvas, 190.2 x 154.2 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst (Den Kongelige Malerisamling), Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.
Volodymyr Orlovsky (1842–1914), Harvest in Ukraine (1880), oil on canvas, 80.6 x 171 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.
Mykola Pymonenko (1862–1912), Reaper (1889), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, National Art Museum of Ukraine Національний художній музей України, Kyiv, Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.
The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.
Anna Ancher (1859-1935), Harvesters (1905), oil on canvas, 56.2 x 43.4 cm, Skagens Museum, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through ripe wheat.
Finally, conventional corn stooks were by no means universal across Europe.
Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928), Corn Stooks (1920), oil on board, 90 x 104 cm, Bergen Kunstmuseum, KODE, Bergen, Norway. The Athenaeum.
By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut corn (cereal) wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.
These paintings suggest that, between 1550 and 1890, wheat was generally cut using scythes when suitable men were available. Otherwise, it would be cut using a hook, most likely for reaping rather than bagging. Wheat was normally cut low to preserve the stalk as straw suitable for thatching, then tied into sheaves before being stacked into stooks.
There aren’t many mythical animals in operating systems, and the most famous of those is probably Tux the penguin who appeared in Linux around 1996. The Mac’s first mythical animal predates that by more than a decade, and is the distinctive dogcow named Clarus, who appeared in every version of Mac OS until Mac OS X.
When Annette Wagner was designing the Page Setup dialog for Classic Mac OS, she needed a figure to place on the page to show the user its orientation and other options. She was working with an early symbolic font Cairo, created by Susan Kare who was also the designer of Chicago, the first Mac system font, and modified its z character of a dog to make it work better in the dialog. The result was a creature that looked like a hybrid between a dog and a cow.
In 1987, Scott ‘Zz’ Zimmerman coined the term dogcow for this curious beast, which by now was featured in every Page Setup dialog on every Mac, and was becoming quite a celebrity. A little later, Mark ‘The Red’ Harlan gave the dogcow the name of Clarus, a variation on the name of Claris, Apple’s software subsidiary that had been formed in 1987.
As Apple’s campus at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, developed, Clarus was one of several large plastic figures forming the Icon Garden in front of the offices.
The dogcow lived on in Page Setup dialogs until Mac OS X was released, and early in the 2000s she was put out to grass in favour of a stylised icon of a human figure. Those who pined for the reappearance of the dogcow in OS X remained disappointed until macOS Ventura, when she finally returned, although now in full vector graphics glory.
By this time, there was another reference to Clarus tucked away as an Easter Egg in the Emoji & Symbols viewer: type the letters of her name into its search box, and you’ll see the two emoji characters of a dog and a cow, although neither of them resembles Clarus in appearance.
Although not heard in Mac OS, Clarus has been attributed the sound of moof, a portmanteau of moo and woof, of course.
The next time you open the Page Setup dialog, spare a thought for Clarus the dogcow, still doing the same job nearly forty years later.
For countless generations, since humans first started farming the land, improving the soil and fields has been a constant task. Once the plough has passed, there’s still work to be done in many areas, where there are stones mixed in the soil. This has been the burden of those who have worked the land, and has been featured in occasional paintings.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942), Worn Out (1889), oil on canvas, 207 x 270 cm, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Odense, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Worn Out (1889) follows in the Naturalist tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. The soil around them is poor, and full of flints; the two were engaged in the toil of the poorest of the poor, picking out the large stones and putting them into piles for collection. It’s backbreaking work for the young, and clearly proved too much for this man.
Once ploughed to a fine tilth and rid of its stones, the soil is ready for the seed of the next crop, accomplished by manual broadcasting, a term in common use long before it came to be applied to radio then TV transmissions.
Sowing is one of the basic tasks in arable farming, and one at the heart of the changes that took place between 1600 and 1900. Broadcasting is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient in use of seed, making it one of the first tasks for attempts to mechanise farming. Although early types of seed drill had been tried before, it’s Jethro Tull, an English gentleman farmer from the early eighteenth century, who has generally been credited with inventing the first successful seed drill, in 1701. Today his name is better-known as that of one of the great rock bands formed in 1967.
Alongside the use of a seed drill was the requirement for a horse hoe, a light and small plough drawn by a single horse, to ensure the seed was well covered by soil. Unfortunately, early drills proved too fragile for general use, and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that metal could be turned to manufacture more durable drills, that became widespread across Western Europe during the rest of that century. However, contemporary painting continued to show sowers still broadcasting seed.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Sower (1850), oil on canvas, 101.6 x 82.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Wikimedia Commons.
The first of these is Jean-François Millet’s The Sower, completed in 1850, shown at the Salon that year and now recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, broadcasting seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker harrowing with a pair of oxen. This was being used to ensure the seed sown was covered with soil, and not exposed to the flurry of birds trying to eat any seed left on the surface.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Sower (c 1865), pastel and crayon on paper or pastel and pastel on paper (cream buff paper), 43.5 × 53.5 cm, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Wikimedia Commons.
Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, including the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), The Sower (1865-66), pastel and crayon on beige wove paper mounted on board (Conté crayon, wood-pulp board), 47.1 × 37.5 cm, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. Wikimedia Commons.
By the late nineteenth century, manual broadcasting was becoming less common as farms turned to seed drills, but the image of the sower continued to appear in paintings.
Hans Thoma (1839–1924), Säender Bauer (Sowing Farmer) (1886), oil on canvas, 60.5 × 73 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
The title of Hans Thoma’s Säender Bauer (1886) apparently means Sowing Framer (thanks to Gregory for his accurate translation). A sower in Millet’s tradition is at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour. Two years later, when he was living in Arles in November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his version of The Sower.
Albin Egger-Lienz (1868–1926), The Sower (1903), oil on canvas, 177 x 156 cm, Museum Schloss Bruck, Lienz, Austria. Wikimedia Commons.
Millet’s influence is also manifest in the first of Albin Egger-Lienz’s versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in his later works. Its earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.
Laurits Andersen Ring (1854–1933), The Sower (1910), oil on canvas, 186.5 x 155.5 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst (Den Kongelige Malerisamling), Copenhagen, Denmark. Wikimedia Commons.
Laurits Andersen Ring admired Millet’s social realism, and would undoubtedly have seen at least one of Millet’s depictions of this motif. In 1910, Ring painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, the first means of producing such images.
Hans Andersen Brendekilde (1857–1942), A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church (1914), oil on canvas, 49 x 76 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Ring’s friend and contemporary Hans Andersen Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church. This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).
This motif seems to have long outlasted the practice of broadcasting. By 1900, even gardeners and smallholders were being offered mechanical seed drills. As those used less than a third of the seed than broadcasting, it’s hard to see any farmer in the early twentieth century still preferring traditional methods.
With the young plants growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, another laborious and back-breaking task often assigned to women.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), The Weeders (1868), oil on canvas, 71.4 × 127.6 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name that Jules Breton made in 1860, which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon the following year and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.
Although only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes, showing their sanctity in labour.
Jakub Schikaneder (1855–1924), Plečka (Weeder) (1887), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.
Jakub Schikaneder’s Weeder (1887) shows a woman bent double as she pulls weeds from a young crop, and would pass for a social realist work from the likes of Millet or Breton.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 270. Here are my solutions to them.
1: The periodical is secure when charged through this attractive force.
Click for a solution
MagSafe
The periodical (mag or magazine) is secure (safe) when charged through this attractive force (it’s a charging lead attached by magnetism).
2: Quick flash followed by thunder for power adaptor and more.
Click for a solution
Lightning
Quick (lightning) flash followed by thunder (lightning) for power adaptor and more (what it’s for).
3: Might of military planes would have been magic for 8 and X until cancelled because of heat.
Click for a solution
AirPower
Might of military planes (air power) would have been magic for 8 and X (it was a wireless charging system announced with iPhones 8 and X in 2017) until cancelled because of heat (Apple cancelled it in 2019 apparently because it got too hot).
The common factor
Click for a solution
They have been used to charge Macs and Apple devices, although the last never made it to market.
It wasn’t until System 7 in 1991 that the Mac gained any feature that let the user create links to files or folders. Without a command shell, Unix traditions of symbolic and hard links weren’t available. Apple belatedly added what it termed an alias, created using the Make Alias command in the Finder’s File menu. This made a document-like object bearing the name of its original with alias appended, displayed in italics to distinguish it from the original. To help users locate the original file for an alias, the Finder’s Get Info dialog gained a button to Find Original, later moved to the File and contextual menus.
Later versions of classic Mac OS added refinements to this transformative feature, including the selection of a new target for a broken alias, creation by drag-and-drop of a file or folder with the Command and Option keys held, and a distinctive arrow badge to both the item’s icon and the pointer during drag-creation.
Internally, the alias was a small file of less than 5 KB size containing opaque data with more information than just the path to the original. Aliases were designed to support free movement within the same file system, at the time an HFS volume (or partition, as they’re the same in HFS and HFS+).
Aliases transferred across to Mac OS X, where the more adventurous could open Terminal and create both symbolic and hard links instead. It has remained a sign of the lasting schism between the GUI and Unix internals of Mac OS X that there are no standard command tools supporting Finder aliases, and there’s no way to create or maintain symbolic or hard links in the Finder.
Something happened to aliases when they transitioned into Mac OS X, and their size started to rise steadily until they reached 1-5 MB in El Capitan.
Back in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger they were still fairly small, this one at 48 KB. Note the Select New Original… button in the Get Info dialog.
Aliases were all very good for the user, but OS X needed something similar that could be stored in property lists and other files, so the alias format was rejigged into more generalised form as the bookmark, introduced in OS X 10.6 in 2009. In early 2012 with 10.7.3, bookmarks could be security-scoped with permission on a per-app or per-document basis, to enable their use with the app sandbox. By OS X 10.9 Mavericks in 2013, bookmarks were in widespread use throughout the system.
In El Capitan (2015), bookmark size often reached 1 MB, while the Select New Original… button remained the same in the Get Info dialog.
macOS Sierra brought a major revision to both aliases and bookmarks, reducing their size substantially, but bringing other problems. As late as 10.12.1 they were still having problems resolving some links. The end result was worth the struggle, though, as they have since become more robust than ever, with a typical size of only 1 KB, making them almost as efficient as symbolic links.
Although aliases and bookmarks are still intended to be treated as opaque, their contents have become more accessible. Among the useful values each contains are:
_NSURLPathKey gives the full path to the file,
_NSURLFileIDKey gives the inode number of the file,
_NSURLBookmarkURLStringKey gives the file’s full URL,
NSURLCreationDateKey gives the file’s creation timestamp,
NSURLIsRegularFileKey indicates whether it’s a normal file,
NSURLIsPackageKey indicates whether it’s a package rather than a file,
_NSURLBookmarkSecurityScopeCryptoKeyKey is used if this is a Security-Scoped Bookmark, most used with sandboxed apps.
I even have a couple of utilities that work with them. Among the many features of Precize is the ability to generate bookmarks, and to analyse and resolve them. For those who want to bridge the divide between the GUI and command line, alisma is a tool that can both create aliases and resolve them to paths. Finally, Alifix helps you refresh and identify broken aliases.
By 1500, towns remained small throughout Europe. These days, a populated area with up to twenty thousand inhabitants is recognised as a small town or large village; France had only fourteen towns larger than that, and England had just one, London. The contrast between urban and rural life is illustrated well by some of the most remarkable frescoes from before the Renaissance, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-39.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290–1348), Effects of Good Government in the City (1338-39), fresco, dimensions not known, Fondazione Musei Senesi, Siena, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.
These frescoes for the Council Room are overt social and political commentary forming a lesson in civics. In six different scenes, he shows allegories and examples of good and bad government in the city and country. The Effects of Good Government in the City (1338-39) is modelled after Siena, and intended to illustrate peaceful prosperity resulting from wise politics. There are no beggars, no street crime. Life is peaceful and orderly, and the citizens are prosperous and healthy. During its golden age before the Black Death in 1348, Siena reached a population of fifty thousand, huge by the standards of the day, and similar to its present size.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290–1348), Effects of Good Government in the Countryside (1338-39), fresco, dimensions not known, Fondazione Musei Senesi, Siena, Italy. Wikimedia Commons.
Essential to the prosperity of the city were the Effects of Good Government in the Countryside (1338-39), where crops were grown and livestock farmed to feed the city and provide materials for its trade. This is a neat, almost manicured countryside with a patchwork of fields, and all the peasants fully occupied and working hard.
Almost all farms combined the rearing of livestock such as cattle with the production of cereals and vegetables, and few were able to specialise in either, or in a single crop. Almost all had the joint tasks of feeding locals at a subsistence level and trying to grow a surplus to sell into the city.
Key to the growing of crops was soil quality. The only fertiliser available to increase soil nutrients came from livestock, and the only way to prepare the soil to give the best yields was ploughing. Little land at this time had any form of drainage, so in many parts of Europe it was wet for much of the year. That made the soil heavy, particularly if it was clay, and ploughing was used to break the soil up into a fine tilth, and to build that into ridges and furrows to help it drain.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (copy of original from c 1558), oil on canvas mounted on wood, 73.5 × 112 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons.
This is shown in the foreground of this copy, possibly painted by de Momper, of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from about 1558. Although its landscape is fictitious, the ploughman in the foreground appears true to life, and his plough typical of much of Europe at that time, as shown in the detail below.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (copy of original from c 1558)(detail), oil on canvas mounted on wood, 73.5 × 112 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Wikimedia Commons.
At the very front of the plough is a small jockey wheel, behind which is a vertical metal blade, the coulter or skeith, whose task is to cut into the ground just ahead of the share, a wooden board that turns the surface of the earth to one side. The effect on the ground is to cut furrows into its surface and turn the soil onto ridges. When repeated five or more times over the course of the autumn and winter, this could build ridges high enough for the water to drain into the furrows, and coupled with the action of ground frost could break up even heavy clays into a tilth ready for sowing in the Spring.
An interesting detail revealed in Brueghel’s painting is how the course of the plough is curved, and swings wide to make the turn, as I explained in the introduction to this series last week.
Ploughing required considerable pulling power, usually delivered by a team of oxen, generally bullocks (castrated males), rather than horses. Where the soil was heavy going, a team of six or even eight were required. Even after the introduction of the heavy mould-board or turning plough in the eighteenth century, it wasn’t unusual to see large teams still in use.
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), Ploughing in Nevers (1849), oil on canvas, 134 x 260 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
Rosa Bonheur’s Ploughing in Nevers, painted in 1849, shows two teams of six oxen each drawing more modern mould-board ploughs through heavy soil to build high ridges.
Eugène Burnand (1850–1921), Ploughing in the Jorat (1916), oil on canvas, 270 x 620 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
Further improvements in plough design and possibly lighter soil enabled the reduced team seen in Eugène Burnand’s Ploughing in the Jorat in 1916, with a single horse leading a pair of oxen.
Grant Wood (1891–1942), Fall Plowing (1931), oil, dimensions and location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
By 1931, when Grant Wood painted Fall Plowing, the recently-developed walking plough had a steel ploughshare, bringing a major advance in cultivating the prairie in Iowa. By this time many farms had started to replace their horses and oxen with tractors, a subject I’ll return to later in this series.
Ploughing was arduous work for all concerned, and working even relatively small areas of arable land was time-consuming. In more northerly latitudes, winter days are short, and it wasn’t easy to find sufficient daylight to plough enough land five times over for the following year’s crops. Arable farming demanded a great deal of time and effort year-round.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 269. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Palmtop with gravity was first with arm for five years.
Click for a solution
Newton
Palmtop (what it was, although Apple coined the term PDA) with gravity (first elaborated as the law of universal gravitation by Sir Isaac Newton) was first with arm (it was Apple’s first device to use an ARM processor) for five years (released in 1993, discontinued 1998).
2: Component framework took aim at OLE for a couple of years.
Click for a solution
OpenDoc
Component framework (what it was) took aim (it was part of the foundation of the AIM Alliance between Apple, IBM and Motorola) at OLE (it was a competitor for Microsoft’s OLE) for a couple of years (released in 1995, discontinued 1997).
3: Blue-sky lab from Larry’s education brought quick things for over a decade.
Click for a solution
Advanced Technology Group (ATG)
Blue-sky lab (what it was) from Larry’s education (it sprung from the late Larry Tesler’s Education Research Group) brought quick things (responsible for Color QuickDraw, QuickTime and its VR and 3D versions, and more) for over a decade (formed in 1986, closed in 1997).
The common factor
Click for a solution
They were all cancelled by Steve Jobs on his return to Apple in 1997.
If you have any interest in rural history, you may have noticed how few of its accounts are illustrated. There are extensive quotations from written accounts of life in the country, farming practice, and figures gleaned from the analysis of surveys and wills, but no pictures. Yet in the centuries before photography came into widespread use, artists recorded landscapes and life in the countryside in paint. This article introduces a new series in which I’m going to look at the reality of life and work in the country using some of its finest depictions.
In 1500, the countries in Europe were overwhelmingly rural, with about 80% of their people living in the countryside and engaged almost entirely in agricultural work. By the end of the nineteenth century that had reversed, with 80% living and working in cities and towns. Working the land was physically arduous with only the aid of manual tools, oxen and horses. Injuries were common and seldom received any medical attention, and for most life was brief.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c 1525–1569), The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, 119 x 162 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wikimedia Commons.
The first agricultural revolution brought the transition from hunting for and gathering food to cultivating crops and raising livestock. This brought annual events such as the grain harvest, shown above in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), which forms a complete visual reference to all the work involved in creating flour from a ripe cereal crop.
Jules Breton (1827–1906), Song of the Lark (1884), oil on canvas, 110.6 × 85.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wikimedia Commons.
While men wielded large scythes to mow some crops, others were cut with the sickle shown in Jules Breton’s Song of the Lark (1884). This young woman is walking barefoot through the fields on her way to start another day harvesting the grain she and her village relied on to keep them from starvation.
Léon Augustin Lhermitte (1844–1925), Gleaners (1887), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA. Wikimedia Commons.
Old Testament accounts of the underprivileged surviving by gleaning what’s left after the landowner had brought in their harvest continued well into the twentieth century. This is Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s account from 1887. In many areas, though, gleaning was a common essential for everyone.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), L’Angélus (The Angelus) (1857-59), oil on canvas, 55 x 66 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.
Crop yields in the past were far lower than they are today. There was no understanding of soil fertility, crop rotations led to poor soil quality, and most land was too wet for the primitive ploughs in use. It was often necessary to plough the same land five or more times in a year to eradicate weeds and achieve worthwhile crop yields. In Jean-François Millet’s Angelus, completed around 1857-59, a destitute couple are seen praying over their small basket of potatoes, as they try to eke a living from that pitifully poor soil.
Some problems remain the same, although their solutions are now quite different.
George Morland (1763–1804), The Ratcatchers (1793), oil on canvas, 32.5 × 35.5 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
George Morland’s Ratcatchers from 1793 shows a couple of itinerant workers with the dogs they used to catch vermin such as rats, the man on the left holding up one of their successful catches.
Our ancestors determined the landscapes we see today. In much of England, this has been attributed to the appropriation of what had been common land, for large farms operated by the land-owning classes, in what’s known as enclosure.
The whole countryside changed, as previously open land used for communal grazing was enclosed and turned into farmland. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city, which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed, and ploughed up for agriculture.
Crome opposed the enclosure of common land, and here shows the rich flora, free grazing, and, for the plains of East Anglia, rolling countryside. In the right distance some of the newly created farmland is visible as a contrast. Fortunately, almost two hundred acres (74 hectares) of this heath have been preserved, but it had been considerably more extensive until 1790.
Agricultural practices have left other marks in our landscapes. In parts of England and Wales, there are two types of countryside, those drawn with straight lines and others featuring curves. These are even seen in roads, which follow old field boundaries. In some areas the roads are generally straight, but in others they wiggle all over the place, like a drunken man.
Sir William Nicholson’s view from The Hill above Harlech, painted in about 1917, looks across the broad sweep of sand in Tremadoc Bay towards the distant Lleyn Peninsula, in North Wales. Much of the land seen here is divided up into small fields by well-maintained hedges, and there’s hardly a straight line to be seen until you get down to the coastal plane.
One of the major reasons for all these curves is ploughing.
Robert Bevan (1865–1925), The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex (c 1909), oil on canvas, 66.4 x 90.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT. Wikimedia Commons.
Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough which needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here. Because of this need to turn, the ploughman’s course was far from straight, but usually traced a gentle reversed S. To enable this team of horses to turn at the top of the furrow, they steered to the left before swinging to the right in the arc that would bring them on course for the furrow heading back down the slope.
When those ploughed strips were enclosed by hedges, their edges were curved with their furrows. In time, tracks ran along those hedges, and in the nineteenth century they were turned into roads, which now twist and turn as they run past those old furrows.
In the nineteenth century, the first signs of mechanisation arrived, using either horses or steam for power.
Albert Rigolot (1862–1932), The Threshing Machine, Loiret (1893), oil on canvas, 160 x 226 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Rouen, France. Wikimedia Commons.
Albert Rigolot’s painting of The Threshing Machine, Loiret from 1893, shows a fine example of horses being used to thresh the grain from freshly cut cereal. One of the early uses for steam engines was to power similar machines, and the next step was to make those engines mobile under their own power, as traction engines and eventually tractors.
Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942), Farmer Ploughing (c 1930-42), oil on canvas, 40 x 50 cm, location not known. Wikimedia Commons.
When heavy steam traction engines were replaced by tractors with internal combustion engines, teams of oxen and horses were replaced by these new-fangled vehicles. Heinrich Vogeler’s Farmer Ploughing from the period 1930-42 shows a tractor with its own tracks towing a heavy plough. I doubt whether even the most visionary farmworker of the sixteenth century imagined what was to come.
I hope that you will join me in this series over the coming weeks.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 267. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Where the store requires apps and kids to play in safety and grip the rails.
Click for a solution
sandbox
Where the store requires apps (it’s a requirement of the App Store) and kids to play in safety (a sandbox) and grip the rails (also used by railway locos to apply to slippery rails to improve grip).
2: Benefit of a rightful claim to go beyond the confines of 1.
Click for a solution
entitlement
Benefit of a rightful claim (an entitlement) to go beyond the confines of 1 (what an app entitlement does for a sandboxed app).
3: ISO 688 could be intermodal folder for 1, but only in ~/Library.
Click for a solution
container
ISO 688 could be intermodal (a shipping container) folder for 1 (what it is in macOS), but only in ~/Library (the only place you should find them).
The common factor
Click for a solution
They are parts of the app sandbox system in macOS.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 266. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Skipper or proprietor who might also live there as one of the users.
Click for a solution
owner
Skipper (sometimes referred to as the ‘owner’ of a ship or aircraft) or proprietor (owner) who might also live there (owner-occupier) as one of the users (what the owner is).
2: Cluster or band such as staff or wheel.
Click for a solution
group
Cluster (a group) or band (a musical group) such as staff or wheel (two common groups in permissions).
3: The rest may be half or significant to everyone else.
Click for a solution
others
The rest (others) may be half (the other half) or significant (significant other) to everyone else (as in permissions).
The common factor
Click for a solution
They are the three classes used to set permissions.
没错，今年 AI 的爆发指向了一个新的趋势：对话式交互界面。但人类之所以发明绘画，开始通过设计图来制作各式各样的新工具，恰恰就是因为语言本身的效率太低。这个逻辑其实也可以从媒体形态上找到端倪：文字–> 图像–> 视频。仅仅依靠对话，我们无法构建出一个一把剪刀；仅仅通过语言表达的播客，也无法传达任何需要视觉才可以精准理解的信息。对话指令的交互界面与图形交互界面之间的关系，并非只是 dos 和 windows 之间的差异，更重要的点在于，后者可以更直观地完成交互，以及精准地进行创作行为。AIGC 的重点不仅仅只是 AI，而是我们如何使用 AI 进行「Generative Content」。
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 265. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Iron ore, manpower, reserve, fork.
Click for a solution
resource
Iron ore (a natural resource), manpower (a human resource), reserve (a resource generally), fork (a resource fork of a file).
2: Use sedit again for classic customisation thanks to Sumit and Samiran.
Click for a solution
ResEdit
Use sedit again (re-sedit, where sedit is a Unix programmer’s editor) for classic customisation (used to customise apps and more in Classic Mac OS) thanks to Sumit and Samiran (Sumit Bando and Samiran Basak were authors of later versions).
3: Lengthened characteristic object swallowed 1 in X.
Click for a solution
extended attribute
Lengthened (extended) characteristic object (an attribute, e.g. of a deity) swallowed 1 in X (resource forks in riddle 1 were incorporated into Mac OS X as extended attributes).
The common factor
Click for a solution
These are all connected with resources and resource forks in Classic Mac OS.
I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 264. Here are my solutions to them.
1: Lines that never meet in 2006 originated in Russia.
Click for a solution
Parallels
Lines that never meet (parallel lines) in 2006 (when it was first released for Mac OS X) originated in Russia (where its products were first developed).
2: Roman 995 perhaps with ceramics from 2007, now part of an HP descendant.
Click for a solution
VMware
Roman 995 perhaps (could be VM in Roman numerals) with ceramics (ware) from 2007 (when it was first released for Mac OS X), now part of an HP descendant (it’s now part of Broadcom, which originated from Hewlett Packard in 1961, as HP Associates).
3: Emulate and host thanks to Fabrice’s flightless bird from 2003.
Click for a solution
UTM
Emulate and host (it’s both an emulator and virtualiser, and based on QEMU) thanks to Fabrice’s (QEMU was originally developed by Fabrice Bellard) flightless bird (the Emu, the origin of QEMU) from 2003 (when the first code for QEMU was published).
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