Frontier and Apple in the early 90s

<p><i>As <a href="https://shownotes.scripting.com/scripting/2025/12/18/whatWouldFirefoxDo.html">with</a> <a href="https://shownotes.scripting.com/scripting/2026/01/17/howXmlrpcStartedUp.html">previous</a> <a href="https://shownotes.scripting.com/scripting/2026/01/05/bloggerOfTheYear.html">podcasts</a> I asked Claude.ai to write the show notes based on a machine-generated transcript. It makes mistakes, so you have to listen to the podcast if you want to know what I really think. But it's pretty good, and will help search engines find this. Additionally, I refer to the <a href="http://scripting.com/2025/08/28/140604.html#a141421">Think Different</a> piece as revealing the big missing piece in web apps, the problem I hope to solve with WordLand and the competitive products that I want to encourage. </i></p><p>Dave Winer reaches back nearly four decades to tell the story of Frontier, his scripting system for the Macintosh, and draws a direct line from that experience to what he's working on today.</p><p>The backstory begins with Winer's company riding the Mac wave in the mid-1980s. While most developers abandoned the platform during its lean early years, his team stuck it out, kept their revenue flowing through a PC product, and were perfectly positioned when Apple removed the hardware limitations in January 1986. That loyalty paid off in relationships — Winer had contacts throughout Apple, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e">Jean-Louis Gassée</a>, the top product executive just below the CEO level. </p><p>After selling his company and taking a well-deserved winter off skiing, Winer set to work on something he'd always wanted to build: a scripting system for the Mac. It was an elegant product — it added a menu to the Finder, provided a proper script editor, and made apps scriptable. He developed it with the knowledge and informal blessing of his friend at the top of Apple's product organization, who met with him regularly and gave feedback. When the demo landed in front of Apple's executives, it went well — they asked for a proposal. Winer went back with what he considered a fair deal: a per-machine license capped at $14 million, after which Apple would owe nothing. He thought it addressed their concerns directly, particularly their frustration over the ongoing royalty payments to Adobe on every LaserPrinter sold.</p><p>What came back instead was rejection — and then the revelation that Apple had an internal project all alo