This is incredible and thank you for the reply. My friend and I are obsessed with computing history and this time period was especially fun for the both of us. Thank you for being a contributor to it.

I'm curious, would you be open to talking about your experience on a podcast with us? https://forkbombpodcast.com/ It's noncommercial, no ads, and is just for fun.

If not, I'd love to know more here. You all must of been really proud of what you built.

Having to optimise for three very different microarchitectures with the G3 (short narrow pipeline, no AltiVec, small caches), G4 (short wide pipeline, focus on in-order AltiVec, useful OoO otherwise, large L2 yet memory bandwidth starved), and G5 (long and wide pipeline, focus on super-scalar OoO, AltiVec just glued on, more memory bandwidth) must have been "fun".

How many variants of the codecs did you have to implement to make it work?

I really love HN!

Thank you for working on this. You added so much enjoyment to using AIM on an eMac circa that time. People talk fondly of their 90's/80's computing experience, but this was mine. It really was a magical time...

I was a teenager at the time and would watch all of Apple's keynotes. I remember them making a big deal for a while about H.264 support. It's very cool to get a glimpse of the context where engineers like yourself were likely proud of your work, and I'm glad that it was shown through the way that Apple talked about it.

I remember Jobs promising it would be released as an open standard. What happened behind the scenes to prevent that occurring?

You can gut it and replace with a Raspberry Pi camera!

https://github.com/maxbbraun/pisight

https://www.printables.com/model/418381-webcam-project-using...

It still worked for video on Apple Silicon, only the built-in mic stopped working (which was easily bested by the built-in mics on the laptop anyways). Only after they removed FireWire support in Tahoe did it die.

It was FireWire, wasn't it? Pretty sure I still have mine in a box somewhere.

Oh neat! What was your computing experience like back then? Do you remember what you were trying to figure out?

I don't see what's confusing about the app, both on macOS an iOS. You get a preview of your face, the last contacts you called and a green "New call" button.

To me this is simple to the point of being excessively simple, especially with the "missed calls" being in a 16x16 click target dropdown.

It looks like they optimized for "calls from grandma" mode.

> and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center.

MS Teams is especially bad for this if you have a few people in your addressbook with the same name and corporate email naming gives you for example john.mcleod@place and john.mcleod2@place - oh, you messaged john.mcleod@ six months ago but you message john.mcleod2 multiple times per day? Then this time you must mean john.mcleod with no 2, this time surely!

My "patch" is basically just Scotland, about half the phone book for the north-west is McLeods, and the John McLeods alone are about two dozen pages, so duplicates are common.

Holy cow I hate the facetime app so much

- answering a video call freezes the app. It recovers 10s later but video is not transmitted out

- 4 seconds to load in contact pictures

- typing 5 letters in the contact search field freezes the app for 5 seconds

- scrolling the left sidebar with contact posters is choppy

Yep Apple software is absolute garbage with a shiny veneer and everyone laps it up - ‘all about the marketing’

I'm curious why they did they're own thing and how closely it functions to the actual spec. I never did consider trying this against an actual STUN server.