This is the original video showing Steve Jobs introducing the Mac to the world. The crowd’s reaction is amazing to hear, approaching hysteria.
History
Steven Levy: The Mac is 30 and I was there for its birth
Steven Levy, on how he came to be part of the Mac’s 1984 launch:
Almost no one remembers who played in the Super Bowl (the Los Angeles Raiders lost to the Washington Redskins. Like I said, 1984 wasn’t like 2014). But the commercial, aired two days before the Mac launch, is part of history, and many can recite the tagline verbatim: “On January 24, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ’1984.’”
Jobs also planned a massive advertising campaign to follow, including a complete mini-publication that would run in multiple magazines. But, as he would do often in his subsequent career, Jobs relied on the news media to provide the narrative focus for his effort. He decided to give the exclusive story, along with early access to the team, to Newsweek and Rolling Stone, though he also gave briefings to a new magazine called Macworld.
I was the Rolling Stone writer.
Great read.
Apple execs on the Mac at 30
MacWorld’s Jason Snell spoke with Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Bud Tribble, vice president of software technology, and Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, about the Mac’s thirty years of evolution.
Think back. Which Mac was your favorite?
Peter Cohen goes back in time (OK, not really!) to revisit his favorites of 30 years of Macintosh.
7 classic versions of Windows and Mac OS you can run in a browser
Not perfect. I struggled to get some features to work. But I definitely had myself a fond walk down memory lane. Enjoy!
Court rules Yelp must ID negative reviewers, no constitutional protection
This is a big deal.
In a decision that could reshape the rules for online consumer reviews, a Virginia court has ruled that the popular website Yelp must turn over the names of seven reviewers who anonymously criticized a prominent local carpet cleaning business.
The case revolves around negative feedback against Virginia-based Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. The owner, Joe Hadeed, said the users leaving bad reviews were not real customers of the cleaning service — something that would violate Yelp’s terms of service. His attorneys issued a subpoena demanding the names of seven anonymous reviewers, and a judge in Alexandria ruled that Yelp had to comply.
Macintosh 30th anniversary event set for January 25
Like a lot of you, I’m sure, I’ve been a Mac user since the beginning. True, I didn’t buy my first Mac until March of 1984, but that was purely lack of funds, not lack of desire.
And, in the blink of an eye, it’s 30 years later. Big wave of nostalgia.
Timeline of the far future
This timeline starts 1,000 years from now and walks us through the massive changes that might be coming. Things like “most words extinct”, “Hale-Bopp returns”, “new north star”, “Earth’s axial tilt reversed”, “Chernobyl finally safe” (20,000 years from now), all the way to “game over, man” and beyond.
Fun times, fun times.
Phil Everly dies at 74
If you are not familiar with the Everly brothers, you are certainly familiar with the bands and singers upon whom they’ve had a profound influence, bands like the Beatles and Beach Boys. Here’s a very young Phil and Don Everly singing Bye, Bye, Love.
Apartment, completely unused since 1942, discovered in Paris
I absolutely love stuff like this. Wish I could have been a French-speaking fly on the wall as they dug through the apartment.
Internet Archive posts playable collection of old console video games
Fantastic news for anyone with a place in their heart for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 Pro System, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey², or the Astrocade. The Internet Archive has posted playable emulations of all five of these old consoles on their site.
Alan Turing gets his royal pardon
When I first got into computer science (lo those many years ago), Alan Turing‘s name was one held in reverence. Turing’s big giant brain hatched many of the abstract ideas at the root of the computing tree. The idea of a computer moving through its varied states, driven by algorithms, owes a lot to Turing’s fertile imagination.
How Google reacted when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone
The Atlantic ran this excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. This looks really good.
High resolution scan of Gutenberg Bible posted on-line
The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Vatican Library have joined together to digitize their collection of ancient texts. One of these (perhaps the most important, in my opinion) is the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book created using movable type.
Debugging a live Saturn V rocket
Brennan Moore’s grandfather was an Apollo engineer. This is from his personal memoirs. It’s the story of a problem he helped fix during the launch of an unmanned Saturn V rocket on November 9th, 1967.
The birth of Xbox Live
This evening, massive numbers of Xbox One consoles will arrive on gamers’ doorsteps. At midnight, many more gamers will queue in stores to get their hands on one. Seems an appropriate time to post this story about how Xbox Live came to be.
I will warn you. This story contains graphic Microsoftness. And it takes place, apparently, in a world where Apple does not exist. All that aside, if you are an Xbox fan, you’ll enjoy this.
Working Apple I fails to get bid at German auction
Would be nice to see this in a museum somewhere. The opening bid was set at €180,000 (about US$243,000), which is relatively low compared to recent bids for a working Apple I. Goes to show how tricky the classic computer market can be.
The real story behind tablet market share reporting
This is some incredible compelling analysis. I would urge anyone interested in the methodology behind PC/tablet/phone market share “reporting” (and I do use that term loosely) to read this top-to-bottom.
Things start off with a bit of history.
Following a routine that began in the 1990s, Gartner and IDC spent the 2000s noting that Apple’s Mac market share was virtually irrelevant, afloat in an ocean of PC sales without giving much regard to the fact that Apple enjoyed very high share in some market segments (such as education and graphic design) and essentially none in others (such as enterprise sales, kiosks and cash registers).
Then came the iPod, then the iPhone, then the iPad, with Mac sales rising as the Mac-iOS ecosystem evolved and expanded.
And that’s when this article really gets interesting. In a nutshell, a case is made that IDC, Gartner, and Strategy Analytics (the big three) set out to torpedo Apple’s perceived market share.
There’s little mystery of who shot down the iPad’s market share or what weapon they’re using: all three major market research firms rapidly fire off headline bullets clearly aimed at wounding the perception of Apple’s tablet. One can, generally, only speculate about why this is occurring.
However, Strategy Analytics has offered some unusual transparency regarding its motive for carving out a very specific market and then stuffing the pie chart with “tier two” volume to the point where the world’s best selling tablet is crushed down into an embarrassing statistical sliver of shrinking “share.”
Read the article. Fantastic.
Video of Steve Jobs being inducted into BAC biz hall of fame
Nice mix of video, speeches, interviews.
It includes several tributes to Steve Jobs from various Silicon Valley luminaries, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (who was also inducted), Bill “Coach” Campbell, and others.
Worth watching.
Apple II DOS source code available for download
This is where it all started for me, my first exposure to Apple. The first bit of money I ever made was writing a game called Library Adventure for the Apple II. Much of the code was written with peeks (to access hidden bits of the OS) and pokes (to hide our own stuff for later retrieval) in memory. We used packages from PenguinSoft and Beagle Brothers. Pulled many all nighters and had a grand old time.
Now the Computer History Museum and Digibarn Museum have released the Apple II DOS code into the wild (non-commercial use only). Here’s the link if you want to grab a copy for yourself. As of this writing, the server returned an internal error. I suspect the servers have been overwhelmed with requests.
Somebody set us up the bomb
Great heist story from Dan Lewis and Now I Know.
Dead bodies on Mount Everest
Ever since I read the book Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer, I’ve been fascinated by attempts to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Incredible how many people died trying to reach the summit or, having reached the top, died on the descent.
They are grisly, but these pictures are a part of the Everest story.
Internet Archive building damaged by fire
This is the group that runs the Wayback Machine. As you’d expect, their data is all online, so the data loss was limited to documents that were in the scanning center. But they are a non-profit and the fire damage is substantial.
An early estimate shows we may have lost about $600,000 worth of high end digitization equipment, and we will need to repair or rebuild the scanning building. It is in difficult times like these that we turn to our community.
Here’s a link to the blog post describing the fire. Consider making a donation.
The incredible memorial to flight UTA#772 in the middle of the Sahara
First things first, open up a new Google Maps window and copy and paste these coordinates:
16°51′53″N 11°57′13″E
This should put you in the middle of Niger, Africa, smack-dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Start zooming in. Keep going. Eventually, the memorial to UTA Flight #772 will appear.
Flight #772 was taken down by a suitcase bomb back in September, 1989. Switch over to satellite view and you’ll get a sense of what the memorial looks like from the air. Then, follow the headline link to see pictures of the construction of the memorial, using pieces of the wreckage from the crashed jet.
Tragic and beautiful.
3D model lets you fly through 17th century London
This is absolutely fantastic. Imagine the implications of teaching history with tools like this at your disposal.
In the video below, the fly-through starts at about :50.
The grad student who created the world’s first malware and brought the internet to its knees
A fascinating bit of history, nice read for a Sunday morning.
Steve Jobs’ home declared an “historic resource”
So much of Apple’s history stems from that house.
Steve Jobs built the first 100 Apple 1 computers at the Crist Drive home with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Patricia Jobs. The first 50 were sold to Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in Mountain View for $500 each, according to the evaluation. The rest were assembled for their friends in the Homebrew Computer Club.
“I’d get yelled at if I bent a prong,” Patricia Jobs told The Daily News in an interview last month.
The original computers are now worth tens of thousands of dollars. One sold for $213,000 at an auction in 2010.
The home is also where Jobs courted some of his first investors, including Chuck Peddle of Commodore Computer and Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital, according to the evaluation.
The first partnership for Apple Computer Co. was signed on April 1, 1976, and nine months later the company was established and operations moved to nearby Cupertino.
“These significant events took place at the subject property,” Commissioner Sapna Marfatia wrote in the evaluation.
The world’s first video game
Homage to William Higinbotham:
Fifty years ago, before either arcades or home video games, visitors waited in line at Brookhaven National Laboratory to play Tennis for Two, an electronic tennis game that is unquestionably a forerunner of the modern video game. Two people played the electronic tennis game with separate controllers that connected to an analog computer and used an oscilloscope for a screen. The game’s creator, William Higinbotham, was a physicist who lobbied for nuclear nonproliferation as the first chair of the Federation of American Scientists.
James Sherry Nirvana interviews, on the net for the first time
If you are a Nirvana fan, these are a fantastic find.
Here we have three separate Nirvana interviews conducted by Sherry; all together, they add up to nearly an hour. The interviews catch Nirvana at three very different stages of their career. In November of 1990 Nirvana was riding the modest success of Bleach; in the summer of 1991 they were ready to release Nevermind and they knew they had something special on their hands; by 1992 they had already become superstars and were dealing with that. By the time the last interview rolled around, Nirvana had been named Metal Hammer’s “Best New Band,” which was just really amusing. Among other things, they discuss their willingness to pursue an idea that had been floated in 1991 of touring with Guns N’ Roses.
The top 100 inventions from the last 100 years
I love lists, and this is definitely a fun one. I suspect that you will find fault with this list, have a few inventions that you think should be on it, see some that perhaps should not be. That’s just the way with lists though, no?
My biggest complaint is that the first Apple product listed is the iPod in 2001. What? No Macintosh? No Apple II? Both of these were game changers.
That said, I still enjoyed your article, Ellie Zolfagharifard.