Today seems to be live-in-the-past day. Heh.
For you young-‘uns, MacPaint was a bit-mapped drawing program that shipped with the original Macintosh. A lovely bit of code.
History
1985 Macintosh calendar
From the most excellent Scott Knaster:
Last week I posted about MAC: The Macintosh Calendar 1985 and included a couple of images from the calendar. Lots of folks asked to see more, so today I photographed the entire calendar and posted it. I apologize in advance to anyone depicted in this calendar who would rather not see these images again. It’s all done in the name of history.
Click on the calendar picture to jump to the gallery. You can zoom in once with the magnifying glass, then again with the + sign in the mini picture in the upper left corner.
Such great memories.
Steve Albini’s letter to Nirvana
Music producer Steve Albini had a conversation with Kurt Cobain about the possibility of Steve producing Nirvana’s next album, their final studio album, In Utero. Kurt asked Steve to put together an outline of his thoughts on producing and the letter after the jump was the result. So much great stuff in there.
Woz and Bushnell share the stage at C2SV conference
One of the founders of Apple and the man who brought video gaming to the masses, together onstage for the first time (at least as far back as they can remember).
They covered a lot during an hourlong conversation before a packed room at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on Friday afternoon, from Steve Jobs and data encryption to the early days of Silicon Valley and the future of robots and computing as machines get smarter and smarter. But the sense you got from both of these valley pioneers is that, for the most part, they had a lot of fun building the future and the idea of having fun still figures into their decisions.
A lot has been written about Steve Jobs and Woz’s roles in building Breakout for Atari. But this is the first time Woz and Bushnell have told that story together.
Both Bushnell and Woz said they never really saw the negative, blustery Jobs that people talk about, though they heard about it. Woz did tell an amusing story about developing the game “Breakout” for Atari on Jobs’ suggestion. He jumped at the chance to create a single-player version of Atari’s popular “Pong” for Bushnell. “Then he said you have to do it in four days,” Woz recalled.
Bushnell laughed at the comment. “I didn’t tell Jobs four days,” he said.
Woz said he was pretty sure that Jobs was trying to buy into a farm in Oregon and needed the money to do so in four days, so he set Wozniak on that insane schedule (a deadline Woz hit, by the way).
Cool stuff.
A timeline of the history of the World Wide Web
This living history of the web is a lot of fun. When you get to the site, click and drag in the timeline or click on the left or right side of each page to move forward or backward in time. OK, you won’t actually move through time, but you get the idea. As you move closer to current day and things start to get a bit crowded, you can click in the lower left corner to expand the timeline.
Lovely.
Ben Sliney and September 11
Terrific piece on Ben Sliney, the FAA National Operations Manager on September 11, 2001.
On September the 11th, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American commercial jets with the intention of crashing them into large, visible buildings in both Washington, D.C., and New York City. As we all know, the terrorists were successful in three of the four cases; the fourth plane’s assault on the United States Capitol — the presumed target — was thwarted by the heroic passengers on board. While we now believe that no other planes were targeted, at the time, each of the other 4,000-plus flights scheduled to be in American air space at the time were at risk. But Ben Sliney, the Federal Aviation Commission’s National Operations Manager on duty that morning, prevented future harm.
How? He made an unprecedented decision, making the call to ground every single commercial airplane in the country.
Read the piece to the end (it’s short). The last line is the payoff.
Steve Jobs preps for first TV appearance
Since this was from 1978, Steve was likely making an appearance to promote the Apple II. Sigh. Big wave of nostalgia.
Reagan calls Nixon in midst of Watergate
This phone call was taped on April 30, 1973, the same evening H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman had resigned. Reagan was calling Nixon to offer his condolences.