Chris MacAskill tells an anecdote about working at NeXT and trying to convince Steve to give a talk at a Unix conference. This is vintage Steve Jobs and, if Steve Jobs history is your thing, well worth the read.
History
The history of the Mac startup sound
[VIDEO] Giant wave of nostalgia, video embedded in main Loop post. This was on the front page of Hacker News this morning.
The story behind Susan Kare’s iconic design work for Apple
Not clear to me where the original quotes come from (please ping me if you know) but I appreciate the side-by-side showing an element or image from real life along with the icon Susan Kare crafted to represent it.
Beautiful.
The woman who brought Siri to life
Susan Bennett is featured in the latest episode of the video podcast, People in America. Here’s the iTunes link.
Most interesting tidbit? Susan did all her voicework for Siri in 2005, but Siri wasn’t really mainstream until it was integrated into iPhone OS (now iOS) in 2011 and she was unaware that her original voicework was going to be used for Siri. Fascinating.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: What I learned from Steve Jobs
Nice read, full of fascinating detail.
Check out your Twitter timeline, 10 years ago today
This is pretty cool. Click on this URL to see your Twitter timeline as it would have looked 10 years ago today if you followed the same people you follow now. Obviously, the actual look is current Twitter, and the stream will only include people who were on Twitter back then.
The date is embedded in the URL, so feel free to muck around to look at different dates. Embed a date one day later than the one you are looking for. For example, here’s one that shows Tweets from January 9th, 2007, the day Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone.
Fun!
[Via Andy Baio]
Epic Bill Gates e-mail rant from 2003
Boing Boing:
In 2003 Bill Gates tried to download Microsoft Movie Maker from Microsoft.com. His confusing, frustrating, futile experience prompted him to write a terrifically scorching email to the managers in charge of the project. It starts off pretty mild, with just a hint of the brutally funny sarcasm to come. (“I typed in movie maker. Nothing. So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist? So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”) It gets better from there.
Here’s a link to a PDF of the actual email exchange. Start at the bottom with Bill’s email, then work your way up.
I feel your pain, Bill.
Adobe Photoshop: Original Pascal source code and screen shots of one of the first versions
The Computer History Museum originally posted this back in 2013, but for some reason, this made it all the way to the top spot on Hacker News this morning.
I saw it, found it fascinating (especially since my very first Mac programming experience was with Pascal), and thought you might enjoy this look back at the early days of Photoshop.
Steve Jobs and the bullet-hole T-shirt meeting
Jim Black, former technology evangelist at Apple, tells the story of legendary game developer John Carmack (Doom, Quake, lots more) coming to Apple to meet with Steve Jobs:
I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John’s.
That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse.
I love a good Steve anecdote. I wonder if John was wearing a T-shirt with the Watchmen Comedian’s Badge logo.
The fascinating history of the “orchestra hit”
[VIDEO] This is an amazing walk through history, from Stravinsky all the way to Bruno Mars, all connected by that same sample, known as the orchestra hit. Terrific video (embedded in the main Loop post), learned a lot, lots of great musical samples, too.
[Via Kottke.org]
Steve Jobs anecdotes from pioneering game dev John Carmack
First things first, from John Carmack’s Wikipedia page:
Carmack was the lead programmer of the id video games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Rage and their sequels. Carmack is best known for his innovations in 3D graphics, such as his Carmack’s Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In August 2013, Carmack took the position of CTO at Oculus VR.
And:
Carmack and Kang married on January 1, 2000 and planned a ceremony in Hawaii. Steve Jobs requested that they postpone the ceremony so Carmack could attend the MacWorld Expo on January 5, 2000. Both declined and made a video instead.
Carmack had a rollercoaster of a relationship with Steve. Follow the headline link and just dive in. I found it a fascinating read.
Woz on the importance of HP in the creation of Apple
For many years, Woz has maintained a series of email lists to pass along news stories, technology he finds interesting, favorite jokes, things like that. A few days ago, Woz shared a link to a brilliant article about Hewlett Packard and the HP-35 calculator.
Jump to the main Loop post for Woz’s comments on this article (used with permission) and some nuggets about the creation of Apple. […]
A review from early 2008: “The Apple iPhone will only ever be a bit player”
This is just such a fun read, “claim chowder” (to borrow from John Gruber) at its best:
The geeks have all bought one and many have got theirs unlocked. The Nike wearing Soho crowd have splurged the cash. The wannabes and the I-must-have-that crowd have weighed in, swapped networks and got their devices. But that’s it. There’s a ton of people all sitting staring at the iPhone and — SADLY — (this is the bit that’s winding me up), turning their backs and walking away. I could name you 20 people, right now, that I know personally, who WOULD have an iPhone if they were marketed at a more reasonable price — 100 pounds maximum — and were unlocked to work on any network. But those 20 people won’t. They’re staying exactly where they are, back in the old world. Or, actually, back in the real world.
Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony and HTC (and, er, the Google offering) are safe. The iPhone, on the current trajectory, will only ever be a number 4 or number 5 device.
To be fair, Ewan MacLeod was not alone in that opinion. Steve Jobs saw what no one else could see. He knew. And he made it happen.
And Ewan clearly got on board, as evidenced by this tweet from last week:
https://twitter.com/Ew4n/status/993920014150447106
[Via Eric Jackson via Aaron Block]
Apple, HyperCard, and a glimpse of how far we’ve come
Check out the video in this tweet, a small piece of a larger project covering HyperCard:
https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/993885366217330689
At the time, back in 1990, this was absolutely groundbreaking. Since the internet was still in its infancy, images and data for a project were always stored locally. And images were massive, compared to the relatively tiny hard drives of the time.
The solution? Video discs and computer controlled video disc players. Back then, paper maps were filmed on incredibly precise animation stands (like those used for special effects camera fly-throughs), then cut into frames and stored on video disc. The computer moved along the maps by stepping through frames, each one a picture of a portion of a map at a slight offset from the previous frame.
In this example, the HyperCard stack presents a picture of the heart, and clicking on various buttons or hot points tells the video disc player to jump to an appropriate image or video.
How far we’ve come. Now, all those image can be stored locally, or brought up as needed from the cloud. And using cloud-shared resources means content can be updated as needed.
Fascinating look back. HyperCard was a truly groundbreaking piece of work by Bill Atkinson, one of the members of the original Macintosh team. If you are not familiar with Bill, take a look at his Wikipedia page. We owe him a lot.
Find content from your favorite games that is hidden, but there
If you love games, follow the link and search for your favorite. If nothing else, click through to your favorite old-timey platform (the Mac OS Classic page, say), and check out the huge wave of titles. Fun.
Apple’s official tech spec page for the original iMac
Fascinating to look back at these specs, representing Apple’s state-of-the-art 20 years ago. Fun.
Interesting that the note’s publication date is July 26, 2017. Wonder if this was part of a mass update, or was created as part of the planned publicity push for the iMac 20th anniversary.
A terrific find by Stephen Hackett and 512 Pixels.
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong
The Verge:
In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed “the green machine” or simply “the $100 laptop.”
And:
The $100 laptop would have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank. It would be rugged enough for children to use anywhere, instead of being limited to schools.
Rugged. Cheap. And powered by a crank. Got it.
Then, Negroponte and Annan rose for a photo-op with two OLPC laptops, and reporters urged them to demonstrate the machines’ distinctive cranks. Annan’s crank handle fell off almost immediately. As he quietly reattached it, Negroponte managed half a turn before hitting the flat surface of the table. He awkwardly raised the laptop a few inches, trying to make space for a full rotation. “Maybe afterwards…” he trailed off, before sitting back down to field questions from the crowd.
The moment was brief, but it perfectly foreshadowed how critics would see One Laptop Per Child a few years later: as a flashy, clever, and idealistic project that shattered at its first brush with reality.
I do remember this moment of idealistic promise, the $100 laptop that would change the world. I remember a thought of how, if this dream shipped in quantity, it would disrupt the entire laptop market.
Maybe my favorite bit of the story:
A Linux-based operating system would give kids total access to the computer — OLPC had reportedly turned down an offer of free Mac OS X licenses from Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, hedging his bets. Smart.
[H/T Robert Walker]
The original iPhone and an oral history of Iron Man’s original heads-up-display
The original Iron Man still ranks among my all-time favorite Marvel movies (especially the lead up to the in-cave creation of that first prototype suit). If you are a fan, this oral history is an enjoyable read.
But this one bit is especially interesting for Apple folk:
Kent Seki (visualisation/HUD effects supervisor): There were many rules and driving philosophies we established along the way that led us to the final product. I remember in an early discussion in post-production with Jon Favreau. He pulled out his iPhone, which was a new thing at the time. He said, ‘I don’t want to tell you a specific graphic to make for the HUD, but I want it to feel intuitive like my iPhone.’
And:
Dav Rauch (HUD design supervisor): The iPhone had just come out like literally a week or two before the meeting with Jon – and I got an iPhone and Favreau had gotten an iPhone. When I was down there we kind of geeked out on our iPhones, and we were talking about what we liked about the iPhone because he was really inspired by it. He was like, ‘What I love about this thing is it just kind of does what it should do, and it kind of does what I want it to do and it’s very intuitive and it’s very simple.’ We opened it up and I was looking at the transitions in an iPhone. I’m like, ‘These transitions are so simple and they’re just like zooming transitions, or wipe transitions. There’s nothing fancy about this phone, but what’s fancy about this phone is that it works and it works really well.’
Good design is a virus.
[Via Apple Insider]
Using the old Mac OS is pure Zen
That last post, the look back at the long history of the iMac, goes hand-in-hand with this one, an appreciation of the black and white simplicity of the original Mac OS. If you’ve never had the original Mac experience, take a look at Mark Wilson’s post for a glimpse at what got us here.
And if you are an old-schooler (like me), follow the headline link and immerse yourself in a nice warm pool of nostalgia.
20 years of iMac: A story of relentless design iteration
Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac:
A 20th anniversary is a milestone worthy of celebration in its own right, but even more so when describing a computer. Few technology products boast such a feat in an industry where changing customer preference and exponential technical advancement can quickly obsolete even the most well-considered plans.
This Sunday, Apple’s iMac line joins the 20-year club. Its ticket to entry is two decades of valuable lessons and ideas that tell the recent history of the personal computer industry and reveal Apple’s priorities and values. The iMac’s timeline tells many stories – some of reinvention and business strategy, others of software and hardware.
Perhaps none are more significant than the iMac’s design story. Explorations of color, form, material, and miniaturization have marked significant breakthroughs throughout the years. On this anniversary week, we’ll take a look at the design evolution of the iMac.
Really nice, long look at the evolution of the iMac. Well done.
Wired, from 1997: 101 ways to save Apple
From this terrific Kottke post, a link to a Wired article from June, 1997, just before Apple CEO Gil Amelio was ousted and Steve Jobs became de facto CEO. Dark days, about to emerge into brilliance.
The list of 101 ways to save Apple is brilliant, funny, and sometimes strangely prescient. And absolutely worth the read. So, so good.
Steve Jobs speaks passionately about return to Apple in 1997 interview
[VIDEO] Apple’s deal to buy NeXT was finalized in February 1997, Apple CEO Gil Amelio was ousted in July 1997, and Steve was named interim CEO in September 1997. This interview was recorded on October 2nd, 1997.
Good to have a sense of the sequence as you watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post).
20 vintage Apple ads
This is from 2014, but just came across it yesterday. A fascinating stroll through Apple’s advertising history. Check out the address on that first ad:
Apple Computer Company
770 Welch Road, Suite 154
Palo Alto, California 94304
Popped that address into Apple Maps and I see that it is now the Palo Alto Endoscopy Center. It’s a block away from the Stanford Apple Store on some prime Stanford real estate.
Run a bunch of old-timey Macintosh software in your browser
We’ve run this sort of thing before, but every time it comes back up, I have so much fun with it, I feel the need to share it again.
This is archive.org at its best, sharing the original Macintosh experience in all its (glacially slow) glory.
Follow the link, pick a program, and click to launch. Enjoy the deep dive.
[Via SwissMiss]
Alan Kay talks about meeting Steve Jobs and the 2007 iPhone keynote
Alan Kay was there at the very beginning. He spent 10 years at Xerox PARC, culminating in that famous visit Steve Jobs made that ultimately spawned the Mac.
This is a bit of a walk down memory lane and a nice little read.
Apple is the richest company, so where are the billionaires?
Bloomberg:
Finding billionaires in Silicon Valley isn’t hard. Dropbox Inc.’s Arash Ferdowsi and Veeva Systems Inc.’s Peter Gassner have both crossed the threshold this year, and tech fortunes make up a fifth — or about $1 trillion — of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But tracking down members of the three-comma club at Apple Inc. is a less fruitful endeavor, even though the iPhone-maker is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $879 billion.
Chairman Art Levinson is the only insider to make the cut, and Apple stock accounts for just 20 percent of his $1 billion fortune, according to regulatory filings. The rest comes from his long tenure at Genentech Inc., where he was chairman and chief executive officer, and an early stake in Google Inc.
No other Apple insider comes close.
I think one core attribute of any huge company with few or no billionaires is a long legacy. A tech company born in current times that then grows huge is much more likely to make a billionaire or two. Or three.
Apple’s big growth curve happened long before billion dollar valuations were common. They went public in 1980, fragmenting their ownership stake, making it that much harder for a single person to emerge as a billionaire.
Thoughtful article.
A cool skunkworks story from the days of Apple’s transition from 68K to PowerPC
Ron Avitzur:
Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
I love this story. Ron kept showing up, determined to bring Graphing Calculator to life on the new (at the time) PowerPC chips. Be sure to read all the way down to the bet about being on the front page of the New York Times.
[H/T, @thisneedseditin]
Interview with Apple logo creator Rob Janoff
Terrific piece by 9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber.
“A frank, smart and captivating memoir by the daughter of Apple founder Steve Jobs”
Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir, called Small Fry, due out in September, available for pre-order now.
From the Small Fry book page on Amazon:
Born on a farm and named in a field by her parents―artist Chrisann Brennan and Steve Jobs―Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa’s father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. His attention was thrilling, but he could also be cold, critical and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa decided to move in with her father, hoping he’d become the parent she’d always wanted him to be.
Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s poignant story of a childhood spent between two imperfect but extraordinary homes. Scrappy, wise, and funny, young Lisa is an unforgettable guide through her parents’ fascinating and disparate worlds. Part portrait of a complex family, part love letter to California in the seventies and eighties, Small Fry is an enthralling book by an insightful new literary voice.
Fingers crossed, hoping this is a great book.
How Stephen Hawking got his voice back
Joao Medeiros, Wired:
Hawking lost his ability to speak in 1985, when, on a trip to CERN in Geneva, he caught pneumonia. In the hospital, he was put on a ventilator. His condition was critical. The doctors asked Hawking’s then-wife, Jane, whether they should turn off the life support. She vehemently refused. Hawking was flown to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge, where the doctors managed to contain the infection. To help him breathe, they also performed a tracheotomy, which involved cutting a hole in his neck and placing a tube into his windpipe. As a result, Hawking irreversibly lost the ability to speak.
This is a fascinating story, starting with a program that ran on an Apple II, then evolving over the years, all while keeping that original synthesized voice.