[VIDEO] Steve Jobs gave a very informal talk (video embedded in the main Loop post) to a class at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, back in 1992. I’ve not seen this one before.
I have to say, seeing Steve so young and vibrant both thrills me and fills me with sadness.
I’ve been tracking this one wit great interest. From the description:
Up for sale is one of the rarest Apple computers you’ll find. This is a prototype/clear Macintosh Portable (M5126) backlit. I’ve been collecting for many years now and only know of four of these left in the world. All of which, based on my knowledge, exist in private collections i.e. Lonnie Mimm’s, an individual in Europe, this one, my personal collection. This is one of my favorite Apple computers and the fact this is a clear prototype make is unbelievably rare. The chances of one of these coming up for sale again are very low.
And:
The engineer I bought this from worked on the Macintosh Portable project. Another buddy of his, who also worked on the project and was leaving the Apple, said he planned on throwing this prototype out. The person I bought this from literally found it in his buddies trash before he left Apple. The engineer I bought this from kept it in his office until he left Apple and kept it safe for 28 years.
Follow the link, check out the pictures. Beautiful. From what I can tell, this is the prototype of this device, which Apple sold from 1989 to 1991 at the incredibly expensive price of $7,300 (about $14,000 in today’s dollars). Crazy.
As I write this, the prototype has a current bid of $8,100. Don’t tempt me, internet.
A few days ago, I got into a Twitter discussion about things Apple changed and were mocked for changing, yet those changes were copied and, eventually became the new normal. The original discussion was prompted by a wave of phones embracing the notch.
I was surprised by how many different things emerged from this exercise. Key to making this list was Apple making a change that is first mocked. So innovation isn’t sufficient. Here’s the original tweet. Feel free to retweet or reply to it, send me anything I’ve missed. […]
[VIDEO] First things first, I think Wreck-It Ralph is an under-appreciated gem of a movie. Perfectly cast, beautifully animated. And lots and lots of eye candy and Easter eggs.
Yesterday, Disney released the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph 2, AKA Ralph Breaks the Internet. The trailer is embedded in the main Loop post. That little girl doing the screaming sure resembles toddler Moana. But I digress.
In the trailer, can’t miss it, about 21 seconds in, there’s a shot of a computer interface. In many movies, when they show a computer screen, they’ve mocked up some generic OS. Not sure why, but that happens all the time. Not so here. This is a beauty shot of Mac OS 9, AKA System 9, or at least I think it’s System 9.
There’s a color Apple icon. That launcher bar (that what that was?) at the bottom left, and the application menu on the upper right. That enough to pin this down as System 9?
No matter, I am incredibly excited about this movie. Enjoy the trailer.
Some fascinating items. At the very least, take a look at the Steve Jobs job application. This is a nice bit of history, a sense of Steve before Apple.
There’s also a signed Mac OS X manual, a signed newspaper article (I believe it is from 2008, likely for the iPhone 3G – In the pic, you can already see Steve has lost weight), and a photo of the original Apple logo signed by Apple founder Ron Wayne.
[Via 9to5Mac]
This is both arcane and fascinating. I stumbled into this rabbit hole via this Jason Snell post. His enthusiasm for the story made me dig in, then it was off to the races.
If you have any love for the history of video games, take a few minutes to immerse yourself (don’t miss the video, which might be my favorite part).
This is a great thread on the birth of iPad from Bethany Bongiorno, a former software engineering director at Apple. A real moment in time.
https://twitter.com/bella_bongiorno/status/957378194927054848
Tap the tweet to read the entire thread.
Every wave of Apple new thing brings a wave of skepticism. Last week, we posted one specific example, “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”, which focused on a single, canonical iPod review.
In response to that post, Loop reader João Gomes, sent me a link to this MacRumors forum page, a rabbit hole filled with claim chowder (has John Gruber trademarked that phrase yet?)
So, so good.
Tedium:
So, as it turns out, before the virtual bowling alley borrowed something from the trackball, the inventors of the trackball borrowed something from the actual bowling alley—specifically, the Canadian variation of it, called 5-pin bowling.
And:
The [trackball] is Canadian through and through, a project formulated at the behest of the Royal Canadian Navy by Ferranti Canada, as part of a much larger project—a military information system called Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving, or DATAR.
And:
“Think about the state of play in the computer world in 1952. There were only a handful of operating computers in the world. Almost all were unreliable. There was no common software language… pulse rates were only 50-100kHz. The idea of using a ball to control a cursor which could intervene and change program execution was a million miles ahead.”
This is a terrific look back at a device that changed the path of computing. [Via The Overspill]
This is a phenomenal image from our collective history. This is Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac icons (and so much more) in her office, back in the early days of Macintosh.
There’s a lot of detail here. Check the Mac on the shelf with the color Mac logo. What model is that?
And zoom in (tap the image for a higher rez version) on that piece of graph paper taped above the computer. Is that some kind of icon code? An ASCII table?
Check out the toys on the shelf, the books. It’s all such a moment in time.
UPDATE: Some cool feedback from some folks who lived this history.
First things first, the photo originated in Cabel Sasser’s Twitter feed (thanks for the heads up, Cabel!), as seen here:
https://twitter.com/cabel/status/951163850333741056
Read down Cabel’s post for replies from Susan Kare herself, along with Chris Espinosa and lots of other folks. Some great reading.
And, as a bonus, here are some pics I took of Susan Kare’s original design notebook when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art a few years back.
[VIDEO] The video embedded in the main Loop post is from a few years ago but, if you are interested in icon design and/or Apple history, carve out some time and give it a look. Susan Kare was the original Mac icon and type designer. Lovely stuff, worth the repost.
Stephen Hackett, MacStories:
When thinking about the earliest days of Apple, it’s easy to recall the Apple I, the Apple II line and the Macintosh. However, there’s one more computer that defined Apple’s early years. This computer was ground-breaking but incredibly expensive, and exposed many things wrong within Apple itself.
The Lisa launched 35 years ago next month. Today, it is mostly considered as a precursor to Mac. While that is true, it doesn’t come close to doing this computer justice.
Apple Lisa was an incredibly important part of Apple’s history. This is a terrific read. Don’t miss the embedded and linked videos.
Daily Mail:
The ground-breaking digital blue box was developed by Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1972 and was the inventor’s first printed circuit board.
But the box was actually a hacking device that fooled a phone company’s switchboard by reproducing its specific tones.
As a result, the user was able to get free overseas phone calls in an era when making a long-distance call was hugely expensive.
Click through to the post. Some terrific pics and a video of Steve Jobs telling the blue box story. This is a piece of history I would love to own.
I’m a big fan of Susan Kare’s work. All it takes is a quick scan of her Wikipedia page or this sample page of some of her Apple icons and you can see the impact she had on the original Mac, an impact that carries on to this day.
Susan is still very active as an artist and designer and has a collection of table linens just perfect for the old-school Mac lover in your life. This is definitely my cup of tea. Take a look.
[VIDEO] Regardless of how much (or little) you enjoy the singing or production values, I do find this a fascinating piece of Apple history. Folks who’ve been around the Apple universe for long enough will recognize a lot of these references.
The video (embedded in the main Loop post) was originally posted in 2012, but I just came across it this morning, thought it worth sharing. Anyone recognize anyone in the video? They are ALL Apple employees.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
ModMy today announced it has archived its default ModMyi repository on Cydia, which is essentially an alternative App Store for downloading apps, themes, tweaks, and other files on jailbroken iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices.
ZodTTD/MacCiti also shut down last week, meaning that two out of three of Cydia’s major default repositories are no longer active as of this month.
And:
The closure of two major Cydia repositories is arguably the result of a declining interest in jailbreaking, which provides root filesystem access and allows users to modify iOS and install unapproved apps on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
I’ve always thought of jailbreaking as a wild west frontier, with few rules, little oversight and, correspondingly, no real way to prevent malware. Jailbreaking also technically violates your iPhone warranty.
But, that said, jailbreaking also brought some interesting, experimental features to iOS. Over time, Apple caught up, bringing the more successful jailbreaking features into the fold.
We’re seeing the end of an era.
Tim Bajarin, Fast Company:
About six months before the iPhone hit store shelves in 2007, Steve Jobs called Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, and asked him if he could create a glass cover for a new Apple product that would resist scratches and breakage.
And:
The original iPhone spec called for a plastic cover over the touchscreen display. The story goes that Jobs, after using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, became very worried that the device’s display would get scratched when jumbled around in user’s pockets with keys and coins. So he gathered his engineers and demanded a new glass covering be used for the iPhone. Hence Jobs’s phone call to Weeks.
And:
While many other smartphone makers have crowed about using Gorilla Glass, Apple has rarely (if ever) publicly acknowledged Corning as the maker of the iPhone’s glass cover.
Corning is a critical part of the iPhone’s success and the iPhone a critical part of Corning’s growth as well. If you ever find yourself in the finger lakes region of New York, take some time to stop by the Corning Museum of Glass.
And spend a few minutes with Tim Bajarin’s article, as well as this fantastic New York Times article which details the iPhone’s move, under Steve Jobs’ urgent direction, from a plastic to a Gorilla Glass screen.
[VIDEO] From the App: The Human Story web site:
With the launch of the iPhone and subsequent devices, developers found themselves with a worldwide market hungry for their innovations: apps.
Yet, a renaissance needs cultivation, not exploitation. Ten years in, is the opportunity gone? Will artists find a way to create tools that elevate the human experience, or will the market be valued even above the impact to the future of the industry?
I am really looking forward to seeing this. Enjoy the trailer (embedded in the main Loop post).
The Guardian:
A reporter on the UK’s Cambridge Evening News received an anonymous call telling him to ring the US embassy for some big news, 25 minutes before the murder of John F Kennedy in Dallas, newly released documents say.
I realize this is off topic for me, but this hits me deep. The call was local, meaning someone in Cambridge knew of the assassination before the shots were fired. And in all the years since, this significant detail was kept under wraps.
Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But this comes from MI-5, and is a startlingly new and major development in a story that has been scraped to the bone in the press for many years.
UPDATE: Of course, this was a big leap in logic, from “big news” to “the assassination”, no doubt. Just hits a nerve for me.
Nice look back at the critical role the world’s first spreadsheet had on Apple’s early success.
Zachary Crockett, Priceonomics:
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
The pitch correction software, which automatically calibrates out-of-tune singing to perfection, has been used on nearly every chart-topping album for the past 20 years. Along the way, it has been pilloried as the poster child of modern music’s mechanization.
And:
For inventor Andy Hildebrand, Auto-Tune was an incredibly complex product — the result of years of rigorous study, statistical computation, and the creation of algorithms previously deemed to be impossible.
And:
“The sampling synthesizers sounded like shit: if you sustained a note, it would just repeat forever,” he harps. “And the problem was that the machines didn’t hold much data.”
Hildebrand, who’d “retired” just a few months earlier, decided to take matters into his own hands. First, he created a processing algorithm that greatly condensed the audio data, allowing for a smoother, more natural-sounding sustain and timbre. Then, he packaged this algorithm into a piece of software (called Infinity), and handed it out to composers.
And:
Infinity improved digitized orchestral sounds so dramatically that it uprooted Hollywood’s music production landscape: using the software, lone composers were able to accurately recreate film scores, and directors no longer had a need to hire entire orchestras.
“I bankrupted the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Hildebrand chuckles. “They were out of the [sample recording] business for eight years.”
Great, great read. [H/T The Overspill]
From the Pittsburgh Tribune Review writeup:
New technologies are sometimes a selfish endeavor, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told a crowded Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
He built the Apple II, the computer that made Apple a household name , because he wanted color in arcade games.
And:
“Steve made the iPhone, not for you and me. He made it for himself,” Wozniak said of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. “It had to be elegant and simple, which were design flaws.”
And:
Wozniak didn’t hold back on criticisms of Jobs. He said a 2015 movie about Jobs nailed the man’s personality. He put blame for the failures of the Apple III, the Lisa and other products on Jobs.
Read the rest of the article for more on this. While I’ve heard Woz hint at these things before, I’ve never heard of an interview in which he gets so specific on his feelings about Steve Jobs. This article gets into one specific anecdote, but from what I’ve heard, he did relate others on stage.
From the Kickstarter page:
The Secret History of Mac Gaming is the story of those communities and the game developers who survived and thrived in an ecosystem that was serially ignored by the outside world. It’s a book about people who made games and people who played them — people who, on both counts, followed their hearts first and market trends second. How in spite of everything they had going against them, the people who carried the torch for Mac gaming in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s showed how clever, quirky, and downright wonderful video games could be.
This looks amazing. I love the cover design. Gorgeous, and emblematic of that old school Mac look and feel. Check out the kickstarter. Hoping this meets its goals.
Nice image. Wish Rene had shot this on a less scratchy surface. Makes me uncomfortable just looking at it. But a great shot.
The missing iPhone? The iPhone X, understandably.
CNET:
Right now, an Apple-1 computer valued at $700,000 is being auctioned off, with a current bid of $140,000. And starting Oct. 20, a Newsweek magazine from 1988 signed by Jobs will be auctioned off at a starting bid of $1,000. It’s estimated the magazine will sell for between $10,000 and $15,000, according to RR Auction Executive Vice President Bobby Livingston.
Here’s a link to the Apple I auction page. As I write this, the current bid is up to $204,999. Bidding closes noon PT/3p ET tomorrow.
And here’s a link to the coming (October 20th) auction of the Steve Jobs signed Newsweek cover.
Oliver Haslam, writing for Redmond Pie, gathered every iPhone made and shot them next to the mockups of the iPhone 8 Edition X Pro (or whatever next week’s highend phone will be called).
Odd, yet fascinating.
[H/T, Loop reader George Lancer]
Two things about this detailed chart of iOS beta releases since the days of iPhone OS:
The chart itself. Great work by Will Hains pulling this together. He’s been doing it for quite some time.
Yesterday’s iOS 11 beta 9 release was uncharted territory, the first iOS release to hit this lofty beta territory. So new, Will had to add a new color to the chart. Will iOS 11 hit a beta 10?
Fun chart, Will. Great job.
A fun stroll through history from the Git Tower blog. I LOVE the illustrations. Anyone know who did them?
The Guardian:
MPs are expected to gather outside parliament to witness Big Ben’s final bongs at midday on Monday before the chimes are silenced to allow repair work to begin, amid a political furore about the four-year renovation project.
From the Big Ben Wikipedia page:
Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the clock at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London and is usually extended to refer to both the clock and the clock tower as well. The tower is officially known as Elizabeth Tower, renamed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II in 2012; previously, it was known simply as the Clock Tower.
When completed in 1859, it was, says clockmaker Ian Westworth, “the prince of timekeepers: the biggest, most accurate four-faced striking and chiming clock in the world.” The tower had its 150th anniversary on 31 May 2009, during which celebratory events took place.
A British cultural icon, the tower is one of the most prominent symbols of the United Kingdom and is often in the establishing shot of films set in London.
Hope we hear that famous bong again as soon as possible.
Motherboard:
During its initial printing run, International Data Group printed just 7,500 copies of DOS for Dummies.
And:
By 1993, the series had sold 1.3 million copies on its own. Now there are 1,950 individual books in the series, covering a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with computing, and the books have sold upwards of 300 million titles.
And:
Recently, I bought a book—quaint, I know—and I’m probably the only person to have purchased this book or anything like it in more than 20 years.
It’s a reference book, the kind that you can still pick up at Barnes and Noble today. But it’s best described as what you’d get if you combined a phone book, a Matthew Lesko free money guide, and the internet.
That book is really the crux of the article. A fascinating look back at a time before Google, when the Internet was but a toddler.