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iBug2

macrumors 601
Jun 12, 2005
4,531
851
Love the quote: "we think unix is a really lousy OS for a desktop"

maybe true for the time, but still funny listening to it today.

It's still true today. Have you actually used any other Unix based OS? OS X is the only end user friendly UNIX desktop OS.
 

Chupa Chupa

macrumors G5
Jul 16, 2002
14,835
7,396
I honestly believe if you took Steve THEN forward in time to show him how Apple is now he would be horrified.

The young man with dreams about freedom and breaking the chains of control by the large corporations, turning into what Apple is today, over controlling money making machine not offering people choice, but making people want what you make. The total opposite of most other things we buy in life.

It is sad, and they say about you can often end up becoming the thing you most despised.

It's such a shame to see what Apple have become when they could of been less about how much money they could make, and more about giving the people the things they want.


CLEARLY you did not read the Isaacson Jobs bio or you wouldn't have written the above comment the way you did. Jobs was always a fan of closed, locked systems and even with the Apple I overrode Woz when it came to selling the plans vs sharing it for free w/ fellow club members. Those themes continue with Jobs until his death. The idea Jobs stood for open systems and choice is revisionist history at best. Many Apple systems were easily user upgradable, even sold that way, but only because Jobs was vetoed by others at Apple, as noted in the bio.
 

mrxak

macrumors 68000
A remarkable video for many reasons. It shows both what Apple has been aiming for since the very beginning (and starting to realize today), as well as the beginnings of the style of presentation that we are all too familiar with now. Fantastic bit of history, there, and I'm very glad it was recovered and will be preserved in a museum (and online). I agree some of the most remarkable parts come from the questions asked by the audience.

The telegraph vs. telephone analogy explains a lot.
 

Piggie

macrumors G3
Feb 23, 2010
9,117
4,016
CLEARLY you did not read the Isaacson Jobs bio or you wouldn't have written the above comment the way you did. Jobs was always a fan of closed, locked systems and even with the Apple I overrode Woz when it came to selling the plans vs sharing it for free w/ fellow club members. Those themes continue with Jobs until his death. The idea Jobs stood for open systems and choice is revisionist history at best. Many Apple systems were easily user upgradable, even sold that way, but only because Jobs was vetoed by others at Apple, as noted in the bio.

I suppose a lot of it stems from the old Superbowl advert by Apple, all the breaking free ffrom the lock downs of IBM and the PC, Apple coming to the rescue.
Now Apple is way way more locked down than the IBM PC they fought against at the time.
I don't know any other company today as locked down and controlling as Apple
 

NY Guitarist

macrumors 68000
Mar 21, 2011
1,585
1,581
BTW, I think the video has been fireballed.

I waches it on my iPad with no Problem.....in Safari....

I think the combination of server being slammed, Adblocker in Firefox, another poster blaming flash (which may still be the case) and my own impatience are the culprits.

VideoDownloader still can't see it in order to download the FLV file though.

The mp4 linked saved the day for me.
 

Macinva

macrumors 6502
May 15, 2007
333
79
This really makes me miss watching Steve during the keynotes and WWDC. The man is gone way too soon.
 

MagnusVonMagnum

macrumors 603
Jun 18, 2007
5,193
1,442
The lack of color brings back memories of a home computer show at the Raleigh, North Carolina fairgrounds around a year later in 1985.

...

Another show a couple of months later had the new Amiga, which drew even more crowds.

Yeah, flashback videos are very nostalgic and you start to think, Gee, they had this GUI in 1984! Whoa! But then I think back to my own life and realize, hey, I was playing the game Impossible Mission ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivHFP3dJAkM ) on a Commodore 64 that very same year! Listen to THAT voice and look at those graphics in color!

The following year (1985), the Commodore Amiga (later called the 1000) came out and frankly, it kicked the Mac's hind quarter back then. Up to 4096 colors for stills and 32 colors (later 64) for up to 320x480 and 16 colors up to 640x480 and you could pick your own monitor or even use a large television with a simple adapter. The Amiga had a GUI interface with mouse control like the Mac, but also had a more Unix-like than Dos-like CLI/Shell. So, back then I was a little underwhelmed by the Apple II due to the C64 and the Mac due to the Amiga. (I just ran across this video from NewTek for the VideoToaster 2.0 released in 1992 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7O4xqRqhPY ). To think that desktop computers were capable of THAT just 8 years after the original Macintosh came out is astounding, IMO. The original Video Toaster came out for the Amiga 2000 in 1990, only 6 years later! The Mac didn't even get color until 1987 (only 3 years prior).

The video dismisses all home computers except the Apple II and the IBM PC, but Commodore sold more C64s than any other single model home computer back then. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 ). I still miss going to my C64 (later Amiga too) user group every month. Good memories.

The comments about Unix being "a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation" and it being "really OLD technology" were funny given OSX today IS UNIX as were the ones about local area networking being a joke right now as Ethernet never really took off, but back then things looked pretty different than today.
 
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HAMEYO

macrumors member
Jan 19, 2011
98
0
It still gives me goose pimples just to watch the Macintosh demo with the music Chariots of Fire!
We are Apple! Leading the way! :apple:

What is AMAZING is Their Way of Tecknique Using Music on BackGroung !
In A Way It Excels Today's Monotonous Yawning Ad Commercials in General.
Though Machine's Spec were Minimal Compared with What We've Got Today, Bill Atkinson's Demo STILL REALLY REALLY GLITTER Today !
They were REALLY INSANELY GREAT AMAZING TEAM !!!!!!
 

furi0usbee

macrumors 68000
Jul 11, 2008
1,790
1,382
Was there a better presenter? I mean, if you created a product you thought would change the world, is there any other person you would want to present it for you? This is the thing I really miss about Steve. His product presentations were incredible. And now that we have had several without him, you really can appreciate so much more what he did for that company.

30 years... all of us who were around back then are surely getting old. I didn't use my first Mac until Junior High in 1988, an Apple II no less. But it wasn't until 2005 I got my first Mac, and I've never looked back through the Window(s).

I REALLY want to go to that computer museum in Silicon Valley. Never been on a trip out West, but I think I'll save up.
 

kettle

macrumors 65816
Ah, but there is a difference in Jobs and your average politician: Jobs actually believed in what he was selling and he usually only introduced notable products. The only real embarrassments I can think of were first iPod accessories: the socks, the speaker, and the $100 or whatever leather case.

And NO FREAKING WAY could Jobs have been a politician. Compromise was absolutely not his thing. If he was a U.S. Senator he would have been king of the filibuster. Also he demanded close to perfection and most legislation is swiss cheese.

absolutely - he says about the original Macintosh team that none of them are interested in careers - politicians are the exact opposite of this.

I think this is where collaboration and design committee are separated - poor collaboration is pretty much a committee of 'careerists'.

I think this type of failed collaboration is behind iOS7 - this is the 'shakeout' of competing careerists - post Steve Jobs.
 

pubwvj

macrumors 68000
Oct 1, 2004
1,901
208
Mountains of Vermont
I keep pushing for legacy support of especially software but also hardware and formats and some people claim it doesn't matter. Well this is a beautiful example of why it does matter.
 

dannyyankou

macrumors G5
Mar 2, 2012
13,009
27,996
Westchester, NY

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richman555

macrumors 6502
Jan 23, 2010
450
214
Collegeville, PA
The most interesting part of this video is when Steve talks about Unix. Basically he goes on to say we think Unix is lousy for a workstation but great for a multiple user environments such as servers.

I think Steve really meant to say the price of running Unix was lousy. Back in that day, Unix was something you had to pay for whatever distro it may be and it wasn't cheap.

The irony here is that Mac OSX is a unix based platform based originally on FreeBSD/NetBSD and Nextstep.
 

NT1440

macrumors G5
May 18, 2008
14,623
20,838
Which OS are you using? Click2Flash's QuickTime Player feature won't work for me here in Mountain Lion. And I'm really sick of watching YouTube on their lousy player.

Thanks for the link!

That link plays the video, if you'd like to download it just right click and choose save video or save video as.

I love mp4
 

CFreymarc

Suspended
Sep 4, 2009
3,969
1,149
I honestly believe if you took Steve THEN forward in time to show him how Apple is now he would be horrified.

The young man with dreams about freedom and breaking the chains of control by the large corporations, turning into what Apple is today, over controlling money making machine not offering people choice, but making people want what you make. The total opposite of most other things we buy in life.

It is sad, and they say about you can often end up becoming the thing you most despised.

It's such a shame to see what Apple have become when they could of been less about how much money they could make, and more about giving the people the things they want.

"After years of campaigning and capitalizing the old entrenched enemy's weakness, the newly crowned young king rises to the top of his claimed land and surveys his conquest. For what he won is not a new kingdom but the same people who always lived there, doing the same jobs and raising the same families. The young king meets the guild masters and the landlords controlling almost all of the commerce. Months of campaigning has turned into years of court meetings and negotiations. This young king as grown tired of the same faces his arch-enemy dealt with while sitting on the same throne. He wonders if he did make a difference and when alone at night, wonders if he became the old king he defeated." -- from the writings of Freymarc.

----------

I keep pushing for legacy support of especially software but also hardware and formats and some people claim it doesn't matter. Well this is a beautiful example of why it does matter.

There has been very good efforts on this. A lot if it was done by the now quite rich and retired original Mac engineers. Check out vMac on the link below.

http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/
 

Winni

macrumors 68040
Oct 15, 2008
3,207
1,196
Germany.
Did he mean UNIX itself, as in with no GUI? I wouldn't want to use that.

----------



Well, nothing about UNIX makes the user interface bad. Just cheap or non-paid GUI employees building a little GUI for an OS that isn't really meant to have one. What ticks me off is that they made it worse over time by trying to make it more "user-friendly". RIP Ubuntu.

I tried Debian. It has basically a knockoff of Simple Finder. :eek:

Debian, like any Unix/Linux system, has at least a dozen entirely different desktop environments that you can choose from. I don't know what you tried, but it sure as hell wasn't one of the big desktops like KDE, Gnome or Unity that can give OS X a run for its money.

Even Andy Hertzfeld, the father of the original Mac multi finder, years ago has donated code to the Gnome project, by the way. So much for " unemployed developers that work on Linux "...
 

CFreymarc

Suspended
Sep 4, 2009
3,969
1,149
The older man who asked about an individuals efficiency with the Macintosh or a traditional keyboard-only computer over time was also funny.

Early in my career I worked with a few senior IBM mainframe software engineers that were "beaten into submission to write Windows applications" as one manager called them. On in particular absolutely refused to use a mouse with his Windows 3.1 machine.

This guy knew every alt-key combination out there to navigate Windows and hated Macs because of the mouse requirements. I would write Win32 era apps and he'd be all over me that he couldn't navigate the dialogs or menus without a mouse. These stickler points would add weeks to project release.

The guy would be in his 60's to 70's now. If he does use a smartphone, he's probably one of the remaining hardcore Blackberry users and scoffed the iPhone the day it came out.
 

Winni

macrumors 68040
Oct 15, 2008
3,207
1,196
Germany.
What timestamp? Thanks!

Book computers were the hot prediction at the time.

The year before, Jobs had talked about cramming the $10,000 Apple Lisa into a book shape with a radio link, and eventually being able to sell it for $1,000.

He predicted this would be available within 5 to 7 years ... that is, by the year 2000.

1990 would have been more like it - that prediction was from the early 1980s. If you count the Newton, he almost was right.
 

CFreymarc

Suspended
Sep 4, 2009
3,969
1,149
absolutely - he says about the original Macintosh team that none of them are interested in careers - politicians are the exact opposite of this.

I think this is where collaboration and design committee are separated - poor collaboration is pretty much a committee of 'careerists'.

I think this type of failed collaboration is behind iOS7 - this is the 'shakeout' of competing careerists - post Steve Jobs.

This is why Steve coined the term "Bozo parade" describing those that move into a company after an initial success and made group decisions based on concession and group-think that typically catered to the lowed common denominator of the group.

Like any entrepreneur, you have an idea, invest your time and money into it. Sell the dream and then sell the product. If the product sells well in the market, you benefit. If not, you eat it. The beat goes on.
 

CFreymarc

Suspended
Sep 4, 2009
3,969
1,149
absolutely - he says about the original Macintosh team that none of them are interested in careers - politicians are the exact opposite of this.

I think this is where collaboration and design committee are separated - poor collaboration is pretty much a committee of 'careerists'.

I think this type of failed collaboration is behind iOS7 - this is the 'shakeout' of competing careerists - post Steve Jobs.

What timestamp? Thanks!

Book computers were the hot prediction at the time.

The year before, Jobs had talked about cramming the $10,000 Apple Lisa into a book shape with a radio link, and eventually being able to sell it for $1,000.

He predicted this would be available within 5 to 7 years ... that is, by the year 2000.

There was a huge effort and a lot of money spend on the tablet computer craze of the mid-90's that many have forgotten about. Companies like Momenta, Slate, PenWare, GRiD and Go Corp has a slew of tablet computers with greyscale LCDs running a resistive touch single point pen interface.

The most novel of that era was that of Monenta's "screen puck" interface where you would have the app over most of the screen with this puck working as a menu control system. You could flick anywhere on the screen to interact with the app.

Unfortunately, the low power semiconductor technology was not there, the units had heavy public first generation LiIon batteries and IMO, very very poor marketing. Too many where trying to come up with the best handwriting recognition code. This lead to the folly of the Newton and the unreleased by highly collectable PenMac.

Then Palm got it right a few years later. They had the day in the sun 'til the iPhone came out.
 
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