Slashdot Mirror
The Lost 1984 Mac Video
An anonymous reader writes "Never seen video footage of the introduction of the Macintosh in January 1984 was published for the first time on the Internet today. Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years, and German media agency TextLab has unearthed this only surviving video tape of the launch." They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie.
I know I've seen this video online a while back. I dont exactly remember it being 'lost' anywhere.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Here's a mirror, hosted, appropriately, on an Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID:
m acintro.mov
http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors/temp/1984
Thanks for checking for "The Lost 1984 Mac Video"
You can try a time sliced download here, and if this is overloaded (it probably is), there are mirrors at macnews.de, php-schmiede.de, ppcnux.de, ftp.ppcnux.de, MacTechNews.de and elbewerk.
And now that the US are with us, you guys could back us up with some mirrors. Thanks bunches to all the folks who are helping us out!
Join the Free Software Foundation
Here's another mirror: http://www.larry.org.mx/The_First_Mac.mov
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
The site's /.ed, but I remember seeing the video... our company Mac Dweeb (Hey, I liked him and called him that to his face, so no flamebaiting is going on... really) played that for me sometime in 1999 or 2000.
So, add one more to the list of people who swear this is not quite a "first time ever"
The Digital Sorceress
Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more robust format.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
http://tracker.degreez.net/downloads/1984macintro. mov.torrent
My attempt at a mirror:
http://www.preinheimer.com/1984macintro.mov
Decent box, I say odds are good it makes it, if not, no worries.
paul reinheimer
525 scan lines = vertical. VHS very much uses all of it. Betamax has slightly more horizontal bandwidth than VHS, but its not night an day.
A mirror set up on Case Western's network - should be able to handle a lot. http://dasystem.student.cwru.edu/1984macintro_2.mo v
Torrent: http://tracker.degreez.net/downloads/1984macintro. mov.torrent
http://www.preinheimer.com/1984macintro.mov
Good Luck fair box
paul reinheimer
1984macintro.torrent
(Sometimes I wish others who downloaded a huge video or slashdotted site would bother to describe some of it so I will for the rest of y'all)
Steve Jobs ca. 1984 is speaking on a stage in front of an audience, suit coat and bow tie, these are his pre-jeans-and-black-turtleneck days. He tells the audience "All of the images you about to see on the large screen will be generated by what's in that bag." The lifts the black bag to reveal a Mac on a table (applause) he inserts a diskette into the Mac and steps back. The word MACINTOSH slowly scrolls across the screen to the tune of "Chariots of Fire" (wild appluase) Screen shots of paint program, word processor and calculator, fonts, program editor, 3d chess (cheering, applause). Steve introduces Macintosh speaking for itself. A bad robotic voice reads a few paragraphs of text on the screen. (applause, cheering) (wide shot of audience appluading) (end)
I do recall the days when PC DOS and the Apple II ruled the world and first time I saw a Mac in action was easy to recognize it was a big step forward.
Here's a torrent: http://kubla.xanadunet.net/1984macintro.mov.torren t
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but this isn't actually a "Teen Beat" photo: http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/gates.asp. Not that it matters, it actually seems worse knowing that this was a publicity shot.
Just in case any one is confused, this is not the Big Brother ad that showed during the Super Bowl.
It's a video of the actual introduction by Jobs at an Apple event.
Screen shots, speech synthesis, Jobs in a bow tie.
Interesting to see what geeks in 1984 cheered at, but that's about it.
"The torrent" that I made, am hosting on that server, tracking on that server, and seeding on that server (as well as three others).
Slashdotted in German?
As the Heise Newsticker tends to have the same effect as Slashdot on linked sites, the term "geheised" is a accurate translation of "slashdotted".
Apple 1984 Commercial
Uh, actually, Apple did do something for the 20th... it is known as the 20th Anniversary Mac (TAM), http://tam.axon.net/, and has something of a cult following (it being a low-end 604e and all).
- smarmy sig omitted
do Macs support torrents natively
Yes.
Here's a torrent mirror: http://208.29.16.74/1984macintro.mov.torrent
I distinctly remember seeing clips of this in the documentary Triumph of the Nerds.
> Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more
;-)
> robust format.
This is a common misconception, but no. The magnetic tape used is almost identical and will last roughly as long. VHS and Beta, using magnetic tape and analog formats, are very long-lasting and decay gracefully.
You might see extra noise and dropouts on a 25-year-old VHS or Beta, but it will play perfectly fine as long as it wasn't stored in a hot or wet place. Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
http://cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
also,
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
Try this. It should perform a lot better.
Betamax is the consumer format, Betacam is the pro format. Betacam SP was a tape enhancement on normal Betacam. Same size, better materials, higher bandwidth, more scanlines. Both are much larger than Betamax tape, and much higher res. Betamax died, Betacam has always been a success, and continues success now as Betacam Digital, though it's losing out to the various DV derivitives in many cases.
no direct translation possible! Slash = [german]Schrägstrich Dot = [german]Punkt Germans (which are known worldwide, as native English speakers :) would say: "(ge)strichpunktet"
---
Die Botschaft hör` ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube.
(Goethe, "Faust I", Nacht, Vers 765)
If you are interested by this video, check out Andy Hertzfeld's accounts of that presentation. (Andy was one of the developer of the Mac back then.) While you're they're, check out the rest of the Classic Macintosh section of that site. It's a lot of stories (mostly by Andy) of how the Mac came to be.
(I'm not associated with folklore.org or Andy Hertzfeld or anything. I found the site a couple weeks ago while googling for little rubber feet, and got hooked.)
Try Festival !!!!
Festival speech
75% as good at AT&T Natural Voices - and it's free, with a BSD like license.
Quite good when set up properly.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Moo 10 Mbps mirror moo moo:
http://www.trunkmonkey.com/content/view/52/51/
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Jobs was an asshole his entire life.
The presentation wasn't about Macintosh, it was about Jobs. The pictures were of jobs, the digitized voice was about jobs.
The guy never said "This was a team effort". Look at when the digitized mac voice say "he's been like a father", the guy grins like he really was a father.
The only thing worse are the Mac fanboi's cheering every little... nothing. If jobs said "You guys should all be killed", they would have cheered him.
No wonder he was fired. He deserved to be.
All the free tts systems sound the same as they did since the early 80s. Because they all use the same algorithms and data generated by the Navy. The nicer sounding ones that have more complete data sets, improved algorithms and are computationally more intensive are only available through special licensing. (the algorithms have multiple patents, the data has copyrights, etc).
Compare a public domain TTS like rsynth to a free, but commercial quality TTS like festival or Bell Lab's. It's funny how rsynth sounds a lot like the mac (although rsynth doesn't have a bunch of predefined settings to do different voices, you have to set all the parameters yourself to make it sound exactly like Bruce).
TTS technology doesn't move terribly fast. the TTS that was in the Mac 21 years ago is basically the same technology 30 years ago. But that's no excuse for Apple not to have moved on to using diphonemes or triphonemes like other systems. Apple is behind, but in the TTS world, 20 years behind is not all that far behind. (unlike say the harddrive world, where 20 years behind is the difference between 100s of gigabytes to 10s of megabytes. ouch)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This movie was encoded using Sorenson Video and QDesign Music. They are both poorish choices for downloadable video nowadays, with MPEG-4 being preferred. The codecs used date back to the tail end of the era when QuickTime was mostly used for CD kiosks and presentations, and just when QT was starting to develop towards Internet streaming applications.
At least it wasn't done in Cinepak and MACE...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Flint Center in Cupertino.
slash = Schrägstrich
dot = Punkt
so...
Schrägstrichpunkten?
http//injoke.org -- Culling The Interesting
http://planetmirror.com/pub/1984macintro/
(Brisbane, Australia)
The Mac was the first major computer with support for the 3 1/2 inch hard cased floppies. PCs continued to use the 5 1/4 inch soft floppies for years afterwards. I remember reading a magazine article where Jobs pulled a floppy out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Everyone gasped. They had learned how fragile floppy drives were and the importance of always carrying them careully and putting them promptly into the box (not only did the 5 1/4s bend, they had holes so dust could get onto the disk surfaces).
That's why everyone claps right at the beginning, he pulls the floppy out of his pocket(!) and sticks it into the computer.
People watching today might not realize that the Mac did not have a hard drive. One was later provided as an expensive extra option. But initially the Mac had only a floppy drive to boot from.
Those were the days... I loved the Mac. I bought one back in 1984, the first GUI I'd ever used. Then a year later I laboriously unsoldered the memory chips and upgraded the system from 128K to a whole half a meg of memory. I can't count how many Macs I've bought over the years since then... we've got 7 right now, counting the 2 my kids in college have.
Decent pipe and RAID hardware
Why do people go out of their way to make downloading these things so cryptic?
o v
Try this URL: http://www.uriah.com/apple-qt/movies/Apple.1984.m
No worrying about dropout because of network traffic and even works with dialup.
Kevin