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!
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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. "
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
Torrent: http://tracker.degreez.net/downloads/1984macintro. mov.torrent
http://www.preinheimer.com/1984macintro.mov
Good Luck fair box
paul reinheimer
(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
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.
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
> 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
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.)
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