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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.
No, I imagine it's for the event at which the Mac was introduced; you know, "It sure is great to get out of that bag" and all that.
oohhhh... Rounded Rectangles! Wild Applause.
And it took till the Ibook G4 before I bought another Apple (my first was a IIc).
Seriously, the mac is back. OsX and Ilife, are as awe inspiring today as MacOS and MacWrite/MacPaint were back then...
Nah, it's funnier when you only half-translate it, and poorly at that! I was in a Betriebsrat (worker's council) meeting one day at my former employer in Raunheim, Hesse, and the worker's council head (who spoke German only) used the word "ge-updated" in reference to a system we were rolling out... for some reason that Denglish word has just stuck with me ever since.
Seven or eight rows back, on the left side, wearing one of those red shirts
hoping, praying, that everything would work
that Andy got everything working (smooth horizontal scrolling was hard)
what an incredible feeling, to be part of the family, the project, the revolution.
Was it really that many years ago?
When the Mac introduction happened in 1984, there was a lengthy, somewhat heated thread on the "SLASHDOT-L" BITNET Listserv. I foolishly didn't save a copy of it, but I'm sure someone out there has it and will post it in the next few days. From my recollections, people were of divided opinions.
A small minority thought it was "insanely great," and I suppose they still do. Most readers, though, found flaws with it.
Some viewed the Macintosh as "just a toy," and insisted that they were holding out for a real computer - the Lisa.
Some thought it had promise, but wouldn't be truly useful until Apple added support for the Commodore-based SIDplayer music format.
Quite a lot said it was too expensive. Some of these pointed out that there were any number of kit computers they could build for less, while others questioned having a screen built in - and a small one at that - when most people already had televisions.
Purists were quick to point out that the Mac lacked features that had been developed years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and others. Why wasn't the keyboard more of a chording model? And why did the mouse have only one button? Even Engelbart's original patent drawings, they argued, had shown a multi-button mouse. What good was a single button?
And of course, there were the hardcore geeks and techies, who were quick to point out that it wasn't any good if it couldn't run a real operating system, like VAX/VMS.
Ah, the good old days. If anyone has a copy of the thread, please post it!
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
It's amazing how 21 years later MacOS still has the same crappy voice synthesizer. Why has the industry been so stagnant when the issue came to text-to-speech?
I know there are solutions out there, among them AT&T Natural Voices (which I might add costs more than my computers put together), but generally, the speech thing didn't really take off.
To be fair, Windows also ships with the most annoying text-to-speech engine which hasn't made any progress since Windows 95.
What brings?
Anyone notice that the date shown by Macintosh in the slideshow is exactly 21 years ago to the day?
I find it rather unsurprising that they wouldn't make a huge fuss about the 20th anniversary of the Mac. Why, you ask?
The "old Apple" used to love to look backwards and do things like celebrate anniversaries (20th Anniversary Mac, many "special edition" products like the clear Newton 110, etc.). Unfortunately, I think looking at the past 20 years of the Mac, while there have been some great milestones, there have also been a lot of missed opportunities. I think the current management at Apple understands this better and is more focused on the next 20 years of the Mac.
It's kind of ironic that Steve Jobs has much better business sense than the "business" people they put in charge of Apple originally because they didn't think Steve Jobs could really run Apple. Man, has he proven those folks wrong!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more robust format.
This is a load of crap. My father, an engineer who was given the task of evaluating the formats for use in education, managed to get hold of a highly bootleg copy of Star Wars on VHS, in 1977.
The JVC machine we played it on even had mechanical type buttons, none of this newfangled soft touch nonsense.
Not robust...? I actually played this old 1977 VHS cassette just a month or two ago (2004) to compare against my recently purchased Star Wars trilogy DVD.
It played just fine thank you, and this is after being originally played many, many times, a long time ago, as you can imagine a 7 year and all his friends would...
I don't know which of the formats was actually this mythical more robust thing you speak of, but I can imagine if there was any difference, it would be beta that was weaker due to the continuous take up spooling to ensure a fast start playback.
"Robust" is pretty vague. You oughta seen me naked: I'm robust.
Beta technology was gentler on tape than VHS. The transport system on a Beta deck pulled out a lot more tape than VHS did and was more sophisticated. The benefit was less stress on the tape -- really.
A rewound Beta tape is less taut than a rewound VHS tape and for long term storage that counts for a lot.
I have a related suggestion for any VHS users: when you are done watching your tape, don't rewind it. Let it sit and then rewind it right before you watch it again.
The reason is that fast-rewinds really wrap the tape tightly onto the spindle, stretching it over time. When you watch a tape or fast-scan forward/backward, the tape remains pulled into the machine where it benefits from the relatively gentle handling of the pulleys and capstans.
As an aside, I was an early video adopter, which is to say that I bought Beta. I used my Beta unit for years and then the VHS units began to include video filters for prettier pictures. I bought one of these nice new VHS units but the picture was not superior to my Beta unit.
--Richard
Sorry, I don't install spyware on my computer. (eXeem ships with Cydoor bundled.)
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
I'm aware of the continued OS development...but I have two questions:
1. Where is Amiga OS now? Literally? It's changed hands so many times, it's becoming a bit of a joke.
2. Who is actually developing software for Amiga OS? It seems that there must be some developer making something for it.
My point is, just because it's still being developed doesn't mean that it outlasted MacOS. I think more people are running the GNU HURD than Amiga OS.
I remember the first time I saw an Amiga computer--I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then again, Beta was so much better than VHS.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...