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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.
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...
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?
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!
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