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.
Patience, honey.
The next download slot will be free
in 0 minutes und while(01); seconds
Saying "They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie." as you post it to Slashdot's frontpage mid-day is like walking up to a guy after a fight, knifing him in the stomach and saying "You could probably use more bandages for your wounds."
A ZJPNAS.VSUEDMAYUMKDSRKBIA6TDCW6DIZ5MTYD26FOONQ&dn= 1984macintro_2.mov
8 d3dc495ee743d7c54f5e29e|/
Here are some magnet/edonkey mirror links:
magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:CGUXHDIRWXFK362VRT63RMU6V
ed2k://|file|1984macintro_2.mov|21939485|c72b7ecf
After Lord Of The Rings, I have learnt to wait for the extended director's platinum cut version before committing myself.
Wait for the 33MB version!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Never seen video footage [...] Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years
And he never watched it?!?! What about the camera man? Was he blind?
I'm afraid to watch this - I heard about that world's funniest joke. Sounds like they've taken special precautions here.
Slashdotted in German?
Does anyone else find it oddly fitting that this was preserved on a Betamax tape?
Apple is really gonna sue him!
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.
I can't believe I'm asking for a mirror for a betamax tape ...
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
Here's a mirror, hosted, appropriately, on an Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID:
m acintro.mov
http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors/temp/1984
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.
1984 called... it wants its technology back.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie.
You could do something useful and make a torrent before posting the story to slashdot.
-Colin
That must of been the biggest file ever, how could they loose something so big?
For FREE NO ADS! 1GB/20GB PHP MySQL With a Control Panel Hosting
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
This is just a pathetic attempt to overshadow the *real* 20 year old mega-story: Bill Gate's 1983 Teen Beat Spread.
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
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
Although wouldn't it be a antastic revolution if we could download from people who had already dowloaded it, thus allowing us all to share bandwidth. The data would arrive at such a high speed that one might consider it a torrent. A bittorrent, one might say. If only such a technology existed...
If der linken ist geslashdotted, relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights
I'm not arguing the accuracy of this description, but it's an odd turn of phrase. "Look at the way he presses that Apple command key! Astonishing!"
Imagine instead "renowned spoon user Dr. Dew."
"Renowned telephone user Mrs. Dew."
Pithy enough to fit on a headstone, too.
http://tracker.degreez.net/downloads/1984macintro. mov.torrent
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
WTF? If you saw that in 1984, you'd be cheering too.
Torrent: http://tracker.degreez.net/downloads/1984macintro. mov.torrent
http://www.preinheimer.com/1984macintro.mov
Good Luck fair box
paul reinheimer
Steve never should have given up the bow ties.
sulli
RTFJ.
No, not corny at all. Remember that this was 1984. This was back when the C64 was considered state of the art. The PC programs were text only. Most people in the audience had never seen anything like that before.
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
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.
You can't find a more real computer that has aseperate video card, tiny form factor, rock solid OS, includes software to get productive, and comes with a warranty.
If you really want to impress your wife, try listening to her.
Yeah yeah, it's a troll. He posted a whole topic about it last week.
Exeem.
"The torrent" that I made, am hosting on that server, tracking on that server, and seeding on that server (as well as three others).
I WANT ONE!!!
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...
Most of Slashdot readers weren't born yet in 1984.
do Macs support torrents natively
Yes.
Here's a torrent mirror: http://208.29.16.74/1984macintro.mov.torrent
Young one, obviously you've never seen the music video of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins".
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?
http://cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
also,
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov
I still have my mid-1980s Apple videos about Applecare, Laserwriter repair, and Hyperdrive installation. I get no points for exoticness, though, because they're VHS, not beta.
My favorite moment is in one of the repair videos, where it shows the technician crossing fingers behind the back before discharging the CRT anode.
-DeeT
fghit entyrop
I'm glad Steve doesn't wear bowties anymore.
Try this. It should perform a lot better.
About 15 years ago, I had a job as a PC repair monkey at the computer center at my university. As was often the case with student jobs, people came and went all the time. We were hiring new kids every couple of weeks.
About halfway through my senior year, we hired this freshman. Nice kid, but a little on the clueless side. Not only had he never worked on a Mac before, he'd never even seen one in person.
One day he had to go to one of the computer labs to pick up a Mac and bring it into the shop for service. (The analog board needed replacing, or something like that.) He hauled it in, set it on the bench, and proceeded to dig through all the bins in the shop.
"What are you looking for?" I asked him.
"A Mac power cord," he said. I just kinda stared for a minute. "What?" he demanded.
Without saying anything, I reached down into the bin by my bench, grabbed a power cord, and threw it at him.
"You mean Macs use regular power cords?" he asked.
Your question wasn't quite that stupid. But man, was it ever close.
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.
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.
People are cheering on various screens shown on a Macintosh. Quite corny.
Yeah, thank God nobody ever does that any more.
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?
What master of business administration is going to go around (in the USA) using English that makes him look like a hillbilly
You mean besides the Preseident?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"Me, I'd prefer not to spend $500 for a machine whose specs are met by the three year old laptop I'm using right now." You have a 1.25 GHz G4 on your 3 year old laptop?
Where Macs Belong in the Living Room
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.)
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
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.
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
Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more robust format.
And the VHS vs. Betamax wars begin. Keep it clean. Fight!!!
I'll always remember this:
Apple's new Macintosh.
Smaller than a PDP-11. No wireless. Lame.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
http://planetmirror.com/pub/1984macintro/
(Brisbane, Australia)
Mod parent funny. I'm a Bush man, but I know when to say 'touché.'
Too much Law; not enough Order.
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.
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.
Most people would probably agree with you, even those who know Jobs personally.
And yet, without Jobs to goad people into stroking his ego, there would have been no Mac, no NeXTSTEP, no Apple post-1997, no iMac, no iPod, no standards of excellence in GUI computing.
Sometimes it takes an asshole to make a dent in the universe.
Do you know when to say 'sorry'?
That was classic intercourse!
"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
I don't see what's amazing about Macintosh classic when 1 year later Amiga came with colorful graphics(up to 4096 colors), a real preemptive multitask OS and all the hot stuff. You could actualy format a disk drive while printing and doing some other stuff while on Mac you had to wait in front of a black & white screen.
Decent pipe and RAID hardware
Yeah... the fact that it got rated "insightful" is amusing in its own way.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Even in the 80's, Macintosh was (generally) only significantly more expensive than the cheap brands. If you compared it to the better built and more expensive brands fitted with comparable video and sound, there wasn't much difference (in most cases).
The 5 year typical service life of a mac compared to 3 years for dos/windows typically made it less expensive than even the cheap brands over the long term.
And once you factored in support costs in a business, the mac made up for the purchase price difference in the first year or two (there was about a 4:1 factor there!)
hawk