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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.

61 of 636 comments (clear)

  1. Patience, honey. by maxdamage · · Score: 5, Funny

    Patience, honey.
    The next download slot will be free

    in 0 minutes und while(01); seconds

    1. Re:Patience, honey. by Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie."

      I have 5 words to say about this statement:

      BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent.

      --
      People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
  2. Insult to injury by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."

    Here are some magnet/edonkey mirror links:

    magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:CGUXHDIRWXFK362VRT63RMU6VA ZJPNAS.VSUEDMAYUMKDSRKBIA6TDCW6DIZ5MTYD26FOONQ&dn= 1984macintro_2.mov

    ed2k://|file|1984macintro_2.mov|21939485|c72b7ecf8 d3dc495ee743d7c54f5e29e|/

    1. Re:Insult to injury by PktLoss · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Insult to injury by Me-The-Person · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wait for it.... Wait for it.... /.'d!!!!!!

  3. Hold Your Horses! by fembots · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  4. never seen? by seanadams.com · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:never seen? by syd2000 · · Score: 4, Informative
    2. Re:never seen? by neonstz · · Score: 3, Funny

      Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beierhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!

  5. How do you say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Slashdotted in German?

    1. Re:How do you say... by easter1916 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Slashdotted in German... how about "upgefuckt"?

    2. Re:How do you say... by piquadratCH · · Score: 5, Informative

      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".

    3. Re:How do you say... by hunterx11 · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's easy. Take the sentence, "This website no longer operates due to excessive traffic caused by being linked to from Slashdot." Translate it into German. Remove the spaces. You now have a valid German word.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
  6. Betamax? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does anyone else find it oddly fitting that this was preserved on a Betamax tape?

    1. Re:Betamax? by stox · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. "
    2. Re:Betamax? by Bob+McCown · · Score: 5, Funny

      Time to switch to decaf, dude, or were you scared by a Beta camera at an early age?

    3. Re:Betamax? by SirWinston · · Score: 5, Informative

      > 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
    4. Re:Betamax? by EulerX07 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media. ;-)

      I think you lost half of the /. audience at that sentence.

    5. Re:Betamax? by Patik · · Score: 4, Funny
      Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady
      +1 Informative

  7. Oh man.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apple is really gonna sue him!

  8. Erm, Lost!? What!? by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  9. Mirror by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a mirror, hosted, appropriately, on an Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID:

    http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors/temp/1984m acintro.mov

    1. Re:Mirror by Kardnal · · Score: 3, Informative

      They got smart. Now they only have a link to the torrent there, instead of the full movie...

      --
      ------------------
      "Never Attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity..."
  10. BETAMAX by zenneth · · Score: 3, Funny

    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!
  11. Thanks for the help by CGP314 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  12. 22MB in 1984 by Hosting+Geek · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  13. Here we go... by byolinux · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

    1. Re:Here we go... by techathead · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or Here
      Just trying to help

    2. Re:Here we go... by nodnarb1978 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Got your US mirror here:

  14. Amazing... by angst7 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  15. http is such a great transfer mechanism by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  16. Slashdotted? by delta_avi_delta · · Score: 5, Funny

    If der linken ist geslashdotted, relaxen und watchen der blinkenlights

  17. Re:Corniest.video.ever.. by therevolution · · Score: 3, Insightful

    WTF? If you saw that in 1984, you'd be cheering too.

  18. BitTorrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    1. Re:BitTorrent by Lucidwray · · Score: 4, Informative

      Same Torrent file, same tracker, different http server.

      http://www.keyholedesign.com/1984macintro.torrent

      What is the world coming too when even 7k text files get ./'ed and take 30 seconds to get a download slot.... sad..

      --
      My sig can beat up your sig.
  19. North American Mirror by PktLoss · · Score: 4, Informative
  20. Re:Corniest.video.ever.. by lokedhs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  21. Text described for the bandwidth impaired by Kurt+Gray · · Score: 4, Informative

    (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.

  22. Torrent by kss · · Score: 4, Informative
  23. NOT the 1984 Commercial by Agar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:NOT the 1984 Commercial by Agar · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you do want to see the 1984 commercial, you can find it here: http://www.apple-history.com/frames/body.php?page= gallery&model=1984&format=small

  24. Man We were easily impressed back then. by barfy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Man We were easily impressed back then. by Drakonian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Since then, has there been anything else as revolutionary as the Mac was at the time? I can't think of any. It really *was* something to get excited about.

      --
      Random is the New Order.
  25. Corniest ever? Not hardly! by macdaddy · · Score: 3, Funny

    Young one, obviously you've never seen the music video of "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins".

  26. bow tie by sometwo · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm glad Steve doesn't wear bowties anymore.

  27. Re:How about a bittorrent? by Leo+McGarry · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  28. Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thread? by Shag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  29. Re:Corniest.video.ever.. by Leo+McGarry · · Score: 4, Funny

    People are cheering on various screens shown on a Macintosh. Quite corny.

    Yeah, thank God nobody ever does that any more.

  30. Behold the speaking computer! by cioxx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Behold the speaking computer! by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
  31. Re:Lesson: by soft_guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  32. Macintosh Folklore by fo0bar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

  33. Re:Funny... by soft_guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  34. This was part of Cringely's excellent documentary by AgentCooper · · Score: 3, Informative
    Most of this footage has been available for years within Robert Cringely's excellent documentary, Triumph of the Nerds. No self-respecting geek or Apple fan should be without it! Three tapes' worth of interviews with industry pioneers, from Homebrew Computer Club to Microsoft. Steve Ballmer and Larry Ellison are fascinating, but Steve Jobs steals the show:
    The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is - I don't mean that in a small way I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product ehm and you say why is that important - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products and ehm so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success - I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success. For the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products. - Steve Jobs
  35. Mirror by `Sean · · Score: 3, Informative
  36. Re:Wost encoding job EVER by DLWormwood · · Score: 4, Informative
    22 megabytes for a little 300x200 video that's mostly 4 minutes of still scenes?

    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 /. should be disemvoweled
  37. Re:Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thre by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  38. Re:It strikes me that Jobs was an asshole his whol by michaeldot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  39. Re:Oooh. That IS a good one. by Alan+Partridge · · Score: 3, Funny

    Do you know when to say 'sorry'?

    --
    That was classic intercourse!
  40. Amiga by Ostie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.