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Watch Steve Jobs Demo the Mac, In 1984
VentureBeat is one of the many outlets featuring recently surfaced video of Steve Jobs doing an early demo of the Macintosh, 30 years ago. I remember first seeing one of these Macs in 1984 at a tiny computer store in bustling downtown Westminster, Maryland, and mostly hogging it while other customers (or, I should say, actual customers) tapped their feet impatiently.
I keep pushing for legacy support of especially software but also hardware and formats and some people claim it doesn't matter. Well this is a beautiful example of why it does matter. Without legacy support we lose access to old data. Pretty soon we'll be repeating history on big things, not just some presentation.
Silicon Valley used to be a truly remarkable place. It was where industry and the future truly did collide head-on. And because of this, great things happened there.
Hewlett-Packard. Fairchild Semiconductor. Xerox PARC. Intel. Sun Microsystems. Cisco Systems.
Those were the kind of names we came to associate with very advanced technological achievement. They earned our respect with the tremendous advances they made.
But then something happened. Silicon Valley ceased to be about a productive, beneficial future. It became about a shitty, rotten future. It became about "social media". It became about advertising. It became about a disturbing level of data collection and mining.
The Silicon Valley of today is a mere shell of what it once was. Clad in fedora hats and rampant hipsterism, Silicon Valley of today is a sissified, degenerate place. Gone are the real scientists and engineers who advanced technology for all of mankind. Gone are their advances. Gone are the hope they brought.
I weep for Silicon Valley. It truly does make me quite distraught to think about what has happened to it. One of the greatest intellectual creations ever to existed has been crushed by men who wear tight jeans and glasses without lenses. It has been dragged through the mud by overweight, unshaven manchildren wearing stained shirts with shitty Japanese drawings on them. It has been shit upon repeatedly by self-styled "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" whose only talent is unjustifiable self promotion.
It is too late to save Silicon Valley. But other technologically-inclined regions should take note of what happened there. Keep away the hipsters. Keep away the bearded manchildren. Keep away the "entrepreneurs" and "engineers" who spew forth about Ruby on Rails. These people are an infection, and this infection will destroy even the most robust of technological and industrial communities. Do not let them ruin your community like they ruined Silicon Valley's.
It's tough to describe how space-age that stuff was in the 1980s, where 4k and 8k home computers with 8 bit processors was the norm. The 32 bit Motorola 68000 series were used as workstation processors in Sun Microsystems' Sun 1 and Sun 2 workstations & servers, so it was quite surprising to see one in a personal computers.
Note also how Jobs hammers away at IBM, the evil empire who had held foul dominion over computing at that time for longer than MS has existed today. My, how times change.
"We think Unix is a pretty lousy operating system to put inside a workstation. It's old technology and it's really big and you need a Winchester so you can never make the workstations cheap..."
I'm glad that Jobs was open minded enough to recognize the value of Unix, and to eventually migrate MacOS to BSD Unix.
(I watched the video and typed this post from a laptop running Linux.)
Did you know that Goebel approached edison and attempted to sell him the patent for the lightbulb, but Edison refused, allowing Goebel to fall into destitution and die penniless. He then went to his destitute widow and offered her a fraction of the original asking price, effectively screwing Goebel's estate out of any royalties of the invention that Edison is most well known for? That's my whole issue here; people who steal other people's work, or who lie and cheat to get their hands on it. Edison was an asshole, if you don't believe me, just look at how he treated Goebel.