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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.
How about a demo of Jay Miner demoing the Amiga 1000?
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.
VentureBeat's story appears to be nothing but a re-writing of the original, which is
http://techland.time.com/2014/01/25/steve-jobs-mac/
I'm really nostalgic for the days when Silicon Valley was an innovative hotbed when some sharp brash kid could not only make it big, but provide a product that has some value.
Now, Silicon Valley is a bunch of whiny bitches who are trying to get ever cheaper labor for their social media/advertising app/user-data pimping service in order to market crap to a population in a downward spiral of their living standard.
This submission really isn't about the news article at all. It's about the most important Holy Day in the Religion of the Hipster. It's a celebration of His Graceful Holiness, Steve Jobs. It's a tribute to The Creation of The Master Of All Creation, the Macintosh. It is The Most Important of Days. Please show some respect.
...Steve Jobs take credit for other people's work in this video, just like always.
Where? I didn't see him claiming at any point to have single-handedly developed it. Are you claiming he didn't play any part at all in it? If not, then you're just plain wrong and you know it.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Whooa! Godwin's law in just three comments! This must be some kind of a record.
Anyway, the same could not be said for any AC! (Including this one)
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.
..."Steve Jobs take credit for other people's work in this video, just like always", scubamage
1:18:20: "Remember when you use a Macintosh, these are the people that did it and they're sort of hiding out in that ROM", Steve Jobs
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.
Well, in 1984 indeed nobody had problems with Windows. Which may be because the first Windows version had not yet released yet. And the first memory extender hadn't yet been released either, therefore nobody had problems with those either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"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.)
I've heard Apple people describe this with the too-kind phrase "tradition of demonstrating a wolf in sheep's clothing." That is to say, the Mac he was demonstrating was different from the Mac Apple was selling: it had 512K of RAM. The only Mac available for purchase at launch had 128K and was not capable of running the MacInTalk speech synthesis software.
This was indeed a Steve Jobs tradition; I recall him demonstrating a NeXT in Boston--brilliant demo, brilliant showmanship--and the NeXT he was demonstrating had an internal hard drive, which delivered much better performance than the product available for sale which ran entirely off a read/write optical drive.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If Jobs were wanting to wholly take credit would he have wanted everyone's signatures embossed on the inside of the case? I don't think so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's no denying the Mac was a game-changer, but it's also important to note that when it was released it cost $5600 in today's dollars - Adding a printer pushed you well north of the $6000 mark.
No wonder nobody I knew had one.
Look, man: no slashdotter worth his salt has any illusion that Steve Jobs was involved in technical design beyond a very abstract level.
But he's a disgusting human being for having clarity of vision and salesmanship? I'll grant that he seemed like a dick for other reasons, but that's another discussion.
I'm writing this from an Ubuntu box that I built myself, and I tend to be an OS pragmatist. I make my living as an engineer. I don't discount my own contribution in my work, but I dare say there is room for more Steve Jobs (Jobses?) in tech. Someone's got to identify opportunity, guide a bunch of engineers to a product, and then sell the fucking thing. If that someone is very highly effective, it's no small contribution and I submit that if one person deserves credit for Mac it's Jobs.
I truly don't get the level of vitriol for this guy... there are posts here that honestly read batshit, foaming at the mouth crazy to me.
Besides, have you seen what happens when engineers drive product design? There are situations where those products are appropriate but we're talking about mainstream PCs here. Sure, elements were ripped off from Xerox, sure you can probably dig up earlier, better technical implementations of most of this tech. The thing that matters, and the reason we're still talking about it, is that Apple brought it into your grandmother's living room.
Much of the internet is powered by real UNIX systems (BSD, you know, its where OSX took much of the core OS from). Learn some history, OSX was from NextStep. If not for that "reverse-merger" you would probably still be using a co-operative multitasking system (remember the good old days when a bad app crashed the entire system?)
Apple might be cheaper if they didnt insist on having ridiculous profit margins and an army of tools lined up to pay them. After all they source everything from China the same as every other computer manufacturer.
You might want to take a look at the market share reports before you determine that OSX is "superior".
Even your "beloved" apple believes in opensource, at least when they take it and incorporate it in OSX
"In addition, Apple uses software created by the Open Source community" - http://www.apple.com/opensourc...
Much of the functionality OSX relies on is opensource (SAMBA being a key one up until 10.7)
"Apple began bundling Samba with Mac OS X 10.2, enabling Mac users to connect to Microsoft's Windows file and network directory services based on SMB (Server Message Block, a protocol also known as Windows File Sharing)." - Source is apple's website
One of my favourite postings from Apple Fanboi's is the quote about how much money apple has in the bank. Not sure why they are proud they overpaid for their products and the company(apple) hides this money in offshore accounts to avoid US taxes.
Did you know that Edison assigned many of his patents to his assistants? I had a dear friend whose family had benefited from the assignment of several of them. Edison took care of his own.
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.
You're right, but only up to a point. By '87 a system add-on called Multifinder ran multiple apps and that was integrated into the OS in system 7. This was co-operative multitasking for sure (same as Windows 3) but it was easy enough to make your app co-operate (actually harder to write it so that it didn't). You could also write system tasks that ran under the 680x0 interrupt if you needed something pre-emptive (though that was fraught with danger if you didn't know the system pretty intimately). I managed to do plenty of productive work on early Macs.
You need both sorts of people. Geeks and engineers that can build cool stuff, solve hard problems, and guys like Steve Jobs to give it a structure, to motivate them and to get the damn thing shipped. Would there have been a Mac without Jobs? Maybe, but it would have never seen the light of day outside a R&D room. Would there have been a Mac without Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Steve Capps, et. al.? No of course not. It's not one-or-the-other, the Mac came into being because of all of the people involved, and that definitely includes Jobs.
Woz built the machines. Jobs built the company.
Is there a reason many such videos are kept secret for decades?
"Unix is a lousy operating system to put in a workstation" (36 minutes in...)
No sig today...
Did you know that Edison assigned many of his patents to his assistants?
Did you know that many of Edison's patents were actually developed by his assistants? It would have been inappropriate at best not to name them on the application, and probably illegal in at least some of the cases.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Too bad Goebel wasn't the patent holder. You're post show you lack any real knowledge of Gloebel (Göbel's ). I also find it hilarious that you blame Edision for Gloebel dying penniless. He didn't make any money form his actual patents either, is the also Edison's fault?
anyways:
Heinrich Göbel, later Henry Goebel (April 20, 1818 – December 4, 1893), born in Springe, Germany, was a precision mechanic and inventor. He emigrated in 1848 to New York City and lived there until his death. In 1865 he received the American citizenship.
In 1893 the public in the USA and in Europe took notice of Henry Goebel. Magazines and newspapers reported that Henry Goebel had developed incandescent light bulbs comparable to those invented in the year 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison 25 years earlier. Henry Goebel did not apply for a patent.
In 1893 the Edison Electric Light Co. brought suit against three manufacturers of incandescent lamps for infringing Edisons patent. The defense of these companies claimed the Edison patent was void because of the same invention of Henry Goebel 25 years earlier (Goebel-Defense).
Judges of four courts raised doubts; there was no clear and convincing proof for the claimed invention of Henry Goebel. A research work published in 2007 concluded that the Goebel-Defense was fraudulent.[1]
After the death of Henry Goebel, in some countries, the legend came into being that he was the true inventor of the practical incandescent light bulb.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on