Not to frown at mister. walker's youtube video...but this one is more fun.
its part of an article in rolling stone a feature done in 1984. I was
enjoying myself so much reading it that I forgot they do not do single page
formats. II have I hope included the link to the actual piece however. If
it fails and others are interested let me know as I intend getting the rest.
Tomorrow I will share a different article, ten years later after Jobs had
been kicked out of apple and his own second company was in trouble. what
makes it neat is you can tell just how much of a visionary he was even when
the industry was laughing at him.
for now though, enjoy!
Karen
The Birth of the Mac: Rolling Stone's 1984 Feature on Steve Jobs
and his Whiz Kids
When Apple's Macintosh took on IBM, 'the Darth Vader of the
digital world'
By Steven Levy October 6, 2011 2:50 PM ET
This the future of computing.
Here in Silicon Valley, there is a room ringed with
nondescript cubicles. Each contains a small, beige box not much
bigger than two shoe boxes stood on end, a box that emanates a
whitish glow of a nine-inch video display. The box is a computer
called Macintosh, and the people who sit in the carpeted commons
in the center of the room are some of its designers. They call
themselves pirates. On the wall is a skull-and-bones pirate flag;
one of the skeleton's eyes has been replaced by the
rainbow-colored Apple Computer logo.
They are ten weary computer wizards. Average age: well under
thirty. Standard dress: blue jeans and T-shirt. Standard look in
the eyes: crazed by fatigue. One of the wizards, blond-haired,
twenty-two-year-old Randy Wigginton, has been riding the
fluctuations in the word-processing program he's been writing for
Apple Computer's messianic new machine for over two years. Now
that it is two weeks from his absolutely, positively final
deadline, his face has the dull pallor of a torture victim. His
tormentors are two cheerful software hackers, dressed in shorts
and hiking boots, who, at this intolerably late date, are
blithely revamping the part of the computer operating system
called "the Finder."
Despite the looming deadline, things are upbeat. For many of
the wizards, the bulk of the work is done. Burrell Smith,
designer of the digital guts of the new computer, is already
working on his next Apple project. Two key wizards who
masterminded the "ROM" - the program on a chip that contains much
of the magic within the computer - are here, but now they're
assisting with software debugging. The industrial designer who
originally drafted the computer's simple profile is
checking out the first run of casings from Apple's completely
automated $20 million factory.
But the Finder, the part of the computer that greets the user and
finds files, is not yet done. And if it doesn't get done, the
programs won't work right, Macintosh will be seen as a dud, and
Apple Computer - the one corporate nexus of vision and
capitalism, the dream company of the Eighties - could turn into a
nightmare for the billion-dollar firm's employees and investors.
Worse, the personal-computer industry would then be dominated -
lock, stock and microprocessor - by IBM, the Darth Vader of the
digital world.
This is the showdown at the Silicon Corral, and Apple has only
one bullet left in its chamber against IBM's well-funded arsenal.
That bullet is Macintosh. Steve Jobs, the twenty-eight-year-old
multimillionaire chairman of Apple's board of directors, has
staked his reputation (and the value of his approximately 7
million Apple shares) on the machine. He describes the situation:
"It's kind of like watching the gladiator going into the arena
and saying, 'Here it is.' It's really perceived as Apple's do or
die. And it goes even deeper... If we don't do this, nobody can
stop IBM."
Randy Wiggington, one of Jobs' wizards, is more succinct: "The
whole company is on the line. It's put up or shut up."
Apple made a $400,000 tv Commercial that ran during the Super
Bowl. The ad, in washed-out gray tones, shows rows and rows of
emaciated men with shaved heads, dressed in the faded pajamas of
concentration camps. Inside a large auditorium, a Big Brother
type on a projection screen drones on about the triumphs of the
electronic age. This scene is intercut with flashes of a stunning
young woman in red gym shorts, sprinting like an Olympian and
holding a sledgehammer. She rushes into the auditorium, swings
the rope attached to the sledgehammer and flings it toward the
screen. Everything explodes in fiery light; the mouths of the
stunned masses drop open in astonishment. There is transcendent,
blazing chaos. Then the screen goes black, and these words
appear:
On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And
you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'
Can a $2500 computer, weighing under twenty pounds and taking up
no more desk space than a piece of paper, change the world?
Improve your life? Foil Orwell's prophecies? Save Apple from the
clutches of IBM?
For your answer, meet Macintosh. Put in a three-and-a-half-inch
disc, plug in the keyboard and the "mouse" - the palm-sized
device that moves a dark pointer around the screen - and flick on
the machine. That act alone may dispel your doubts
If you have had any prior experience with personal computers,
what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called
a "prompt," consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters
on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder.
On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the
background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little
pictures called "icons" appear, representing choices available to
you. A word-processing program might be represented by a pen,
while the program that lets you draw pictures might have a
paintbrush icon. A file would represent stored documents - book
reports, letters, legal briefs and so forth. To
see a particular file, you'd move the mouse, which would, in
turn, move the cursor to the file you wanted. You'd tap a button
on the mouse twice, and the contents of the file would appear on
the screen: dark on light, just like a piece of paper.
This seems simple, but most personal computers (including the
IBM PC) can't do this.
the link...I hope lol.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-birth-of-the-mac-rolling-stones-1984-feature-on-steve-jobs-and-his-whiz-kids-20111006
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