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back to article Ancient video of Steve Jobs launching the first Apple Mac found

Long-lost footage of Steve Jobs launching the first Apple Macintosh in 1984 has been dug out of storage and shown in full for the first time in 30 years. The video shows the Apple godhead addressing the Boston Computer Club just days after his famous speech to shareholders at Cupertino. Time magazine journalist Harry …

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  1. ruscook

    Ancient? 30yrs? Oh come on I know the world moves fast but that is totally inappropriate use of the word.

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    1. John H Woods Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Sensitivity to context ...

      ... the most important part of critical thinking; I suppose you object to the superb(ly titled) Antique Code Show, as well?

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    2. Amorous Cowherder
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      Headmaster

      "belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence"

      It's relative, in IT terms 30 mins is a bloody long time! Ha ha! And "no longer in existence"? Pretty much sums up the illustrious cult(*) leader.

      ( * cult - "devotion directed towards a particular figure or object" before you start! )

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    3. mIRCat
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      Big Brother

      By the time you read this post it will already be considered ancient.

      Take it up with the OED.

      Ancient:

      adjective

      belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence.

      In the computer world the Macintosh may well be considered ancient. It's definitely a relic of the past.

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    4. pacman7de
      Reply Icon

      Inappropriate use of the word ..

      @ruscook: "Ancient? 30yrs? Oh come on I know the world moves fast but that is totally inappropriate use of the word"

      They're trying to pitch it at the level of their audience, which is appariently about 13 and 3/4 ..

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  2. Oh Homer

    Steve who?

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    1. John Bailey
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      On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked, a question that must never, ever be answered.

      Am I holding it wrong?

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  3. myhandler

    Umatic : "defunct"?

    It's a professional format still widely in use 10-15 years ago, if not now.

    To call it defunct is like saying paper is defunct - there must be millions of tapes unconverted to digital.

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    1. MD Rackham
      Reply Icon

      Indeed.

      If I crane my head a bit I can see the machine room with at least 5 U-Matic (3/4") VTRs, most of which are the SP flavor.

      Of course, we also manage to keep a 2" Quad VTR working, alongside all the other formats that people still have tapes for. (1/2" EIAJ reels anyone?)

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  4. Neill Mitchell

    Is it just me...

    Or does Apple's famous 1984 promo video seem hugely ironic now.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's perfect

    I love videos like this, they give us a sense of how far we've come in a relatively short time (it also shows how Apple has changed its ethos in a relatively short time as well, but that's another topic).

    And to top it all off, it's made the news just around the 30th birthday of the Mac! I love coincidences like this - they're what makes life perfect.

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  6. Stuart Elliott

    Enjoyable watch

    Was good seeing things we take for granted in today's machines being touted as new and wonderful, hurt not seeing Woz's name in the Macintosh roll-call part of the video though.

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    1. ThomH
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      Re: Enjoyable watch

      It's possible Wozniak preferred that. It's also possible he's speaking with hindsight but per e.g. http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-thought-the-first-macintosh-was-a-lousy-computer-that-failed-2013-6 he wasn't a big fan of the original machine.

      His most specific gripe: not enough memory to get anything done, leading to endless disc swapping. I guess he wasn't the only one who thought so as the motherboard, despite using soldered RAM, contained the logic to drive 512kb (four times the 128kb it came with) and the Mac started shipping with 512k within a year or so after launch.

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  7. binsamp

    Oversold

    Jobs claimed the 68000 eats x86 for breakfast and hyped the blazing speed of the Mac. I bought one. It was so glacially slow I took it back for a refund.

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    1. Charles Manning
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      x86 vs 68000

      The 68K did eat the x86 for breakfast.

      Sure, Mac was slow, but if you ran a GUI on a 1984 era x86 that was glacial.

      The only way to get any sort of speed on an x86 was to use a text-block UI, not pixel graphics.

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  8. I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
    Linux

    WTF was I thinking, watching that for half an hour?

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  9. Not That Andrew

    Most interesting part IMHO is Woz and the other techies mingling with the crowd from about 1h36

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Link to the interesting bit of the video

    I found the linked page wouldn't load properly (after a long time-out, I eventually got a page devoid of formatting and no video). However, I did see the link to YouTube, and managed to find the point of introduction:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YShLWK9n2Sk#t=2166

    Pretty remarkable what they managed to cram into 128kB RAM.

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    1. Snapper
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      Re: Link to the interesting bit of the video/128k RAM

      Didn't I read somewhere that the Mac(s) used for the launchings had additional RAM, possibly 256k?

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Link to the interesting bit of the video/128k RAM

        Still a damn sight less than the 8MB RAM required to run Linux or the 256MB RAM to run Windows 7…

        (And still less than the 2GB+ or so to make either of them useful.)

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  11. P. Lee

    Brutal culling of Apple ][?

    Hardly, the //c wasn't exactly a massive success and things just moved on - much like the 30pin adapter.

    Loved my ][+ though. Back in the days when tech was fun...

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