I've seen things you people would believe.
Mac OS X Programming Secrets ADHOC/MacHack: I Love the Nightlife by Scott Knaster If you're a Mac programmer, you've attended your share of computer conferences, such as Macworld Expo, Java One, and Apple WWDC. But unless you've been there, you've never experienced anything like ADHOC, the Advanced Developers Hands On Conference, formerly and still occasionally known as MacHack. ADHOC starts at…
One of the highlights of my youth was my Spelling Bee career. When you're a pudgy little nerd, you take your competitive events where you can get them, and I was a great speller. In 8th grade I took the Denver written spelling test and I did well enough to qualify for the state test, also in Denver. That memorable day began with the test in a fancy hotel downtown, followed by a lunch banquet for…
Why did we travel almost 2000 miles to see a total eclipse? All my life I've loved science fiction movies with amazing special effects. Yesterday I stood on a field with a few hundred people as it gradually got dark in the middle of the day. I watched through heavy sunglasses as the sun became a crescent and then slipped away completely. The temperature dropped 12 degrees in a few minutes. Then I…
Hey! Check out my stories told here! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbHVyamNJexYo1T2HPdybrg
Resources for the MacTech Conference keynote "That’s amazing! Why Storytelling is Crucial to Tech, Business, and the World": An Introvert's Guide to Better Presentations 5 Science-Backed Ways to Give Better Presentations How To Give a Killer Presentation The Moth TED Talks
I'm feeling lucky! I've had an incredibly fortunate career in Silicon Valley. I spent 7 years at Apple in the '80s, a few years at General Magic in the '90s, and more years at Microsoft and Google after that. I'm a writer, not an engineer. I've loved watching, teaching, and describing the incredible work I've been lucky enough to see: Macintosh, HyperCard, Magic Cap, and other marvels. Over the…
There's a long tradition of storytelling and theater in technology companies. You might be surprised to hear this, because a lot of people think of tech as mostly nerds and bros doing nerdy bro things. But tech companies aren't shy about talking of changing the world, making a difference, and so on, in addition to selling widgets or serving up websites. If you think your work is important - and it…
A few weeks after visiting the "Steve Jobs" production office , I got to watch some actual filming. The Mac was introduced at Flint Center in Cupertino in 1984. In the movie, Flint Center got to play itself. The place was nicely dressed up for the occasion. Lots of people were taking pictures of the 1984 banners with their iPhones The crew needed 2500 people to come sit in the auditorium for…
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd Marks . He said he was on the crew of a new movie about Steve Jobs. He said they're filming a scene that’s the public intro of the Mac in 1984. They heard I was there at the original event , and they wanted to talk to me about what was going on that day. Cool! I…
Sometimes in Silicon Valley we make stuff. Like any makers, or really anyone who wants a bit of fame and immortality, we like to sign our stuff. There are many ways to do this. Even in ancient, pre-Mac times, software usually had credits buried in it somewhere. With the advent of graphical user interfaces in the mid-1980s, the About Box became the standard place for credits. The About Box was…
If you were online in tech circles last week, you couldn't miss the fact that last Friday was the 30th anniversary of the Mac. News sites and bloggers posted zillions of stories about the anniversary, and there was a big event at Flint Center, the site of the original announcement. More surprising was that Apple itself celebrated the birthday. Apple is not noted for looking back. But this time,…
In 2004 Andy Hertzfeld was building Folklore.org , his amazing now-famous website devoted to first-person stories of the earliest days of the Mac. Andy was writing one of the key stories of the saga, the one about the day of the Mac's public unveiling. I mentioned to Andy that I had a video of the intro, and he was welcome to watch it to spur his memory of the great day. So Andy came over, we…
This is probably familiar to you. Yeah, everybody knows that. But did you know that just one year earlier, on January 19th, 1983, Apple introduced the Lisa ? You might know that Lisa was Apple's first computer with a graphical user interface. It was pretty cool but cost $10,000 and was a little ahead of its time. Steve Jobs code-named Lisa for his daughter, but nobody acknowledged that at the…
In the 1990s I worked at General Magic , an extremely ambitious startup that began as a project inside Apple and then became its own company. The people at General Magic wanted to make portable touch-screen personal communicators that could send and receive beautiful notes called telecards, provide access to online shopping, and make phone calls. It was sort of like trying to make an iPhone in…
In 2003 I left the comfort of Microsoft's employ and struck out into the cold Silicon Valley recession looking for work. I soon connected with Andy Rubin, my co-worker from General Magic days, and got a job at his new company, Danger Inc. Danger created the Hiptop , a revolutionary mobile device for phone and other kinds of communications. You could use the Hiptop for email, AIM (AOL Instant…
When Microsoft shipped Office 98, the Redmond marketing team set up a roadshow to demo the new software at Apple offices (yes, Apple offices) around the country. I was pretty good at giving demos, so somehow I wound up getting asked to give the Office 98 demo on this tour. This was a 50-minute demo, part of a half-day program. The plan was for morning and afternoon demos in 5 cities in 5 days,…
Having a whole new magazine devoted to the Mac was pretty cool back in 1984. You've seen the cover of the first issue, right? The first issue of Macworld appeared on the same day as the Mac's introduction, which meant a few interesting points: Lots of things were very new that day and worthy of coverage, including the Mac itself and all its software, graphical user interfaces, and even the mouse.…
I've blogged previously about working in the Mac group at Microsoft and how much fun that wasn't during Macworld Expo. In those strange days, Microsoft was doing tremendous work supporting the Mac, which resulted in really nice apps. These apps happened for 3 basic reasons: First, Microsoft created Word 6 as a cross-platform product designed to look and feel the same on Windows and Mac. This was…
Last week I posted about MAC: The Macintosh Calendar 1985 and included a couple of images from the calendar. Lots of folks asked to see more, so today I photographed the entire calendar and posted it . I apologize in advance to anyone depicted in this calendar who would rather not see these images again. It's all done in the name of history. As I said last week, can you imagine Apple allowing this…
My buddy John Vink saw Jobs and wondered just how accurate it was. But unlike most of us, John (a) knows several of the folks depicted in the movie and (b) has a TV show. So he sat down with Steve Wozniak, Daniel Kottke, and Andy Hertzfeld and went through the movie scene by scene to discuss what really happened and how they felt about it. It's a very cool piece of video.
If you think Apple has its fanatic fans today, check this out: in 1985 when the Mac was one year old, Banbury Books produced a wall calendar showing pictures not of Mac products, but members of the Mac team at Apple. MAC: The Macintosh Calendar 1985 featured photographs by D.W. Mellor. As far as I know, a product like this for the Mac never happened again. Each month had a photo depicting one or…
In 1997, Apple was beleaguered and struggling. But Steve Jobs was back, and there was hope that things might change. Part of that hope came from arch-rival Microsoft, which had shockingly invested in Apple and was working on a sparkling new version of Microsoft Office that would give the Mac an instant shot of renewed credibility. I was working on the team that built Internet Explorer for Mac,…
Once upon a time, every year from 1986 to 2004, there was an amazing annual programming conference called MacHack. Some of the key features of MacHack were: It took place at a crappy Holiday Inn in Dearborn, Michigan. There was little to do but hack. The conference started at midnight with a keynote, and the keynote always lasted several hours. I was part of one that ended at 6:50 AM. Every…
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the classic issue of Scientific American on " microelectronics " that included the first ad for the Apple II. Because I never throw anything (interesting) away, I found my copy of that four-page color brochure at home. Here's the cover: Brochure courtesy of ComputerLand of Denver (defunct) 36 years later, Apple still worries a lot about simplicity. That's pretty…
Believe it or not, there was a time when Microsoft dominated and everybody else hated them (only half of which is true now). The Internet in its role as Great Disruptor helped turn that all around, starting in the late 1990s. As Netscape, Apple, and other companies were using the Internet to move forward, Microsoft was working on how it could own the Internet like it owned personal computing. In…