The Lost 1984 Mac Video 636
An anonymous reader writes "Never seen video footage of the introduction of the Macintosh in January 1984 was published for the first time on the Internet today. Renowned Mac user Scott Knaster kept that Betamax video tape for 21 years, and German media agency TextLab has unearthed this only surviving video tape of the launch." They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB movie.
Patience, honey. (Score:5, Funny)
The next download slot will be free
in 0 minutes und while(01); seconds
Re:Patience, honey. (Score:2)
Re:Patience, honey. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have 5 words to say about this statement:
BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent, BitTorrent.
6th word? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:6th word? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Moo 10 Mbps mirror moo moo:
http://www.trunkmonkey.com/content/view/52/51/ [trunkmonkey.com]
Insult to injury (Score:5, Funny)
Here are some magnet/edonkey mirror links:
magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:CGUXHDIRWXFK362VRT63RMU6V
ed2k://|file|1984macintro_2.mov|21939485|c72b7ecf
Re:Insult to injury (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.preinheimer.com/1984macintro.mov
Decent box, I say odds are good it makes it, if not, no worries.
Re:Insult to injury (Score:3, Funny)
BitTorrent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BitTorrent (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.keyholedesign.com/1984macintro.torrent [keyholedesign.com]
What is the world coming too when even 7k text files get
Try this (Score:3, Informative)
high-bandwidth mirror (Score:5, Informative)
also,
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov [uiuc.edu]
Hold Your Horses! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait for the 33MB version!
Re:Hold Your Horses! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Lesson: (Score:5, Funny)
You mean besides the Preseident?
Oooh. That IS a good one. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oooh. That IS a good one. (Score:3, Funny)
never seen? (Score:5, Funny)
And he never watched it?!?! What about the camera man? Was he blind?
I'm afraid to watch this - I heard about that world's funniest joke. Sounds like they've taken special precautions here.
Re:never seen? (Score:2)
Judging by our local TV station news crew, it wouldn't be anything new if he was....
Re:never seen? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:never seen? (Score:4, Informative)
How do you say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do you say... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How do you say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do you say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How do you say... (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdotted in German?
As the Heise Newsticker [heise.de] tends to have the same effect as Slashdot on linked sites, the term "geheised" is a accurate translation of "slashdotted".
Re:How do you say... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do you say... (Score:3, Funny)
DieseWebsiteläßtnichtmehrwegendesübermäßigenVer
Re:How do you say... (Score:3, Funny)
Betamax? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Betamax? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Betamax? (Score:5, Informative)
> robust format.
This is a common misconception, but no. The magnetic tape used is almost identical and will last roughly as long. VHS and Beta, using magnetic tape and analog formats, are very long-lasting and decay gracefully.
You might see extra noise and dropouts on a 25-year-old VHS or Beta, but it will play perfectly fine as long as it wasn't stored in a hot or wet place. Hot and wet is great when you're with a lady, but not when you're storing media.
Re:Betamax? (Score:5, Funny)
I think you lost half of the
Re:Betamax? (Score:5, Funny)
Watch Out!!! (Score:3, Funny)
And the VHS vs. Betamax wars begin. Keep it clean. Fight!!!
Re:Betamax? -- The parent is flat out wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, A VHS would not have survived as long. Beta was a significantly more robust format.
This is a load of crap. My father, an engineer who was given the task of evaluating the formats for use in education, managed to get hold of a highly bootleg copy of Star Wars on VHS, in 1977.
The JVC machine we played it on even had mechanical type buttons, none of this newfangled soft touch nonsense.
Not robust...? I actually played this old 1977 VHS cassette just a month or two ago (2004) to compare aga
Robust? Simpler than that. (Score:3, Interesting)
Beta technology was gentler on tape than VHS. The transport system on a Beta deck pulled out a lot more tape than VHS did and was more sophisticated. The benefit was less stress on the tape -- really.
A rewound Beta tape is less taut than a rewound VHS tape and for long term storage that counts for a lot.
I have a related suggestion for any VHS users: when you are done watching your tape, don't rewind it. Let it sit and then rewind it right bef
Re:Betamax? (Score:5, Funny)
mac cost (Score:3, Insightful)
The 5 year typical service life of a mac compared to 3 years for dos/windows typically made it less expensive than even the cheap brands over the long term.
And once you factored in support costs in a business, the mac made up for the purchase price differenc
Re:Betamax? (Score:3, Insightful)
They likely mean Betacam [wikipedia.org] not betamax. But who knows.
No not so much (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Betamax? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh man.. (Score:5, Funny)
Erm, Lost!? What!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Erm, Lost!? What!? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Erm, Lost!? What!? (Score:3, Informative)
Patience honey... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh well, guess I waited for 21 years, I can wait a few more hours until it's mirrored elsewhere.
I can't believe I'm asking for this but ... (Score:2, Funny)
Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
http://mirror.services.wisc.edu/mirrors/temp/1984
Re:Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mirror (Score:3, Insightful)
BETAMAX (Score:3, Funny)
1984 called... it wants its technology back.
Thanks for the help (Score:5, Insightful)
You could do something useful and make a torrent before posting the story to slashdot.
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
22MB in 1984 (Score:4, Funny)
Bandwidth limit already reached (Score:2)
They could probably use more mirrors for the 22MB (Score:2)
Here we go... (Score:5, Informative)
You can try a time sliced download here [slashdot.org], and if this is overloaded (it probably is), there are mirrors at macnews.de [macnews.de], php-schmiede.de [php-schmiede.de], ppcnux.de [ppcnux.de], ftp.ppcnux.de [ppcnux.de], MacTechNews.de [mac-software-updates.de] and elbewerk [mac.com].
And now that the US are with us, you guys could back us up with some mirrors. Thanks bunches to all the folks who are helping us out!
Re:Here we go... (Score:3, Informative)
Just trying to help
Re:Here we go... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How about a bittorrent? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. [bittorrent.com]
Re:How about a bittorrent? (Score:4, Funny)
About halfway through my senior year, we hired this freshman. Nice kid, but a little on the clueless side. Not only had he never worked on a Mac before, he'd never even seen one in person.
One day he had to go to one of the computer labs to pick up a Mac and bring it into the shop for service. (The analog board needed replacing, or something like that.) He hauled it in, set it on the bench, and proceeded to dig through all the bins in the shop.
"What are you looking for?" I asked him.
"A Mac power cord," he said. I just kinda stared for a minute. "What?" he demanded.
Without saying anything, I reached down into the bin by my bench, grabbed a power cord, and threw it at him.
"You mean Macs use regular power cords?" he asked.
Your question wasn't quite that stupid. But man, was it ever close.
Amazing... (Score:5, Funny)
Mirror (Score:2, Informative)
http is such a great transfer mechanism (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotted? (Score:5, Funny)
North American Mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Good Luck fair box
Stylish! (Score:3, Funny)
Text described for the bandwidth impaired (Score:5, Informative)
Steve Jobs ca. 1984 is speaking on a stage in front of an audience, suit coat and bow tie, these are his pre-jeans-and-black-turtleneck days. He tells the audience "All of the images you about to see on the large screen will be generated by what's in that bag." The lifts the black bag to reveal a Mac on a table (applause) he inserts a diskette into the Mac and steps back. The word MACINTOSH slowly scrolls across the screen to the tune of "Chariots of Fire" (wild appluase) Screen shots of paint program, word processor and calculator, fonts, program editor, 3d chess (cheering, applause). Steve introduces Macintosh speaking for itself. A bad robotic voice reads a few paragraphs of text on the screen. (applause, cheering) (wide shot of audience appluading) (end)
I do recall the days when PC DOS and the Apple II ruled the world and first time I saw a Mac in action was easy to recognize it was a big step forward.
Re:Text described for the bandwidth impaired (Score:3, Informative)
Torrent (Score:4, Informative)
NOT the 1984 Commercial (Score:5, Informative)
It's a video of the actual introduction by Jobs at an Apple event.
Screen shots, speech synthesis, Jobs in a bow tie.
Interesting to see what geeks in 1984 cheered at, but that's about it.
Re:NOT the 1984 Commercial (Score:5, Informative)
OMG (Score:3, Funny)
Man We were easily impressed back then. (Score:4, Interesting)
And it took till the Ibook G4 before I bought another Apple (my first was a IIc).
Seriously, the mac is back. OsX and Ilife, are as awe inspiring today as MacOS and MacWrite/MacPaint were back then...
Re:Man We were easily impressed back then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Torrent mirror (Score:3, Informative)
bow tie (Score:4, Funny)
Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thread? (Score:5, Interesting)
A small minority thought it was "insanely great," and I suppose they still do. Most readers, though, found flaws with it.
Some viewed the Macintosh as "just a toy," and insisted that they were holding out for a real computer - the Lisa.
Some thought it had promise, but wouldn't be truly useful until Apple added support for the Commodore-based SIDplayer music format.
Quite a lot said it was too expensive. Some of these pointed out that there were any number of kit computers they could build for less, while others questioned having a screen built in - and a small one at that - when most people already had televisions.
Purists were quick to point out that the Mac lacked features that had been developed years earlier by Douglas Engelbart and others. Why wasn't the keyboard more of a chording model? And why did the mouse have only one button? Even Engelbart's original patent drawings, they argued, had shown a multi-button mouse. What good was a single button?
And of course, there were the hardcore geeks and techies, who were quick to point out that it wasn't any good if it couldn't run a real operating system, like VAX/VMS.
Ah, the good old days. If anyone has a copy of the thread, please post it!
Re:Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thre (Score:5, Funny)
Apple's new Macintosh.
Smaller than a PDP-11. No wireless. Lame.
Re:Who has a copy of the SLASHDOT-L Mac intro thre (Score:3, Insightful)
Behold the speaking computer! (Score:5, Interesting)
I know there are solutions out there, among them AT&T Natural Voices (which I might add costs more than my computers put together), but generally, the speech thing didn't really take off.
To be fair, Windows also ships with the most annoying text-to-speech engine which hasn't made any progress since Windows 95.
What brings?
Re:Behold the speaking computer! (Score:3, Informative)
Festival speech [ed.ac.uk]
75% as good at AT&T Natural Voices - and it's free, with a BSD like license.
Quite good when set up properly.
Re:Behold the speaking computer! (Score:5, Informative)
Compare a public domain TTS like rsynth [cmu.edu] to a free, but commercial quality TTS like festival [ed.ac.uk] or Bell Lab's [bell-labs.com]. It's funny how rsynth sounds a lot like the mac (although rsynth doesn't have a bunch of predefined settings to do different voices, you have to set all the parameters yourself to make it sound exactly like Bruce).
TTS technology doesn't move terribly fast. the TTS that was in the Mac 21 years ago is basically the same technology 30 years ago. But that's no excuse for Apple not to have moved on to using diphonemes or triphonemes like other systems. Apple is behind, but in the TTS world, 20 years behind is not all that far behind. (unlike say the harddrive world, where 20 years behind is the difference between 100s of gigabytes to 10s of megabytes. ouch)
Macintosh Folklore (Score:5, Informative)
(I'm not associated with folklore.org or Andy Hertzfeld or anything. I found the site a couple weeks ago while googling for little rubber feet [google.com], and got hooked.)
This was part of Cringely's excellent documentary (Score:3, Informative)
3 1/2 inch floppies (Score:3, Informative)
That's why everyone claps right at the beginning, he pulls the floppy out of his pocket(!) and sticks it into the computer.
People watching today might not realize that the Mac did not have a hard drive. One was later provided as an expensive extra option. But initially the Mac had only a floppy drive to boot from.
Those were the days... I loved the Mac. I bought one back in 1984, the first GUI I'd ever used. Then a year later I laboriously unsoldered the memory chips and upgraded the system from 128K to a whole half a meg of memory. I can't count how many Macs I've bought over the years since then... we've got 7 right now, counting the 2 my kids in college have.
Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Amiga (Score:3, Insightful)
Another difference is that while Amiga focused on flashy hardware, Apple focused on a solid user interface. It's a lot easier to be backwards compatible with software
Re:Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Where is Amiga OS now? Literally? It's changed hands so many times, it's becoming a bit of a joke.
2. Who is actually developing software for Amiga OS? It seems that there must be some developer making something for it.
My point is, just because it's still being developed doesn't mean that it outlasted MacOS. I think more people are running the GNU HURD than Amiga OS.
I remember the first time I saw an Amiga computer--I thought
Re:Corniest.video.ever.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Corniest.video.ever.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Corniest.video.ever.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Corniest ever? Not hardly! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Corniest.video.ever.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, thank God nobody ever does that any more.
Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you really want to impress your wife, try listening to her.
Yeah yeah, it's a troll. He posted a whole topic about it last week.
Re:Funny... (Score:4, Interesting)
The "old Apple" used to love to look backwards and do things like celebrate anniversaries (20th Anniversary Mac, many "special edition" products like the clear Newton 110, etc.). Unfortunately, I think looking at the past 20 years of the Mac, while there have been some great milestones, there have also been a lot of missed opportunities. I think the current management at Apple understands this better and is more focused on the next 20 years of the Mac.
It's kind of ironic that Steve Jobs has much better business sense than the "business" people they put in charge of Apple originally because they didn't think Steve Jobs could really run Apple. Man, has he proven those folks wrong!
Re:Wost encoding job EVER (Score:5, Informative)
This movie was encoded using Sorenson Video and QDesign Music. They are both poorish choices for downloadable video nowadays, with MPEG-4 being preferred. The codecs used date back to the tail end of the era when QuickTime was mostly used for CD kiosks and presentations, and just when QT was starting to develop towards Internet streaming applications.
At least it wasn't done in Cinepak and MACE...
Re:It strikes me that Jobs was an asshole his whol (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, without Jobs to goad people into stroking his ego, there would have been no Mac, no NeXTSTEP, no Apple post-1997, no iMac, no iPod, no standards of excellence in GUI computing.
Sometimes it takes an asshole to make a dent in the universe.