In Part 11 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs, Steve Jobs triumphantly introduces the Mac to the world. “It sang to us. It performed mathematical calculations with the blinding speed of a Cray mainframe. It drew beautiful pictures. It communicated with other computers. It bounced rays off satellites and sent a subversive message to the Soviet Union.”
Steve Wozniak is unhappy at the Mac launch, which resembles “Woodstock for nerds.” Part 10 of “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs,” a personal history of the original Mac by Macworld founder David Bunnell.
In part 9 of “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs,” Macworld founder David Bunnell tells how he shouted “Steve Jobs is a fucking genius!” in front of a bunch of kids at a Super Bowl party.
If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.
Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.
At long last, the Welcome to MacIntosh documentary (which we’ve mentioned here a few times) is now available to watch online, for free. .
Back in January, we reported on the blurry images of some ancient Apple Newton prototypes that were doing the rounds on the internets.
Since then, Grant Hutchinson, who was mentioned in that article, has taken a fantastic set of photos of the Newton “Cadillac” prototype. We asked him if we could show you some of those photos here, and he kindly said yes.
Oh. My. God.
Forget the iPad, kids, just forget it forever. You don’t need one anymore. Because the guys at E4 have created… ePad. It’s more than amazing. It’s amazinger.
Don’t just take my word for it. Watch this video for the full details.
The world’s most advanced music AI runs on a rickety old Power Mac 7500.
Called Emily Howell by its creator, music professor David Cope, the program just released “her” first album, From Darkness, Light, in January.
Fashion designer Kosuke Tsumura wove old iPods, mice and keyboards into a series of artworks on show at Nanzuka Underground in Tokyo until March 20, Japan Trends reports.
We’ve seen a few artistic reincarnations of defunct iPods but love the way he’s turned that tangle of useless cables we all have in a drawer into something more: the work is intricate enough that it takes awhile to spot the NSFW element in at least one of them.
Some devices are more versatile than others.
Though the 2002 iLamps were declared “obsolete” by Apple in 2009, the repurposed stainless steel base plate of this iMac G4 makes a nice wall clock.
It’s the handiwork of a Japanese Apple fan, who published a step-by-step DIY project.
It’ll go nicely with your G4 iLamp Lamp, too, and probably won’t take more than half an hour to make.
Not to be trusted with a drill? There’s a ready-made version on Etsy for $30.
Via Blog! NoBon
This is the sort of apocalyptically messy work room that any man can be proud of, but Flickr user Grant ups the ante for Mac fans because of the deliriously implausible and achingly retro home server housed within.
What you are looking at are three old school Power Macs : a 9600/200MP “Kansas” running Webstar 4 and RumpusFTP, an 8500/120 “Nitro” running MacHTTP and a Dual 450MHz “Mystic” with 1GB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive running OS X 10.4.11.
Those are pretty rad, but even better is what’s not in the shot: his Apple Newton web server.
Grant, we salute you. That’s just some amazing mileage you’re getting out of a garage of old-but-still-in-their-prime Power Macs.
[via MAKE]
It’s just so charming when programmers forget about the App Store and universal binaries for a second, blow the dust off that old Apple IIc+ in the basement and code up something new… like this awesome wavetable synth, programmed, compiled and sold by chiptune musicians 8 Bit Weapon.
Called the Digital Music Synthesizer, the application isperhaps the only wavetable synth for Apple’s 8 bit machines, and runs on the Apple IIe, IIc and IIc+, with support for up to eight voices including acousting piano, vibraphone, acoustic guitar, electric bass, trumpet, clarinet, square wave, sawtooth wave, sine wave, and the banjo. You can listen to a sample of what the Digitial Music Synthesizer can do here.
The best part? You can order a 5.25-inch floppy of DMS from 8 Bit Weapon for only $19.95.
True, it’s probably only of real interest to chiptune artists interested in generating the most accurate retro-bleeping sounds possible, but it’s still wonderful to listen to songs performed on software freshly programmed for Apple computers that may be dead, but not forgotten.
[via Technabob]
So this is the web that you don’t see; the web in text-only form. Ugly, isn’t it?
Yeah, ugly. But fast. By disregarding everything that isn’t text, browsers like Lynx display web pages at lightning speed. If all you want to do is read stuff, Lynx is useful to have around. And if you don’t want to do that, it’s fun to play with. For five minutes.
But not many people are comfortable enough with the Terminal to install it manually on their Mac. It’s not the kind of app that comes with a drag-and-drop installer.
Well, it wasn’t, until Lynxlet came along. Lynxlet gives you the best of both worlds: the text-only speediness and the drag-and-drop simplicity. Nice.
Lynxlet’s maker calls apps like this “Termlets”, and Lynxlet isn’t the only one available: you can grab a handful of others here.
(Via Merlin Mann.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCRijF7lxzI
Steve Wozniak recounts a nice bit of Silicon Valley folk lore in this excerpt from the Discovery Forum interview where he talks about how he got the idea of bringing color to the Mac after staying up four nights in a row to meet a deadline for Atari.
Wish sleepless nights brought me that kind of inspiration…
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObN9wSLSI_k
Mac aficionado Matt, who made a retro-awesome video of the Apple website over the years, also concocted this video of an iPhone running on Mac System 1.0.
This old school MacPhone does everything you’d expect from an iPhone.
It simultaneously runs apps, widgets, has an accelerometer and makes calls — the phone dial pad graphic is an excellent touch — though you won’t be able to play Desert Trek on an iPhone any time soon since he recreated that 1984 look with video effects.
The MacPhone mock-up took him about a day to make it using Keynote and iMovie plus some photoshopped screenshots from his 128kMac.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI898pp6rxI
Matt, whose website describes him as a “normal dude that likes to talk about Apple and technology in general,” made this “what-if” trip down memory lane — an alternate reality version of what the Apple website might have looked like from the pre-Internet days.
The farther back you go, the more fun it is, check out the “See Our Ads in Byte Magazine” button and a photo of Jobs & Woz that looks snapped in the founding garage.
For a longer trip down pseudo-memory lane, check out his slideshow here.
Thanks to reader Thomas for the tip!
Opening tonight in Brooklyn — an art exhibit based on obsolete Apple technology that examines the “fetishizing” of products that are soon discarded.
The installations include a mechanical interpretation of Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, and a doormat with Bill Gates’ face on it.
See the video and several pix after the jump.
This bang-whiz creation is the brainchild of Justin Adler plus the handiwork of artist/costume maker/prop designer extraordinaire Ted Southern.
It’s the innards of two Apple G4s, plus a graphic card, turned into a the kind of table that will make any night feel like was-there-something-in-my drink? night, if the promo video is anything to go by.
Sure, it doesn’t have the cool linearity of the iPod table, but it’s better than the scrap heap.
Flickr user raneko (who is no stranger to regular Cult readers) has just uploaded a bunch of fantastic photos of Apple mice through the ages.
The financial crisis may be spurring a few Apple collectors to clean the computer room — after a couple of Apple Is we found on eBay, reader David Fulero tipped us off about this Lisa model up on the block.
She’s up for sale for just $999, a relative bargain if you consider the 26-year-old machine’s original sticker price was about $10,000 — something like $20,000 today.
Cult of Mac reader Tiago Piccini from Brazil wrote in with yet another idea — following our posts on cat beds and hackintosh holders — for recycling the shell of a dear, departed iMac.
He spent under an hour gutting his non-working iMac, then adding a lamp socket and switch device, powering it with a 40w bulb and adding a piece of fabric under the screen to soften the light.
Piccini, who by day works at an Apple Solution Expert, calls his creation the iAbat-jour…It’s an easy DIY project that gives off a nice glow, no?
There’s another Apple 1 on the eBay auction block, this one comes with enough collateral to stand as its own museum exhibit.
The starting bid is $50,000, the auction is on for another two days.
The owner, who wished to remain anonymous, told us how this Apple artifact got there.
CoM: How did you get your hands on an Apple 1?
Anonymous Owner: I came to own the Apple 1 through a very convoluted story, but in short I found a guy in Minnesota who bought it from the original owner in 1990 and, eventually, he sold it to me.
CoM: What made you decide to sell it?
AO: It is killing me to sell it but I’m on very hard times and I’ve sold everything else of value. I want to keep this magnificent piece of history forever. There is no price I would willingly put on this item…but I have kids and of course that takes priority.
CoM: How did you decide the price?
AO: I set the opening price because a) an Apple 1 has sold for as much as $43k and b) if I have to sell my most prized possession and I sold it for an inadequate amount I’d have to take my life.
So, really, the price is all about saving lives. lol.
CoM: In the selling info, you say that Woz looked at it and said that it probably wouldn’t boot because the first batches of Apple 1s used a brand of chip they later replaced because they blew out easily.
How did you meet Woz?
There are only thought to be about 50 Apple 1s still in the wild, this is the second one up for auction on eBay in a month.
The last one sold for about $18,000, several thousand over its estimated value, to an anonymous computer collector who also tipped us off about the sale of this 1976 progenitor of the personal computer. The starting bid is $50,000.
So why is this Apple 1 , which the seller states won’t boot up, priced at 177% more than the other one?
It’s pretty much a capsule history of early Apple: the wise person who first bought it for Electric City Radio Supply in Montana kept everything — the invoice, the box (which shows the return address as Steve Jobs’ parents house), a cassette with BASIC, the operation manual and a typed letter on ring binder paper from Steve Jobs answering questions about it, including how to hook up a keyboard. Even if you don’t have the cash, the photos are worth checking out.
We wrote to the seller, more when we hear back.
Hit the jump for the letter signed “Steven Jobs” on notebook paper and more details…
So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.
Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.
“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”
When I saw this snap in the Cult of Mac Flickr pool, I wanted to find out more. Who is the owner of the little family of Macs old and new, and how did they end up on this desk?
