Courtesy of Edible Apple, here’s Apple co-founder Steve Jobs giving the finger to the IBM logo in a photo that appears to date from “sometime in the early 80s.”
If you weren’t around or too young to remember those times, the rivalry wasn’t between Apple and Microsoft (in fact, the AppleSoft BASIC in the Apple ][ series of computers was produced under a Microsoft license), but between Apple and IBM, who introduced their Personal Computer, a.k.a. “PC” in 1981. We knew that this rivalry would become quite fierce when Apple fired the first PR salvo with this ad welcoming IBM to the personal computer industry, whose big players at the time were Apple, Radio Shack and Commodore:
I can’t remember if it was former Apple Evangelist (and one of my role models) Guy Kawasaki or former Apple UI guru Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini who made the astute observation that the PC was the responsibility of IBM’s “Entry-Level Systems” division, which it implied that the PC was something you’d use until you decided that you wanted a real computer.
Apple’s relationship with IBM has always been a little bit rocky, first with the rivalry and then with their ill-fated alliance in the 1990s. This alliance produced only one thing I would consider a “semi-success” – the PowerPC chip, which was completely dumped by the end of 2006 – and a number of flops that came from the Taligent and Kaleida projects, including “Pink”, “Blue” and ScriptX (which, unlike Pink and Blue, actually made it to the :half-baked” stage; I actually got to noodle with during my early days at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia). The alliance, which was meant to counter the threat of an increasingly powerful Microsoft never quite made sense to me, nor did it to Guy Kawasaki, who once likened it to two people getting married because they hate the same person.
His blog presence is missed, but Reginald “Raganwald” Braithwaite is alive and well in real life. He and I work in the same building, and we’ve caught up with each other a couple of times recently. Here we are (along with developer/paparazzo Libin Pan) having dim sum at one of Kristan “Krispy” Uccello’s local developer lunches…
Me, Libin Pan and Reg Braithwaite. Photo by Adam Wisniewski.
My friend Miss Fipi Lele, who provides me with a lot of pictures for my blogs, pointed me to this photo on Shorpy, “The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog”. It depicts “multi-processor computing”, circa 1924:
Click the photo to see it on its original site, Shorpy, at full size.
The caption for the photo at Shorpy is:
November 24, 1924. Washington, D.C. “Bonus Bureau, Computing Division. Many clerks figure the amount of the bonus each veteran is entitled to.”
Before the age of electronic computers, the term computer referred to someone whose profession was performing mathematical calculations by hand.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the profession’s origins (see the entry Human Computer):
The approach was taken for astronomical and other complex calculations. Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713–1765), when he divided the computation to determine timing of the return of Halley’s Comet with two colleagues, Joseph-Jérôme Le Lepart and Nicole-Reine Étable. For some men being a computer was a temporary position until they moved on to greater advancements. For women the occupation was generally closed, but this changed in the late nineteenth century with Edward Charles Pickering. His group was at times termed “Pickering’s Harem.” Many of the women astronomers from this era are computers with possibly the best known being Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Florence Cushman was one of the Harvard University computers from 1888 onward. Among her best known works for him was A Catalogue of 16,300 Stars Observed with the 12-inch Meridian Photometer. She also worked with Annie Jump Cannon. That said as a female computer she normally earned half of what a male counterpart would.
The Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar was employed as a “computer” for the Great Trigonometric Survey of India in 1840. It was he who first identified and calculated the height of the world’s highest mountain, later called Mount Everest.
While this is actually not about computer security nor about the Python programming language (which I’ll cover in some articles soon), I thought my Pythonista readers might find it amusing…
Shop manager Aaron Kaplan said they were prompted to put it up because so many people were having problems with Windows Vista, including compatibility issues with older software and trouble adjusting to the interface.
“A lot of people didn’t like using Vista, and a lot of the manufacturers forced people to go up to Vista,” he said.
What was the demand for the service? “We had a lot of people coming in and asking about it,” Kaplan said. “Of all the signs we put up there the last two years, at least, we probably got the most response out of that one. A lot of people coming in.”
Kaplan said they’ve since replaced it with a different message, but they’re thinking about putting the Vista removal message back up.
I love this Photoshop job in which Rapture (the setting of the game BioShock) propaganda replaces the standard “Do not leave child unattended” message on grocery shopping carts:
The line is derived from the philosophy of game character Andrew Ryan (whose name and backstory are rearrangements of Ayn Rand). You hear it in an in-game recording in Ryan’s own voice:
I am Andrew Ryan, and I’m here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
No, says the man in Washington. It belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican. It belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow. It belongs to everyone.
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible.
I chose…Rapture.
A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
If you’re looking for a gift for someone with an XBox 360 or a PC with enough horsepower to play modern first-person shooter games, you might want to consider BioShock as a gift. It’s an excellent game that blends gaming action with a very rich backstory — quite possibly the richest since Myst. Better still, it’s can be finished in an amount of time that still lets you have a life: at the “easy” level, I finished it in a about a week, playing a couple of hours a day, and I’m a relatively casual gamer.
Here’s a photo that’s just over 25 years old — taken on November 7th, 1982, it’s a Life magazine photo featuring the best players of arcade games of that era:
Rockin’ it old school in 1982! The best videogamers of 1982 pose by the games they’ve mastered. Click the photo to see it at a larger size. Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
Here are a couple of shots from a presentation made by Harmonix founder and CEO Alex Rigopoulos in which he talks about the pros and cons they considered when trying to decide whether or not to make a guitar game:
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The “pro” argument is all you’d need to convince me!
I think the suggestion in the ad goes double if you start pointing out what’s wrong with the code (“you == understand.this? get as an object name? Couldn’t they have hired a real programmer to write the ad copy?”).
359 is the new 555
Fictitious phone numbers on many TV shows and movies begin with the number 555, which I presume is to avoid the legal hassles that arise when people try to call those numbers (I remember that a number of people whose phone numbers were actually 867-5309 had their phones ringing day and night when Tommy Tutone’s song Jenny became a hit).
The people behind the TV show CSI: Miami probably wanted to avoid similar legal trouble in an episode where an IP address was shown onscreen. I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of portscanning some IP address I’d seen on a fiction TV show, but somewhere, out there, someone just might. Hence their invention of an IP address whose first “octet” is 359. It’s IPv4.5!
I’m working on an article (working title: Walled Garden…or BEER Garden?), so here’s something to keep you amused in the meantime…
My Obsessions, Circa 1980
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The “Star Wars Trumpet” Video
Well, I can’t make a reference to Battlestar Galactica (the 80′s version) without making one to Star Wars, can I? How ’bout the video that’s making the rounds right now — this so-bad-it’s-good performance of the Star Wars theme on trumpet for the “talent” portion of an old beauty pageant?
I work in TV Sports, this tape has circulated amongst our tape rooms for years, I figured it was only natural to be on YouTube. I’m of the understanding it was a statewide beauty pagaent, and Stacy is Miss Douglas County. I have no idea who she is, or if she even knew there was a talent portion of the contest.
It’s believed that the tape has origins in the Kansas City area, and I thought it was a Nebraska beauty pageant.
You’ve probably heard of Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbows. They’re bypassing the record industry, and you can buy it directly from them, either as an audio CD or as downloaded MP3s. For those of you who have downloaded or ripped the album, here’s the album art for your enhanced listening enjoyment!*
