"Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy" on ABC1 tv 9:30 TONIGHT
As with it's subject, the few reviews I've read of this doco cover a wide spectrum of opinions. Apparently the aim was to show the Haight-Ashbury based hippy/freaks movement influenced nearby Silicon Valley's push to spread computers from big Govt, military & corporations into homes & small businesses. Perhaps comparable to John Markoff's book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said & the doco made of that. (see also http://www.thefix.com/content/steve-jobs-think-different-and-lsd-9143 ) I'm not impressed by the newspaper description that refers yet again to Apple supposedly having started in a garage. It takes real effort to be less accurate than Wikipedia but our glorious professional mass-media do it every-time on this subject!
Well they started in two bedrooms, an Atari engineers workbench, several lecture halls, and a garage. The story often points to the garage as that's where they did the first 'production line' of a large number of Apple main boards. Where do you say it started? On 03/05/2012, at 18:36, David E Payne <spyder.king@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
garage
[format recovered] On Thursday, 3 May 2012 at 1:36:00 -0700, David E Payne wrote:
As with it's subject, the few reviews I've read of this doco cover a wide spectrum of opinions. Apparently the aim was to show the Haight-Ashbury based hippy/freaks movement influenced nearby Silicon Valley's push to spread computers from big Govt, military & corporations into homes & small businesses.
I'm not impressed by the newspaper description that refers yet again to Apple supposedly having started in a garage.
I'm pretty sure it did. Do you remember the Apple I? Did you watch the programme? I'm certainly not known for being uncritical, but by normal press standards it wasn't too bad. Yes, the "hippy" aspect was a little overdone, I think, but the documentary gave me a historical perspective that I had lost. They pretended that Apple invented the mouse, but that was about the worst. I also wasn't too sure about the distinction between the Lisa and the (first) Macintosh, but that could be lack of information on my part. I don't think I've seen any documentary on computer history that was better.
It takes real effort to be less accurate than Wikipedia but our glorious professional mass-media do it every-time on this subject!
Well, read the article on Woz (and fix it, if you can). In this case, Wikipedia is pretty rough. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog@FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
On Sun, 6 May 2012, "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
"hippy" aspect was a little overdone, I think, but the documentary gave me a historical perspective that I had lost. They pretended that Apple invented the mouse, but that was about the worst.
They gave credit to Xerox PARC, but credited Apple as being the first to rip off Xerox. That seems to correlate well with all other accounts. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On Sunday, 6 May 2012 at 14:41:19 +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sun, 6 May 2012, "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
"hippy" aspect was a little overdone, I think, but the documentary gave me a historical perspective that I had lost. They pretended that Apple invented the mouse, but that was about the worst.
They gave credit to Xerox PARC, but credited Apple as being the first to rip off Xerox. That seems to correlate well with all other accounts.
It doesn't match my memory, nor the descriptions and illustrations of early mice (mouses?) in Wikipedia. Other aspects of the Lisa and Macintosh were more clearly derived from the PARC work. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog@FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua
Russell Coker wrote:
On Sun, 6 May 2012, "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
"hippy" aspect was a little overdone, I think, but the documentary gave me a historical perspective that I had lost. They pretended that Apple invented the mouse, but that was about the worst.
They gave credit to Xerox PARC, but credited Apple as being the first to rip off Xerox. That seems to correlate well with all other accounts.
For the lurkers, background reading is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Englebart#SRI_and_ARC The former is one of a rare commodity -- a video worth watching. | He never received any royalties for his mouse invention. During an | interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no | idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had | licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."
Flame bait. The technology was licensed at what was considered a fair rate at the time. Xerox wasn't interested in personal computing at the time (to the disgust of their engineers) and when they became interested their computers were reviewed as unusable. Apple were not even the first to cherry pick from Xerox- HP did it for almost a decade before hand- nor were they the last with other vendors not even bothering licensing. Of course we shouldn't let reality have a place in this thread. ;) On 06/05/2012, at 14:41, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
On Sun, 6 May 2012, "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@lemis.com> wrote:
"hippy" aspect was a little overdone, I think, but the documentary gave me a historical perspective that I had lost. They pretended that Apple invented the mouse, but that was about the worst.
They gave credit to Xerox PARC, but credited Apple as being the first to rip off Xerox. That seems to correlate well with all other accounts.
-- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing list luv-talk@lists.luv.asn.au http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-talk
participants (5)
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David E Payne -
Edward Savage -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
Russell Coker -
Trent W. Buck