While you wait for tomorrow’s keynote…
6 Jun 2011 | in Steve Jobs history, Steve Jobs news, Steve Jobs trivia
- The New Yorker did a story on the history of the computer mouse, back to Xerox PARC and the famous Steve Jobs visit that supposedly inspired Lisa then Macintosh. One of the mouse’s inventors, Malcom Galdwell, recalls what we already know, that Apple didn’t “steal” the mouse from Xerox. Unfortunately the story can only be accessed by subscribers — I didn’t subscribe just to read it. The abstract is here (not very well done). It contains interesting old sketches and pictures of prototypes, as well as quotations from the piece, such as this one:
“I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off [Jobs], and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like,‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue,” Hovey told Gladwell.
(via Cult of Mac)
- We’ve talked about it earlier: the building of the extension of Pixar’s Emeryville campus, Pixar Phase II, is now over. Check it out on the excellent Pixar blog.
- A curious piece of trivia, some study was made to prove that Apple had actually the same effect on fanboys that a religion (or, more appropriately, a cult) on its followers:
As discussed in the new BBC documentary “Secrets of the Superbrands”, when you put an Apple fanatic under an MRI and start mentioning iPhone 5s and iPad 3s, neuroscientists found that Apple tends to stimulate the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.
No news to me.
- And I thought I would never be able to find new keynotes… but no, two oldies came up this past month to add up to my impressive collection. I hope you guys take time to check them out, because they’re both pretty interesting.
First, an interesting one (and in high quality, too) from 1996, where Steve Jobs still spoke as CEO of NeXT Inc. — but already famed CEO of Pixar — at a Microsoft Developers Conference, about NeXT’s server technologies, WebObjects. In the video he is a late speaker, which is a testament to how unimportant he seemed to be. He is also very casual and humble, as depicted in a number of articles from that time (he was just coming out of his wilderness years). Watch the keynote here (via Daring Fireball). - The second one I just found, and on YouTube, too! it’s a casual chat Steve Jobs had with then-struggling Mac developers at the end of the 1997 WWDC! Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in Steve Jobs history. Again, it is a testament to Steve’s unchanging character and principles. He stands by the same rules now as he did then, including the most important one: building great products. He also mentions something I knew from a 1999 interview, quoted below:
About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I’m actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody’s going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I’m at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It’s all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I’m not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email.
in the aforementioned video, we discover Steve’s been working in such an environment since 1990. This is thanks to NeXT’s very advanced ‘inter-personal computing’ (i.e. networking) technology. So basically Steve’s been living ‘in the cloud’ for over 20 years, while we mere mortals will probably find out what it’s like thanks to a product that he will introduce (if rumors are to be verified) tomorrow. The advancement of NeXT’s technology still continues to amaze me.
- Business Insider has published a thorough interview of Apple’s first CEO, Mike Scott. Honestly I haven’t had time to read it yet, so I wo’nt comment on it, but you can be sure I will pretty soon. (via TUAW) Same goes for the Fortune article Inside Apple, which I finally got my hands on last week, but haven’t yet had time to write about.
- Conan O’Brien dressed as the iLeader in a baroque fresco by Fast Company:
- I am still waiting for AllThingsD to put up all their sessions’ videos online, but so far of all the extracts I’ve seen, one was particularly funny. It was an extract from the opening interview with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: my current employer) in which Kara Swisher told him a Steve Jobs anecdote about Android phones being ‘probes in your pocket‘. The funny part was how Steve called the Google search engine: ‘The Borg’, a Star Trek reference, but also a term often used by Fake Steve to describe Microsoft. Once more, in search of satire, he was actually depicting the truth of Steve’s mind.
- Some guy did the One More Thing Rap Song. I hate rap but here goes. Weird.
- The biggest news hit this morning (French time): iSteve, The Book of Jobs, the much anticipated authorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. I won’t pre-order it because I’m sure that by March 2012 I will have an iPad 3 to read it on via the iBookStore… I was pleasantly surprised with the picture on the cover, a vintage portrait of Steve from the Macintosh heyday. I have no idea whether the iLeader was involved in this design or not — although I assume he was. The cover in high res is below:
