I ran across a great segment of Steve Jobs talking at the WWDC in 1997 just after he returned to Apple. Similar to my post about pruning the decision tree , he speaks about the power of saying no to the bad ideas. "Focusing is about saying no," he says. His analysis of what was wrong with Apple at that...

This picture says it all. The front page of Hacker News is completely dominated by the news of Steve's death. Even as someone who never owned an Apple product, he had a huge influence and raised the bar. Not just once, but at least 5 major products from him changed the state of the industry. The Apple...

As part of the Berkeley Webcast project, a pair of presentations by Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) is available. The presentation is from the early 1980s and discusses the development of user interface design from the 1960s onward. If you ware into computer history at all, these are very interesting. ...

Modern computers all utilize the same user paradigms: interactive computing, mouse, windows, hyperlinks, teleconferencing, etc. Many people consider Xerox Parc to be the nest in which most of these concepts were born. That is, afterall, where Steve Jobs got his inspiration for the Macintosh. It is not...

Back before World of Warcraft or even Everquest there existed an entity called a MUD or Multi-User Dungeon. These were a lot like today's MMOs except that they were text-only interfaces. Most of the concepts were the same. Build a character, kill lots of bunnies/elves/etc. to grind out levels, get cool...

Here's a fun one for the weekend. A retrospective of the Commodore 64 and it's place as a great game machine. The C= 64 sold something like 17 million units and is, to this day, the single greatest selling computer model of all time. My first computer was a Commodore 128 which was basically an expensive...

Ars just released another edition of its history of the Amiga series. The first deals with the purchase of the Amiga by Commodore. I'll be updating this post as new articles in this edition are posted. Part 4 - Enter Commodore Part 5 - Postlaunch Blues

I just finished listening to the unabridged version of iWoz. It's basically the autobiography of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. I was hoping to get an understanding of the early days of Apple. I've read several books on the subject but this is directly from someone who was there. Alas, I was disappointed...

Ars Technica is running a series on the history of the Amiga. This is the machine I grew up with. It was way ahead of its time for graphics and sound. It took many years for the PC (and even Mac) worlds to catch up. Unfortunately, it was marketed by a less than competent company. The Amiga eventually...

Those of you who owned an Amiga were probably aware of the Fred Fish disk collection. For those that weren't, this was a huge collection of shareware and freeware software for the Amiga. It was organized into a series of disks which became known as Fred Fish disks. It became the definitive way to reference...

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore Amiga . It came out 22 years ago in 1985 and was way ahead of its time. It had a GUI, ,stereo audio, hi-res color graphics, hardware-accelerated graphics, etc. It had all this years before the PC. I didn't jump to the PC until 1995 because it was only...

I just finished reading Showstopper! by G. Pascal Zachary. It recounts the creation of Windows NT starting with the hiring of Dave Cutler in October 1988 and ending with the shipping of the first version of NT on July 26, 1993. The book puts a lot in perspective. NT took nearly 5 years of grueling work...

He's talking about his childhood. How his father managed to get him transisters and diodes because he worked at Lockheed Martin. He did a lot of electronics. He didn't know was a computer was for a long time because he was afraid to ask. Eventually in high school he got a chance to program a computer...

Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple for those of you in Rio Linda) is on campus to promote his new book iWoz. The room he is scheduled to speak in hold about 100 people. The speech is supposed to start in 15 minutes and it is standing room only already. A little before 1:00 the room was half full. Crazy...

Microsoft, like many technology companies, has been the site for many pranks over the years. In this video , Larry Osterman and Dave Norris relate many of the pranks that have been seen on the Microsoft campus during their tenure. On his blog , Larry describes their latest prank involving 20,000 bouncy...

IBM finally announced the official, final death notice for OS/2. Back before I joined Microsoft I was one of those who was attempting to jump on the OS/2 Warp bandwagon. When I was in college I would read about it every week in PCWeek (now eWeek) and was impressed with its capabilities. I even went so...

There is a local cable television station run by the University of Washington. On it there airs a show called Information Technology Leaders hosted by a woman named Laura Shildkraut . On the show, Laura spends an hour interviewing, you guessed it, leaders in the information technology field. The guests...