David Pogues book presentation last night at the computer history museum in mountain view, Apple the first 50 years.
Many early Apple employees were there and shared stories. Well worth a watch, very entertaining. Also John Sculley, apple co-founder Ronald Wayne and more... if you make it to the end David pogue composed and sang a parody which was hilarious. Afterwards, there was book signing and socializing.
It was a packed evening with tickets selling out in 15 minutes. I was lucky and honored to attend.
https://www.youtube.com/live/w8wt0LBCjXM?si=auk5_0dgNvXixXIn
David's book seems excellent, with many color photos. I look forward to reading it.
In post #1, 'Mrthreeplates' wrote:
" Well worth a watch, very entertaining ... "
Uncle Bernie respectfully disagrees.
I watched the whole livestream and was disappointed. Reason being, the "new information bandwidth" of the presentation was far too low for me, having read both "iWoz" and Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs". If you have read these two autobiographies thoroughly, the livestream does not not convey much new information and for me, I came to the conclusion it was probably a waste of my time to watch it, except for these insights:
There were a few new anecdotes about the reason why Ronald Wayne quit shortly after the Apple Computer Company was founded, and why John Sculley was fired (from the horse's mouth !) and some other anecdotes shining a light on the chaos at Apple when they nearly went under: "lots of brilliant people, each one of them working in another direction", not a verbatim quote, though. But it explains a lot. What eludes me is how upper and middle management at Apple could ever allow such a chaos to grow and fester. This is not the way to run any company.
On John Sculley's statements on the Apple III:
He erroneously attributed the unreliability of the Apple III to "aluminum" connectors stating that the "aluminum" contacts corroded and hence caused trouble. AFAIK, there were no "aluminum" contact fingers anywhere in any sliding contact connector used in the industry ever, simply because aluminum is one of the worst materials for such contacts and any reputable connector manufacturer would - most likely - refuse to produce such junk - except that a few years ago some flex circuits with aluminum contact strips did appear in larger quantities. This leaves the remote possibility that back in the 1980s, Apple might have bribed a connector manufacturer to make the worst possible connector possible ;-) . . . makes no sense to me. But he was right with his statement that the contact fingers were not gold plated, and the mezzanine PCB using them was not bolted down. For me this info was a new insight - I always thought that marginal circuit design was the reason for the demise of the Apple III. Now we have learned it was a unreliable connector that was not bolted down. I do have a 40 year old, 80186 based XENIX machine which does use a stack of mezzanine PCBs using high quality connectors, all bolted in place, and it still works fine.
Ronald Wayne told us that he was not willing to take the risk with the $10000 (his number) of Y1976 US$ they had to wager on procuring the components for the first production batch of the Apple-1 ordered by Byte Shop and that he would have been on the hook because none of the two Steves had any assets. Hmmm. I'm still wondering about how that start-up with almost no funds could have pulled this off. As the story is told in various books, Job sold his old VW Bus, and Woz sold his HP-65. That may have gotten them maybe 1/10th of the funds they needed. Oh, and Ron Wayne claimed that these $10000 may be the equivalent of $100000 today. So back then it was not exactly spare change. They went "all in", except for Ron, who "went out". Because he was the only one having assets to lose in case of a bankruptcy of the fledgling "Apple Computer Company".
The inflation calculator of www.minneapolisfed.org claims that $10000 of Y1976 are equivalent to $56572 in Y2025, but these numbers can be deceiving as they are based on inflation rates which may not represent reality but are intentional political obfuscation. The $666.66 price for the Apple-1 would be equivalent to $3771 today. So whoever builds Apple-1 clones today, spending typically $1000+, gets a bargain ;-)
I was disappointed that many of the early Apple pioneers were attending but were only mentioned to be there. It would have been interesting to hear more, possibly new, anecdotes from people like Paul Terrell about the reliability (or lack thereof) of the early Apple-1 computers. How many customers did return them ? Did they sell quickly ? None of the books out there tells us the truth about that.
Maybe somebody having the right software to cut videos could make a condensed version which captures the most important statements ... it might run only for 15-20 minutes and still would convey the key points. And then it certainly would be worth the time invested to watch.
- Uncle Bernie