I have Leopard. Have had for a few days now. But I also have a colossal deadline hanging over me, in the form of Time‘s Best Inventions issue. So I’ll plan on running another in my “The Last Review” series next week. Meantime I’ll perform the most important service a blogger can serve: linking to the roundups of the reviews. Apple 2.0 …
Computers
Can Anybody Take Down Microsoft Office? Probably, Yeah
I spent my high school years composing bad short stories in PFS Write. The first two years of college were lost to a monstrous Smith Corona typewriter/word processor hybrid. I finally got a Mac Classic in my junior year, and since then I have never been tempted to stray from the happy prison of Microsoft Word. I think of it as one of the …
Bill Gates, the Early Years: Damn, This Thing Works!
I’m going to post a lengthy excerpt here from the conversation I had with Bill Gates earlier this week, because, well, I have so much of it, and it kind of works as this wonderfully absorbing dramatic monologue about where Microsoft came from. This is him essentially telling the story of how he and Paul Allen figured out that writing …
What Was Your First Computer?
A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used “hole-punched movie film” to store data, and goes up through Google’s first production server, which is not very …
Quantum Computers: Unimaginably Powerful, Also Kinda Hot
My knowledge of physics and engineering is shaky enough that sometimes I forget that stuff like neutron stars and superconductors is actually real and not made-up. (If Slaver stasis fields are real and not made-up, somebody needs to tell me.) Scheduled to cross the fiction/non-fiction barrier shortly is a commercially available quantum …
Peep Show Duo Are New Mac, PC in UK; John Hodgman So 2006
It’s very hard for me to explain why it’s so urgently important for me to blog about this. Short, telegraph version: Peep Show, British sitcom, insanely vicious and funny. Steve Jobs, hires two Peep Show stars, to be Mac and PC in UK Apple ads…maybe that wasn’t so complicated.
If you’ve never seen Peep Show, it’s about two guys, a …
Steve Jobs and You, like Ships in the Eternal Night of Outer Space
There’s been a lot of hype lately about the rising tide of you-culture and user generated content. Much of which I wrote with my own 8 fingers.
So what with the iPhone coming out and all, it’s interesting to look at Apple in that context. Because it’s the least you-culture company I know of. They do no market research on new …
I Have Eaten the Apple Computer of Knowledge
Or oh, snap, it’s just Apple now. They dropped the “Computer” part. Does Sir Paul have to sue them all over again now?
One reason posting has been a little light lately is that I’ve been in Cupertino for the past week working on a behind-the-scenes piece about the iPhone launch. It’s here. So I have physically touched an iPhone, and it …