...more recent posts
I live with a bird named Tarzan. He is a very noisey grey-cheeked parakeet. About six inches long. He has free run of the house, although acutally it's more like free waddle because he doesn't fly very well. Anyway, lately he's learned a new trick which is to climb up the mass of cables under my desk until his little green head pokes up right under my monitor. He likes to perch at the top of the phone line going into the modem. He'll sit there for hours watching me stare at the screen. Occasionally he'll say something. If I had a web cam I'd put him on. Since I don't you'll just have to use your imagination. I wonder if he can feel all the information flowing through his little feet?
Here we go again. Rumors are flying (thanks to Drudge this time) of an Apple, Pixar, Disney merger. Variations of this story have been floating for a year and a half, so a few grains of NaCl may be necessary. In fact, I'd dismiss this outright if it wasn't for the nagging fact that it makes so much sense. Disney is looking for a clue, and Jobs is really good at convincing people he has one. That would really shake things up.
A trip down RAM lane Camworld has a great link to a sequence of early GUI concept drawings for the Apple Lisa. This was the first computer to blow my mind. It was 1982 (or was that '83?) and I had just received my first computer, the loveably pathetic ibm pcjr. I thought that thing was slick, and with Borland's Turbo Pascal, my internal 300 baud modem, and the intel 8088 processor cranked up to 4.77 mhz., I was sitting pretty. Then one day my sister's friends older brother came home from Harvard and he had an Apple Lisa with him. I hadn't ever heard of this machine before (and I don't think many people had at that point.) The Lisa was an incredibly large "luggable" all in one computer. Much bigger than the eventual first Macs. The built in black and white screen was tiny. But like I said, this machine blew my mind. Graphic interface? MacPaint? Point and click? What new brand of sorcery was this? Anyone using DOS (3.1 at that time) could see right away that this was the future. The funny thing is, when you look at the old screen shots, we're basically in the same place right now. (Well O.K., network services are a little improved :-)