I was the lead software engineer (and later the PowerBook/MacBook Pro software manager) for the PowerBook line, starting with the original Macintosh Portable and continuing through the Macbook Pro up until 2009. The guy who came up with the keyboard forward layout first seen here in the PowerBooks was the chief hardware design engineer by the name of Jon Krakower, not a member of the vaunted Apple industrial design group. I remember him showing us a mockup of the layout where we could try it out and all of us on the core design team went, "Duh!", why didn't we think of this before? Of course for decades now this is the way all laptops are configured, but at the time it was ground breaking. The always secretive Apple was even more so during the development of the PowerBook line as we were terrified that a competitor would find out and beat us to market. Also, the PowerBook 100 was built by Sony. It was Apple's design, and in fact was pretty much a repackaging of the Portable. Sony wanted to be more involved in the design, but we weren't going to let them in.
You'll be happy to know that I once came across a PB from 1994 that had been - to my knowledge - owned by one guy to hook up a couple Ensoniq sampler keybaords and a couple of TX7 (rack-mounted synths). And it still talked with the equipment just fine. This was probably around 2011.
i know Im asking randomly but does anyone know of a tool to log back into an Instagram account?? I was dumb forgot the login password. I appreciate any help you can give me!
@Ty Reign I really appreciate your reply. I got to the site on google and I'm trying it out now. Takes quite some time so I will get back to you later when my account password hopefully is recovered.
After looking at one of the episodes from 1989, you can see how quickly technology advances. Laptops were already slimming down in 1991 while they were still big and clunky in '89. A mere 2 year span.
3:14 That was the firestorm that destroyed Will Wright's home. A few years later, he created "The Sims" concept based on the experience of buying again all his stuff and starting a new life.
@@CoMmAnDrX Why not? Much more than you realise is in mono, and it has very appropriate uses. Mono is perfectly centred, and this show is probably already a mono signal that's running down the left channel. Converting this to mono would fix the issue.
true. Computing as a hobby was just an awful painful time then if you didnt have the kind of disposable income needed to enjoy the advances. The 'regular folks' had to make do with tech up to a decade old and even that was not exactly cheap.
I was using some of the devices described in the video at that time. I remember the so-called flight simulator I used to play around with on my "laptop" computer at the time, and how I thought it was the bees knees. It had a sexy 8" monochrome monitor and a 1kg battery which had to be charged every 2 hours. Now I sit next to my Mac Pro in front of a 50" 4K monitor (it keeps me warm) with more computing power and memory than the entire Pentagon had in those days.
"This can fit over 150 full-size books on it- more reading than you could ever do in your life" Something tells me this guy doesn't do a whole lot of reading.
@@carljiu8601 Well yeah, I don't read much. But I love learning stuff from videos. We all do, including people who would never have read and would probably never have learned anything after school.
Wow that grid tablet and the pen are doing pretty much the exact same demos apple did with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Right down to drawing circles to create geometric shapes that you could manipulate in the MS Office mobile apps. Very sophisticated hardware and software for 1991.
That's what I remember about 90's technology. We geeks would rave about how fast our 486 CPU or 14.4 baud modems were, but when it came time to demonstration, we were oblivious to the fact it took us 10 minutes of setup and boot to send a freaking fax. This host seamlessly moves right along while people were setting up their apps which were supposed to send things quick and easy.
And to think in the early 90's, GPS was being used and now just about every smartphone can help you determine where you are so quickly... 25 years later and we're all reaping the benefits.
Much more surprising is the use of a cell phone as a modem, I wonder how that worked ? as far as I know there was no wap or gprs back then, were there any standards that allowed this ?
Of course this all archaic, but here I am feeling bad for the NEC guy with his hobbled together briefcase setup next to the IBM guy who had all the same functionality in a single device. Even in 91, it would have been clear which was the better idea lol. Meanwhile forget even today, most of this stuff could have been done with a palm pilot connected to a cell phone maybe 6 years later. The speed in which the tech evolved in the 90s was insane.
This would have been broadcast near the end of 1991, probably in November or December. Notice they talk about Comdex in the Random Access. That always happened in November. And the fire damage shown in the credits. There was a wildfire in Oakland, CA, a few miles from where CC was headquartered, on October 20, 1991. June 3, 2014 12:25 am
I got one of those HP-95LX palmtops and it was quite usable. I used as a terminal, as a data collector on sorting and handling drawings of engineers in Lotus 1-2-3. The batteries two AAs lasted about a week. It has a 40 characters x 16 line display. I paid $600 for it and at those times it was as be years ahead of everybody. Ah, time goes by.
Because they tend to ramble on. He asks a question, gets the answer, and moves on. Otherwise you DO get one hour episodes but with the SAME amount of information.
This is why: Stewart: Tell me how much faster your machine can compute over an older model? Sales guy: Benchmarks show 200% faster speeds and in the real world you could experience very close to that as well... Now just imagine being able to save all that time, increasing your productivity to get so much more done in the day. Why, you could go out for that afternoon tea that you always wanted to do but never was able to because of a slow computer. Purchase our system today and we'll also throw in a free bag made of the highest quality materials and super light weight that won't break your back while you carry your new speedy super machine!
oh man, compare that to the 1989 video, laptops gone a crazy far way in those little two years. Just look at them! The advancements where bigger than with laptops today. Actually did laptops even advance in the past 5 years? Seriously the improvements are minder to not worth a damn. Well with the exception of the 10xxseries of nvidia.
actually i'd say yes, they are cheaper and much faster than from 5 years ago. 1920x1080 IPS is standardized on low end $399 laptops with i3 mobile processors that are significantly faster than the same ones from 5 years ago.
@@oldtwinsna8347 In 2010 I bought the following budget Dell laptop: Intel i5 dual-core m430 @2.27GHz (CPUMark score: 1219) 4 GB RAM Integrated graphics 320 GB HDD USB 2.0 1600X900 Screen Paid $850 ($1,015 in 2020 dollars) In 2018 I upgraded my budget Dell laptop to another budget Dell laptop: Intel i5 quad-core 7200-HQ @2.5GHz (CPUMark score: 5115) 8 GB RAM NVIDIA GTX 1050 8 Gb + Integrated Graphics 256 GB SSD USB 3.1 1920X1080 Screen Paid $775 So in 8 years the computers in that price range became maybe twice as powerful (with somewhat larger gains in CPU tech). I could still run that 10 year old laptop today and it would still be able to get it done. In 2001 I owned a PC built in 1997 and it was barely even usable in the 2001 software climate. CPUs in 2001 were roughly 5-6 times as fast, had 4-8 times as much RAM, 10 times as much VRAM and 10 times the hard disk space as machines built in '97. It was like using a completely different kind of machine...especially comparing Windows 95 to Windows XP.
@@takigan I believe you are giving too much credit to your old system. That old Intel integrated graphic set was horrific even during the timeframe it was released. It wouldn't even be able to run 1080p videos without skipped frames due to the lack of hardware acceleration, and say nothing about 4k playback. These video standards are pretty big deal players not to be underestimated in the kind of computational power and bandwidth needed to move them along without skipped frames. Nevertheless, even a $30 amazon fire stick can do this today and produce video quality far exceeding any integrated graphic set from 2010. You might be looking at things more from an OS and software engineering perspective - software is programmed much more quickly today at the expense of optimization, and much of the commercial software still only uses one core.
I enjoyed so much the progress at that time.. but it was so expensive. If you see what you can get nowadays.... and then I hear people complaining about "screendoor effect" in VR... probably these are young people, never used an early pc. By the way, Kate Purmal.. wow she had beautiful eyes and the way she talked about computers... she must be around my age now... probably with beautiful grandchildren. I hope she still enjoys computing... 😊
Meyer Films of course I did. I even had a Compaq iPAQ H3630 some years later than that device appeared... meaning when I was no longer the poor school kid. But I found it funny how Apple went on everybody on the tablet thing saying about rounded edges and stuff...
Meyer Films Apple also failed with newton and the mac and IBM failed with OS/2 even if that was great technology in retrospect. I really don't know how Windows became so popular. Nobody really cared until the 90's and then there were better alternatives like Mac OS or OS/2 or even GeoWorks (or something like that I don't remember exactly) It's not the boxy wires and buttons but I liked how you could open them up and fix them yourself. Now you easily can't. Even if you'll get Error 53 eventually!
When Stewart ask that girl to print it out on the printer to prove it's coming from the network, I never heard the printer at all. either that's the quietest printer I have ever heard, or she never printed it out and gave him a duplicate. Printers today is not that quiet.
I love that a palmrest is a new idea, couldn’t afford any portable back then, had just made the leap from my Atari computer to a brand new 486, was the king for a bit as all my friends had 386s
Interesting how even back then Apple got the ergonomics right demonstrating the overall keyboard/touchpad configuration used on laptops to this day. While the other companies had these ridiculous track-balls on the side.
3:43 - LIE! I just looked it up. The newest L5 GPS goes into orbit in 2027. For land surveyors it has a maximum long term peak accuracy of 2 centimeters. But this guy could do as little as 1 cm in 1991. Cool story bro.
The 1989 laptop is only "luggable" PC with LCD display, 1991 laptop is like todays' laptop just bulkier (I still have 2011 Toughbook CF19X that is bulkier than these 1991), it is like a jump from what I experienced in 2005, I need laptop for personal use, but in 2005 new laptop is still too expensive for me so I bought 1999 "trashed" Compaq 12" without working battery for $200...in 2007 Asus starts the netbook trends with their EeePC series, new starts from $349😂.
I wish I could see people's reaction from watching these old Computer Chronicles videos maybe 100 years in the future. Also I would like to see what people use in the year 2120 and post my reaction video on RU-vid.
If the uploader is reading this, you can fix the issue of having the audio down the left channel by converting to mono. Don't be afraid of mono, it has its uses. :)
I actually have a Franklin handheld electronic book of the Holy Bible King James Version, it is used when I cannot turn the pages fast enough at church on Sundays.
@Garrett Yarbrough still got all my commodore gear, two C64c computers, few amigas too, if I had the space to have it all set up I'd get it all out of the loft but after all this time I expect the whole lot would need to be recapped to be on the safe side & prevent any damage to the boards.
Just imagine a computer that fits in your pocket, and can do what a full-size one can. Call me crazy, but you might be able to add phone abilities to it. I know, science-fiction.
PLEASE, I dont wanna get Handheld computers that cant run all my new DOS 5 software and has 800KB when my Compaq has 4Mb , This is why you should get those brand new PDA organizers, because Handhelds suck! Also I may buy that Discman, I really need to replace my cassette audiobooks
Im from 2020 and i think their device is very high tech and intuitive but too big and expensive Their graphical device is more intuitive than Ms.Word in present day
