The Lost 1984 Video: young Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh

The video of Steve Jobs introducing the Macintosh in 1984 never fails to put a smile on my face. It was a groundbreaking feat of engineering in many ways, but what impress me the most is how the computer for the first time ever had a personality of its own. It spoke. link to this video Computers, software and humans have come a long way since 1984. By standing on the shoulders of giants I managed to build a little something that comes bundled with several different personalities… It lets you select from 50+ voices in 17 languages. It detects the language of text automatically. It SOUNDS FANTASTIC - in fact, up to 54% more human than existing solutions. It makes web pages readable (a.k.a. un-suck) by re…

The humour is classic Jobs. When he introduced the original Macintosh, it began with a speech synthesizer telling a joke. link to this video forward to 3:20

The Mac line has had text to speech functionality since the very beginning, even being somewhat showcased at the first reveal of the Macintosh by Steve Jobs. link to this video Although, I imagine the quality of the reader has greatly improved since 1984.

> I’m calling it a pathological case because it’s forcing style recalculation and layout ten times per frame It's only pathological because the web makes it pathological. Phones routinely do complex layout animations that are unimaginable on the web. And yet, "we're doing layout calculations on ten emojis, it's pathological" is the norm on the web. > t’s decidedly rare to want to animate more than one or perhaps two such element at a time Yes. It's rare on the web . Because the web is unbelievably inefficient and slow when it comes to any animations beyond a very limited subset. > And alternatives to the web are normally not actually going to be better—the web has had an insane amount of eff…

This has been the case since 2007 with "iPhone"...which mimicked the naming for "iPod" since 2001 0...which mimicked the naming of "iMac" since 1998 1. All of these, of course, go back to Steve Jobs' introduction of "Macintosh" in 1984 2. 0 link 1 link 2 link to this video