steve jobs

Eight years and two days ago

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I really wonder what I’d be doing now if this hadn’t happened back on 9 January 2007.

The Blank Screen probably wouldn’t exist and I certainly wouldn’t be doing exactly the job I am today. Hopefully I’d have been having as much fun but it’s astonishing how one thing shapes so many others. And you’re either going to nod in agreement or wonder why I’m saying this at all.

Because what happened eight years and two days ago was the announcement of the iPhone. Now, seriously, if you loathe Apple then fine – but look at your Android phone. I’m not impressed with them but even you would be thinking they were crappy if the iPhone hadn’t come along. Google saw this launch and scrapped the plans it had been working on for years.

This is the presentation Steve Jobs made. That’s one man standing up there representing for, what, a few hundred men and women who had been responsible for this phone? But the number of people affected by it is in the billions.

I might be back on the tenth anniversary.

Jeff Goldblum and Steve Jobs on connecting to the internet

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Inspired by the video of today’s teenagers reacting to how the internet was in 1990 and also by how today is WWDC day where Apple announces something or other, let me show you two things.

One is the Apple way of getting online back in the olden days:

And then there’s this. This is the Apple announcement in 1999 when Steve Jobs demonstrated wifi. It’s now impossible to imagine there was a time we didn’t have this so, strangely, it’s also impossible to conceive how jolting this Jobs presentation was. As ever, wifi existed before, but as ever, you wouldn’t know it from how no other firm got us using it so completely.