Tag: Debt Financing

Posted on

iPhoto Retro or John Sculley’s Gift To The World of Photography

I collect 20th century technology antiques. They are not expensive and don’t take up much space – perfect for my cubicle museum.

My shelf at work houses a small, but growing collection of monstrous early cellphones. There are a couple of gigantic vacuum tubes (some from an early Univac), a core memory plane, a multiprocessor unit from an Amdahl mainframe, a weird hardwired logic unit from a forgotten computing machine. My latest purchase is rather interesting – the first consumer digital camera.

A $700 piece of equipment in 1994 Apple Quicktake 100 cameras sell for just a few bucks on eBay. I first saw one mentioned in this outstanding livejournal post. This guy’s camera still had some images in it which provided a weird time tunnel into some office party in 1994. I guess the people in the photos were celebrating extravagant Mac purchases.

I bought two cameras on eBay for just a few bucks each, and one came with a cable and a floppy with PC software. Not even hoping that it’d work I plugged in the serial cable, installed the software on my Win 2000 machine, turned on the camera and ran the program. It worked the first time.

Here are the two Apple QuickTake 100’s that I purchased. I bought two so I could take stereo images and view them on my 100 year old stereoscope. In a couple of years I think I’ll be able to buy a couple of iPod photo thingies for a few bucks and do what this guy did.

Times Square at night in full .3 megapixel power (compressed to 500 width).

Times Square at night with lower resolution option turned on

Snow storm in Brooklyn

Considering how difficult lighting conditions were the results are respectable. Usability wise these cameras are lacking. Even though they look like those binoculars from Star Wars movies, they have a very nasty lens cover that is very hard to open without leaving a nice fingerprint on the lens. Taking portrait orientated pictures is rather hard.

So here I am, paying tribute to one of the last Apple products of John Sculley’s era at Apple (note how Apple CEOs are arranged in a timeline at Wikipedia – just like kings). I wonder if Steve Jobs will ever consider making an Apple digital camera. So far the fate of Apple Newton shows that to Jobs anything ever touched by Sculley is taboo.

Posted on

Thought Tally : I’ve Got Bottles Of Grins And Racetrack Wins And Lotions To Ease Your Pains

* I wonder is Tom Doherty of TOR is a relative of Henry L. Doherty of the City Services Corporation.

* Did Steve lose a lot of weight since the infamous “Developers! Developers! Developers!” video?

* Theodore Sturgeons real name was Edward Hamilton Waldo. He heh.

* Salesman of the Century about Ron Popeil and Curve of Binding Energy are totally going into my Amazon wishlist.

* The “Shottle Bop” from Sturgeon’s story Is located on 10th Avenue between 20th and 21st street.

* NESFA Clubhouse must be pretty damn cool:

“A big chunk of the purchase price came from money raised by the NESFA Lunar Realty Trust #1, a trust organized under Mass. law which collected around $60,000 towards the purchase price. The NLRT#1 sold bonds worth $100 each and paid interest based on the prime rate. Most of the money was raised locally, but S.C.I.F.I, the organization which had just run the huge and financially quite successful LAcon II, purchased $20,000 with of NLRT#1 bonds. (It’s worth noting that they paid for it with 100 checks for $137 — it’s a long story — plus one more check for $6300.) The NLRT#1 bonds were paid off completely over the next two and a half years.
…
While dismantling the huge dryer for removal, we discovered about a quart of stuff in the bottom: coins, jewelry, marbles, and other pocket stuff. The coins were the biggest portion and amounted to a decent haul. (Of course, it took three people several hours to fish them all out and clean them up…)

Another find of considerable value was a power shaft for the washer which was perhaps 6′ long with lovely ball-bearing axles and a 2′ diameter toothed gear on one end. As it was dismantled, people though it was much too lovely to waste — but what to do with it? Inspiration struck: Send it to LASFS! Don Eastlake quickly organized a carpentry crew and built a shipping crate which features heavy-duty construction and special mounting brackets which allowed the shaft to spin freely within the crate. The finished crate was closed, screwed shut, and put on a truck for delivery to LASFS. Since there was some doubt that LASFS would accept delivery of a huge sealed crate from NESFA, arrangements were made to have a secret agent on site to handle that chore for them…”