This is a collection of his talks (also see Lanyard), arranged in reverse chronological order.
Category Archives: Innovation
The Best Video Ever About Journalism Today
The Three Little Pigs. Re-imagined.
And which I can’t embed cuz I’m on WP.com and TheGuardian doesn’t have shortcodes.
The world has changed a lot in my lifetime. I typed on an IBM selectric when I was in journalism school. Shot stills with a heavy 35mm Nikon. Used xacto knives and wax to paste up newspapers and magazines … and that was cutting edge because it was cold type!
This is part of TheGuardian’s ongoing series on Open Journalism.
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My Life With Apple
Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, 2011 by Lea Suzuki
In 1984, I convinced my about-to-be (then) husband not to buy a Macintosh ($2,495/$5,440 in 2011 $). It wasn’t just because it was expensive. It wasn’t interoperable, you see, and the dairy cooperative we worked for was an IBM shop. Mainframes and IBM PCs (not clones) didn’t talk to Macs. Heck, Microsoft Word wasn’t around yet!
Instead, we bought an Epson cp/m machine with 5 1/4″ floppies, a green screen and a great software bundle (Peachtree). And a dot-matrix printer, of course. I can’t imagine that it was interoperable either, but it was less expensive. And it was the gateway drug to the life I lead today. Continue reading
Thinking Portability: The Osborne 1 Is 30 Today
It was early 1984. Apple had just released the Macintosh, but IBM (and its partner/stepchild/competitor Microsoft) had jumped into the nascent personal computer market in mid-1981 with the IBM PC. However, the tried-and-true operating system (or tired-and-old, depending on your point of view) of the day was not DOS but CP/M.
Somehow I convinced my then husband-to-be that we should not buy a Mac (shiny!) but an Epson CP/M computer that came bundled with Peachtree Software’s office suite: word processing, spreadsheet and database. This was years before Microsoft would release Office for the Mac (1989) or Windows (1990).
What I didn’t know was that what I thought of as “ease of use” was a direct result of the work done for the Osborne 1, a “portable” computer launched 30 years ago today (April 3, 1981). According to Thom Hogan, who had been Osborne’s director of software, the Osborne 1 was the first computer that allowed the buyer to “take the box home, unpack it, plug it in, and start using [the] computer.” Continue reading
Thinking Visually: IBM Circa 1975
I remember the pre-PowerPoint days, and the challenges of creating slide presentations: 35 mm slides created by hand and with computerized augmentation. Here’s a great presentation (wish we had the speaker notes!) ostensibly from IBM (1975). I use “great” because of color and design that feels almost modern and Zen-like (Garr Reynolds). I say “ostensibly” because the provenance is, umm, nuanced.