Edible Apple

For all the talk about Apple’s iCloud initiative following in the footsteps of Google, here’s a fascinating look back at Steve Jobs talking about remote computing during his closing keynote at the 1997 WWDC.

Some choice quotes from an extremely interesting chat with developers:

I have computers at Apple, at Pixar, at NeXT and at home. I walk over to any of them and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I’ve got my stuff, where ever I am. And none of that is on a local disc. The server…is my local disc.

One of the things I’m really excited about is to look at that personal computer and take out every moving part except the keyboard and the mouse. I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster. Because I look at that network connection as mfs dialtone

…we were able to take all of our personal data, our home directories we call them, off of our local machines and put them on a server, and the software made that completely transparent…

…so in the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I have backed up my computer? Zero.

One of my hopes is that Apple can do for the new type of network… that Apple could make that as plug and play for mere mortals as it made the user experience over a decade ago.

Carrying around these non-connected computers… is byzantine.

The video is over an hour long, but for the pertinent parts, forward onto 14:30 inwards.

We’ll break down other pertinent portions of the video in subsequent posts.