Apple now selling over a million songs a day

So this report says. What I still find amazing is that the record industry missed this opportunity.

Microsoft backs down

I can’t believe I wrote that, but it’s true. Redmond has decided not to appeal the EU instruction to produce a stripped-down version of Windows. Stand by for Windows sans MS Media Player. Yippee!

(Not that it matters personally to me. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly used Media Player.)

Pass the sickbag, Alice

In some ways, the Financial Times is an excellent newspaper. In other ways, it’s nauseating. Once a month, for example, it publishes a glossy supplement entitled How to Spend It aimed at folks who think they’re under-dressed if they don’t have a Breitling watch or a gold-plated Rolex. Last Saturday the paper’s restaurant critic, one Nicholas Lander, took the gold medal for pretentious tosh when he wrote about lunching at La Tour d’Argent in Paris. Here’s a sample:

“It is important therefore to find some balance in the choice of wine and to bear in mind that as this list has been slowly and scrupulously accumulated, the prices of the older vintages are remarkably gentle for a restaurant of this standing. We drank a 1990 Faller Schlossberg Riesling (95 Euros), and a 1991 Gevrey Chambertin Abeille from Ponsot (109 Euros) both less than the least expensive wine on the list at the three-star Michelin Arpege across town. The Japanese couple next to us chose well, spending 1,400 Euros on a bottle of 1991 Ta Tache. This wine can easily cost 850 Euros retail”.

The bill for six, you will be interested to learn, came to 1,030 Euros (£725) — “considerably less than I had paid for a far less satisfactory experience at L’Arpege”.

The Mac comes of age

Twenty-one years ago today, the Apple Mac was launched.

A collective of German Mac fans has digitised the only surviving video tape of the launch. The recording features all the often-told moments of the launch – from Steve Jobs’s bow tie (how diferent from the jeans and black turtlenext of today) to the moment he pulls the Mac from the bag, and the huge grin he casts at the assembled early Church of Mac at the now-demolished Flint Center in Cupertino. Until today the video has never been seen online. But now it’s available on several mirror Web sites (list here). It shows, among other things, the demonstration of the computer’s ability to convert text-to-speech — when Macintosh said “hello” to the assembled multitude.

In my book I wrote about my own first encounter with the Mac. I’ve just dug out what I wrote. Here it is:

“It happened at a workshop for academics known to be interested in personal computing which was organised by Apple UK at the University Arms hotel in Cambridge.

The venue was a stuffy conference suite ringed with tables covered in green baize. On each table stood an astonishing little machine with a nine-inch screen and a detached keyboard. Compared with the clunky, three-box design which then represented the industry’s idea of what a personal computer should look like, these elegant little machines seemed, well, just gorgeous. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on one.

After an initial spiel by the Apple crowd, we were let loose on the machines. They had been set up, for some unfathomable reason, displaying a picture of a fish. It was, in fact, a MacPaint file. I remember staring at the image, marvelling at the way the scales and fins seemed as clear as if they had been etched on the screen. After a time I picked up courage, clicked on the ‘lassoo’ tool and selected a fin with it. The lassoo suddenly began to shimmer. I held down the mouse button and moved the rodent gently. The fin began to move across the screen!

Then I pulled down the Edit menu, and selected Cut. The fin disappeared. Finally I closed the file, confirmed the decision in the dialog box, and reloaded the fish from disk. As the image reappeared I experienced what James Joyce would call an epiphany: I remember thinking, this is the way it has to be. I felt what Douglas Adams later described as ‘that kind of roaring, tingling, floating sensation’ which characterised his first experience of MacPaint. In the blink of an eye — the time it took to retrieve the fish from disk — all the DECwriter teletypes and dumb terminals and character-based displays which had been essential parts of my computing experience were consigned to the scrapyard. I had suddenly seen the point — and the potential — of computer graphics.

All this was Bill Atkinson’s doing. In the circumstances, to call him a programmer is like calling Christian Dior a dressmaker. Atkinson is in fact a genius, or at the very least an artist whose medium just happens to be software.”

Note for non-Macintosh folks: Bill Atkinson was the programmer who wrote MacPaint. He later wrote HyperCard. Not many people change the world twice in one lifetime.