Macworld Boston 1997 Steve Jobs Keynote

August 6, 1997. Fresh off his developer fireside chat in May at WWDC 1997, these two presentations led me to eventually invest in Apple (after further due diligence) in the fall of 1997 (many thought I was crazy at the time and rightfully so given the uncertainty).  Jobs had been an adviser to CEO Gil Amelio (as part of the NeXT acquisition by Apple) until Amelio was asked to step down by the board of directors on July 6, 1997 after a massive quarterly loss. This paved the way for Jobs to become interim CEO.

Jobs presentation begins at 5m40s after the introduction by Colin Crawford. The part of this keynote that I wished more (people and companies alike) subscribed to is “personal accountability” where he stated “if we screw up and don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault — it’s our fault”. I still do get a laugh at the Microsoft part of this keynote since it was very heavily ingrained in the Apple culture (company + customers) at the time to despise Microsoft; I wasn’t really part of that since I was heavily involved in other environments (like Unix and OS/2) early in my career (and viewed this as tools to get the job done). When Gates is projected on to the screen though, that part was always funny (to me) since these two were the definition of “frenemies” in constant coopetition with each other; but that was like sacrilege to those diehards in attendance 😂

The other side effect of this as a then Unix gearhead/system engineer (Sun Micro with Solaris+Ultra SPARC) is that Rhapsody (Mac OS X Server 1.0) is what also led to me to be a part of Apple Enterprise with Mac OS X Server v10 (Cheetah-Jaguar) with focal points being Server Admin and Workgroup Manager/Xserve/Xserve RAID. I occasionally re-watch these older videos for a retrospective look as to what shaped things over the next decade leading into the release of the iPhone.

Rhapsody (a PowerPC version of OPENSTEP) is what morphed into Mac OS X Server 1.x and became the core foundation for the Mac OS X v10.x releases (and all current day macOS versions) that came shortly after that. The lower level stacks of the operating system formed what became the system software that power the iPhone (iOS), iPad (iPadOS), AppleTV (tvOS), Apple Watch (watchOS), and Apple’s current foray into spatial computing with the Vision Pro (visionOS). All of this has its lineage in NeXTSTEP (what became OPENSTEP), the BSD based Unix operating system that came with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, Inc (and also brought Steve Jobs back to the company he co-founded).

The web broadcast was of very low quality (given the technology at the time) and later “better” sources came off a recording on video tape (still of grainy quality once digitized). So I put my RTX 4070Ti Super to good use to ML upscale/enhance/noise reduce this keynote to 720p 60fps (tried it on my M4 Pro mini but the RTX in my PC was crunching through it twice as fast). Trying to get this upscaled to 1080p didn’t look good (maybe a few more iterations of the software algorithms and LLM’s will allow that).

Didn’t always agree with his takes over the years, but I always appreciated the articulated responses he gave to questions. Might as well have these in better quality.