Sometimes I miss the early days of the personal computer software industry. Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty happy with the state of computing these days; I’ve got computers that are more powerful than ever running great software that beats the pants off what you could do 25 years ago.
But sometimes it seems to me that the industry has gotten to be a little too…well, industrial. It’s lost a little bit of its charm—its character. I mean, you don’t see shticks like this nowadays.
Yes, that’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates doing the Macintosh Dating Game at an event sometime back in the early ’80s (the video says ’83, but as the Mac wasn’t released until January of 1984, it’s got to be after that). While the video isn’t complete—we hear nary a peep from Lotus’s Mitch Kapor and Software Publishing Co.’s Fred Gibbons—there is still kind of an eerie air of foreboding over the whole thing, with the Gates of yesteryear pimping how important the Macintosh is to Microsoft’s business.
Then again, some things haven’t changed: Lotus Notes’s UI on the Mac still seems to think it’s 1983. Talk about dated, right?
High five! No? Awww.