Random Apple Memory
Adam Banks remembers when wireless internet was the stuff of dreams
The ol’ clamshell. It’s back to 1999 and the truly portable iBook. Plus, what to expect in the next issue of Mac|Life…
An air of unreality pervaded Apple’s keynote at Macworld Expo New York on July 21 1999. Proceedings began as usual with Steve Jobs striding on to the stage, dressed in his now familiar jeans and black turtleneck; except it wasn’t Steve Jobs at all, but Noah Wyle, star of the TV hospital drama ER, who’d recently played Jobs in the film PiratesofSiliconValley.
Steve himself soon arrived to mock Wyle’s actually pretty passable imitation of his physical and vocal tics, a rare acknowledgement of the interim CEO’s cult of personality. Things looked set to get even weirder when he invited Ozzie Osbourne on stage to demonstrate IBM’s ViaVoice speech recognition software, but it turned out he was referring to the similarly named general manager of IBM Voice Systems, who completed his presentation without biting the head off anything.
But it was what happened later that was truly “magical.” Bringing out a longawaited consumer laptop – which was described as “iMac to go” – in the colorful plastic form of the iBook, Jobs talked through its style, practicality, and performance, and showed a series of TV commercials the company had made to promote it. Then he loaded up the Apple website on its 12-inch 800x600 color screen, picked up the machine, walked across the stage and opened another website. Seeing the point immediately, the audience erupted as Steve milked the moment by passing the machine through a hula hoop. Look, no wires!
Once again, a technology not invented by Apple – the 802.11b Wi-Fi protocol, then branded by the company as a series of products under the AirPort name – became a groundbreaking, unique selling point of the Macintosh.