HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ webwielder2

This is not really an internal video, it’s a video made on campus by some employees. It reflects the rudderlessness and low morale of the company at the time, as it pursued a new strategy seemingly at odds with its values led by a complete nonentity of a new CEO.

⬐ None

None

⬐ pge

For those not familiar with 80s music, the song being parodied is Tiffany's "I think we're alone now." Original music video from 1987 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Q3mHyzn78

⬐ maxton

There might also be a connection to Weird Al's parody of that song, titled "I Think I'm A Clone Now" from 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kw_d3d0XAo

⬐ richardfontana

Itself a cover of the 1967 song by Tommie James and the Shondells: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkMFLUXTEwM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Think_We%27re_Alone_Now

⬐ exikyut

The YouTube comments for this video mention the existence of something called ARPLE. I think I probably want a copy of this. Where can I learn more about it?

⬐ st3fan

Here is another classic .. pretty sure Apple played it at a WWDC

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W--13mBc788

⬐ retrac98

This is so cringeworthy, I can barely watch.

⬐ bshimmin

That one is really a pleasure to watch/listen to in comparison with this, from the same guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W--13mBc788

⬐ superbatfish

You're right -- that's amazing.

⬐ asimpletune

Idk, I thought they were both pretty good. Especially since he sang on both of them.

⬐ throwaway2016a

I wasn't into the Mac scene in '94 can someone explain? My whole time using Macs clones were fought every step along the way. I can't tell if this video is pro licensing or anti-clone...

This reminds me of near the end of the dotcom bubble where startups were making these kind of videos. There was one where the whole team was at a rented mansion doing a lip-sync. I wish I could find it but I think it got wiped from the internet after backlash. I remember it showed employees lounging around a pool.

Edit: a few minutes googling for that video I mentioned and I realized we may have finally hit a point where you can be forgot online. Not because the content disappears but because there is so much new content / noise that finding anything more than a few weeks old is very difficult.

⬐ mikeash

The 90s clones were officially approved and licensed by Apple. You might be thinking of the 80s Apple II clones, such as the Laser series, which were not approved by Apple. The more legally sound ones reverse-engineered the Apple II, much like Compaq did with the IBM PC. Apple tried to fight them legally, but failed.

The Mac largely avoided this by having massively more complex ROMs (huge chunks of the OS, including the GUI, were implemented in ROM) which was impractical to reverse engineer. Apparently one company tried and had some limited success: https://everymac.com/systems/nutek/index.html

In the mid-90s, Apple was in serious trouble and they saw official clones as a way to expand market share and revenue. They licensed the OS and ROMs to a bunch of different companies. The result was a wide range of non-Apple Mac-compatible computers with official OS support from Apple.

Unfortunately, the idea of expanding Apple's reach through clones never really materialized. Instead, the clones cannibalized Apple's Mac business. After the return of Steve Jobs, he killed the whole program and the clones disappeared. The whole thing only lasted about two years.

I remember the DayStar Genesis MP was the dream system of that time. The highest end model, the MP 932+, had four PowerPC 604e CPUs running at 225MHz. It could hold up to 1.5GB of RAM, although buying that much RAM would, I'm sure, have cost more than the GDP of a medium-sized country at the time. The computer itself cost $6,500 in 1997. Some of the earlier DayStar systems cost up to $12,000.

I owned a PowerCenter Pro 180, from Power Computing, which was probably the most active and interesting clone maker of the era. It was a great machine for a great price and continued to be well supported by Apple OS updates well after the demise of Power Computing. My first Linux experience was on that computer, first with MkLinux (which was a wacky hybrid made by Apple, running the Linux kernel on top of mach) and later LinuxPPC (basically Red Hat for the Mac). It became definitively obsolete when Mac OS X came out, because OS X wouldn't run on it. This was just part of the march of technology, though, as OS X didn't run on official Apple Macs of that vintage either.

⬐ bsaul

Mac clones were a thing at that time. They were thought of as a way to battle against wintel. You started to see low cost and very high end macs made by other manufacturers.

It didn’t last more than a couple of years, and the deal ended pretty badly for those manufacturers. They were kind of let in the mud.

⬐ Angostura

With the switch to PowerPC architecture, Apple started a Licensing programme that would allow other companies to build official Mac clones. Power Computing was the first company to get into the business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Computing_Corporation. Steve Jobs pulled the plug on the clone idea when he returned to Apple and bought out Power Computing.