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T
here was an air of unreality
pervading 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 Pirates of
Silicon Valley.
Steve himself soon arrived to mock Wyle’s
actually surprisingly passable imitation of
his physical and vocal tics, a rather 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 that he
was actually 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 long-awaited
consumer laptop – which was described as
“iMac to go” – in the colorful plastic form
of the iBook (tangerine chosen for the big
unveiling), 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. “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. Jobs proudly saying that
Apple was going to be there “first and best”.iBook
106 | MACFORMAT | SEPTEMBER 2019
RANDOM APPLE MEMORY
That clamshell truly was
portable when it came to
internet connections.Adam Banks remembers when wireless
internet was the stuff of dreams
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