[SIGCIS-Members] First instructional videos for Macintosh?

Peter Sachs Collopy collopy at sas.upenn.edu
Tue Sep 9 08:33:59 PDT 2014


On Sep 9, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Luisa Emmi Beck <emmi.beck at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you all for helping me with this quest!! This is all fascinating! Yes, ​I was just wondering why the first video that includes the tutorial "Mousing Around" doesn't have any audio. The first radio story that I'm producing on this topic is about the computer mouse, so I'm hoping to find audio of those tutorials. Do you know where I might be able to find the audio cassette for that particular video? Or have those audio recordings been digitized somewhere and are available to download?

Just from listening to the YouTube recording right before that (from about 2:00), it sounds to me like the audio directs you to pause the tape recorder and try the mouse tutorial—so there isn’t any audio for that section. It might be interesting to use that bit of audio starting around 2:00 in your radio piece, though, just to communicate that using a mouse was something one was expected to learn and practice and not an assumed skill.

As far as the Apple II, keep in mind that it didn’t have a mouse until after the Mac was released in 1984, so you won’t find material there about the origins of the mouse. And since the Apple II could record data on an audiocassette, there’s a lot of material online about audiotape and the Apple II that doesn’t actually deal with audio recordings—or at least not with any that one was actually meant to listen to. The first Apple machine to have a mouse was the Lisa in 1983, and there’s a nice bit in a marketing video for it (at 2:57 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt5q0oedi_c) introducing the mouse.

Going back a bit, there is actual video of Douglas Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of NLS, including the mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

Peter




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