Most of these “crazy ones, misfits, rebels and rule breakers” have been featured on Open Culture throughout the years (click the links above), and what make this ad special is that Steve Jobs narrates it himself. The original TV ad — the one that made it on air — had Richard Dreyfuss doing the voiceover…
Time to resurrect another suddenly relevant item we first mentioned back in 2009…
Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a life ‑transforming publication. Speaking to Stanford graduates in 2005, in what Ken Auletta has called the “Gettysburg Address of graduation-speechism,” Jobs explained why he drew inspiration from this intellectual creation of the 60s counterculture:
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
The good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. We suggest diving in right here, in Fall 1968, where it all begins. Enjoy.…
We originally posted this video back in 2009, and it seems like the right time to bring it back. It captures the first of many times that Steve Jobs thrilled audiences with the promise of what technology could deliver. The video takes you back to January 1984, when Jobs demoed the first Macintosh. (The event was famously promoted by Ridley Scott’s commercial during the Super Bowl. See below) A young Jobs, sporting a bow tie and a fuller head of hair, could barely hold back his smile and some tears, and the crowd simply couldn’t contain its enthusiasm, giving Jobs a five-minute standing ovation. That’s where the video ends, fading happily and suitably to black. We’ll miss you Steve. Read the New York Times obit here.
For another great Steve Jobs moment, don’t miss his inspiring Stanford 2005 graduation talk where he discussed his approach to living and urged the young graduates to “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” So far as commencement speeches go, it’s hard to beat this one.
Both video mentioned above appear in our Cultural Icons collection — a media collection that features great artists and thinkers speaking in their own words.
No more top hat and handkerchief. Marco Tempest uses iPods and iPhones to create magic for the 21st century. He calls himself a techno-illusionist. “I explore the borders between technology and magic,” says Tempest, “between what’s incredibly real and incredibly not.” Originally from Switzerland, Tempest now lives in New York City. He was featured in the internationally syndicated television series, The Virtual Magician, and his work can be viewed on a YouTube channel of the same name. His newest release, “iPod Magic–Deceptions,” features an application he developed to synchronize video playback on multiple screens. The App is called “MultiVid.” You can download it for free here, and learn how to use it here.
Every so often, we like to bring back a favorite talk of ours, and today seemed like a better day than most. Speaking at Stanford’s commencement in 2005, Steve Jobs gives the graduates a glimpse of his life philosophy. Some pearls of wisdom here for the young, to be sure. But if you have some more life under your belt, you’ll appreciate the message even more. The talk ends with Jobs telling the students to “stay hungry, stay foolish,” a line from The Whole Earth Catalog, the Bible of Steve Jobs’ generation, which became freely available online back in 2009…
Looking to design apps for the iPhone or iPad? Stanford University now has a course online that will help you do just that.
Simply called Developing Apps for iOS, the course features 20 video lectures (the last installment was uploaded just this week) and, somewhat fittingly, they’re all available on Apple’s iTunesU.
Paul Hegarty teaches the course, and he assumes that you have experience programming in C, and some familiarity with UNIX, object-oriented programming and graphical toolkits.
You can find Developing Apps for iOS in the Computer Science section of our big collection of Free Online Courses, along with two previous Stanford app development courses, both called iPhone Application Development.
Perhaps you’re accustomed to downloading free lectures and courses on iTunes U. Now, you have a new option. Last week, Apple began introducing free eBooks to its media collection. And, to kick things off, they’re giving users access to 18 free textbooks sponsored by Connexions (a Rice University project); a series of 100 ebooks produced by the Open University, and then, courtesy of Oxford University, the complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays from the First Folio of 1623. You can download all of these texts in the open ePub format. And if you have an iPad (or an iPhone with a copy of iBooks), they easily sync to the device, and make for a great reading experience. But you’re not necessarily limited to using the iPad. I was able to read the texts in ebook readers created by Stanza and Barnes & Noble (the maker of the new color Nook). And, using this free online service and then following these general directions, I easily converted the ePub files to Amazon’s .mobi format and uploaded them to my Kindle. The bottom line? You can expect iTunes U to become a handy resource for free ebooks as the service matures – one best suited to the iPad, but certainly not limited to it. And, speaking of the iPad, you should give this story a read. “IPad Opens World to a Disabled Boy.” It’s a great way to start the week…
Note: If you want a simple html version of Shakespeare’s collected works, don’t miss MIT’s invaluable web site.
Writing in The Guardian, Victor Keegan, a longtime journalist and poet, talks about his new iPhone app, City Poems. The newly released app will run you $2.99 on iTunes, which makes it less than open, I know. (Have you seen our free app, by the way?) But it’s admittedly a pretty nice concept for the cultural crowd, enough to justify giving it a quick mention here. About City Poems, Keegan says:
City Poems – published today – … uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about.
They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), public burnings in Smithfield (“His guts filled a barrel”) or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades…
Like I said, an intriguing concept, and it seems as though Keegan has plans to bring this material to other mobile platforms. You can grab the app on iTunes here.
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