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Author Happy 30th Birthday, Quicktime! (Read 4867 times)
Bolkonskij
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on: December 18, 2021, 15:13

I know, it's hard to believe (time sure goes by fast!) but Quicktime celebrates its 30th birthday this december. It was initially released in December 1991 playing postage-sized on 68k System 7 machines :-)

Still, it's yet another technology that had its roots in System 7 and at a time when Apple churned out innovative and actually useful improvements (along with a few duds too. OpenDoc, anyone?).

So I've been giving Quicktime its own virtual birthday cake on Cornica. Anyone wanna hold a toast or share some Quicktime anecdote? :-)

I for one can say that I used it a lot during the mid 90s to mid 2000s before mp4 arrived. I remember my excitement of seeing a computer video actually running on our family Mac. Not on TV, on a Mac! And you could watch it over and over again. Oh, what a future we're heading for!

I later also used it to stream a few web radio stations once our internet connection got faster. (it wasn't easy to find good sources though, RealAudio was a serious competitor in that area).

Still, I had maybe my best computing days with Quicktime as my companion and at one point it was basically a synonym for everything multimedia to me.
wove
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Reply #1 on: December 19, 2021, 03:39

Boy Quicktime was a huge game changer. It was required software on the Quadra 840AV, which shipped with System 7.1. In the early to mid nineties it was a long way ahead of anything out there. If you wanted to use the latest buzz word "multi-media" you really needed to have a Mac. I clearly recall being amazed by postage stamp size movies on the computer. I suppose the big downside there was that our 100+/- MB hard drives were really just to small and hard drives were still expensive hardware.
68040
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68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
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Reply #2 on: December 22, 2021, 17:51

My first 3D video was a Quicktime flick: A clothing store somewhere in the valley. I was fascinated by the idea of "virtual shopping" - and could have never have guessed that it would bore me to death one day. :-O
Bolkonskij
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Reply #3 on: December 31, 2021, 15:28

oh yes, wove ... your description perfectly fits my memories. "Do i let the 8 MB movie file sit on my hdd or rather install another app?". Well, when it comes to volume sizes the old days weren't always better for sure. :-)

And 68040, sounds like some Quicktime VR? Here's one from the Apple store in Cupertino:

Mac Store VR

If you think what was in those 200 kb file it's impressive, you could actually have a 360° view of the place. Quicktime VR is another Apple technology I felt never really took off because Apple themselves were a bit clueless as to do with it. (same as Hypercard for instance)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with online shopping, unless it's blowing $$$ into a guy's backside who has his employees pee into bottles because he's too damn greedy to allow them to go to the toilet ...
Last Edit: December 31, 2021, 15:30 by Bolkonskij
wove
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Reply #4 on: December 31, 2021, 17:20

MS was very late to the game, but the camera app and viewer that shipped with Windows 8 (at least the Surface RT) could create and view panoramas. It used a different file extension, but you could modify the name and view QT VR files in Windows 8 and view panoramas created in Windows 8 on System 7 Macs. Very strange. MS had no more luck than Apple at making the format popular.
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