Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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The Old and the New
The art auction house Christie’s was founded in 1766. The Art Authority Museum was founded in 2024. Last week Apple brought the two together. In their press release announcing the new Vision Pro M5, Apple highlighted a few of the key apps on that Future-setting device. There are over 1 million apps available for Apple…
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2008: Envisioning the iPhone, part 4 (apps)
As mentioned, the iPhone App Store opened on July 10, 2008 with over 500 apps, including iEnvision from Open Door Networks. Even Steve Jobs grossly underestimated the degree to which the App Store would be instrumental in distributing the Future, predicting there would ultimately be thousands of apps. In the first year alone, the number…
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2007: Envisioning the iPhone, part 3
Steve Jobs died 14 years ago today, October 5, 2011. Steve was not only a great visionary, but he was a great showman as well. Those two came together most historically when he introduced the iPhone at MacWorld San Francisco on January 9, 2007. That iPhone keynote was so brilliant, so prescient and so important…
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2007: Envisioning the iPhone, part 2
Before there was the iPhone, there were many other cell phones. Alan had a few in those couple decades.
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Step (further) into the Future of Art
A week ago, along with its new iPhones, Apple released a new set of operating systems for all its devices, unifying its OS version numbers at 26. Particularly interesting to Alan and company was the “spatial scenes” capability that Apple added to visionOS 26 for the Vision Pro. The Art Authority Museum was introduced the…
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2007: Envisioning the iPhone, part 1
Apple announced the new iPhone 17 line last week. The iPhone is the pinnacle of Apple’s near-half-century of evenly distributing the Future. To pretty much the entire world. There is so much to say about the iPhone that it will likely take until Apple’s half-century anniversary (April 1, 2026) to say even close to half…
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2001: Envisioning the iPod
Before there was the iPhone there was the iPod. At the turn of the 21st century, portable digital music players (and in fact the whole digital music industry) were at that stage where Apple really excels: already here, but very unevenly distributed; complex and not well implemented. At that time, Apple was Apple Computer. A…
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2003: Envisioning the Future
In 2003, Alan and Priscilla mounted a WiFi-enabled iBook on their kitchen wall. It was an early glimpse at the Future, but we certainly did not envision what it would lead to. Digital cameras were starting to become popular, and the worldwide web was rapidly evolving into a very visual place. Digital photo frames were…
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Technology Notes: The Levy Sheet Music Collection
Alan’s great-uncle Lester Levy was one of the foremost collectors of sheet music in the United States. He donated his collection of over 30,000 pieces to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, in 1976, adding to it until his death in 1989. After that his relatives and Johns Hopkins took over. The evolution of the…
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The rise and fall of dial-up Internet
In early 1995, when Alan started his easy-to-use dial-up Internet company, Open Door Networks, there was already a well established company leading that field: America Online. AOL, as it would come to be named, already had well over a million users, and its “You’ve got mail!” greeting would even become the title of a popular…
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