Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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The 10th Anniversary of our 30th Anniversary
Last Friday, June 5, 2026 was the 10th anniversary of Alan and Priscilla’s celebration of their 30th anniversary. That celebration was staged at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, where they had been married 30 years and 4 days before (June 1, 1986). The celebrating couple were surrounded by family and friends, many…
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Happy Anniversary, Us!
Apple’s 50th anniversary was 2 months ago. Priscilla and Alan’s 40th anniversary is today. These are not unrelated events. On April 1, 1976 Apple Computer was established. On August 1, 1983 Alan started at Apple, Priscilla having started there a couple weeks before. The exact date of their 1983 meeting at Apple is lost in…
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Building a Time Machine
In 2006, Alan built a time machine. And not just any time machine. A particularly fine-grained time machine, which could advance or go back one second at a time. In fact it could actually only advance or go back by a single second, stepping back into the past a second, or jumping forward into the…
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Bits Pretending to be Atoms
As our world becomes more digital, we are being surrounded by bits pretending to be atoms. That’s what the whole field of augmented reality (AR) is about. Through a headset or handheld device, the atoms of our “real” reality are augmented by images created from bits on the device. We then perceive our overall reality…
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From Bits to Life
Craig Venter took a page out of Lynn Conway‘s book and was able to convert bits to the ultimate form of atoms: life. Venter and his team were able to create a novel living bacterium whose DNA atoms (genome) were determined by bits representing that DNA. Venter’s bacterium wasn’t created solely from bits. In fact…
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Craig Venter 1946-2026
Craig Venter, leader of a commercial effort which paralleled the government’s Human Genome Project (HGP), has died. Venter passed away less than six months after his frequent rival James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and first director of the HGP. Whereas Watson had been working towards a human genome his whole career, Venter…
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From Bits to Chips
The silicon-based integrated circuit, a.k.a. IC or chip, was productized in the early 1960s, giving rise to not just the name of a San Francisco Bay Area valley, but an entire industry. Like other similar technologies, chip design and manufacturing initially required the resources of large organizations. Today it’s another example of how much easier…
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From Bits to Atoms
The previous post talked about how technology has moved the world from physical (atoms) to digital (bits), as epitomized by Alan’s bookshelf. But technology has moved the world the other direction too. Back in 1986, Apple Computer spent $15 million for a Cray X-MP, then one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. They used…
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From Atoms to Bits
In 1995, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte authored Being Digital. The insightful book presented a history of digital technologies to date, followed by generally accurate predictions of how those technologies would advance and affect society. A central conceit of the book is how the world is moving from “atoms” to “bits.” Atoms being a…
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A bit more on Apple’s 50th
Not surprisingly, there’s been more than a bit of coverage on Apple’s 50th anniversary. There would have been even without Apple’s special 24-hour-only video on apple.com And even without Apple’s employee-only Paul McCartney concert on the Apple Park (spaceship) campus. Perhaps the most interesting coverage from Alan and Priscilla’s point of view was a New…
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