Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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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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1994: QuickTake state-of-the-art camera
In 1994, ten years after introducing a computer that would define the state of the art for decades to come, Apple introduced a state-of-the-art digital camera. It wouldn’t be quite as successful as the Macintosh. The Apple QuickTake had a resolution of 640×480 pixels (about 1/3 of a megapixel). It could be used to take…
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January 24, 1984: The Macintosh introduction
As Apple’s Super Bowl ad promised, the Macintosh was introduced to the world on January 24, 1984. Actually it was introduced to Apple shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, at the Apple shareholders annual meeting. Alan and Priscilla were lucky enough to be in the audience that day, and it’s an experience we will never forget.…
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Open Door by any other (domain) name
In late 1994 Alan was thinking about what to name the easy-to-use dial-up internet company he planned to start. In addition to connoting easy access, the company name had to be available as a domain name too. Luckily in 1994 just about any domain name was available, so Alan was able to grab opendoor.com for…
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“Sequencing at Home”
Our Future Bucket List includes a “Personal DNA analyzer.” But once such a thing exists, what will people be able to do with it? We’re starting on a project that we hope may both answer that question and also help to make such a thing a reality, and part of a much more evenly distributed…
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A Future July 4
In 2004, Ashland was one of the first towns to webcast (stream) its July 4 parade. In 2007, Alan and company live-streamed the parade from the parade. As early as next year (July 4, 2026, for the U.S. Semiquincentennial) we hope to reprise those early glimpses of the Future with yet another early glimpse of…
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1985: The LaserWriter, Desktop Publishing
There was one additional important piece to the upcoming desktop publishing revolution. The combination of the Mac, LaserWriter, Postscript and AppleTalk let Mac users easily print, in very high quality, anything they could create and view on the Macintosh screen. But, as revolutionary as the Macintosh was, its 9-inch screen was black-and-white with a resolution…
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1985: The Macintosh Office, a not-so-epic ad
The Macintosh was introduced in early 1984 with an epic Super Bowl ad, “1984.” The Macintosh Office was introduced in early 1985 with a not-so-epic Super Bowl ad, “Lemmings.” Like much of the Mac’s introduction, “1984” was a rousing success. Like much of the Macintosh Office’s introduction, “Lemmings” wasn’t. “1984” opens with Big Brother (of…
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1985: LaserWriter, key to the Macintosh Office
The LaserWriter was the key piece of a larger effort, “The Macintosh Office,” to make the nascent Mac more appealing to the business market. That effort can perhaps best be summarized by a poster Apple put out at the time: The LaserWriter was literally at the center of the Macintosh Office, with the newly-announced “AppleTalk…
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