Originally published at: Check Out Scott Knaster’s “Adjacent to Greatness” Substack Newsletter - TidBITS
Some people are born storytellers, and my longtime friend and former Take Control author Scott Knaster is one of them. On the advice of his old Apple boss, Guy Kawasaki, Scott has now started the Adjacent to Greatness Substack newsletter, where he writes:
I love to tell true stories about things I’ve seen or that happened to me. Amazing, fun, odd, surprising, or momentous things. Funny is almost always a good reason for a story. Some are ordinary and weird. Little things the universe presents. Everyday and once-in-a-lifetime. Entertaining stories about all sorts of things. About anything. If you know me, you already knew that I do this.
I worked in Silicon Valley for many years with brilliant people at remarkable companies that changed the world. A lot of my stories are about those people and places.
I don’t get to hang out with Scott nearly as often as in the days of conferences like Macworld Expo and MacTech Conference, so I’m making up for it by reading about the time he invited the Grateful Dead to Apple and ended up playing a minor role in the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Those of you who have been reading TidBITS for years will like Scott’s insider tales of the early tech world, when RAM was measured in megabytes and SCSI reigned supreme.
Plus, if you’re old enough to appreciate Scott’s Silicon Valley stories, you’ll likely be just as delighted as I was to discover the Substack newsletter by notable humorist Dave Barry. His name appeared in TidBITS periodically during our early years, and my co-author Bill Dickson and I had a brief correspondence with him in 1994 when we wrote Internet Explorer’s Kit for Macintosh. However, his syndicated column vanished in 2004, and I haven’t read much from him since. Reminded by the Substack posts of how much I enjoyed his writing, I pulled his Dave Barry in Cyberspace from my bookshelf and am trying to resist the temptation to reread the entire book today. While flipping through it, I stumbled upon this classic bit:
First off, you need an operating system, which is the “Godfather” program that operates behind the scenes, telling all the other programs what to do, making sure they cooperate, and if necessary leaving the heads of virtual horses in their beds. The most popular operating system in world history as of 10:30 A.M. today is Windows 95, but there are many other options, including Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 3.111, Windows for Workgroups, Windows for Groups That Mainly Just Screw Around, Windows for Repeat Offenders, Lo-Fat Windows, and The Artist Formerly Known As Windows. There is also the old MS-DOS operating system, which is actually written on parchment and is rarely used on computers manufactured after the French and Indian War. And there is OS/2, which was developed at enormous expense by IBM and marketed as a Windows alternative, which has won a loyal following of thousands of people, an estimated three of whom do not work for IBM. And of course there is the Apple operating system, or “Apple operating system,” for your hippie beatnik weirdo loner narcotics-ingesting communistic types of Apple-owning individuals who are frankly too wussy to handle the challenges of hand-to-hand combat with computer systems specifically designed to thwart them.
Ah, for those kinder, gentler days when we knew that all we needed for world peace was for Apple to take its rightful place as the leader of the tech world.
