“‘Day 1’ might be a stretch,” Richie Davis reports for The Greenfield Recorder. “But Philip Elmer was there on ‘Day 2,’ he says, writing about Apple Inc. before there was a Mac, which became the seed for what would become today’s technological and corporate behemoth.”
“Relaxing in socks and jeans with a MacBook Air in his lap and iPhone close at hand, having just finished today’s Apple 3.0 blog, Elmer — whose byline still reads Elmer-DeWitt — is perched in his Chestnut Hill living room reflecting back a half-century to when he and Margo Jones, with whom he reconnected and married in May, took a computer class together while seniors at Lexington High School,” Davis reports. “Through his years as a reporter and then editor at Time and Fortune magazines, there’s been a modest change of focus — with computing, technology and science in general and Apple’s mystique at its core. He retired last year to launch his independent blog. ‘This is a lot of fun,’ says the 67-year-old blogger, who moved to Greenfield in 2014. ‘I get up every day and I’m really eager, because I don’t know what I’m going to write about. I try to figure out what’s hot, what story interests me. It’s a nice game, and I play it every morning, and usually by noon, I’m done.'”
“When he first met Steve Jobs in 1982, recalls Elmer, he was still promoting his Lisa computer but was already turning his attention to the Macintosh,” Davis reports. “The year after Mac’s 1984 release, Jobs was fired in an in-house power struggle, and Elmer remembers visiting him at his next venture, NeXT, ‘But you could tell it was never going to be as big a market as Apple. I believed in the mouse and the click. I remember in the early days when the Mac came out, people who used PCs sneered at the mice, like it was for kids.'”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s to a continued long, happy, and productive retirement for P.E.D.!
His Apple 3.0 blog is here: https://ped30.com
Nice behind-the-scenes piece for P.E.D.!
I still remember when colleagues said “a real man doesn’t use a mouse” and green monochrome monitors were used for serious work. A colour monitor was for playing games.
I still have a genuine VT100 monitor; I don’t use it that much nowadays though ;-).
I generally like P.E.D’s stuff especially when he writes about and corrects other less knowledgeable writer’s and analysts’ error filled reports. Too much of what passes as ‘tech reporting’ today is poorly researched click bait.
You’re right about tech writers, but I’d expand it to include nearly all journalists these days. Sadly, not one journalist seems to care enough to raise the issue or — dare I say it — even bother to investigate it.
When I hear the phrase ‘journalistic integrity’, I think of it amusingly as an oxymoron (like ‘jumbo shrimp’).
There are still plenty of areas where journalistic integrity means exactly what it should. However, the area is receding, an unfortunate consequence of the 24h news cycle.
There was a time when a journalist had a daily deadline to submit the story. In order to make it into evening newspaper edition, it had to be submitted by a certain time, so the reporter had enough time to seek comments, interview everyone, check his facts, submit to the editor, who might even have a chance to read it before the publishing deadline. Same went for the evening news on TV; there was a fixed deadline, so the journalist knew how much time he had to prepare the story, get the facts straight, interview others and corroborate the story.
Today, there are no deadlines. The story must go out immediately, otherwise, the competing web site will publish it first. There is no time for fact-checking, corroborating, interviewing multiple people. If a news outlet wants to survive, it must publish news before others. And proper journalism suffers.
The remaining pockets of proper journalism survive in weekly print publications, such as The New Yorker, or the National Review. They employ a number of veteran, highly professional journalists who sometimes work for months, even years, on an investigative story. Their facts are checked by the fact-checking departments and the stories are thoroughly researched. These two are examples from opposite sides of the political spectrum (The New Yorker is strongly liberal, while the National Review is strongly conservative), but both are shining examples of journalism with high integrity and accuracy.
The demise of the print media has caused the demise in factual journalism. This is very unfortunate…
So, does that mean that ‘factual journalism’ has become a de facto oxymoron?
Almost….
I have been reading the New Yorker for about 18 years, and am still reminded every week how proper journalism is supposed to work. It is increasingly rare.
I know him as Elmer Fudd. What with all the fudd he generated. He was always anti apple for no reason at all (just like most of the other press).
He was an imbecile, with all the nonsensical crap he wrote. MDN probably has many many “iCal’ed” items by him. Would be nice if they could list them all for the record.
Lots of command line people looked askance at the Mac and it’s users like old sports car drivers used to at people who drove Automatic Transmissions. Funny how things come full circle and the Mac is now built upon UNIX with command line available to those who want or need it.
There is a generational turnover happening in journalism and Uncle Walt and PED have left the building.