Steve Jobs vs. Steve Ballmer, Circa 1996

With concerns rising about Steve Jobs' health (which naturally has an ill effect on Apple's stock price, because Apple without Jobs is much worse than Martha Stewart LLC without Martha), here's an old clip from PBS' 1996 series, "Triumph of the Nerds" (hat tip to ValleyWag.com for finding it). Interestingly, Steve Jobs today looks 20 years older than he did back then, whereas Microsoft's Steve Ballmer looks almost the same. Life really isn't fair, is it?

StartupSounds.com is a Ghost Site

I'm not a fan of the Apple Computer Company, not because I think Steve Jobs is a horrible person to work for, or that Apple's products are crappy, or that the Mac users I know seem to behave like members of a sinister cult, but because Apple burned me back in the 1980's, and I'll never forgive them. What happened is that I cleaned out my bank account to buy a brand new Apple IIC, and just a few months later Apple decided that it would no longer support the II series, utterly destroying the future value of my investment. Since then, I've used PC's, and I've never been burned as badly again.

So that's my own story: I'll never buy another Apple product, but lots of people don't feel this way: in fact, they're clearly as jazzed by Apple as ever: witness the round-the-block lines last week for the iPhone.

Which brings me to StartupSounds.com, a site created by a fellow named John Swerdan, who so loved his Mac that he created an entire album's worth of songs about it in the late 1990's and early '00's. Swerdan's audio homage was in the spirit of The Beach Boys and other California-based groups that had written immortal odes to automobiles and motorcycles in the mid-1960's. Of course, Swerdan wasn't the only musician to write about computers in those days: a group called Barcelona released an album called Simon BASIC in 1999 whose theme was the lot of the programming geek; Netslaves.com reviewed Shell Account, a later album, in early 2001 and they maintain an active MySpace page. There were also The Geektones, a band which not only wrote songs about computers but about The New Economy.

StartupSounds.com got a lot of play in those days, especially from Wired.com. But for reasons unknown, StartupSounds.com has not been updated in many years (the site bears a 2001 date-stamp and the most recent entries in its photo section are from 2002).

I tried to see whether I could buy some of John's songs on iTunes but my browser immediately stalled, but that's because I refuse to use iTunes or any other Apple product. If you like Swerdan's songs you might have better luck using PayPal. In any case, StartupSounds.com is an interesting time capsule of one man's love for a machine. Hey - it's a crazy world with all kinds of strange passions: some nutburgers even write songs about parrots!