Stephen Fry is everyone’s favourite tech evangelist, and with over 100,000 Twitter followers to his name, he’s fast amassing an army of online fans.
Tonight, around 400 of them have gathered in the Apple Store on London’s Regent Street to hear their hero speak, and you can follow it too, in our exclusive liveblog!
20:11: That’s it. All done! Hope you enjoyed it.
20:10: Q: Do you feel restricted in what you can say about religion? No. I wouldn’t want to be rude to a religious person. Maybe Richard Dawkins overdoes it, a little. But the reason I don’t want to dip my toe into it is I can’t bear the response you get back. I can’t bear the insults. It seems to me that if they’re happy in their religion then I’m happy with my non religion.
20:09: Q: Isn’t the most divine thing about the internet that it has erradicated distance and generation gaps? I think it’s easy to lose sight of the simple miracle of what the internet makes possible. There was a cartoon of a dog typing away on the internet, and someone asked him “what do you get out of the internet?” and the dog says “no-one on here knows I’m a dog”
20:03: Q: What do you think about children spending too much time on the internet? Stephen’s OK with it… he’s likening it to adults scolding children for spending too much time reading books (when books were new)… or watching the TV too much (when it was new). For every piece of research which says the internet is bad for children, there’s another saying they’re sharper than ever.
19:56: Q: “America is the only country that went from barbarians to decadence without civilization in between.” What do you think of that quote? I love America. Of all the foreign countries I know there is less to dislike in America than any other. I can’t pretend that I can listen to some of the religious and anti-scientific people without being uncomfortable. But at the same time you get people like Barack Obama. The very fact of his election in a country that some people in Europe had almost given up on politically…. he picked on so many things in his inauguration speech. One of the greatest qualities of Americans is curiosity.
19:55: The worst thing that happened to broadband was DSL, because it put off the change from copper to fibre optic.
19:54: “I’m very pleased that a Tory spokesman said that their government wouldn’t use proprietary software wherever possible,” and would use open source instead.
19:50: Q: What’s your view on Government pronouncements on broadband Britain? I Don’t blame Governments for being behind the curve. It develops at an astonishing speed. It seemed so modern when Tony Blair proclaimed “a computer in every classroom” but in 1997 I had Peter Mandelson staying at my house, and he had never seen a website. I showed him the Tory website, and it wasn’t very good, but you could hear John Major’s voice. Then I showed him the Labour site, and it had just a few clickable links. I tried to persuade Tony Blair to put a laptop in his red briefcase. “It would fit so beautifuly” I said… instead of civil servants having up to 10 boxes each… “But what would I do with it?” Blair said. Then I interviewed him for an Apple podcast just before he left, and he said “One of the things I’ve got to get to grips with, is making sure I can use a computer when I leave…. While the current prime minister has an amusing e-mail adress with a number and a dot in the middle, which some of you will realise is an old Compuserve address.” Blimey, that’s going back a bit….
19:49: Round of applause for Stephen being the “second most followed person on the planet, after Barack Omaba… I’m the vice president of Twitter.”
19:49: Q: Will you be my friend? Ahhh… “I can certainly be your follower” says Fry, before explaining what Twitter is… (we think everyone here knows what it is, somehow.)
19:48: Every time I buy a PC I think “oh, they must’ve got better by now” but they’ve actually gotten worse! But maybe one day they’ll be open source, which is a pretty anti-Apple thing to say, since OS X isn’t. But, I’d be very happy if everyone used an open source operating system, and they could use it on a Mac, or a Dell.
19:47: Oh, and Stephen thinks Justin Long is “quite cute.” Ahh…
19:46: Q: What do you think of the Mac and PC ad campaign? I think if it’s not a causal connection then it’s a concurrent connection that around the advertising they were selling more desktops.
19:45: “Yes, I have pirated software, and I will admit it. All of you have, somewhere along the line, I bet you have, but you’ve also bought a hell of a lot too. You’re not just a pirate, or a citizen. If the creative industry creates too much of this, saying “you’re a thief”! People will just say, “oh fuck off.” and laugh at them in their Rolls Royce. What they need to do is use the creativity which supposedly got them in that place to begin with. There will still be an incentive to respect those copyrights, but also a way to pass it round without having it locked in.
19:43: Q: What’s your view on creative commons and mashups? I’m not that excited about my copyrights. If someone steals whole wodges of my work my publishers would be annoyed, and I’d say “oh golly” but I’m in a profession that’s overpaid, overpampered and if a small percentage gets leaked away, well, tough quite frankly.” – Talking about DRM. “What happened when philips introduced the cassette? Record sales went up.”
19:42: Fry thinks Twitter is terrifying the press, since it takes celeb news, and more, out of the hands of journalists.
19:38: How would Oscar Wilde have used Twitter? He’d have put the Wit in Twitter. I think he’d see it as an art. He identified the quality of the British to have a fear of the new. It still exists. Read the Daily Mail and see what they say about a new modern artist. It’s the same fear of the new, that’s really strong in the British. In science, nobody would suggest going back to the way of understanding blood that the ancient Greeks had, but for some reason an artist is always criticised for trying something new. He would have loved and relished the way people are always finding new things to do with technology.
19:36: Q: Is Net neutrality worth fighting for? Yes. Freedom is something that I feel personally is very important. I believe any control of free speech should be taken extremely rarely, and only in areas like child pornography where people feel it’s absolutely unacceptable. On the other hand, I simply don’t go to areas of the web where fascists congregate, but I wouldn’t ban them. Then there’s the political side where: what do you do about China’s firewall? I don’t know.
19:35: Quick word on entertaining, and why he’s here. He says he came to talk about audio books, but has instead talked about his digital life. Now, Q&As.
19:31: You wouldn’t get someone coming into London, and having to go through a gate where someone takes their name… but people are talking about controling the internet like that, and it’s not right.
19:29: Fry says Leetspeak and Loltalk is just a modern incarnation of “post talk” which dates back to when stamps were so expensive, and few people could afford to send letters. People used to compress every word they possibly could. Jane Austen, Lord Byron and Wordsworth used to use it… now, the ignorant who haven’t thought it through think there’s something wrong with it when the young do it now. That really angers me. The internet is like a city, and like any great city it has monuments and museums where you can learny any type of thing you could want, but it also has red light districts and seedy parts. Because it’s a city, and cities are like that. But they’re still great places to live.
19:29: Now I can walk around town and head a human voice, speaking to me, as I control it. Where I want them, how I want them…. It’s the most well argued audiobook sales pitch we’ve ever heard.
19:26: Books are very lonely, and unsocial things. It’s a marvelous feeling, but the idea that it’s a more natural form of communication over, say, a laptop computer is nonsensical.
19:25: And that’s it. We’re going to move on to a Q&A shortly…. after Fry has talked about his audiobook, which he’s here to promote… not that he’s done much of that so far!
19:24: “I don’t own shares in Apple, I’m not employed by them, although they’re very kindly paying me with goods today, but I am a personal evangelist for Apple because if someone else came up with stuff as good I would happily champion them. Thankfully, with the arrival of the iPhone, they have so disturbed the smartphone market there are a few trying.”
19:23: Suddenly people got the message. They’re like office blocks, these computers. People go to work, use them and “step into that environment of the computer, like an office block. But only Apple understands that the dullness and contemptuous views of the business side of computing are that it’s there to do a job… That’s not good enough. All the things we love, beauty, colour, the wit of the thing, should be inside.”
19:23: It was absolutely beautiful, and then came a music player, the iPod. “You don’t need me to fill in the gaps…”
19:21: Steve Jobs eventually returned to Apple for $1 a year, and some shares. He met Jonny Ive, a brilliant designer already working at Apple, and together they hatched the plan for the transparent iMac.
19:21: Back to Apple and the web. Tim Berners Lee took his Next computer to a conference with Steve Jobs in Paris and tried to show him what he’d created, but he was very busy, and they never met. “It’s very sweet, really”.
19:20: Stephen Fry’s geek credentials are superb. He has the exact Next spec computer that Tim Berners Lee used to create the web. He’s trying to convince him for an exact copy of the original optical disc with HTTP on it, so he can build a shrine “because as I told you, I am. Sad.”
19:19: The thing about the Next, which changed the world, was a scientist took the Next, took it to CERN and used it to write HTTP… the language which now powers the web.
19:18: Jobs left Apple to found Next. Stephen Fry owns a Next computer (obviously)…
19:17: Now talking about John Scully. He was CEO of Pepsi, which overtook Coca Cola one time. The only time it had ever happened. Steve Jobs saw that, and hired Scully to beat Microsoft, which he saw as a similar threat. Jobs said “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water, or do you want to change the world?”… he said OK. Came to Apple, and then a few months later fired Steve Jobs.
19:16: Sorry to write this almost word for word, but paraphrasing Stephen Fry just doesn’t seem right somehow.
19:16: Microsoft copied Apple. They built Windows on top of MSDOS. And Apple’s death was predicted.
19:15: There was this belief, you bought IBM no matter how shit they were, and believe me they were shit, but people got it into their head that they were the gold standard… and others got it into their head that they could make compatible computers, and they could also pay Mr Gates to run that operating system, and all of a sudden IBM wasn’t the biggest computer company anymore. Meanwhile, Apple struggled on, making huge leaps.
19:14: “This little creature, called William Gates, who had a little company called Microsoft bought – not built- QDOS. Quick and Dirty Operating System, and renamed it MSDOS, after Microsoft. Then went to IBM and said “don’t worry about badging it and recoding it, we’ll do all the work for you, and IBM in the single stupidest moment in history on this plannet agreed to it, and comitted suicide. The Thinkpads are chinese… they don’t even own it. They gave all the power to this man who bought QDOS…. Which was still a command line OS. He still thought mice were for WIMPS. He thought they were a toy.”
09:11: A few months later, they bought out a printer that was simply beyond belief, and I paid £7,000 for it. I believe I was the only person (other than a business) to own one… I would write people letters, and they would say ‘you’ve written me a letter, and sent it to the printers… what’s going on?!’… and I would say, that’s my home printer!”
09:10: Command line operating systems were “very exciting” until 25 years ago, when instead of we the user needing to be computer literate, it seemed the computer had become human literate. “The moment I saw it, it was like falling in love. I realise that sounds pathetic, but others may have done it with a car, or even, I believe, human beings.”
09:08: The inspiration for the Mac’s GUI, or graphical interface, came from Xerox. Where they had prototypes of mice and windows, but had’t put it into production. It was just an idea. The Dynabook. A small book which could communicate with the world, input text and receive text, store knowledge and even play music and pictures. It was a suggestion of something way beyond reach… “This was the computer heaven, something to reach for that we would never achieve.”
09:07: This all lead up to the “magical time” 25 years ago, when the Mac was launched. Bill Gates reportedly said “mice are for wimps”… his idea of a joke, because WIMP also stands for Windows Icons Menus and Pulldowns.
09:06: On to the IBM PC… Stephen’s describing loading things from disk, the BBC Micro followed… we’re building up to the Mac, and its graphic interface, we’re sure.
09:05: Brilliant Douglas Adams quote: Don’t ask computer people what they think of the future, they were very surprised that the year 2000 followed the year 1999.
09:03: Now on to Apple… IBM was the largest company in the world, and one of its executives once said he could foresee a time when five computers were needed in the world. And another anecdote, about having a telephone in every town.
19:02: Fry’s describing his experience of technology over history. We won’t try to keep up (he’s talking very fast). But he’s recounting the idea of having a whole house run on a single motor (from the 60s, apparently) and you had to be motor literate… nowadays, you need to be computer literate.
19:00: There’s the story of me and technology, and there’s the story of the world and technology… the most important thing for me was the Altair… a kit home computer. It persuaded people in the 70s that there was such a thing as a computer you could have in your house.
19:00: Fry’s recounting Macintosh history. He was the second person in the UK to buy one. The late Douglas Adams was the first.
19:00: Hello and welcome to everyone including his “faithful followers” on twitter. It’s a talk, not a lecture.
19:00: Oooh. Here he is! The Fry Man commeth!
18:58: Here we go. This event will be available as a podcast next week.
18:55: We’re sat in the corner by a set of black boards hiding (what we assume is) the mixing desk… There’s a helluvalot of activity going on behind those boards whatever’s there… Three men are behind there at once now. Maybe they’re Stephen’s dancers, waiting to begin the show.
18:53: Did Elizabeth from Philadelphia make it here today? We’re asked… no answer. That’s a shame. We hear she turned up yesterday, after braving the snow all the way from Oxford to find the event had been canceled due to the weather. That’s quite a trip. Apple even reserved her a seat at tonight’s event. Shame she couldn’t make it a second time.
18:52: The wait continues, but now there are two bottles of water by Stephen’s stool. Thrilling this, isn’t it?… Who’s willing to bet he needs a “comfort break” half way through?
18:50: Still no sign of the Fry… although he’s just tweeted to say he’s about to hand over to Andrew, his web guy.
18:44: The Apple Store on Regent Street has a health and safety limit of 450 audience members… From the look of the crowd, we’re at that limit.
18:43: Strangely, a table has been set up next to Stephen Fry’s stool… either he’s having a jumble sale, or giving free massages…
18:37: Stephen Fry is in the building, and we’re looking at a 7pm start, say Apple. Keep your peepers on this page, and you’ll keep up to date. Keep refreshing the page for events as they happen.
