A comment today on Twitter seems completely divorced from basic computer history, and it’s gathering a lot of misplaced attention as something new.

Similar attempts at false “new” ideas can also be found on other platforms and channels.

I’ve discussed here before how Apple always has been following others around since the beginning; a constant late-mover in the personal computer industry that profits from taking the ideas of others without giving credit.

With all due respect I don’t know what new things they’ve done. […] Everything was demonstrable in 1973.

Ouch.

It’s usually trivial to prove how Apple (and its loyal users) copy someone else’s ideas and cannibalize them, while pretending to be innovative.

Consider, for example, that a highly popular very affordable Commodore VIC-20 design in 1981 for the personal computer looks very much like the allegedly new concept in 2022 — a keyboard with the computer inside and plugged into any monitor, using peripherals for expansion.

It was unquestionably a best-selling personal computer with a low price of $299 that quickly made it the first computer to reach 1 million units sold.

Boom.

It ended up selling another 4 million before 1985. Neither obscure nor forgotten, Commodore was a true innovator and sales leader.

Moreover, Commodore saw such incredible demand for this exact design that sales ballooned into 20 million Commodore computers delivered, straining ability to keep up with demand. Subsequent models included the famous Amiga (easily one of the best personal computer products in history).

The Amiga offered both this keyboard design, and also a standalone thin “box” or even the amazing headless “toaster” model… Commodore had such ground-breaking engineering that by 1988 an Amiga was running like a personal computer from 1998, ten years ahead of its time.

Now in 1990, on the Mac side of the fence, Apple was still charging over $6,000 for a black and white Macintosh (like the SE/30). Before 1987, they couldn’t run more than one program at a time. When they finally did do multitasking, it was with a crash-prone method called co-operative multitasking. Contrary to popular myth, the first true pre-emptive 32-bit multitasking colour Mac didn’t arrive until the release of OS-X in 1999.

The PC side of the fence was far worse. For those who have never experienced the “joy” of a PC running MS-DOS refusing to boot because the AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS file isn’t configured correctly, just imagine the computer equivalent of root canal surgery. It didn’t get a colour pre-emptive multitasking operating system until Windows 95.

In contrast, first released in 1985, the Amiga was a useful colour video editing tool. By 1990, you could hook up to four video cameras up to one and switch between them in real time.

By 1990 we were able to take an Amiga, a keyboard with a computer inside, plug it into any television to watch videos in color that we downloaded on the Internet while we edited our documents. The high-end models like the Amiga 3000 look like a computer 20 years ahead of its time.

Taking the integrated monitor off an Apple computer to get “likes” today on a social platform is… sad.

The market seems to constantly reward laggards and follow-on products, and too easily fails to recognize true innovators, let alone keep in mind some basic knowledge of computer history.

The BBC offers sharp insight into why Russia is firing missiles at memorials to victims of Nazism, killing civilians.

Babyn Yar is now a place of quiet contemplation, where thousands of people travel to every year to remember those who died. That it could be damaged or destroyed by an aggressive military attack goes against everything it stands for. But the significance of an attack so close to Babyn Yar goes deeper. “It is symbolic that [Russian President Vladimir Putin] starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest Nazi massacre,” said the chair of Babyn Yar’s advisory board, Natan Sharansky.

A pattern of Russian ignorance and cover-ups is also laid bare in the article.

A few years after the Nazis attempted to cover their own tracks, the Soviets tried to flood the ravine with mud. Then in the 1960s, there was anger at plans to build a sports stadium there. Mr Sharansky said the construction of the TV tower directly adjacent to the memorial in the 1970s was another attempt to “destroy the memory of the Holocaust”. “There were so many attempts to erase Babyn Yar and change its nature, finally we turned it into a big memorial, and that is once again overshadowed by Russian aggression,” he said. For decades under Soviet rule, there was little to mark the massacre site, except a simple obelisk that referred to “Soviet” victims, without mentioning the Jews, who were the main victims. Finally, in the 1990s, a large Menorah monument was erected, when independent Ukraine decided to commemorate the Jewish victims. And last year a synagogue was opened.

Reads to me like the Russian mindset was to downplay systemic racism and obscure history by erecting an “all lives matter” obelisk on the spot where Nazis massacred Jews.

#RussianLivesMatter has been used to undermine the American fight against systemic racism by downplaying the impact of racism against African Americans, by suggesting police killings of Black Americans were deserved, and by framing empathy towards victims of police violence in Russia as a zero-sum game.

The Nazis killed nearly 34,000 Jews in two days in the Babyn Yar ravine, Kyiv as part of a sustained plan of genocide. Historians estimate two million were shot dead across occupied Europe.