Roddenberry's computer isn't the first Mac-Plus off the production line, as some had mistakenly stated. Rather, it's one of the very first Macintosh 128 computers built, which Apple presented to Roddenberry. According to the auction house, Apple then upgraded the computer to a Mac-Plus and gave it the Mac-Plus model number of M-0001. (Apparently, according to our sister site Gizmodo, the computer really is still a Mac-128, and the "Mac-Plus" thing is meaningless.)

Either way, the computer shows how Roddenberry was an early adopter of technology, and gives some context for the famous "Scotty tries to talk to a Mac" scene in TVH:

So how can you own Gene Roddenberry's Mac? It might even cost that much. According to auction house Profiles In History:

This amazing artifact, which is accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from Gene Roddenberry's son, Rod, will be a special addition to Profiles in History's October 8-9, 2009 auction of Hollywood memorabilia. It has an estimated sale price of $800-$1200. Worldwide bidding begins at 12:00 PM (noon) both days and can be placed either in person, via mail, phone, fax or live on the Internet at: http://www.icollector.com/Hollywood-Auction-37_a5736.

And then all you need to do is launch the Mac-Plus into space, where it'll be found by alien intelligences and upgraded to become super-intelligent, so it can come back to Earth and kill us all.

The stories available in their entirety (Stories lasted multiple episodes before the relaunch, and the iTunes store offers each story episode by episode) are suspiciously Jon Pertwee-heavy, but also include offerings from the Patrick Troughton, Tom Baker and Colin Baker eras. While we could understand skipping the William Hartnell (too old and rare) and Sylvester McCoy (let's face it, too crap, even with Sophie Aldred's Ace) Doctors, what's going on with the complete lack of Peter Davison?

Don't let that scare you away from looking at what's available, though; in addition to relative rarities like Terror Of The Autons and The Krotons, stories like The Ark In Space and especially The Three Doctors are well worth investigating.

(While you're there, why not pick up the free first episode of Primeval, in case you missed it last week?)

Doctor Who: The Classic Series [iTunes] (Via)

Last fall, Funamizu starting formalizing his drawings using programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Shade, and posted them on his web site. The blogosphere quickly picked up on them, and that led to interest from developers. "In the future, gadgets will be much more intuitive to use," says Funamizu. Here are some of his and my personal favorites:

1. The Looking Glass
In a series of posts he calls The Future of Internet Search, Funamizu explores different ways in which an intelligent transparent looking glass can help us get information without having to type tons of info into a desktop or handheld. Curious how nutritious that apple is? Want to know what the cityscape in front of you looked like 30 years ago? Just slide the looking glass over to get the info you desire. "I always wondered why I have to use keywords to search for an object that I don't know about," he says. "In order to get the right results, you have to use the right words to describe it. It's a complete paradox."

2. Bookshelves for Super-Lazy People
Funamizu believes that bookshelves of the future will either be sliding hangers that rest under your desk to neatly tuck away and keep open pages intact (similar mechanically to a file cabinet), or they'll be staggered wall units with sliding tabs so that you can sort through and reorder books without pulling each one out. "I'm very lazy," Funamizu says. "With this, I'd be able to put all the magazines and books scattered on my desk away."

3. Desktop Holography
What if the thing you were thinking about buying showed up as a 3D image that projected out of your monitor? Or if your favorite web celeb showed up in front of your face as a holographic reality? "My kids would be so happy if their favorite cartoon characters popped up from the computer screen," Funamizu says. "Also, it'd be so convenient if I could check 3D models floating in the air. I think I'd be able to create better items that way."

4. Unmistakable Shampoo & Conditioner Containers
Funamizu believes that shampoo and conditioner will be much easier to tell apart if they were stacked on top of each other, not placed side by side so that the labels are obscured. I don't know what to think, but I like the corner design. It's space-efficient and space-agey. I think the yellow meter on the side tells you how much is left so you can gauge when you need to step out to buy refills.

5. Highlight-the-Line-I'm-On Plug-in
Reading things online could be a huge pain, in part because you can't put a crease in the page where you last left off. A lot of times, I end up just reading articles half way through and forgetting about them shortly thereafter. This solves that. "I read lots of blogs, but I lose the line I'm on all the time," Funamizu says. "Please, someone, develop this plug-in!" Images by Mac Funamizu

Petit Invention [Mac Funamizu's blog]

It's no huge surprise that Apple was involved with Wall-E. After all, CEO Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney and is a large shareholder for Disney.

In the Fortune article Director Andrew Stanton describes how he envisioned Eve and even inadvertently takes a stab at IBM.

"I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous," Andrew Stanton, Wall-E's director, told Fortune. "The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design." It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in 2001: A Space Odyssey, based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

And not surprisingly, Jonathan Ive declined comment in the article. According to Stanton, Ive didn't have too much to add, and was very tight lipped on many details. It's because the chip they implant in their brain keeps all the great Apple minds in check.

If Eve was an Apple inspiration, what was little M-O inspired by? He looks a bit reminiscent of a George Foreman Grill. [Fortune Magazine via CNN Money]

A Brief History of the Reality Distortion Field

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• Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field: Apparently the Star Trekly-esque named Bud Tribble was working on a software project for Apple in 1981, and thought he had been given an unrealistic ten-month schedule from inception to ship date. When asked why he didn't just ask Steve to change it, he reportedly said "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field." Although it turns out no one could find a connection between that term and Star Trek, and thus a legend was born.
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• The Scramble Suits from A Scanner Darkly: In Phillip K. Dick's novel about drug addiction and the paranoid world on both sides of that issue, government narcotics agents wear "scramble suits" that change every aspect of the reader, shifting at a moment's notice so that people looking at someone wearing one will never be able to tell what they look like. In the novel they shift extremely quickly, but they slowed it down in the movie to show how they work. They alter your voice as well, making you the most visible invisible man/woman around: they scramble reality for everyone except you.
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• The Matrix in The Matrix: Nothing distorts reality more than entire system of machines set up to grow you from a fetus, nurture you, and feed your brain signals that tell it you're growing up normal inside a world that doesn't exist. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Sounds pretty distorty to us, although if they decided to make us some sort of science fiction superstar inside this simulation, we probably wouldn't mind. Then you'd all be invited to the rad parties we'd throw.
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• The Holodeck in Star Trek: Seriously, we could never understand why people just didn't stay on the holodeck 24/7. Sure, it's technically "not real," but it does everything you'd want a real world to do. You've got an entire library of billions and billions of option of things to simulate, plus you can even disable the security protocols making it possible to actually die while you pretend you're inside Alice in Wonderland. It's like a portable Matrix To Go (tm), so how did they ever manage to get any work done with one of these things around?
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• The world of They Live: You can blame our current obsession with this film on the fact that it's been showing up on cable a lot lately, but there's something about this Roddy Piper/John Carpenter film that makes it hard to hate. In their world, an alien signal is being beamed out that makes humans as complacent as cattle, and stops them from seeing the aliens as they actually are. Thankfully, Roddy gets some magic glasses that help him kick ass and thwart the fugly aliens. Although in retrospect, they just wanted to make him rich. Was that so bad?
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Image above from the Joy of Tech website. Full version can be seen here.

Amazon's "Unbox" program offers Heroes episodes but they don't work on the iPod. So you've got millions of people out there who want Heroes and Battlestar Galactica for their expensive little toys, and have to turn to BitTorrent to get it. Don't blame us, NBC. We're not going into the stores and stealing these off the shelves.

If they offered up formats that worked on iPods and other popular players at a nominal price (no one was really bitching that loudly about a buck ninety-nine), then the network would be able to reclaim some of this revenue stream. But if you keep using Windows-only video files and denying a large portion of your audience the goods, then yes, they'll find a way to get it.

'Heroes' tops the list of most pirated shows of 2007 [TV Squad]