on 5 September 1997www.maconan.com/97.09.01—Rumours from wherever it is journalists get rumours, ie, other journalists or, on a quiet day, themselves, strongly indicate, whatever the heck that means, that an announcement later today (Eastern Standard Time, for the sake of sounding more cosmopolitan and, you know, businesslike, despite the entire computer industry being on the opposite coast and not giving a damn what time it is in Washington, but there you are) will confirm the merger, ie takeover, with or of, or possibly by, Apple Computer, Inc, by or of a consortium comprising Power Computing, Motorola, Oracle, Sun, Power Computing, IBM, Sony, Bandai, Power Computing, Fisher-Price, Princess Diana, Dodi al Fayed, Gateway 2000, space aliens, Power Computing, and the yellow one with the stupid voice out of Teletubbies.
Our exclusive high-level contacts at all of the above companies were unavailable for comment when we called them during the middle of the night (their time) and left a garbled message on their voicemail, those of them whose numbers we could actually get from AT&T Information, and who hadn’t resigned the previous day after their board of directors respectfully suggested they might like to stop whining and throwing their toys out the pram and get a frigging grip, but anyway, the rumours were lent fresh weight, or whatever, this morning by reports from inside one of the companies concerned (which we can’t name for reasons of making the story seem more interesting and/or less fictitious), or at least from some company or other when they hacked into the Norwegian A]>]>leW@tc}{™ site yesterday and posted a fake story to this effect which we’ll pretend to believe for a couple of hours before exposing it as a hoax one nanosecond before all the other zillion sites exactly the same as this one, that there was, probably, a meeting, or lunch, or some guys got together in a bar, at or near one of the other companies, or with the same name as a building they once hired for a press conference we think we remember, and, like, talked about stuff.
Meanwhile, in a related story, everyone else in the industry, and every Mac journalist, and every Mac owner, and everyone who’s currently thinking about buying a Mac or might, in the future, be born and grow up and see an advert for a Mac and start wondering if it’s a good thing to get, called us up or emailed us today and asked if we would please, finally, just, stop.
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adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper