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- It's "Pull Together, Fight the Foe Foe Foe" because it has to rhyme with the previous line, which is "Go Toronto Argos Go Go Go". :-)
- If we sang "Pull Together, Fight the Edmonton Elks" it would neither scan nor rhyme. :-)
- Yes, it's an old-timey song, written by legendary Toronto tunesmith Johnny Burt and recorded by legendary Vancouver bandleader Dal Richards on his seminal 1968 album CFL Songs - but it's also a link to a previous era.
A different story about Apple and NeXT
Today’s the 27th anniversary of the Apple/NeXT merger, and instead of my annual rehashing of what that was like, you can just read what I wrote up for the 25th Anniversary.
So here’s a slightly different Apple/NeXT memory.
I really knew nothing about the Mac growing up. Although Dad had bought an Apple II, I never really even touched a Mac, not even in university.
(I do remember one other grad student who was using his Mac to write his thesis, while the rest of us were using LaTeX or troff or some other Unix command line formatting thing on the mighty Vax 11/780, which proved we were REAL computer scientists. Oh, how we laughed at Terry, trying to write his thesis on that Mac toy. Of course he got the last laugh, he finished his work about a year quicker than I did.)
In 1995 or so while working for Steve Jobs at NeXT, we had some sort of a sales contest. If your region hit 120% of its quota, you’d win a big-screen TV.
Our region did OK, and I did not particularly want a 1995-era big screen TV - which would have been some giant rear-projection thing in a huge cabinet - so I bravely asked the NeXT sales VP, “Can I get a Mac instead? I hear they’re kind of interesting. And we’ve got a two year old here and there are some educational games etc etc” and the VP said, “Sure.”
So, NeXT bought me a Performa 5200CD, which had a place of honour on our kitchen breakfast nook for years.
We had a lot of fun with that computer, even though I have since read that architecturally, it was one of the worst Macs. But what did I know? We hooked up a Microsoft EasyBall to it - a giant trackball, the size and colour of a grapefruit - and spent many happy days playing classics from Humongous like Backyard Baseball, or Freddy Fish, or Putt-Putt, or my favourite, Let’s Explore the Airport, with Buzzy the Knowledge Bug.
Buzzy would explore the airport, and you got to operate baggage conveyor belts and try to steer bags to the right destination.
update: holy cow there is a full 90 minute walkthrough of this game, and now I am getting superextranostalgic watching it - here’s part of the baggage handling game -
Of course this machine didn’t have Wifi, nothing did back then, but I managed to string an Ethernet cable from my office upstairs to the kitchen, thinking “It’d be nice if I could print from this Mac to my NeXT printer upstairs How hard can that be? It’s just a Unix print queue”
Well, interoperability was not exactly the Mac’s strong point back then. I think I dropped a couple of hundred bucks on some sort of Mac print spooler package that was supposed to let you print to a Unix printer and never could quite get it to work.
I spent a lot of time futzing with that. My wife, trying to be helpful, would say “Why don’t we just buy another printer and connect it to the Mac directly?”
because that would not be FUN, that’s why.
I don’t think I can quite spin this story as “Steve Jobs bought me my first Mac”, although it was Steve’s VP Marty Yam who did, but anyway, architecture be damned, my kids and I had a lot of fun with that Mac, and I started to think the odd positive thought about Apple, and a year later, Apple acquired me and 400 other NeXT employees.
Happy anniversary. Especially to the handful of us NeXT folks who are still here at Apple.
The story of Go Argos Go - the Toronto Argonauts Fight Song
Sing along with the bouncing ball! (The lyrics start 30 seconds in to the above video.)
Words and music by Johnny Burt From the 1968 album CFL Songs, by Dal Richards and his orchestra.
Go, Toronto Argos, Go Go Go!
Pull Together, Fight the Foe Foe Foe!
Scoring touchdowns for the Blue on Blue
The Argos will win for you!Full of fight and courage you can’t stop
They pile up the points until they reach the top!
Pull Together ‘til the Grey Cup’s won!
Go Argos Go Toronto Go! (second time only)
Go Argos Go Go Go!
about this song
Here are some thoughts on “Go Toronto Argos Go Go Go”, inspired by a comment I read that called the fight song ‘ridiculous’ and questioned the lyric “fight the foe”.
I happen to know one of the quartet of singers from this album and I can really hear his voice when they play this song at the games. (I did a whole podcast episode about this 20 years ago, I’ll have to dig that up.)
Just like the slogan Pull Together, the Oxford and Cambridge Blue colour scheme, and even the name Argonauts, the ritual playing and (I hope) singing of this song reminds us of the long history this team has in Toronto and gives the franchise a sense of permanence, and (I also hope) gives the fans a sense of community.
Many teams have an ancient fight song that they still enjoy today.
Chicago Bears fans love singing Bear Down, Chicago Bears, which dates from the 1940s and was written in celebration of a 73-0 victory over Washington. It’s part of their identity. And they still sing it loud and proud.
Washington fans have their own tradition - Hail to the Commanders, which of course was written with a previous team name, but dates to 1937. It’s a great tune too.
And needless to say, every big time college football program features a memorable traditional song sung joyously by the crowd, dating WAY back. USC’s Fight On? 1922. On, Wisconsin? 1909. Notre Dame’s Victory March? 1905. Michigan’s The Victors? it’s from 1898.
The Argos even had an older song called Yea, Argos but sadly I have never come across a recording or even the sheet music.
So, what we have is Go Toronto Argos Go Go Go, and personally, I celebrate it and I’m thrilled when I see others singing and/or clapping along You don’t have to sing along, although I wish you would, but I hope you can cherish some of these links to the past.
There are plenty of other new fangled things - hey, how about that halftime drone show at the 150th Anniversary game? That was cool and unexpected! - but I’m happy we can still hold on to and encourage legendary artifacts like Go Argos Go as well.
Regards, A Charter Member of the Go Argos Go Appreciation Society
PS. I was deeply honoured to meet the late Dal Richards, the long time BC Lions bandleader and the impresario behind the CFL Songs album, in Vancouver in 2014. He kindly autographed a copy of the album for me…
… and in 2015 donated it to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, where it rightfully belongs.
Outside the former downtown Hamilton location of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame; it’s since moved to Tim Hortons Field.
(with Hall of Fame manager Andrea Lane)
Apple + NeXT, 25 years ago today.
25 years ago today, I was a field systems engineer for NeXT, one of three NeXT employees in Canada - and our family was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, introducing a three week old baby to his grandmother.
Nobody had reliable cell phones back then, so most messaging was done through a voice mail system called Audix, and somehow I still remember the number. 1-800-345-5588. I dialled it the other day. Number not in service. But I can still dial it quickly.
So anyway, we got a sudden Audix message. Urgent. Everyone must dial in at 2 PM. I went looking for a reliable land line for the call, not having much idea what it was about, and somehow wound up on a pay phone at the Steamtown Railroad Museum. (which I kind of wanted to visit anyway.)
And there, we learned that NeXT had agreed to be acquired by Apple for $400,000,000.
In retrospect, the tech involved in the merger wound up being so one-sided that many people say “NeXT actually bought Apple for negative $400,000,000.” A few years later, something like 70% of Apple’s VPs were ex-NeXT people.
I was floored. I didn’t expect this at all.
NeXT was struggling. Our founder, Steve Jobs, seemed to be spending all his time at his other company, Pixar, and although we just just eked out our first quarterly operating profit (mostly based on selling WebObjects, a Java application server) we weren’t exactly setting the world on fire.
Here’s the sort of thing NeXT was selling at the time - a press release from three weeks before the merger, touting CyberSlice, a revolutionary new system for (get this!) ordering pizza from your computer. (WebObjects was also powering the Disney and Dell online stores, and Steve had even demoed using it to buy a plane ticket through a web browser. Heady stuff for the mid-1990s.)
"CyberSlice has enabled any small or large pizza provider to get online," said Steven P. Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software. "NeXT is excited to provide the enabling technology to CyberSlice, which combines fun with an innovative business concept. The success of CyberSlice shows the versatility of WebObjects in creating and deploying consumer web applications that are both sophisticated and original."
It must have been killing Steve Jobs that his vision of a revolutionary new workstation and operating system for higher education hadn’t panned out and that he was now reduced to selling enterprise server software for $50,000 a copy.
Apple was seemingly caught in a death spiral too and was getting awfully close to running out of money.
two weeks earlier
Two weeks earlier, I’d got a call from a former NeXT colleague Barb, who’d gone to work for Apple. She wanted to know if I wanted to come along.
“No thank you”, I replied politely, when what I was really thinking was “What, that bunch of losers? Why would I go there? They’re the only company going out of business faster than WE are.”
But the merger happened anyway, and Barb called me about a minute after it was announced to say “Well, we really wanted to hire you, so this is the only plan we could think of.”
I always wondered if the message of “We really need to hire Steve from NeXT” got garbled somehow.
shortly thereafter
Barb called and invited me to visit Apple’s office in Markham to “show us what the heck it was we just bought.”
What Apple was most interested in was NeXT’s NeXTSTEP operating system that originally came with the NeXT cube but had been ported to run on Intel systems as well. I wasn’t even using that day-to-day any more; most of my work was using WebObjects on Windows NT. But I managed to reinstall NeXTSTEP on my Toshiba Tecra, and took that up to Markham for a demo to the Apple team.
I remember struggling to get my laptop to work with their weird mutant boardroom projector, and thinking “geez, I hope this works.” and I wasn’t just thinking about the projector.
Ultimately we got it to work at a cramped 640x480 resolution and I was able to show off NeXTSTEP, Unix, Interface Builder and (horrors) the Terminal program, which was pretty much the opposite of what Apple had been providing.
Everybody at NeXT was so unclear that this merger was going to work that we all handed out our NeXT business cards for as long as those phone numbers and emails still worked. (Remind me to write up my “I was steve@next.com” story some time too.)
eventually all was well.
It worked out OK, though. The merger happened at a historic low point for Apple, and once Steve Jobs came back as CEO, an incredible technical and business turnaround began.
NeXT’s software and hardware became the foundation of everything Apple made. The NeXTSTEP operating system - which NeXT was just about to shelve, until a midlevel NeXT guy John Landwehr (hi John! How are things at Adobe?) cold-called Apple’s CTO Ellen Hancock to ask if they needed a robust operating system because Mac OS was really shaky - became the foundation of Mac OS X; NeXT’s Project Builder and Interface Builder became Xcode; NeXT’s love of the Objective-C language eventually created Swift.
And, all that technology that I started learning when I bought my $11,000 NeXT cube in Indiana in 1988 now runs on my phone. And my watch! On my wrist. Objective-C and NeXTSTEP runs on my wrist today. Crazy.
And here we are. It’s been a pretty amazing run.
The three week old baby turned out to be a fine young man too.
My NeXT badge, and over my shoulder, my NeXT cube.
the people
At the time of the merger, NeXT had about 400 employees, and Apple had only a few thousand. Today. Apple has 160,000 people. I’m curious how many of the NeXT crew are still here. I know about a dozen, and I’m sure there are more. 100 maybe? Who knows. We’ve all been incredibly lucky.
PS. This is a photo of the last ever gathering of NeXT employees before the merger was legally finalized. To my great regret, I was not able to get out to NeXT’s HQ in Redwood City for this picture, but it sure brings back a lot of memories.
The John Davidson Show
40 years ago today, I was on The John Davidson Show.
Yes, me.
Yes, THAT John Davidson.
âThatâs incredibleâ, youâre thinking.
Yes I suppose it was, but not that show.
You know. The John Davidson Show. This one -
It woulda been mentioned in here. Well, I probably wasnât mentioned, but that episodeâs guest star Todd Bridges would have been.
Perhaps youâre wondering how I, Steve, happened to be interviewed by John Davidson on the John Davidson show, 40 years ago today.
Or perhaps you arenât. Understandable.
S1Ep224. Johnâs guests are actors Danny Thomas and Todd Bridges, singer Bill Medley and Joan Embery of the San Diego Zoo. Highlights:Bill Medley sings "Hey Girl".
It is our sincere hope that there is no video of John asking audience members trivia questions at the end of the show.
My 1981 Train Trip to California
So, OK. I was in California. Shortly after graduating from Waterloo, I took the train all the way from London to Los Angeles as part of swell grad present from my parents - A two week Amtrak pass. I headed first to Sacramento for the grand opening of the California Railroad Museum. That was great. A big pageant of music and locomotives.
Then, down to LA And beautiful downtown Burbank. I really wanted to see the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Stood in a long line for tickets. Eventually got to see his show that night. It was outstanding.
I got to take a tour of the NBC Studios, and while there, I actually met Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. As if this trip didnât have enough highlights already.
Somewhere in there, somebody was desperately trying to get people to come to a taping of the John Davidson show, a daytime talk show that I think had been a replacement for Merv Griffin.
John was a singer of some repute, and also the host of âThatâs Incredible.â
His daytime talk show, I was soon to learn, was not that incredible.
Well, the tickets were free, and I had time to kill before seeing Johnny Carson, so why not. Into the studio we went.
suddenly I'm in the audience
Now, when I saw the Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, it was incredibly slick. They didnât mess around. The band played right through the commercial break and the show picked right up again. No stopping. One take. Brilliant comedy. High production values. Carson, a total pro.
The John Davidson Show was not quite like that.
So, the show always started with John Davidson singing a song. He really was a good singer. And the day I was there, he announced to us ahead of time that he was going to do the Barry Manilow classic, âCopacabana.â Hey, thisâll be good. Descending some stairs. Fog machine. OK!
Show starts. Roll tape! Lights! Camera! Fog machine! Backing band! We are GO for Copacabana!
15 seconds later, song stops. Cut. John Davidson cannot remember the words. He confesses to the audience, off air, that heâs never heard this song before.
Srsly? Copacabana?
After a couple more takes, they have a complete version in the can somehow, and the show continues.
Iâm sitting in the audience, halfway back on the aisle, looking at my watch, wondering how long this is going to go on, and when the Tonight Show taping that I really wanted to see starts.
(5:30. The tonight show taped at 5:30.)
Can I just add here that John Davidson struck me as an extremely nice guy, even if he couldnât remember the words to âCopacabanaâ.
end of show trivia segment
So the show continues, mostly without incident, and they interview Todd Bridges, and it was getting towards the end of the episode And I suddenly remembered: Oh, doesnât John Davidson ask audience members trivia questions at the end of show? And look at me, here on the aisle.
Here we go, final segment. Trivia time. Souvenir coffee cup prizes. John Davidson approaches a woman in the front row, and asks her a question. I donât remember what it was, but he said the answer was wrong. Was it, though? (Foreshadowing.) He moves on to another contestant.
Now, I have seen a recording of this, recorded by pointing a Super-8 movie camera at the live TV broadcast.
Let me describe what happens, in an impartial observer kind of tone.
John Davidson looks around the audience for another trivia contestant, and makes a beeline for the nerdiest, geekiest-looking doofus in the crowd, and sticks out his microphone.
so of course I stand up.
the dorkiest thing I have ever said
He asked my name, and we have a pleasant little chat, and he asked me what I do, and Iâm thinking that I just graduated from Waterloo with a particular degree and Iâm not really sure what I do and I havenât started my first job yet, but I blurt out âIâm a computer scientist.â
I really wish I could edit that part out.
Audience: âOooooohâ.
40 years later, Iâm still cringing about what a dork I mustâve looked like at that moment. On national TV no less.
But, no matter. The show must go on. John Davidson hits me with a trivia question.
I donât remember what the question was, but I got it right somehow, and the band played a little âTa-da!â and John Davidson handed me a souvenir John Davidson show coffee mug.
I shouldâve just sat down.
But, for some reason, egged on by the director, John Davidson kept asking me trivia questions.
I think he asked me six questions. And I got them all right, somehow.
The only one I remember is this.
John Davidson: âWhere are Panama hats made?â Me, recognizing a trick question: âThey are not made in Panama, theyâre made in Ecuador!â
Tada, another coffee mug.
panama hats
I donât know why I knew that 40 years ago, but now that Iâm a grown-up, I actually own a Panama hat and I can confirm this.
six mugs
Anyway, show is almost over. John Davidson thanks me, I sit down, with my set of six John Davidson show coffee mugs â And the Director is frantically signaling to John Davidson about something.
âWhat? She was right?â John Davidson says.
Remember the first contestant from about 47 paragraphs ago?
âShe gets a mug tooâ, he announces.
And then, this might be the highlight of my television career (and let me remind you, that includes leading band at the world beer games opening ceremony)
the best part
John Davidson turns to me and says:
âWeâre out of mugs! Steve, can we have one of those back?â
And of course I turned one over. I still regret that I did not ask John Davidson a trivia question in return for the mug.
So thatâs what I was doing 40 years ago today. My sincere thanks to John Davidson . That really was fun.
epilogue
So youâve still got those John Davidson Show coffee mugs, right?
Sadly, no. A few broke and the others eventually faded to pure white after multiple dishwashings.
I think I’ll order some more, somehow.
another epilogue
Hey, how about that -
