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Comment by paulsutter | Hacker News Reader

For nostalgia's sake, here's Elon's speech to employees after the first successful launch of Falcon 1 (flight 4), in 2008 at Kwajalein Atoll:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FQhtMrUQlE&t=32m30s

(speech begins at 32:30, in case link doesn't work)

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He's definitely matured a ton as a speaker. I mean, he isn't smooooth now, but there are far fewer pauses, to the point where it's just another striking feature about him instead of making his words hard to follow.

Also, the kid being held aloft at 34:20 was a very cute touch. https://youtu.be/8FQhtMrUQlE?t=34m20s

Why does this video look like it was shot in 1990? Camera quality can't have been that bad in 2008, can it?

Might have been an early mobile phone camera.

I don't think the video was shot with a mobile camera, but probably a DV camera typical of the day – Canon XL1 was pretty popular if I recall. These days you can record HD video on your cell phone, but a decade ago (and recall, the original iPhone was released just in the year prior to this video) you had to get dedicated equipment that would run in the thousands of dollars.

Camera quality has absolutely exploded in the last decade, when compared with how much they've shrunk, and Apple certainly had a role to play in that transformation. I'm not at all surprised that video from a decade ago looks so dated compared with video today.

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