[HN Gopher] Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer (2011)
___________________________________________________________________
Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer (2011)
Author : lproven
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-05-03 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| joren- wrote:
| I have just finished restoring a NeXTcube and was surprised how
| modern the environment feels: neworking, interface, unix tooling,
| .. To get to know the environment I compiled the original httpd
| server and managed to get it compiling after only tweaking the
| makefile a bit, very similar to what still is sometimes needed on
| Linux.
|
| The usability of the NeXT computers also had a lasting impact on
| interactive music applications with the introduction of MAX at
| IRCAM:
|
| https://0110.be/posts/Electronic_Music_and_the_NeXTcube_-_Ru...
| marbu wrote:
| Cool work, I wonder how hard would it be to compile the 1st
| browser/editor[1]. I have seen few source code repositories
| with it's code[2], but I'm not sure if it's complete source or
| not.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb [2]
| https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeX...
| joren- wrote:
| I have tried to compile the browser/editor, the
| worldwideweb.app, as well and failed, indeed due to having
| incomplete sources/dependencies. I did not look into it too
| much though with my main goal being to get music software
| running.
| [deleted]
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Butterfly effect is really something. Steve Jobs gets kicked out
| of Apple, builds NeXT as a form of revenge. Tim Berners-Lee buys
| a NeXT computer, finds it inspiring, and, thanks to NeXT's focus
| on a usable development environment, finds it easy to whip
| together a prototype of the WorldWideWeb. And so, even though
| none of us use NeXT computers today, thanks to one particularly
| important NeXT computer, all of us use the Internet and
| hyperlinks today. And yes, I know that much of MacOS and iOS has
| some lineage to NeXT. Still, this chain of events: Apple => NeXT
| => Tim Berners-Lee => WorldWideWeb is just bonkers for its world-
| wide ramifications.
| anthk wrote:
| Mac OS it's the new NeXT since OSX and Rhapsody.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If memory serves right, DOOM was also developed on NeXT.
| itisit wrote:
| Indeed it was: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-
| on-a-NeXT
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The million dollar question, of course, is whether Tim Berners-
| Lee--or someone else--would have built a web browser anyway, or
| at least something very similar. We don't know the
| counterfactual.
| exsf0859 wrote:
| There were tons of alternative hypertext systems before the
| world wide web.
|
| Major reasons WWW succeeded:
|
| 1) Open standard, no license required. (My understanding is
| that TB-L worked hard to make this happen.)
|
| 2) A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author,
| serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards
| compatibility.
|
| 3) One-way links. (Many other HyperText projects were hung up
| on bi-directional links.)
|
| 4) URLs didn't require any centralized authority other than
| already-existing DNS.
| rjsw wrote:
| It probably hit just the right time in terms of available
| CPU power and network speed for a text-based format to get
| accepted.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to
| author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward
| /backwards compatibility._
|
| I'm not disagreeing, but that's certainly a less often
| heard characterization of SGML ;) and also, not sure
| evolution of the HTML vocabulary past 4.x, or lack thereof,
| supports this point considering there are entire universes
| of additional syntax such as CSS and philosophical schools
| of thoughts only there to avoid having to write plain
| markup attributes. The metaphor also is apt, since, like
| the universe, CSS syntax seems to expand faster than the
| speed of light.
| mpweiher wrote:
| 5). 404s. Other systems went for total consistency. Good
| luck with that!
| scrame wrote:
| yeah, off the top of my head I remember gopher, hytelnet, I
| think there was some screwy thing built on finger, even.
|
| There was also an amiga format that was getting picked up
| for documentation and gamemanuals/guides, but the name is
| escaping me.
| ff317 wrote:
| Not to knock the amazing contributions of Tim, but IMHO
| Gopher and HyperCard had already laid a lot of the important
| concepts down in various suboptimal ways. I think there were
| enough smart people using both in the 90s that it was
| virtually inevitable that something like Tim's work was bound
| to arise somewhere, somehow, as a merger of and improvement
| on those two sets of ideas.
| peter303 wrote:
| And Xanadu. That had built in editing and bidirectional
| hyperlink. Never really took off. In many cases the free
| open source product beat the commercial product.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This. When the web first came about, it seemed evolutionary
| to me, not revolutionary, because it built on those ideas.
| amelius wrote:
| Don't forget about Minitel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
|
| > The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980
| in Saint-Malo, France (...)
|
| > From its early days, users could make online purchases,
| make train reservations, check stock prices, search the
| telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar
| way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.
| throwaway60607 wrote:
| It was similar from the user point of view, but it was
| absolutely different from creator/admin point of view. It
| was supposed to be a service provided by big
| cable/telecom companies and not something that everyone
| would've been able to use to create. The whole
| architecture gives it away - minitel is merely a display
| device to a telecom mainframe, paid per minute of
| connection. The average Joe was not supposed to create
| their own services/pages.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a
| Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...
| throwaway60607 wrote:
| Given how big telecoms usually behave, I really don't
| think so. Remember the fight for usable mobile
| internet... Ever tried WAP and developing on it?
|
| They set the whole thing up to control it and charge
| extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone
| publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is
| _peanuts_ compared to the fees I 'm talking about - I
| mean contracts with minimums in millions.
|
| Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People
| don't give them enough credit for that.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| People do seem to forget about things like Verizon
| forcing camera phone vendors to disable Bluetooth on
| their devices to prevent you from being able to transfer
| image files off the phone without going through Verizon
| and paying a per image fee.
| [deleted]
| chongli wrote:
| Don't forget about the Mother of All Demos [1] with
| Douglas Engelbart! Windows, hypertext, graphics,
| navigation and command input, video conferencing, the
| mouse, word processing, dynamic links, revision control,
| and real time collaboration; all that in 1968!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
| abudabi123 wrote:
| Rand Corp had a moonbase idea on paper two years before.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Who knows, we might have something better than a networked
| document format masquerading as an application delivery
| platform. Something in spirit to 3270 or X/RDP and
| programmable with a single language.
| ohjfjfk wrote:
| [dead]
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Interesting data point...
|
| By 1988 Theo Gray also in Urbana-Champaign, had build the
| notebook interface for Mathematica's release that summer,
| which is nowadays cloned as originally iPython Notebooks then
| generalized as Jupyter for various languages.
|
| This is still popular in the Mathematica version as well, and
| can do many things HTML browsers demonstrated years later.
| anthk wrote:
| Maxima existed far before iPython.
| amelius wrote:
| > The million dollar question
|
| Don't forget about the 150 million dollar investment made by
| Microsoft that saved Apple.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Well, yes, there was already an existing web concept out of
| University of Minnesota called Gopher:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
|
| But it had many limitations WWW/HTTP did not, and was
| crippled by restrictive licensing. Still, probably reasonably
| likely Gopher would have been riffed on by a different open
| source hacker eventually, had WWW not been created.
| adventured wrote:
| As is typical, many of the pieces were primed to lead to
| the Web outcome, and Berners-Lee was the right person in
| the right place at the right time. It certainly could have
| been someone else. Just as another company would have done
| some variation (better or worse) of what Apple did with the
| iPhone (most of the pieces were ready to do it well and
| Jobs saw that).
|
| The more intriguing question is _how_ things might have
| occurred differently, if the beginnings were derived from a
| different set of factors & actors. It could have been a
| lot more obnoxiously commercial from the beginning (AOL &
| CompuServe style).
| macintux wrote:
| My belief has been that sure, someone would have created
| a device like the iPhone, but remembering just how
| consumer-hostile the phone manufacturers and carriers
| were at the time, it would have:
|
| * required a carrier-specific App Store
|
| * been just one of 20 models sold by the manufacturer
|
| * gathered dust in their awful retail stores because the
| salespeople had no idea how to use it or incentive to
| sell it
|
| Not only did Apple create the device, but they threw
| their entire weight behind it (and of course had a built-
| in fan base eager to try it), and committed to its
| success.
|
| Even Google with Android was experimenting with multiple
| form factors, and would not have demonstrated that level
| of commitment to a single one.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| BlackBerry was a thing, and the Sidekick had traction
| among kids. Apple hit it out of the park at a time where
| BlackBerry hit the stagnation phase, the tech was good
| (but not great) for screens, etc, and Apple was sitting
| on a software framework that could be adapted phones
| quickly, there was a struggling carrier willing to do
| anything to get traction, _and_ had Apple stores full of
| happy iPod customers.
| tjoff wrote:
| That is a very US specific problem though.
|
| It would have been easy to make a store for java apps
| present on other platforms as well. Could even have been
| a java app itself or a homepage.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I think you just described Symbian.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Don't forget it was preceeded by the iPod, which had a
| momentum of popularity Apple could build on.
|
| As well, the original iPhone was a very different device
| - in my opinion the platform didn't realize its potential
| until they opened it up to third party apps and the App
| Store.
|
| I still think Palm squandered their decade headstart and
| I actually like their UI so much better. What could have
| been if only they hadn't made such terrible business
| decisions...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 3G's broadband capabilities are what I think made iPhone
| a no brainer, and AT&T's unlimited 3G data offer.
|
| Streaming music, using google maps, real time accurate
| location data with GPS, and being able to browse most
| websites.
|
| They had a sufficiently capable product available at just
| the right time to take advantage of newly rolled out
| mobile broadband networks, and in the US at least,
| coupled it with unlimited data so people would not
| hesitate to extensively use it and cultivate the new
| space.
| selectodude wrote:
| The iPhone was EDGE. It was genuinely pretty awful if not
| using Wi-Fi. It was just so incredibly far ahead of
| everything else that 2G internet was an acceptable trade
| off. AT&T literally built out a weird patchwork of Wi-Fi
| hotspots to make it more bearable.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I know, I was referring to iPhone 3G, which is what I
| thought the person who responded to me was referring to
| with:
|
| > in my opinion the platform didn't realize its potential
| until they opened it up to third party apps and the App
| Store.
|
| I do not recall iPhone in 2007 being that huge of a hit.
| It was obviously very promising, and making waves, but
| iPhone 3G summer of 2008 was a no brainer even to non
| techies. I remember there being lines at Apple stores for
| months.
| adventured wrote:
| I also think it was invaluable that the iPhone app system
| was heavily secured (app approvals/reviews/restrictions)
| and or closed in the early years. Consumers were coming
| from a terrible Windows stretch where viruses plagued the
| mass PC systems connected to the Internet. They mostly
| didn't have to worry about that while learning how to
| best utilize the iPhone in their day to day lives. Apple
| made several excellent pro-consumer choices that many
| other companies would not have (including squeezing the
| telecom companies; which at the time, Apple & Co were
| nowhere near the size they are now, pushing around big
| telecom was no small feat).
| tudorw wrote:
| Xanadu
| themadturk wrote:
| _now we are here..._
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| _A place... where nobody dared to go..._
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| _A million lights are dancing and there you are_
| marban wrote:
| Apple should have just doubled down on HyperCard
| scarface74 wrote:
| And ended up with something like Flash?
| Maursault wrote:
| Functionally speaking, the WWW is an implementation of
| HyperCard. They're very similar, again, functionally.
| bena wrote:
| Everything looks like this in hindsight. You can trace any
| significant thing through a series of seemingly unlikely
| events.
|
| You can do it with your own life and career if you wish. The
| larger things you can impact now makes the smaller things you
| did earlier look more significant.
|
| If it were something else that took off, we'd say "Wow, x, then
| y, then z happened and now we all do abc."
| alberth wrote:
| > "WorldWideWeb.app"
|
| That sounds so funny in todays time.
| TheAtomic wrote:
| I wish the person at Apple responsible for disappearing scroll
| bars, miniature, hidden, adding useless "features" would read
| this. I know, there's a setting...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| For some things there isn't even a plist setting.
|
| It's a sad turn of events that people were paid to make an OS
| less usable.
| amelius wrote:
| And the most stupid thing of all is that they tried to
| reinvent the filesystem when they developed iOS.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but it's arguably
| one of the reasons for iOS (and Android's copy of) success.
| Most people struggle with multiple levels of hierarchy
| [deleted]
| wolpoli wrote:
| "Designing the app's menus was trivial -- just drag and drop with
| InterfaceBuilder. The code framework of the app was generated
| automatically. "
|
| User Interface development has gotten more complicated since
| those early days.
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| "Steve was a champion of usable technology - even sexy
| technology. Intuitive on the outside and extensible and cool
| engineering on the inside. "
|
| There's still some examples of this in Apple current products and
| OSes, but I wonder how many more "intuitive" and "extensible and
| cool engineering" choices we'd see in their products today if he
| was still alive.
|
| Apple's trajectory over the last decade has been simultaneously
| impressive and depressing to watch through. I miss Steve.
| Lammy wrote:
| > the optical disks proved unreliable
|
| Fun fact: this is what the "spinning beachball" cursor
| represents. The wait cursor looked like a magneto-optical disc in
| NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody/Cheetah/Puma because original (1988) NeXT Cube
| booted from a single MO, no HDD. It was redrawn into a glossy
| sphere in Jagwire.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-03 23:01 UTC)