9 ms·

After more or less six years of running this demo, a designer (Steve) steps in and makes a couple suggestions that very much improved the experience, suggestion

After more or less six years of running this demo, a designer (Steve) steps in and makes a couple suggestions that very much improved the experience, suggestions that took only a few seconds to implement in Alan’s own words. Alan seems to poopoo Steves’s visit but it highlights exactly why the computer industry needed Jobs.

copenja 9y ago
Do you feel that the value of Steve Jobs is underappreciated? In the mainstream media he has received perhaps more attention and praise than anyone else in the computer industry. He is widely considered to be a genius and given nearly sole credit for a wide range of innovations. I think it's okay for the guys who invented the GUI to also get a small fist bump.
- pdpi 9y ago
  In mainstream media, Jobs is a god amongst men. In technical circles, he's demonised. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle, and the HN audience in particular is one that probably needs reminding that he did have valuable input to contribute.
  - blackguardx 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. There are plenty of people here that recognize Jobs' positive contributions. In fact, most HN threads about Jobs devolve into acolytes fighting detractors.
  - mehrdada 9y ago
    > The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle I have found [irrespective of this case] that this statement is just not true. Often, the truth is not in the middle but at one of the extremes, or even beyond them.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    "The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle" This statement ticks me off to an unreasonable degree. The truth is complicated. Any clear spectrum drawn between 2 points is an artificial construct. There is no reason to suppose that the truth would just happen to lie in the middle of an artificial spectrum. In fact if it did on average it would be incredibly strange. Further the world is full of morons who espouse clearly ridiculous things and the truth doesn't lie somewhere midway between sanity and insanity. Jobs is a great businessman who excelled at turning other peoples ideas into piles of money not at making the world a better place. People like kay changed the way people interact with computers. Jobs isn't halfway between god and demon hes just not that important.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    I think the demonization you're referring to is rooted in the fact that he receives or takes credit for innovations he helped refine but definitely didn't invent. Where as the inventers receive little to no credit of appreciation for their contributions.
tyingq 9y ago
I don't discount Jobs' influence, but I think people tend to dismiss the degree to which luck is involved. Jobs certainly made plenty of mistakes, but was in the right place, at the right time, enough times to overcome them. I tend to think if you take Jobs, or Gates, or any other icon out of the picture, somebody else would have filled the void. And the end state might be slightly different, but not that much. Maybe Kildall, CP/M, and GEM would have filled part of the Apple void, for example.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Every successful person had some event(s) that are lucky. Dismissing a person's accomplishments because they got lucky in some way is disingenuous. Unlucky people get hit by cars and never fulfill their potential. Jobs defined how the mass market 8-bit computers looked for example[1]. GEM wouldn't exist without the Mac, and well, CP/M was actually the first choice but some people have one bad day. If the giants of the industry didn't exist then we'd be living in an alternate reality with different pillars to support later people. I often think about Rome. They had all the technology to move to something like the steam engine. Maybe someone in the empire got close and just had some bad days, but it never really got done until much later. People who see something different are not interchangeable. You might get close, but all the experience that brought someone to a point isn't going to be duplicated. Parallel inventions happen, but even they are not exact duplicates (e.g. a different notation for Calculus). 1) it is almost a iPhone type display on how 8-bit computers looked before the Apple ][ and then after. This is no way says anything about my opinion of which 8-bit computer was the best.
  - fragmede 9y ago
    A slightly more "we're-living-it" example is to look at Elon Musk and Tesla. Mr. Musk has succeeded in convincing the auto industry to make electric cars. Not all by himself, mind you, certainly the EU emissions regulatory environment had something to do with the "convincing", but nor were those regulations dreamed up in a world where Tesla did not exist. Fisker tried and failed at around the same time Tesla was making the roadster, so while there is certainly an element of luck to Elon Musk's success, saying it's all due to luck undercuts the fact that he's also worked very, very hard to get where he is - there are stories about him sleeping in the factory so he can do QC inspections himself. I'm doubtful that electric cars would be in the same position they are in today, if this single individual, Elon Musk, had not existed, but that's impossible to prove - there were hobbyists who were converting Mazda Miatas and Honda Civics to electric engines, without Mr. Musk, would one of those hobbyists have "made it big" and managed to the auto industry into the future?
carussell 9y ago
What are you saying? Did Jobs's suggestions improve things so much that they wrapped around to being terrible or something? Because virtually every single desktop or mobile UI in the world—including Mac and iOS—does the Smalltalk thing and highlights the text, not the Jobs thing to put a box outline around it. This is embarrassingly unrepentant idol worship.
torgoguys 9y ago
1. Jobs' suggestion of outlining text is not the norm today. 2. Pixel by pixel scrolling is, but that it was done line-by-line on the Xerox computer could have been a deliberate performance concession for this 70s era hardware. Redrawing large sections of the screen over and over (for every pixel of scroll) was very slow by modern standards and not redrawing every pixel was often preferable on those systems even if you could do it.
- timthelion 9y ago
  Pixel by pixel scrolling was so hard, that one of the parts of the original MSWindows drawing api was "shift up/down by one pixel" for the purpose of scrolling and this was to hardware accelerated on systems that supported it. The API was otherwise completely low level.
- alankay1 9y ago
  See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for other reasons.
agumonkey 9y ago
I don't like to shit on steve jobs, he was a cultural father (like gates, or other figures of that cherished era). That said, what jobs saw was the outer layer, the shallow experience. It has hard consequences: - it's what the user wants to feel quickly: beauty (it drives sales also) - it's not what the user wants to have: understanding (it's .. non existent for a commercial market) both are true, still the elusion of the underlying layer saddens me to no end. Another example: the copy key, in mainstream OSes you copy some text, in PARC OS, you copy an object, the whole graph; it's life altering in capabilities and simplicity. It even has a dedicated key !
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  On the Mac desktop copy and paste has long (always?) worked with file & folder icons, i.e. objects.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    I believe it was a per application design. File explorer could copy folder and files (windows too). But you can't copy anything out of the box.
    - robotresearcher 9y ago
      The macOS Finder comes in the box. Copy paste a file icon to replicate a file. I just tried it and it works.
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        can you copy an application ? a window ? a structured paragraph ?
        lostlogin 9y ago
        Yes to an app, no to a window and I don’t know what a structured paragraph is. I can’t explain how but being able to copy a window seems like it would break the metaphor.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
alankay1 9y ago
See my comment above, including the last paragraph

copenja 9y ago

Do you feel that the value of Steve Jobs is underappreciated? In the mainstream media he has received perhaps more attention and praise than anyone else in the computer industry. He is widely considered to be a genius and given nearly sole credit for a wide range of innovations. I think it's okay for the guys who invented the GUI to also get a small fist bump.

pdpi 9y ago
In mainstream media, Jobs is a god amongst men. In technical circles, he's demonised. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle, and the HN audience in particular is one that probably needs reminding that he did have valuable input to contribute.
- blackguardx 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. There are plenty of people here that recognize Jobs' positive contributions. In fact, most HN threads about Jobs devolve into acolytes fighting detractors.
- mehrdada 9y ago
  > The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle I have found [irrespective of this case] that this statement is just not true. Often, the truth is not in the middle but at one of the extremes, or even beyond them.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  "The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle" This statement ticks me off to an unreasonable degree. The truth is complicated. Any clear spectrum drawn between 2 points is an artificial construct. There is no reason to suppose that the truth would just happen to lie in the middle of an artificial spectrum. In fact if it did on average it would be incredibly strange. Further the world is full of morons who espouse clearly ridiculous things and the truth doesn't lie somewhere midway between sanity and insanity. Jobs is a great businessman who excelled at turning other peoples ideas into piles of money not at making the world a better place. People like kay changed the way people interact with computers. Jobs isn't halfway between god and demon hes just not that important.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  I think the demonization you're referring to is rooted in the fact that he receives or takes credit for innovations he helped refine but definitely didn't invent. Where as the inventers receive little to no credit of appreciation for their contributions.

tyingq 9y ago

I don't discount Jobs' influence, but I think people tend to dismiss the degree to which luck is involved. Jobs certainly made plenty of mistakes, but was in the right place, at the right time, enough times to overcome them. I tend to think if you take Jobs, or Gates, or any other icon out of the picture, somebody else would have filled the void. And the end state might be slightly different, but not that much. Maybe Kildall, CP/M, and GEM would have filled part of the Apple void, for example.

protomyth 9y ago
Every successful person had some event(s) that are lucky. Dismissing a person's accomplishments because they got lucky in some way is disingenuous. Unlucky people get hit by cars and never fulfill their potential. Jobs defined how the mass market 8-bit computers looked for example[1]. GEM wouldn't exist without the Mac, and well, CP/M was actually the first choice but some people have one bad day. If the giants of the industry didn't exist then we'd be living in an alternate reality with different pillars to support later people. I often think about Rome. They had all the technology to move to something like the steam engine. Maybe someone in the empire got close and just had some bad days, but it never really got done until much later. People who see something different are not interchangeable. You might get close, but all the experience that brought someone to a point isn't going to be duplicated. Parallel inventions happen, but even they are not exact duplicates (e.g. a different notation for Calculus). 1) it is almost a iPhone type display on how 8-bit computers looked before the Apple ][ and then after. This is no way says anything about my opinion of which 8-bit computer was the best.
- fragmede 9y ago
  A slightly more "we're-living-it" example is to look at Elon Musk and Tesla. Mr. Musk has succeeded in convincing the auto industry to make electric cars. Not all by himself, mind you, certainly the EU emissions regulatory environment had something to do with the "convincing", but nor were those regulations dreamed up in a world where Tesla did not exist. Fisker tried and failed at around the same time Tesla was making the roadster, so while there is certainly an element of luck to Elon Musk's success, saying it's all due to luck undercuts the fact that he's also worked very, very hard to get where he is - there are stories about him sleeping in the factory so he can do QC inspections himself. I'm doubtful that electric cars would be in the same position they are in today, if this single individual, Elon Musk, had not existed, but that's impossible to prove - there were hobbyists who were converting Mazda Miatas and Honda Civics to electric engines, without Mr. Musk, would one of those hobbyists have "made it big" and managed to the auto industry into the future?

carussell 9y ago

What are you saying? Did Jobs's suggestions improve things so much that they wrapped around to being terrible or something? Because virtually every single desktop or mobile UI in the world—including Mac and iOS—does the Smalltalk thing and highlights the text, not the Jobs thing to put a box outline around it. This is embarrassingly unrepentant idol worship.

torgoguys 9y ago

1. Jobs' suggestion of outlining text is not the norm today. 2. Pixel by pixel scrolling is, but that it was done line-by-line on the Xerox computer could have been a deliberate performance concession for this 70s era hardware. Redrawing large sections of the screen over and over (for every pixel of scroll) was very slow by modern standards and not redrawing every pixel was often preferable on those systems even if you could do it.

timthelion 9y ago
Pixel by pixel scrolling was so hard, that one of the parts of the original MSWindows drawing api was "shift up/down by one pixel" for the purpose of scrolling and this was to hardware accelerated on systems that supported it. The API was otherwise completely low level.
alankay1 9y ago
See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for other reasons.

agumonkey 9y ago

I don't like to shit on steve jobs, he was a cultural father (like gates, or other figures of that cherished era). That said, what jobs saw was the outer layer, the shallow experience. It has hard consequences: - it's what the user wants to feel quickly: beauty (it drives sales also) - it's not what the user wants to have: understanding (it's .. non existent for a commercial market) both are true, still the elusion of the underlying layer saddens me to no end. Another example: the copy key, in mainstream OSes you copy some text, in PARC OS, you copy an object, the whole graph; it's life altering in capabilities and simplicity. It even has a dedicated key !

robotresearcher 9y ago
On the Mac desktop copy and paste has long (always?) worked with file & folder icons, i.e. objects.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  I believe it was a per application design. File explorer could copy folder and files (windows too). But you can't copy anything out of the box.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    The macOS Finder comes in the box. Copy paste a file icon to replicate a file. I just tried it and it works.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      can you copy an application ? a window ? a structured paragraph ?
      - lostlogin 9y ago
        Yes to an app, no to a window and I don’t know what a structured paragraph is. I can’t explain how but being able to copy a window seems like it would break the metaphor.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

alankay1 9y ago

See my comment above, including the last paragraph