5 ms·

This article fawns over a guy who quite mistakenly thought his terrible automation software was better than Windows, who then went on to "invent" callback URLs.

saagarjha 8y ago
> This article fawns over a guy who quite mistakenly thought his terrible automation software was better than Windows The technology behind it was (and still is) amazing. I'm not aware of anything in any other major operating system that even comes close. > who then went on to "invent" callback URLs No, that was Greg Pierce. Soghoian was still at Apple at that point.
- db48x 8y ago
  Perhaps it depends on how you define "major", but Smalltalk and the Lisp Machine come to mind.
- stormking 8y ago
  > I'm not aware of anything in any other major operating system that even comes close. ARexx on AmigaOS was pretty similar and shipped first (1990).
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    I wouldn't consider that to be a major operating system.
    - stormking 8y ago
      It was, in the day (and market).
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      The AmigaOS was far more advanced than MacOS in 1990 just as the Amiga hardware was 5 years more advanced than the Mac at launch. There were about 5 million Amigas in circulation, especially in Europe, by 1990. How many home users owned Macs at that point? Apple users seem to overstate the importance of early pre-OSX Apple. For example, The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out)
      - code_duck 8y ago
        As a child with a c64 at home, every school I attended had computer labs stocked with Apple IIes. I was often struck by the inferiority of the Apple II to the Commodore (to say nothing of how impressive the Amiga was). It couldn't even display monochrome text normally.
      - stormking 8y ago
        I wouldn't even go to comparisons. An operating system that for roughly a decade had several million users was a "major operating system", period. We're not talking about some obscure research system here, that only very few people used. It was mainstream.
      - mschaef 8y ago
        > The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful There's no doubt that the Commodore 64 had better graphics and sound hardware, but the idea that it's more powerful in general seems dubious at best. By the time 1983-84 rolled around, an Apple ][ machine was available with 80 column text, 128KB of memory, and a disk that transferred data 30 times faster than the 1541. Sprites and 3-voice audio are nice and all, but it doesn't make the C64 the machine I'd have chosen (even then) for anything other than games. The 1541 disk is notably amazing because that blazing performance was the result of making the disk drive an entirely separate computer in its own right. This did at least make it possible to upload new firmware to the drive to improve the performance... but that was hardly standard. The only material advantages to the 1541 disk architecture was that it let the main machine be slightly cheaper, and it also enabled single disk drives to be multiplexed across multiple C64's. From an educational point of view, it's also interesting to compare the difference in graphics programming models. Drawing a line on the screen in Applesoft: 10 HGR 20 HPLOT 100, 120 to 150, 200 Drawing a line on the screen in Commodore BASIC 2.0: 1. Switch the machine to graphics modes by POKEing data into graphics hardware control registers 2. Implement something like Bresenham's algorithm to get the pixels on the screen. One of these is something that an interested layperson (teacher) can communicate to a class of elementary school students. The other is something out of an upper division undergraduate computer science curriculum. (Admittedly, Terrapin's wonderful C64 Logo made things a lot better for the Commodore.) > and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out) It's important to consider the machines in their historical contexts. The Commodore 64 and Amiga were great machines at single points in time, but neither of them were created by an organization with the capability to effectively continue and promote their development. (ie: How much of the C64's success was due to setting its price so low that it couldn't fund ongoing development of the platform? Or due to short-term gains produced by a management strategy that alienated key allies in the long term?) Viewed in that context today, Apple is now the most valuable company in the world and successful to the extent that I can look across the aisle of this train and see somebody watching a movie on an Apple product. Commodore, in contrast, is happy memories, a bankrupt company that hasn't existed for decades, and a condemned Superfund environmental contamination site in a Philadelphia suburb. While I have great personal fondness for the C64 machines, there are reasons the industry turned out the way that it did, reasons for Commodore's failure, and reasons for Apple's success... including the Apple ][.

saagarjha 8y ago

> This article fawns over a guy who quite mistakenly thought his terrible automation software was better than Windows The technology behind it was (and still is) amazing. I'm not aware of anything in any other major operating system that even comes close. > who then went on to "invent" callback URLs No, that was Greg Pierce. Soghoian was still at Apple at that point.

db48x 8y ago
Perhaps it depends on how you define "major", but Smalltalk and the Lisp Machine come to mind.
stormking 8y ago
> I'm not aware of anything in any other major operating system that even comes close. ARexx on AmigaOS was pretty similar and shipped first (1990).
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I wouldn't consider that to be a major operating system.
  - stormking 8y ago
    It was, in the day (and market).
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    The AmigaOS was far more advanced than MacOS in 1990 just as the Amiga hardware was 5 years more advanced than the Mac at launch. There were about 5 million Amigas in circulation, especially in Europe, by 1990. How many home users owned Macs at that point? Apple users seem to overstate the importance of early pre-OSX Apple. For example, The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out)
    - code_duck 8y ago
      As a child with a c64 at home, every school I attended had computer labs stocked with Apple IIes. I was often struck by the inferiority of the Apple II to the Commodore (to say nothing of how impressive the Amiga was). It couldn't even display monochrome text normally.
    - stormking 8y ago
      I wouldn't even go to comparisons. An operating system that for roughly a decade had several million users was a "major operating system", period. We're not talking about some obscure research system here, that only very few people used. It was mainstream.
    - mschaef 8y ago
      > The Apple II was brutally outsold by the Commodore 64 which was far more powerful There's no doubt that the Commodore 64 had better graphics and sound hardware, but the idea that it's more powerful in general seems dubious at best. By the time 1983-84 rolled around, an Apple ][ machine was available with 80 column text, 128KB of memory, and a disk that transferred data 30 times faster than the 1541. Sprites and 3-voice audio are nice and all, but it doesn't make the C64 the machine I'd have chosen (even then) for anything other than games. The 1541 disk is notably amazing because that blazing performance was the result of making the disk drive an entirely separate computer in its own right. This did at least make it possible to upload new firmware to the drive to improve the performance... but that was hardly standard. The only material advantages to the 1541 disk architecture was that it let the main machine be slightly cheaper, and it also enabled single disk drives to be multiplexed across multiple C64's. From an educational point of view, it's also interesting to compare the difference in graphics programming models. Drawing a line on the screen in Applesoft: 10 HGR 20 HPLOT 100, 120 to 150, 200 Drawing a line on the screen in Commodore BASIC 2.0: 1. Switch the machine to graphics modes by POKEing data into graphics hardware control registers 2. Implement something like Bresenham's algorithm to get the pixels on the screen. One of these is something that an interested layperson (teacher) can communicate to a class of elementary school students. The other is something out of an upper division undergraduate computer science curriculum. (Admittedly, Terrapin's wonderful C64 Logo made things a lot better for the Commodore.) > and became the most popular 8bit home computer ever sold. (That is, the Apple II was far less important than the hagiography makes out) It's important to consider the machines in their historical contexts. The Commodore 64 and Amiga were great machines at single points in time, but neither of them were created by an organization with the capability to effectively continue and promote their development. (ie: How much of the C64's success was due to setting its price so low that it couldn't fund ongoing development of the platform? Or due to short-term gains produced by a management strategy that alienated key allies in the long term?) Viewed in that context today, Apple is now the most valuable company in the world and successful to the extent that I can look across the aisle of this train and see somebody watching a movie on an Apple product. Commodore, in contrast, is happy memories, a bankrupt company that hasn't existed for decades, and a condemned Superfund environmental contamination site in a Philadelphia suburb. While I have great personal fondness for the C64 machines, there are reasons the industry turned out the way that it did, reasons for Commodore's failure, and reasons for Apple's success... including the Apple ][.