12 ms·
Quotes from 1992
- renholder 8y ago>And the old blood is getting tired - tired of failing in some cases or just tired of working so hard and now ready to enjoy life. I think that this is, perhaps, the most apt quote that will live-on in a state of permanence throughout the generations.
- simonh 8y ago>On big things failing to scale down: It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.
- scoutt 8y ago"Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts" Are we living in a period in which many things seems to be going backwards? With ARM trying to go into servers/desktop, or the (somewhat) failed attempts to bring the tablet/phone interface to PC (Ubuntu and/or ugly full-screen-only apps)?
- rbanffy 8y agoIf we trace personal computers to their root origins, we'll see the LINC. The LINC was designed to be used by a single person. This was before time-sharing and interactive computing happened and, due to the differences in their use, the two kinds of computers diverged into what we saw in the 70's until today in every way - from the hardware to the software to the way they are used. OTOH, my laptop has more in common with a VAX running Unix than it has with a Commodore PET. Or a LINC.
- simmons 8y ago> OTOH, my laptop has more in common with a VAX running Unix than it has with a Commodore PET. This was my thought upon reading the "Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts" quote, and it's also something I've been thinking about lately. Personal computers definitely represented a distinct development track from the multi-user/multitasking industrial/academic computing systems of the time. However, as PCs became more capable and merged key innovations from the higher-end computing branch (e.g. virtual memory, protected execution environments, and the operating systems that can leverage such features), we seem to have arrived at the same point -- a phone in my pocket that's more like a VAX 11/750 available in 1981 than an IBM PC from the same year. The "microcomputer" development track that included the Commodore PET and 8086-based PC systems was greatly useful for jumpstarting the PC industry, but was ultimately set aside. So maybe it's not so much that small computers are completely different beasts than large computers, as their initial development required a unique approach to fit the constraints of that particular era. As someone who has personally installed UNIX on a VAX 11/750, I do appreciate the attention to human factors that the microcomputer era has contributed to computing. :)
- rbanffy 8y agoDesktop PCs of today evolved past the level of minis of the 90's, gaining many features minis never had, but, while minis are no more (our current servers that replaced them are overgrown versions of PCs and RISC workstations), mainframes didn't stand still and continued to evolve hardware and software features that reflect the demands of their segment: reliability, throughput, IO, security, and so on. Their evolution is pretty cool. And their software is very alien to people who grew up on personal computers.
- simonh 8y agoIt depends how you look at it. For example the PET had a single chip CPU and recognisably PC like hardware architecture, while the VAX processor was built from individual TTL logic units. The point the book was making was that the two types of systems have different lineages, but he wasn’t ignorant of the fact that influence went back and forth between them.
- avian 8y agoFunny how these days it's the inverse, isn't it? Everyone, including Microsoft with Windows 10, seems to be obsessed with making PCs into large hand-helds and phones as far as user interfaces are concerned.
- simonh 8y agoI think there are useful lessons that can be learned from mobile, that might be applicable to desktop, but you're right Microsoft made exactly the same mistake again in the opposite direction. I'd say they did that most egregiously with Windows 8 though. Microsoft keep looking at a few data points they have now, extrapolate those into the future and then try to jump directly to that future. Currently it's an attempt to 'catch up' with Apple, but they keep extrapolating straight lines when the actual track of innovation is in curves. They did the same sort of thing with Longhorn, trying to re-invent the PC platform with object oriented database file systems and the whole OS running on .NET because Java looked like it was the wave of the future. They're trying to out-compete rival technologies without really thinking through what they're doing.
- mprovost 8y agoA quote from the post calls this pattern "Microsoft takes three tries to get anything right": Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is the real product.
- jimbokun 8y agoI don't think they're doing that anymore under Nadella. I don't think he sees Apple as their main competitor, but is really competing with AWS for the future of business computing, and not doing that badly.
- simonh 8y agoThat’s a good point. Microsoft saw what Amazon was going with AWS, projected that into the future and got the right answer. It’s an example of where this strategy paid off. To be fair to them it’s not just random chance it worked out either, execution matters too and they seem to have hit the nail on the head with Azure.
- pjc50 8y agoOne key aspect of this was that on the "big iron", software was under the control of the administrator and generally trusted, while the users need to be protected from one another. On "small iron", there is one user, but the applications come from a variety of sources which may not be trustworthy, so the user needs sandboxing between the apps. On interaction design: the iPhone may not have been quite the first consumer device with a capacitative touchscreen that worked brilliantly without a stylus, but it certainly felt like it was. Styluses were the bane of pre-iPhone touch devices and I'm surprised that Samsung tried to bring them back.
- jhbadger 8y agoTwo things that styli do better than fingers are writing and drawing. That was the point of Samsung's use of it, and even Apple now has their Pencil. Yes, using them for everything, like in the Palm Pilot era, was annoying.
- usrusr 8y agoTowards the very end of the 90ies, some introductory CS course had a nice diagram of how general architecture features like memory management, multitasking, networking, multi-CPU, multi-user OS, virtualization and maybe some others had slowly trickled down from research prototypes to mainframes to personal computers to handheld devices to embedded controllers. Everybody in the lecture hall was mentally continuing the lines and I remember prodding my neighbor, joking about when a successor of the Palm III he was using for taking notes would run a multi-user OS. Android, with its full-blown Linux kernel underneath, came just in time.
- ken 8y agoStory I was told from someone who worked on the early-2000's "Tablet PC": Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements, technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the benefit over a laptop, and it never took off. Sounded to me like the classic "faster horse". It's not so much that they needed to make everything a PC, and more that they were such experts at enterprise sales that they didn't have confidence in their own new ideas.
- michaelt 8y agoMy work issued me a pre-iPad tablet computer, the NEC Versa Litepad. I agree with what you said, but part of the problem was resistive touchscreens just weren’t very good.
- kristianc 8y ago> Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements, technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the benefit over a laptop, and it never took off. This is not so obviously wrong. It's fairly well acknowledged that the biggest barrier to the iPad becoming a general computer for most people is iOS. It's unclear that the answer is 'Windows on a touch screen' but it's also equally clear that Apple hasn't done anything like enough to make iOS work for the larger form factor.
- rbanffy 8y agoI used to listen to his podcast during my morning commute. I'll miss him when he retires.
- ForHackernews 8y ago... has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? That Adobe DRM is the industry state-of-the-art.
- dagw 8y agohas this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? To be fair I don't know anybody who has either. I know it's possible and I know my local library offers this, but I've never met anybody who's actually used this service.
- ForHackernews 8y agoI'm surprised. To me it seems like the only reasonable way to use eBooks.
- dsr_ 8y agoThe only reasonable way to use ebooks is to buy the non-DRMed epub, drop it on your web server in a password-protected directory, and read it from all the devices you want to read it from.
- FroshKiller 8y agoMy county library has a poor electronic collection. Still, I tried to check out a book and got put on a waiting list with 30 other people. That was before Christmas. I haven't heard anything else about it.
- jhbadger 8y agoWaiting lists happen with popular new books with physical copies as well. If you look for books that are a year or so old, or are something other than popular fiction (science or history for example), normally you can get a book immediately in my experience.
- beatgammit 8y agoI use it all the time, and is incredible convenient. I use Libby, and it works basically the same as the Kindle app, but with fewer features. Check it out, it's a great resource!
- ilamont 8y agoOn the value of limiting yourself to standards: ...which was why the idea of 100 percent IBM compatibility took so long to be accepted. "Why be compatible when you could be better?" the smart guys asked on their way to bankruptcy court. It sounds a bit like a jab at Apple (or maybe even NeXT, which I believe was struggling in 1992 with its hardware releases). AFAIK neither company ever went bankrupt. Or was it referring to the crop of other personal computing platforms from the late 70s/early 80s? (Vic20/C64, TRS-80, Sinclair, Heathkit, etc.) Or something else? Big SGI workstations, etc.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- simonh 8y agoThere were tons of almost-PC-compatible manufacturers back then, selling their proprietary very slightly better, but incompatible systems. They'd have a slightly faster but incompatible bus system, slightly higher capacity floppy disks with a custom format, a proprietary interface that was quicker but only worked with their own printers, a higher resolution display or with more colours but which required special software to take advantage of it. The Unix workstation market that NeXT, Sun and SGI competed in was a bit different and didn't really overlap much with the PC market.
- ytjohn 8y agoI remember buying an LS-120 drive. To be fair, the drive was backwards compatible with 720/1.44MB floppies. But the 120MB 3.5 floppy could only be used in another LS-120 drive, oh which, I was the only one in my area with one. As the point of the floppies was to allow me to take my work with me, the larger disk capacity became essentially useless (except as a general backup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoMany included "better" features that depended on a somehow non-compatible BIOS. Quite a few of those had dual modes so you could get PC compatible but slower or worse, or incompatible but better. They eventually died out. One company I remember that was pretty successful for a while were Apricot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC
- Unikaca 8y agoApenwarr podcasts are really good, recommended to everyone.
- bhouston 8y agoRobert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate. That is why his writing stands the test of time because he saw things accurately and wasn't just a hype pedeler or mindless trend follower. I feel he doesn't get enough credit for that.
- ak39 8y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX5g0kidk3Y (1996 documentary by Cringely. Excellently presented) There's a part 2 too.
- sedachv 8y ago> Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate. Quite the opposite: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.html http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht... Cringely is a good writer and storyteller. The stories he tells are often hearsay or wildly inaccurate recounting of events by third parties. His writings should in no way be treated as being accurate, and should not be referenced as historical sources or anything like that.
- leoc 8y agoOh, he's certainly sometimes observant (and indeed sometimes accurate), it's just that he's far from being particularly reliable.
- AceJohnny2 8y agoIndeed, I recall the mid-00's when Cringely's predictions would show up on Slashdot to be roundly mocked. I think it was the first time I understood the practice of making outrageous claims just to drive traffic. Thus, I only remember Cringely as a bloviating laughingstock. It's interesting to see where his authority came from, this book seems very interesting.
- ddebernardy 8y agoThe book's Wikipedia page mentions that Cringely made it available online for free, complete with link: https://www.cringely.com/tag/accidental-empires/ https://www.cringely.com/tag/accidental-empires/
- jonstewart 8y agoI obsessively read I, Cringely when I was in college in the late 90s. It was the Stratechery of its time, and taught me an immense amount about the tech business.
- velcrovan 8y agoI read it too in highschool. I even found a Dover Art book containing a copy of that suited-frog spot art sketch he used and cribbed it for my blog. Wonder what old Cringely is up to these days
- JeremyReimer 8y agoYou can find out on his blog (cringely.com). The TL;DR is that he mostly does consulting for startups and writes his own columns on the tech industry at his own pace. A few years back he did a Kickstarter for a $100 Minecraft server with his teenage kids that failed. The blowback from the failure and his poor communication about it has at times taken over the blog comments. For a while he did a series of columns exposing the decline and mismanagement at IBM; he eventually turned these into an ebook that I purchased and thought was a reasonably interesting read. More recently he had cataract surgery and had to move to a new home after his old one was damaged in the California wildfires.
- charlesism 8y agoI don't know that anyone is popular, yet respected enough, to be an equivalent today. I'd say Leo Laporte had a similar impact circa 2010. Maybe Kara Swisher? Maybe Marco Arment? Some Youtuber? At any rate, none of those exactly fit the bill, because Cringely's two "Nerds" documentaries† hold a special place in popular tech reporting history. † https://youtu.be/sX5g0kidk3Y https://youtu.be/sX5g0kidk3Y † https://youtu.be/Pk2BWphDfvc https://youtu.be/Pk2BWphDfvc
- amelius 8y ago> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not the way it happened. This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix, just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers connect to the cloud, which is just like a mainframe. If anything, history is repeating itself.
- xondono 8y agoBy that standard there’s no difference between your computer and most of the consumer electronics market. You’d be astonished of how mant things run flavors of unix
- einr 8y agoUNIX is not a mainframe OS. It was developed for minicomputers. As was VMS, by the way.
- amelius 8y agoMinicomputers are just smaller and cheaper versions of their mainframe counterparts. It's only a small step in evolution, and not an important distinction in this context (imho).
- cr0sh 8y agoFrom what I understand, the greatest difference between mainframes and minicomputers (and later, microcomputers), is that mainframes were batch-oriented machines, while minicomputers were interactive-oriented. Mainframes (pretty much "IBM only" today - I don't know of any other actual mainframe computer manufacturer; to be honest, I am not even sure if IBM is still making mainframes? Ok - just looked, I guess they do) are still batch oriented; what "interactive piece" they have, is just a batch process with a "run forever" run time.
- Stratoscope 8y ago
- asaph 8y ago> I was recently recommended to read the book Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely, first published in 1992 (or was it 1991?) and apparently no longer in print... You can buy a new copy on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887308554/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887308554/
- flippyhead 8y agoHey look, the audio cassette (what's that??) is only $869!
- evo_9 8y agoCringley was involved in adapting this book into a 3 part documentary called Triumph of the Nerds. It's a fun glimpse into the early days of computing. Cringley managed to interview Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and a whole host of figures from those days (too many to list). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Nerds
- gitgud 8y agoIt takes new ideas a long time to catch on - time that is mainly devoted to evolving the idea into something useful. This fact alone dumps most of the responsibility for early technical innovation in the laps of amateurs, who can afford to take the time. Only those who aren't trying to make money can afford to advance a technology that doesn't pay. This is how I feel about hacker news. People who have the time to advance technology. And I'm grateful to witness so much of it here.
- peterwwillis 8y agoThis also describes NASA (sadly) and university research teams
- F_J_H 8y agoObligatory Feynman quote Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoThat is one of my favorites, although I often substitute 'learning' for 'science'.
- jancsika 8y ago> lend it out digitally, one person at a time Think about how much better off we'd be if books were available digitally like Wikipedia articles are, and social media posts were restricted to "borrowers" one-at-a-time.
- EvanAnderson 8y agoI enjoy the quote referencing Gary Kildall: Gary Kildall's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a factor in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you are still expected to want more, but he didn't. I would very much liked to have known Gary Kildall. Everything I've read about him gives me the impression he'd be an immensely interesting person to know. The persona that comes across in his co-hosting of the Computer Chronicles show (something, to itself, that you should look up if you're not familiar) is one of great technical competence combined with a gentle humbleness. (Edit: If you're into learning more about Kildall there's a good prior discussion of an unpublished biography on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091)
- jdsully 8y agoI don’t think it’s true he had limited ambition. His later turn to alcoholism which lead to his death in a bar fight was a direct result of losing to DOS. That’s not the reaction one has if they were content with their accomplishments.
- EvanAnderson 8y agoI don't get the sense that the true details of the latter part of his life are publicly known, and perhaps aren't even documented. That makes me somewhat uncomfortable to speculate about it. It fits my view of his character and public persona that being known as "the guy who lost to DOS" (or "the guy who went flying and blew off IBM"), rather than the actual "loss" itself, would be the biggest source of discontent for him. (For too many people that's all of Kildall's legacy, and that makes me very sad.)
- jdsully 8y agoI read a lot into the fact that the half released auto biography ends where the IBM PC is released. His family saying they censored it because it doesn’t reflect his true self. FWIW I’ve researched this time period extensively and I think Gary was much kinder than Bill and a great guy. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say he wasn’t ambitious. And certainly inaccurate to say that he was content having had a good run and not winning.
- purplezooey 8y agoIt's weird seeing 1992 associated with some kind of far off distant time.
- schwartzworld 8y agoIt was 26 years ago. End of the Road by Boyz II Men came out and topped the charts. I saw Home Alone 2 in the theaters. The little blond munchkin who met the future President in that movie is now 38. Cartoon Network premiered. Bill Clinton became President. Windows 3.1 and Microsoft Works were released. It's a long-ass time ago.
- jhbadger 8y agoI tend to think of the "modern world" as starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but now that I am beginning to work with adults with graduate degrees that weren't even born then, it's beginning to be a bit absurd.
- grayed-down 8y agoBerlin wall? Imagine my distress at having tuned in to the modern world during the Watergate fiasco. My father had to explain to me that it was the name of a hotel and not some sort of earthworks.
- lenocinor 8y agoBut it feels like that to me, even though I lived through it. Sometimes even a year ago can feel so far away.
- openloop 8y agoWhat is this a giant admittance list?
- openloop 8y agoWhat is this a confessional?
- apo 8y agoOne of the most interesting characters from the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was Kildall. His company created CP/M, and depending on who's telling the story either lost the deal with IBM to create the operating system for the PC, or just didn't care about it. Here's the quote about him: Let's say for a minute that Eubanks was correct, and Gary Kildall didn't give a shit about the business. Who said that he had to? CP/M was his invention; Digital Research was his company. The fact that it succeeded beyond anyone's expectations did not make those earlier expectations invalid. Gary Kildall's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a factor in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you are still expected to want more, but he didn't. If this is true, he was the polar opposite of almost everyone else in the story. It reminds me of that line in Breaking Bad when Jesse asks Walter how much is enough. Kildall knew the answer, and stuck with it. I didn't get that sense from any other character, except maybe Woz. Kildall spent the later part of his career hosting The Computer Chronicles, a PBS weekly news show that ended up documenting the entire early history of personal computers. The shows are on YouTube and are fascinating to watch: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkJ6eQKpHZgsZBla4JgKj3A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkJ6eQKpHZgsZBla4JgKj3A
- ryandrake 8y agoI'm convinced that, with few exceptions, to succeed in business requires you to destroy that part of your brain that understands the word "enough". What salary next year is enough? How many assets is enough? Business leaders will never say. How much profit this year is enough? Shareholders will never give you a figure--more is always better than less. These people might have goals, but they are meaningless because when they reach those goals, they don't stop. Unending accumulation is the only way. Anyone who does have a concept of "enough" gets out-competed by the ones who don't.
- benj111 8y agoDear Hacker News I am most disappointed with you. I was expecting this thread to go off on a tangent about DRM etc, I was expecting clever suggesting on OCRing screenshots of iphone screens. But no, on my brief scan through the comments, nothing.
- jhbadger 8y agoFrom Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.
- pjc50 8y agoNot to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper, Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.
- reaperducer 8y agoAt a higher level, Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Reversi weren't games. They were educational tools. This was how Microsoft taught people to do things like double-click, click-and-drag, and a number of other things that we take for granted today but were completely foreign back then.
- ChrisSD 8y agoWindows 95 also had Hover! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21 A while back they made an online version: http://www.hover.ie/ http://www.hover.ie/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dwags 8y agowhat about Fury 3?!
- omegabravo 8y agohttps://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=... Pinball game was licensed, not developed by Microsoft AFAIK
- cubano 8y agoAhhh 1992....the year I discovered QNX and Mosaic. This post brings back so many memories...Novell! the first damn network system that was ever worth a shit on a IBM PC-compatible. Installing that software finally put and end to the nightmare of "sneaker-netting" all my office PCs. OS/2 failure! Who would have thought that shit-DOS would withstand the challenge of such a superior (see QNX!) and deep-pocketed competitor? What were we all smoking back then?? Jobs and NeXT!...man did I covet one of those ridiculous priced machines, but with no market penetration and my company focused on cheap compatible hardware, it made no sense to develop with it. Linux!...see QNX! I could go on and on...it's rather amazing...without me knowing it I've become my own history book.
- skmurphy 8y agoI found this quote the most interesting: "Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is the real product." Robert Cringely in "Accidental Empires"
- 0898 8y agoThis guy sounds pretty ungrateful. He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to Archive.org's "virtual library card" service. This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you, scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time. Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do is moan about how "aggressively user-hostile" is it because you have to double tap to open a book from the list.
- mcguire 8y agoPresumably, he would prefer the publishers' option of not having Archive.org online at all.
- asveikau 8y agoHe said you need to be extremely precise with your finger to have a double tap register. This sounds like a legitimate usability complaint and reasonable feedback. Having UI feedback doesn't mean you don't appreciate what was done well. If the reply to a bug report is "but look at all I've done for you!" you're not going to fix many bugs and no one improves. (I have definitely been there, though.)
- reaperducer 8y agoA few of the local library systems I've used have the same Adobe Editions lending scheme, and it's terrible in so many ways that I just gave up on e-books from the library. On those rare occasions I want a an e-book these days, I go to iBooks or Nook because the library programs (including Bibliowhatsits) are so bad. Mostly I just buy the physical book, or order a physical copy from the library. It might take a few weeks to get from the other side of the country, but that's less hassle than dealing with the current state of library lending DRM.
- FiddlyPack 8y agoOh please. He sounded quite grateful to archive.org. He sounds frustrated because the mobile application developers didn’t think that maybe double tapping a single pixel is extremely difficult to register on a touchscreen. The app dangles content in front of you, tells you that you can have it, but then it seems impossible to actually get to it. That’s the epitome of frustrating software. That software has nothing to do with gratitude to archive.org.
- mcguire 8y ago"A little-known partnership between IBM and Apple to try to make a new OS (Pink) that would finally beat DOS: "IBM has 33,000 programmers on its payroll but is so far from leading the software business (and knows it) that it is betting the company on the work of 100 Apple programmers wearing T-shirts in Mountain View, California." Quote from a co-worker who spent a lot of time at Taligent: "They don't realize mice can have more than one button." (I worked for the IBM Taligent Project Office in Austin. We were an AIX (mostly) and OS/2 (to an extent) shop.) (Advice: Don't work for IBM.)
- DonHopkins 8y agoQ: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM. https://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true https://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true (I worked for Kaleida!)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoAnd another one of those weird tidbits of obscure knowledge... When the Java group was trying to come up with a name for the browser that was going to ship with the Alpha 1 code it was called "WebRunner", that was the name we used up until we discovered through a trademark search that the name was currently registered to Taligent. Sun couldn't get anyone at Apple or IBM to acknowledge it, much less talk to us about licensing or transferring it, so we renamed the browser to 'HotJava' (which I at the time wasn't aware of the sexual innuendo there but it was what it was). I still have my jacket that has Fang on it and says "WebRunner." I have never had the heart to throw it out.
- davidw 8y agoIf you're interested in older Silicon Valley history, In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters ( https://amzn.to/2EJjvHG https://amzn.to/2EJjvHG ) is pretty good, although he gets some things pretty wrong himself, like the rise of open source.
- starpilot 8y ago[From the tech scene], not just general quotes about the state of the world or life.
- AceJohnny2 8y agoThe quote about reorgs practically gives me PTSD. Certainly irrational anger: > The rest of the company was as confused as its leadership. Somehow, early on, reorganizations - "reorgs" - became part of the Apple culture. they happen every three to six months and come from Apple's basic lack of understanding that people need stability in order to be able to work together. [...] Make a bad decision? Who cares! By the time the bad news arrives, you'll be gone and someone else will have to handle the problems. I worked for 6 years at STMicro, and the group I was in (Nomadik SoC) did reorgs every 18 months, practically like clockwork. This was a huge multinational company, and it was my first job so I didn't have any context to weigh it against, but in hindsight it was a huge sign of disfunction and leadership that didn't know WTF it was doing. As expected, the group shut down a few years down the line. The place I currently work hasn't had a reorg since I joined, almost 4 years ago. But I'm sure that's largely attributable to a steady and successful product line. It can be either a vicious or a virtuous cycle...
- AceJohnny2 8y agoAnd Apple's 3-6 months reorg cycle is insane! That sounds like organizational panic. Makes it all the more impressive that Steve Jobs pulled them out of that nosedive.