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Incredible. Not because he was right, obviously with hindsight we know x86 is still going strong. Instead how much Mr. Jobs adopted his vision to match his fi

Incredible. Not because he was right, obviously with hindsight we know x86 is still going strong. Instead how much Mr. Jobs adopted his vision to match his financial incentives. He talks about Mac and IBM in this presentation, but the we he refers to is his NEXT OS. The one he started after getting kicked out of Apple. Yet listening to him here you'd think he left a sinking ship.

simonh 5y ago
He wasn’t talking about x86 when he said ‘PC’, he was talking really about DOS. That’s clear because he said OS/2 and Presentation Manager could be a new curve. Of course then Windows came out, which he couldn’t have foreseen, and that proved to be the next curve but he was still right. The Windows 3.x/95 architecture had its own successful decade long run. He was also right about the Mac (OS) architecture of the time peaking, and going into a glide slope in the 90s. That’s exactly what happened and it was running into the ground by the late 90s when he came back to Apple. What he didn’t anticipate was that advanced pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OSes with virtual memory, multi-threading, process isolation and all that good stuff would escape the glide slope model. Still, being pretty much spot on for a whole decade into the future at that time is pretty impressive.
michael1999 5y ago
Except 16bit 286 code is dead as a doornail. The platform he's talking about (16 bit DOS) really did die on schedule. You'll have trouble running anything from that era on modern Windows. And if it ran, it wouldn't integrate with anything else (networking, printing, character encoding, etc.) The jump from highmem to win98 was very disruptive and had many winners and losers (e.g. Wordperfect). The next jump to 64bit was less painful, but still disruptive. x86 is a marketing term used to paper over 1-2 extinction events and create an illusion of historical continuity despite users having had to throw out their software twice (at least), and developers having had to rewrite their software several times.
thewileyone 5y ago
Yup, that's what Jobs always did, force the environment into his narrative. NeXTSTEP was a great operating systems, for the time, but for most developers too expensive to build up the application base. I was at a company building a paperless system for hospitals on NeXTSTEP and it was pain because we had to build everything from scratch due to the lack of applications available.

simonh 5y ago

He wasn’t talking about x86 when he said ‘PC’, he was talking really about DOS. That’s clear because he said OS/2 and Presentation Manager could be a new curve. Of course then Windows came out, which he couldn’t have foreseen, and that proved to be the next curve but he was still right. The Windows 3.x/95 architecture had its own successful decade long run. He was also right about the Mac (OS) architecture of the time peaking, and going into a glide slope in the 90s. That’s exactly what happened and it was running into the ground by the late 90s when he came back to Apple. What he didn’t anticipate was that advanced pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OSes with virtual memory, multi-threading, process isolation and all that good stuff would escape the glide slope model. Still, being pretty much spot on for a whole decade into the future at that time is pretty impressive.

michael1999 5y ago

Except 16bit 286 code is dead as a doornail. The platform he's talking about (16 bit DOS) really did die on schedule. You'll have trouble running anything from that era on modern Windows. And if it ran, it wouldn't integrate with anything else (networking, printing, character encoding, etc.) The jump from highmem to win98 was very disruptive and had many winners and losers (e.g. Wordperfect). The next jump to 64bit was less painful, but still disruptive. x86 is a marketing term used to paper over 1-2 extinction events and create an illusion of historical continuity despite users having had to throw out their software twice (at least), and developers having had to rewrite their software several times.

thewileyone 5y ago

Yup, that's what Jobs always did, force the environment into his narrative. NeXTSTEP was a great operating systems, for the time, but for most developers too expensive to build up the application base. I was at a company building a paperless system for hospitals on NeXTSTEP and it was pain because we had to build everything from scratch due to the lack of applications available.