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Oh God yes. Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web s

Oh God yes. Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud. We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers. When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it: dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to work the next day. I was the only person on the team to actually do this. I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as soon as we got home. A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines. Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then stuffed into a web browser. They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.

alkot89 5y ago
I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.
- tommek4077 5y ago
  Devs are lazy and wont give up there luxury macs, even for testing.
  - alkot89 5y ago
    That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it went over my head. Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
    - tommek4077 5y ago
      Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on those machines as well.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- watersb 5y ago
  My point did get muddled there in telling a story. It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks. And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue. The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us. Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.
pmontra 5y ago
1999. I had 10 Mb/s at work and 56 kB/s at home which is about 200 times slower, same difference between a 1 GB/s fiber and a 5.6 Mb/s ADSL. I used the same laptop and had very different experiences. Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.

alkot89 5y ago

I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.

tommek4077 5y ago
Devs are lazy and wont give up there luxury macs, even for testing.
- alkot89 5y ago
  That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it went over my head. Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
  - tommek4077 5y ago
    Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on those machines as well.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
watersb 5y ago
My point did get muddled there in telling a story. It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks. And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue. The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us. Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.

pmontra 5y ago

1999. I had 10 Mb/s at work and 56 kB/s at home which is about 200 times slower, same difference between a 1 GB/s fiber and a 5.6 Mb/s ADSL. I used the same laptop and had very different experiences. Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.