11 ms·
Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer (2011)
- alberth 4y ago> “WorldWideWeb.app” That sounds so funny in todays time.
- pixelmonkey 4y agoButterfly effect is really something. Steve Jobs gets kicked out of Apple, builds NeXT as a form of revenge. Tim Berners-Lee buys a NeXT computer, finds it inspiring, and, thanks to NeXT's focus on a usable development environment, finds it easy to whip together a prototype of the WorldWideWeb. And so, even though none of us use NeXT computers today, thanks to one particularly important NeXT computer, all of us use the Internet and hyperlinks today. And yes, I know that much of MacOS and iOS has some lineage to NeXT. Still, this chain of events: Apple => NeXT => Tim Berners-Lee => WorldWideWeb is just bonkers for its world-wide ramifications.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoThe million dollar question, of course, is whether Tim Berners-Lee—or someone else—would have built a web browser anyway, or at least something very similar. We don't know the counterfactual.
- chrisco255 4y agoWell, yes, there was already an existing web concept out of University of Minnesota called Gopher: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) But it had many limitations WWW/HTTP did not, and was crippled by restrictive licensing. Still, probably reasonably likely Gopher would have been riffed on by a different open source hacker eventually, had WWW not been created.
- adventured 4y agoAs is typical, many of the pieces were primed to lead to the Web outcome, and Berners-Lee was the right person in the right place at the right time. It certainly could have been someone else. Just as another company would have done some variation (better or worse) of what Apple did with the iPhone (most of the pieces were ready to do it well and Jobs saw that). The more intriguing question is how things might have occurred differently, if the beginnings were derived from a different set of factors & actors. It could have been a lot more obnoxiously commercial from the beginning (AOL & CompuServe style).
- tudorw 4y agoXanadu
- mixmastamyk 4y agoA place… where nobody dared to go…
- tannhaeuser 4y agoA million lights are dancing and there you are
- themadturk 4y agonow we are here...
- jdougan 4y agoI wonder how that would have worked if the Autodesk situation had been more gentle. eg. they had xu88/Green/Classic working well enough for actual usage while they built out xu92/Gold.
- tudorw 4y agonot sure, but I think with AI's help to codify and code, we could build it now :)
- detourdog 4y agoGopher was better than www until the graphical web browser existed. The gui browser had one technical requirement that gopher did not. The gui browser required a node address on the network or ip address. One could access the www from gopher. The gateway page for the www stated Welcome to the World Wide Web. There is no top or bottom which is what distinguished it from gopher. That had a top of the tree and bottom of the tree of links.
- marban 4y agoApple should have just doubled down on HyperCard
- scarface74 4y agoAnd ended up with something like Flash?
- Maursault 4y agoFunctionally speaking, the WWW is an implementation of HyperCard. They're very similar, again, functionally.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoInteresting data point... By 1988 Theo Gray also in Urbana-Champaign, had build the notebook interface for Mathematica's release that summer, which is nowadays cloned as originally iPython Notebooks then generalized as Jupyter for various languages. This is still popular in the Mathematica version as well, and can do many things HTML browsers demonstrated years later.
- anthk 4y agoMaxima existed far before iPython.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoDid Maxima have a notebook interface back before Mathematica's appeared in 1988, and many years later iPython cloned it (with credit given to Theo Gray's idea) ?
- anthk 4y agoMaxima it's the continuation of Macsyma. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma
- detourdog 4y agoI used your prompt to look into Macsyma which led me to maxima. What a great tool I just finished the 10 minute tutorial. https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-problems-with-maxima/ https://mathblog.com/a-10-minute-tutorial-for-solving-math-p...
- jjtheblunt 4y agoI know that, but did it have the notebook interface like people call Jupyter nowadays, which was based on IPython which was an explicitly described honoring of Mathematica for Python? I ask because I don't know if Macsyma had that...we had a university site license for Mathematica so in my case I never had Macsyma to play with back then.
- exsf0859 4y agoThere were tons of alternative hypertext systems before the world wide web. Major reasons WWW succeeded: 1) Open standard, no license required. (My understanding is that TB-L worked hard to make this happen.) 2) A forgiving text-based format that was trivial to author, serve, and display. And evolve with forward/backwards compatibility. 3) One-way links. (Many other HyperText projects were hung up on bi-directional links.) 4) URLs didn't require any centralized authority other than already-existing DNS.
- rjsw 4y agoIt probably hit just the right time in terms of available CPU power and network speed for a text-based format to get accepted.
- valley_guy_12 4y agoThe web could have plausibly existed as early as FTP did. Which would have been 1972. Plenty of documents from that era had URL-like manual links of the form "pub/foo/bar.txt at MIT-AI", and many FTP servers supported anonymous login and were fast enough for real-time text document retrieval. It is kind of embarrassing that it took 20 years to invent URLs and browsers.
- rjsw 4y agoI wrote a networked hypertext system in 1985 but it used a binary "page" format to save bandwidth. The GUI used was GEM. Another road not taken could have been to define a rich text format in ASN.1 and build a browser on top of the OSI network stack.
- ff317 4y agoNot to knock the amazing contributions of Tim, but IMHO Gopher and HyperCard had already laid a lot of the important concepts down in various suboptimal ways. I think there were enough smart people using both in the 90s that it was virtually inevitable that something like Tim's work was bound to arise somewhere, somehow, as a merger of and improvement on those two sets of ideas.
- amelius 4y agoDon't forget about Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel > The service was rolled out experimentally on 15 July 1980 in Saint-Malo, France (...) > From its early days, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, have a mail box, and chat in a similar way to what is now made possible by the World Wide Web.
- throwaway60607 4y agoIt was similar from the user point of view, but it was absolutely different from creator/admin point of view. It was supposed to be a service provided by big cable/telecom companies and not something that everyone would've been able to use to create. The whole architecture gives it away - minitel is merely a display device to a telecom mainframe, paid per minute of connection. The average Joe was not supposed to create their own services/pages.
- amelius 4y agoPerhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...
- throwaway60607 4y agoGiven how big telecoms usually behave, I really don't think so. Remember the fight for usable mobile internet... Ever tried WAP and developing on it? They set the whole thing up to control it and charge extraorbitant fees for it both to the user and to anyone publishing on it. Minitel as well as WAP. Apple's 30% is peanuts compared to the fees I'm talking about - I mean contracts with minimums in millions. Good thing Apple kicked their sand castle down. People don't give them enough credit for that.
- ohjfjfk 4y ago[dead]
- amelius 4y ago> The million dollar question Don't forget about the 150 million dollar investment made by Microsoft that saved Apple.
- signatoremo 4y agoThis has been discussed many times here and elsewhere, but it was not an investment, but rather $150 million purchase of Apple stock. The symbolic of it, as well as the confidence of Microsoft to continue developing Office for Mac software for at least 5 years, helped save Apple, and not any cash infusion. https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-microsoft-saved-apple/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...
- detourdog 4y agoIt also settled a long standing lawsuit and a lot of cross licensing.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoWho knows, we might have something better than a networked document format masquerading as an application delivery platform. Something in spirit to 3270 or X/RDP and programmable with a single language.
- eviks 4y agoThat's a $1 question with "yes" as the answer, it wasn't that unique/hard to think it couldn't have been done elsewhere (but true that we don't know alternative histories)
- 908B64B197 4y agoIf memory serves right, DOOM was also developed on NeXT.
- itisit 4y agoIndeed it was: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT
- bena 4y agoEverything looks like this in hindsight. You can trace any significant thing through a series of seemingly unlikely events. You can do it with your own life and career if you wish. The larger things you can impact now makes the smaller things you did earlier look more significant. If it were something else that took off, we'd say "Wow, x, then y, then z happened and now we all do abc."
- anthk 4y agoMac OS it's the new NeXT since OSX and Rhapsody.
- Lammy 4y ago> the optical disks proved unreliable Fun fact: this is what the "spinning beachball" cursor represents. The wait cursor looked like a magneto-optical disc in NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody/Cheetah/Puma because original (1988) NeXT Cube booted from a single MO, no HDD. It was redrawn into a glossy sphere in Jagwire.
- nixpulvis 4y agoWhat exactly is unreliable about an optical drive? I find them to be quite trusty so long as you don't move them while in use. Additionally, I still have yet to hear a better cold digital storage than optical. Perhaps I'm wrong?
- fzzzy 4y agoThese were magnetooptical drives, not cd drives. Also the entire machine booted off it and wrote files to it. No hard drive in the first models.
- wappieslurkz 4y agoJagwire... <3 Thanks, I needed to hear that again.
- joren- 4y agoI have just finished restoring a NeXTcube and was surprised how modern the environment feels: neworking, interface, unix tooling, .. To get to know the environment I compiled the original httpd server and managed to get it compiling after only tweaking the makefile a bit, very similar to what still is sometimes needed on Linux. The usability of the NeXT computers also had a lasting impact on interactive music applications with the introduction of MAX at IRCAM: https://0110.be/posts/Electronic_Music_and_the_NeXTcube_-_Running_MAX_on_the_IRCAM_Musical_Workstation https://0110.be/posts/Electronic_Music_and_the_NeXTcube_-_Ru...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- marbu 4y agoCool work, I wonder how hard would it be to compile the 1st browser/editor[1]. I have seen few source code repositories with it's code[2], but I'm not sure if it's complete source or not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb [2] https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeXT https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeX...
- joren- 4y agoI have tried to compile the browser/editor, the worldwideweb.app, as well and failed, indeed due to having incomplete sources/dependencies. I did not look into it too much though with my main goal being to get music software running.
- mpweiher 4y ago> NeXTcube and was surprised how modern the environment feels Yeah, I started with a NeXTcube ~30 years ago (after Apple ][ and Amiga), and the computer experience itself hasn't really changed materially. Which is stunning, in a way. And sad.
- TheAtomic 4y agoI wish the person at Apple responsible for disappearing scroll bars, miniature, hidden, adding useless "features" would read this. I know, there's a setting...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tambourine_man 4y agoFor some things there isn't even a plist setting. It's a sad turn of events that people were paid to make an OS less usable.
- amelius 4y agoAnd the most stupid thing of all is that they tried to reinvent the filesystem when they developed iOS.
- tambourine_man 4y agoI don't know if you're being sarcastic, but it's arguably one of the reasons for iOS (and Android's copy of) success. Most people struggle with multiple levels of hierarchy
- asdff 4y agoGetting rid of the file hierarchy was like saying "Well, most people read at a six grade level, lets publish the New York Times as picture books." Now people are even more siloed between who actually knows whats going on and who doesn't with technology, instead of it lifting everyone up on an equal plane. I'm starting to think that period of time where the kid knew more than the parent with regards to the computer as this goldilocks zone, and its all down hill from here as we've gone from scary cli to safe gui to bubble wrapped mobile to what, vr ad machine probably where all you need to learn how to do is put it on your head and open your eyes. I'm having to teach undergrads what files even are before we can even think about writing code, and these are the ones that are taking computer classes.
- RistrettoMike 4y ago"Steve was a champion of usable technology – even sexy technology. Intuitive on the outside and extensible and cool engineering on the inside. " There's still some examples of this in Apple current products and OSes, but I wonder how many more "intuitive" and "extensible and cool engineering" choices we'd see in their products today if he was still alive. Apple's trajectory over the last decade has been simultaneously impressive and depressing to watch through. I miss Steve.
- wolpoli 4y ago"Designing the app’s menus was trivial — just drag and drop with InterfaceBuilder. The code framework of the app was generated automatically. " User Interface development has gotten more complicated since those early days.
- 1bent 4y agoI'd forgotten all about that gizmo. Under the heading Steve Jobs in my memory, it got completely replaced by "the computer for the rest of them", with a GUI tuned to hide the computer, to prevent users from being tempted to use it as a way to learn to program computers. The NeXT was competing against Sun, priced accordingly, and novel for being weird.
- simonh 4y agoThere have been programming environments on iOS since 2011 with Codea. I started programming on my iPad using Pythonista in 2012.