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Butterfly 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 insp
by pixelmonkey 3y ago
Butterfly 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoXanadu
- mixmastamyk 3y agoA place… where nobody dared to go…
- tannhaeuser 3y agoA million lights are dancing and there you are
- themadturk 3y agonow we are here...
- jdougan 3y 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 3y agonot sure, but I think with AI's help to codify and code, we could build it now :)
- jdougan 3y agoI've been looking deeply at the existing Xanadu docs so I have a pretty good sense of how it all was supposed to work. Could I get a look at the stuff you did with the LLM? I want to see what it gets wrong as there is a lot of misleading data out there on Xanadu and Enfilades. (contact info in bio)
- tudorw 3y agohttps://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot https://github.com/tudorw/Xanadonot it's all on a public repo, it's basically an unfiltered chat between me and gpt, someone more familiar tried some of the python code and said it ran so...would love to hear your feedback :)
- detourdog 3y 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 3y agoApple should have just doubled down on HyperCard
- scarface74 3y agoAnd ended up with something like Flash?
- Maursault 3y agoFunctionally speaking, the WWW is an implementation of HyperCard. They're very similar, again, functionally.
- jjtheblunt 3y 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 3y agoMaxima existed far before iPython.
- jjtheblunt 3y 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 3y agoMaxima it's the continuation of Macsyma. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma
- detourdog 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoPerhaps their plan was to, once successful, create a Minitel AppStore and allow smaller developers ...
- throwaway60607 3y 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 3y ago[dead]
- amelius 3y ago> The million dollar question Don't forget about the 150 million dollar investment made by Microsoft that saved Apple.
- signatoremo 3y 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 3y agoIt also settled a long standing lawsuit and a lot of cross licensing.
- mixmastamyk 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoIf memory serves right, DOOM was also developed on NeXT.
- itisit 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoMac OS it's the new NeXT since OSX and Rhapsody.