16 ms·

Steve Jobs Introduces WebObjects [video] (1996)

186 points by lpsz 12y ago

lpsz 12y ago
At the 23:50 mark the slides follow the familiar model seen in Apple media events today. The approach: in 3-4 concluding slides, concisely reiterate key selling points, compatibility, price, and the availability timeline. I've always found this approach to be particularly effective -- I'm highly likely to unambiguously remember these most important bits given that they are presented last.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I wouldn't say that's exclusive to Apple or something they came up with - sounds like sales 101 to me.
danso 12y ago
What a trip to see Steve Jobs not only try to sell something pre-iPod-success, but something as technical and relatively pedestrian as a web framework...And he does it well, without the use of a primetime-polished slideshow or catchphrases. The one visual that sticks out to me in this video: the silhouettes of people arriving mid-speech and leaving early.
- PeterGriffin2 12y ago
  It's pedestrian today. It wasn't pedestrian back then. Context matters. It's like saying the GUI work of PARC is pedestrian because today everything is a GUI.
- nemo 12y ago
  "relatively pedestrian as a web framework" In early '96 having a RAD MVC web framework backed by an ORM was really pretty groundbreaking (even moving codebases relatively seamlessly between an OpenStep desktop app and WO was possible), though yeah, this was Jobs going after the Enterprise audience rather than consumer electronics, very different vibe.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
For anyone confused: What Steve pronounces as Olé/Olay is OLE.
- nailer 12y ago
  There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms. One suck.com writer was called 'Duke of URL' pronounced like 'Duke of Earl'
  - rwc 12y ago
    The Yahoo campus cafe URLs is pronounced "Earl's"
  - philwelch 12y ago
    Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Things like "U.S.A." where you only pronounce the letters are called initialisms.
    - nailer 12y ago
      > Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Yes, I'm aware of that, hence stating 'There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms' in the comment you're replying to.
  - neoeldex 12y ago
    I say Earl when I speak of U.R.L.s. And I'm not ashamed of it.
- meepmorp 12y ago
  How would you pronounce it?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    Oh El Eee, like the names of its constituent letters. But then I've never heard it pronounced, only ever read it. So maybe "Olay" was the normal pronunciation.
dangerboysteve 12y ago
Man can Steve sell and make things look good. I used Webobjects for some projects back in the day.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  I read somewhere that WebObjects were in part the inspiration for JEE. Somehow the OpenStep efforts got sidestep by making Oak into Java and everything else got ramped down. I wonder how it would have been if Sun had kept with OpenStep instead.
  - philippeback 12y ago
    The spirit of this lives here: http://seaside.st/about http://seaside.st/about And it is an awesome framework. ReactJs is going the same kind of components based thing these days. Nothing so new, except for where the component is running...
    - innguest 12y ago
      Also of note is that Seaside uses the concept of continuations to manage multi-page flow which is a very fitting abstraction for this problem, and that most languages can't afford to do. That means they can code complex behavior as if the line between client and server did not exist.
      - philippeback 12y ago
        Kind of, but in the 3.x series, please note that continuations are now completely optional. As continuations are quite memory heavy, the new way allows for lighter sessions.
applecore 12y ago
A couple of tangentially related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611
ankurpatel 12y ago
"We love the Internet Explorer browser very much" - Steve (6:58 minutes)
- stffndtz 12y ago
  - said no apple employee ever.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - nchelluri 12y ago
    I am not entirely sure about this. While I don't have personal experience, from what I've read, IE on Mac was a fair bit different from IE on Windows. IE 5 for Mac, released in 2000, used something called the Tasman engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 > At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS. Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Internet_Explorer_5_Macintosh_Edition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...: > The Macintosh Edition introduced a new rendering engine called Tasman that was designed to be more compliant with emerging W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS Level 1, DOM Level 1, and ECMAScript. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that back while IE for Windows was giving web developers prematurely grey hair, IE for Mac was a much nicer browser and much more comfortable to support as a development target. I think it ended up getting less time/thought/effort from Microsoft eventually. Also, Safari was released in 2003 (beta in January, default browser in OS X 10.3 Panther, in October).
    - lostgame 12y ago
      IE for Mac was actually fairly nice, especially in the early days of OSX. I kinda miss that candy blue icon in my dock.
  - afandian 12y ago
    IE on Mac was really good, back in the day. More standards compliant than the Windows version and a different codebase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac
cowmix 12y ago
He's obviously in pain here, selling business software on NT of all platforms. The timing of this video is funny because soon after he went back to Apple to recapture the glory which is consumer electronics.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  You are talking about the days when Apple was about to close its doors after the Copland failed experiment and NT was picking up steam against UNIX based workstations. In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops. NeXT was also going multi-platform with OpenStep.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      My final project assignment at the university was to port a particle simulation engine from NeXT/Objective-C to Windows/C++. The professor had his Cube disconnected on his office, piled with other stuff. No one believed NeXT would survive.
      - rbanffy 12y ago
        > No one believed NeXT would survive. And, surprisingly, now every Mac is, essentially, a NeXT.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Sounds like the Enterprise Objects Framework was an ORM? Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework Apparently it provided the basis for Core Data, too.
- threeseed 12y ago
  It was actually one of the first and heavily inspired the beginnings of Hibernate. And yes it is the basis of Core Data.
heyts 12y ago
I would really like to know how cutting-edge this was at the time. It seems incredible to me how little has changed in how we make dynamic web applications.
- daigoba66 12y ago
  At the end of the day every dynamic web application does the same thing: concatenate and send back strings.
  - micampe 12y ago
    Sure, let's go down that road. At the end of the day every software that runs does the same thing: flip bits back and forth.
  - jmulho 12y ago
    From 1996 to 2005 dynamic web applications concatenated and sent back strings. After that we started sending back strings and concatenating. Sadly half the web hasn't caught on to the "new" way.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - stephenr 12y ago
      not every application/use case needs or benefits from dependency on XHR and JavaScript
    - sjwright 12y ago
      > Sadly half the web hasn't caught on to the "new" way. s/Sadly/Gladly/ There's something gloriously simple and effective about the page-is-a-page metaphor. Solid, unambiguous URLs that do what they say on the tin. It's not the "old" way, it's the native way.
      - jmulho 12y ago
lukev 12y ago
It's remarkable to see a presentation presenting programmatic construction of HTML as a novel concept.
- biafra 12y ago
  This was 1996. WebObjects was far ahead of anything I used at the time. I started using WO and EOF in 1999 and it had stuff like scaffolding (D2W) at that time. When did RoR introduce this?
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    That is the thing with RoR. There were frameworks before it that offered similar functionality, but since the web was growing up only a few developers got to see them.
state 12y ago
"Giving your credit card to someone over the phone is far less secure than giving it to someone over the web." [27:53]
whizzkid 12y ago
What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing. It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that.
- quux 12y ago
  He actually wasn't that passionate about enterprise stuff, but could clearly make it look like he was in important events like this. I think at this time, he was getting tired of NeXT and was looking to sell the company so he could focus on Pixar, or something like that. He was really tired of the computer business. I remember seeing an interview with him from around the same time period where the interviewer asked him to talk about NeXT's enterprise stuff and the response was something like "You don't really want to hear about that right? It's not really that interesting."
  - scj 12y ago
    That was the 1995 Cringley interview. About 54 minutes in. "You don't really want to hear about NeXT, do you?" was the exact statement. And he claims that innovation in the computer industry is in software within seconds. I think Jobs' response was more about disarming the perceived courtesy. While polite to ask Jobs about what he was doing with NeXT in 1995, the highlight of his career (and general interest) would be with Apple and to a lesser degree, Pixar. Kind of like talking to a rock legend about their latest album, when most people care about their breakout period.
- _pmf_ 12y ago
  > What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing. > It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that. He's the world's greatest used car salesman.
takahisah 12y ago
The QA is really interesting. Most of the questions I felt he handled well and showed that he has knowledge of the domain. Two questions in particular stood out: Q: How can I, as a developer, get my hands on the expensive software suite? A: Come talk to us. We can accommodate developers who are willing. This may have been some early input for him to think about sdks and the philosophy of providing developers with tools early on. Q: What is your view of transactions on the web? A: We don't think it's a technology problem. It's more of a social/business problem He was clearly wrong on this one, with the advent of cutting edge technology companies like PayPal and Stripe that followed.
- X-Istence 12y ago
  I don't see how he was wrong. Transactions on the web exist, there are improvements to the UI but it is a social problem (I am afraid of my credit card being stolen) and business problem (Don't worry, trust us we won't let anything bad happen to your credit card).
  - takahisah 12y ago
    He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial, as long as society and businesses would get behind the movement. I don't think that is the case from a security standpoint and also designing an api that would allow for widespread adoption.
    - threeseed 12y ago
      > He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial This is a guy who built three operating systems and countless revolutionary apps under his watch. Many of which given the constraints back in the day would've been incredibly complex. By comparison web transactions IS trivial.
- Tycho 12y ago
  Hmm I was more impressed by PayPal's business tenacity than with their technical ingenuity. Along with the entrenched credit card companies they had to deal with fraud and organized crime.
mwcampbell 12y ago
Interesting that he dismissed interpreted languages for non-trivial code, as if it were obvious that the performance wouldn't be good enough. But wasn't Perl already being used for CGI scripts in 1996?
- kevinchen 12y ago
  I'm sure you could make it work, but back then fewer engineer-hours had gone into making interpreted languages fast, and hardware was slower. It was also common to run a website on one machine. Tangentially related: https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213 https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213 "> @spolsky: Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page views, 5 servers. What am I missing? << That's the PHP factor"
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Yes and it was a pain. I learned never ever again to use interpreted languages for anything else other than shell scripting.
kalleboo 12y ago
At the end you can see a glimpse of the UI for Concurrence, the presentation software Steve Jobs used up until Apple created Keynote. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartySoftware/PersonalProductivity/Concurrence/Concurrence.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP... Found this story about the first time Steve Jobs moved from using physical slides to Concurrence running on a NeXT http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92.3/92.3.Fall.How-To1.html http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92...
a_rahmanshah 12y ago
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q
dtanl 12y ago
Great job by Steve Jobs!
lucaspottersky 12y ago
So, about the 10x programmer myth, productivity etc... Steve mentions that it took about 3 weeks with 3 programmers to build this app. The tools & technologies have evolved and today we can build this kind of thing with a tiny fraction of this effort... To me that's the kind of thing that really matters after all: evolving technology & tools, not the "10x programmer myth", or those "how to be more productive" tutorials. The tech evolution has a much bigger impact on productivity than those individual productivity recipees.
- ovi256 12y ago
  Those programmers were arguably 10x or 100x programmers, not run-of-the-mill. They made a choice to work on new technology, solving a hard problem. And then put in the effort, probably with little handholding, and managing the uncertainty. These are traits not found in the average or even median programmer.
- collyw 12y ago
  I can see close to 10x productivity gains depending on my work environment. If I have three meetings spaced throughout the day, a ton of quick interruptions, and I am trying to learn something new, forget it. If I get to focus on that one thing, then I can be pretty productive. I also think that the 10x thing is more to do over the longer term (rather than "look at what I bashed out in 2 hours"). I probably don't code as quickly as I used to, but I am a lot more thorough, and having made plenty of crappy mistakes designing my code in the past, I am in a far better position to know what will make my code robust, and maintainable time a month or two down the line.
- crazychrome 12y ago
  And, 100x cheaper, if taking consideration of free cloud offerings. These profound factors keep me working everyday, although I haven't made my millions yet. There was an article about Nokia or Ericsson around early 2000, saying that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short term but underestimate in long run. It's the case.
based2 12y ago
http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse-on-webobjects-and.html http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse... https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-users/200309.mbox/%3C3F6B3ED6.1020707@ognl.org%3E https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-users/200... http://vschart.com/compare/apache-tapestry/vs/webobjects http://vschart.com/compare/apache-tapestry/vs/webobjects http://tapestry.apache.org/ http://tapestry.apache.org/
CptMauli 12y ago
One interesting thing for me was, to see how slow the server interaction really was.

186 points by lpsz 12y ago

lpsz 12y ago

At the 23:50 mark the slides follow the familiar model seen in Apple media events today. The approach: in 3-4 concluding slides, concisely reiterate key selling points, compatibility, price, and the availability timeline. I've always found this approach to be particularly effective -- I'm highly likely to unambiguously remember these most important bits given that they are presented last.

k-mcgrady 12y ago
I wouldn't say that's exclusive to Apple or something they came up with - sounds like sales 101 to me.

danso 12y ago

What a trip to see Steve Jobs not only try to sell something pre-iPod-success, but something as technical and relatively pedestrian as a web framework...And he does it well, without the use of a primetime-polished slideshow or catchphrases. The one visual that sticks out to me in this video: the silhouettes of people arriving mid-speech and leaving early.

PeterGriffin2 12y ago
It's pedestrian today. It wasn't pedestrian back then. Context matters. It's like saying the GUI work of PARC is pedestrian because today everything is a GUI.
nemo 12y ago
"relatively pedestrian as a web framework" In early '96 having a RAD MVC web framework backed by an ORM was really pretty groundbreaking (even moving codebases relatively seamlessly between an OpenStep desktop app and WO was possible), though yeah, this was Jobs going after the Enterprise audience rather than consumer electronics, very different vibe.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

For anyone confused: What Steve pronounces as Olé/Olay is OLE.

nailer 12y ago
There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms. One suck.com writer was called 'Duke of URL' pronounced like 'Duke of Earl'
- rwc 12y ago
  The Yahoo campus cafe URLs is pronounced "Earl's"
- philwelch 12y ago
  Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Things like "U.S.A." where you only pronounce the letters are called initialisms.
  - nailer 12y ago
    > Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Yes, I'm aware of that, hence stating 'There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms' in the comment you're replying to.
- neoeldex 12y ago
  I say Earl when I speak of U.R.L.s. And I'm not ashamed of it.
meepmorp 12y ago
How would you pronounce it?
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  Oh El Eee, like the names of its constituent letters. But then I've never heard it pronounced, only ever read it. So maybe "Olay" was the normal pronunciation.

dangerboysteve 12y ago

Man can Steve sell and make things look good. I used Webobjects for some projects back in the day.

pjmlp 12y ago
I read somewhere that WebObjects were in part the inspiration for JEE. Somehow the OpenStep efforts got sidestep by making Oak into Java and everything else got ramped down. I wonder how it would have been if Sun had kept with OpenStep instead.
- philippeback 12y ago
  The spirit of this lives here: http://seaside.st/about http://seaside.st/about And it is an awesome framework. ReactJs is going the same kind of components based thing these days. Nothing so new, except for where the component is running...
  - innguest 12y ago
    Also of note is that Seaside uses the concept of continuations to manage multi-page flow which is a very fitting abstraction for this problem, and that most languages can't afford to do. That means they can code complex behavior as if the line between client and server did not exist.
    - philippeback 12y ago
      Kind of, but in the 3.x series, please note that continuations are now completely optional. As continuations are quite memory heavy, the new way allows for lighter sessions.

applecore 12y ago

A couple of tangentially related discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611

ankurpatel 12y ago

"We love the Internet Explorer browser very much" - Steve (6:58 minutes)

stffndtz 12y ago
- said no apple employee ever.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- nchelluri 12y ago
  I am not entirely sure about this. While I don't have personal experience, from what I've read, IE on Mac was a fair bit different from IE on Windows. IE 5 for Mac, released in 2000, used something called the Tasman engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 > At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS. Also from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Internet_Explorer_5_Macintosh_Edition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...: > The Macintosh Edition introduced a new rendering engine called Tasman that was designed to be more compliant with emerging W3C standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS Level 1, DOM Level 1, and ECMAScript. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that back while IE for Windows was giving web developers prematurely grey hair, IE for Mac was a much nicer browser and much more comfortable to support as a development target. I think it ended up getting less time/thought/effort from Microsoft eventually. Also, Safari was released in 2003 (beta in January, default browser in OS X 10.3 Panther, in October).
  - lostgame 12y ago
    IE for Mac was actually fairly nice, especially in the early days of OSX. I kinda miss that candy blue icon in my dock.
- afandian 12y ago
  IE on Mac was really good, back in the day. More standards compliant than the Windows version and a different codebase. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

cowmix 12y ago

He's obviously in pain here, selling business software on NT of all platforms. The timing of this video is funny because soon after he went back to Apple to recapture the glory which is consumer electronics.

pjmlp 12y ago
You are talking about the days when Apple was about to close its doors after the Copland failed experiment and NT was picking up steam against UNIX based workstations. In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops. NeXT was also going multi-platform with OpenStep.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    My final project assignment at the university was to port a particle simulation engine from NeXT/Objective-C to Windows/C++. The professor had his Cube disconnected on his office, piled with other stuff. No one believed NeXT would survive.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      > No one believed NeXT would survive. And, surprisingly, now every Mac is, essentially, a NeXT.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Sounds like the Enterprise Objects Framework was an ORM? Yep! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework Apparently it provided the basis for Core Data, too.

threeseed 12y ago
It was actually one of the first and heavily inspired the beginnings of Hibernate. And yes it is the basis of Core Data.

heyts 12y ago

I would really like to know how cutting-edge this was at the time. It seems incredible to me how little has changed in how we make dynamic web applications.

daigoba66 12y ago
At the end of the day every dynamic web application does the same thing: concatenate and send back strings.
- micampe 12y ago
  Sure, let's go down that road. At the end of the day every software that runs does the same thing: flip bits back and forth.
- jmulho 12y ago
  From 1996 to 2005 dynamic web applications concatenated and sent back strings. After that we started sending back strings and concatenating. Sadly half the web hasn't caught on to the "new" way.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - stephenr 12y ago
    not every application/use case needs or benefits from dependency on XHR and JavaScript
  - sjwright 12y ago
    > Sadly half the web hasn't caught on to the "new" way. s/Sadly/Gladly/ There's something gloriously simple and effective about the page-is-a-page metaphor. Solid, unambiguous URLs that do what they say on the tin. It's not the "old" way, it's the native way.
    - jmulho 12y ago

lukev 12y ago

It's remarkable to see a presentation presenting programmatic construction of HTML as a novel concept.

biafra 12y ago
This was 1996. WebObjects was far ahead of anything I used at the time. I started using WO and EOF in 1999 and it had stuff like scaffolding (D2W) at that time. When did RoR introduce this?
- pjmlp 12y ago
  That is the thing with RoR. There were frameworks before it that offered similar functionality, but since the web was growing up only a few developers got to see them.

state 12y ago

"Giving your credit card to someone over the phone is far less secure than giving it to someone over the web." [27:53]

whizzkid 12y ago

What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing. It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that.

quux 12y ago
He actually wasn't that passionate about enterprise stuff, but could clearly make it look like he was in important events like this. I think at this time, he was getting tired of NeXT and was looking to sell the company so he could focus on Pixar, or something like that. He was really tired of the computer business. I remember seeing an interview with him from around the same time period where the interviewer asked him to talk about NeXT's enterprise stuff and the response was something like "You don't really want to hear about that right? It's not really that interesting."
- scj 12y ago
  That was the 1995 Cringley interview. About 54 minutes in. "You don't really want to hear about NeXT, do you?" was the exact statement. And he claims that innovation in the computer industry is in software within seconds. I think Jobs' response was more about disarming the perceived courtesy. While polite to ask Jobs about what he was doing with NeXT in 1995, the highlight of his career (and general interest) would be with Apple and to a lesser degree, Pixar. Kind of like talking to a rock legend about their latest album, when most people care about their breakout period.
_pmf_ 12y ago
> What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on another completely different thing. > It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with the same passion. Respect on that. He's the world's greatest used car salesman.

takahisah 12y ago

The QA is really interesting. Most of the questions I felt he handled well and showed that he has knowledge of the domain. Two questions in particular stood out: Q: How can I, as a developer, get my hands on the expensive software suite? A: Come talk to us. We can accommodate developers who are willing. This may have been some early input for him to think about sdks and the philosophy of providing developers with tools early on. Q: What is your view of transactions on the web? A: We don't think it's a technology problem. It's more of a social/business problem He was clearly wrong on this one, with the advent of cutting edge technology companies like PayPal and Stripe that followed.

X-Istence 12y ago
I don't see how he was wrong. Transactions on the web exist, there are improvements to the UI but it is a social problem (I am afraid of my credit card being stolen) and business problem (Don't worry, trust us we won't let anything bad happen to your credit card).
- takahisah 12y ago
  He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial, as long as society and businesses would get behind the movement. I don't think that is the case from a security standpoint and also designing an api that would allow for widespread adoption.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    > He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial This is a guy who built three operating systems and countless revolutionary apps under his watch. Many of which given the constraints back in the day would've been incredibly complex. By comparison web transactions IS trivial.
Tycho 12y ago
Hmm I was more impressed by PayPal's business tenacity than with their technical ingenuity. Along with the entrenched credit card companies they had to deal with fraud and organized crime.

mwcampbell 12y ago

Interesting that he dismissed interpreted languages for non-trivial code, as if it were obvious that the performance wouldn't be good enough. But wasn't Perl already being used for CGI scripts in 1996?

kevinchen 12y ago
I'm sure you could make it work, but back then fewer engineer-hours had gone into making interpreted languages fast, and hardware was slower. It was also common to run a website on one machine. Tangentially related: https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213 https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213 "> @spolsky: Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page views, 5 servers. What am I missing? << That's the PHP factor"
pjmlp 12y ago
Yes and it was a pain. I learned never ever again to use interpreted languages for anything else other than shell scripting.

kalleboo 12y ago

At the end you can see a glimpse of the UI for Concurrence, the presentation software Steve Jobs used up until Apple created Keynote. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartySoftware/PersonalProductivity/Concurrence/Concurrence.html http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP... Found this story about the first time Steve Jobs moved from using physical slides to Concurrence running on a NeXT http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92.3/92.3.Fall.How-To1.html http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92...

a_rahmanshah 12y ago

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q

dtanl 12y ago

Great job by Steve Jobs!

lucaspottersky 12y ago

So, about the 10x programmer myth, productivity etc... Steve mentions that it took about 3 weeks with 3 programmers to build this app. The tools & technologies have evolved and today we can build this kind of thing with a tiny fraction of this effort... To me that's the kind of thing that really matters after all: evolving technology & tools, not the "10x programmer myth", or those "how to be more productive" tutorials. The tech evolution has a much bigger impact on productivity than those individual productivity recipees.

ovi256 12y ago
Those programmers were arguably 10x or 100x programmers, not run-of-the-mill. They made a choice to work on new technology, solving a hard problem. And then put in the effort, probably with little handholding, and managing the uncertainty. These are traits not found in the average or even median programmer.
collyw 12y ago
I can see close to 10x productivity gains depending on my work environment. If I have three meetings spaced throughout the day, a ton of quick interruptions, and I am trying to learn something new, forget it. If I get to focus on that one thing, then I can be pretty productive. I also think that the 10x thing is more to do over the longer term (rather than "look at what I bashed out in 2 hours"). I probably don't code as quickly as I used to, but I am a lot more thorough, and having made plenty of crappy mistakes designing my code in the past, I am in a far better position to know what will make my code robust, and maintainable time a month or two down the line.
crazychrome 12y ago
And, 100x cheaper, if taking consideration of free cloud offerings. These profound factors keep me working everyday, although I haven't made my millions yet. There was an article about Nokia or Ericsson around early 2000, saying that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short term but underestimate in long run. It's the case.

based2 12y ago

http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse-on-webobjects-and.html http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse... https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-users/200309.mbox/%3C3F6B3ED6.1020707@ognl.org%3E https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-users/200... http://vschart.com/compare/apache-tapestry/vs/webobjects http://vschart.com/compare/apache-tapestry/vs/webobjects http://tapestry.apache.org/ http://tapestry.apache.org/

CptMauli 12y ago

One interesting thing for me was, to see how slow the server interaction really was.