4 ms·

I have to strongly disagree with this article. Altair BASIC was not lame for it's time. It was GREAT! There was no OS, there were barely any assemblers, y

I have to strongly disagree with this article. Altair BASIC was not lame for it's time. It was GREAT! There was no OS, there were barely any assemblers, you would have to toggle switches to binary representation to enter code in home brew computer. Without BASIC, You do have to first of all learn assembly programming, learn to assemble it by hand and translate to hex/binary then flip it in. BASIC was amazing for the time, anyone could and can program in BASIC. Google was not lame for the time, search engines sucked, no one saw/used google and said why? The first time we all used google we were hooked, we didn't have to AND OR NOT our results, it found meaningful results from the get go. Now Facebook we could argue that about if it would take off, you might say, why? There's already myspace. But I don't know that the Microsoft BASIC or google search was lame in any way shape or form. If we all folks did was hear about the idea, then yes, they would easily be brushed off, but after implementation, it was a no brainer. Kinda like Tesla, all electric cars have really sucked until Tesla showed you could make electric cars stylish, fun to drive and with range.

nostrademons 12y ago
PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them. Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead. Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends? I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.
- rwmj 12y ago
  PCs had a huge ecosystem of software, certainly after a year or two. Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    When Altair Basic came out? PCs had a huge ecosystem of software by the time I was born, in the 80s. The Altair was released in January 1975 and Altair Basic was released in March 1975. Ditto Google - I don't recall search being all that useful. I went to Yahoo to find websites until I was introduced to Google in 2000.
S_A_P 12y ago
I was in college when google first launched. I remember distinctly at the time AltaVista was the best search engine, but I still rarely got relevant pages from searches. I dont think that in the early days I remembered getting much better results from Google, but eventually it was pretty clear cut for me. I do remember in around 2004-2005 some folks I worked with were thinking of starting a "new" search engine, and that it would far surpass Google. I can say I thought that was a pretty lame idea. Of course to a large degree I think that Uber and AirBnb are a bad idea, but you cant argue with valuations....
- veb 12y ago
  For the group I ran around with it was how easy and uncluttered Google was back then that made us like and switch to it. I wish it were still the case.
- vram22 12y ago
  >I was in college when google first launched. I was working in a company at the time. Happened to be one of the early people there to know about Google. Tried it out. A few days later told a friend, who was sitting at the desk next to me, about it. He tried it with a search; results came back in 0.x seconds (even in those days, 1997 or so), then muttered: "That's fast."
Tloewald 12y ago
Setting aside Facebook -- Apple, Microsoft, and Google were all technically impressive early on -- it's as a business that they were kind of pathetic. It's easy to think of similarly technically impressive products that never turned into megacorporations -- e.g. UCSD Pascal did not create a software empire.
- acqq 12y ago
  UCSD Pascal was very slow compared to the (later) Turbo Pascal. It was the "Java before Java" always interpreting the bytecode.
  - jloughry 12y ago
    And that was my impression of the p-System too. The key thing that made Java fast, and wasn't clearly appreciated (except by a few people, not me) at the time was that the JVM was small enough to execute entirely in the CPU's cache. When the p-System came out, caches were tiny, a handful of bytes at most. By the time Java was defined, caches were growing larger, and the language designers knew it.
    - dbenhur 12y ago
      When the p-System came out cpu caches were not yet a thing. Main memory was fast enough to match cpu speeds. Your cache was your register set.
      - kragen 12y ago
        CPU caches were not a thing on microcomputers. The 360 Model 85 had a CPU cache in 1968.
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    UCSD Pascal allowed you to write compiled binaries on the Apple II -- that's very impressive technically when everyone else was either coding in BASIC or having to code in assembler. My point being that this was, in its way, far more impressive than MS BASIC, but did not create a software behemoth.
ganeumann 12y ago
They weren't lame products, they were lame companies. Yeah, Google had a better way to search. But it was obvious that Google, without any viable revenue model (they planned to lease their tech to other search engines) could never compete with the might Yahoo! or Excite. Likewise the Altair. Sure it was a great personal computer, but who wanted a personal computer? What would you do with it? (Remember that some of the first Apple Computer commercials showed the Apple ][ being used to store recipes...What do you do at home? You cook. What would you do with a PC? Um, use it to help cook?) I don't think PG is saying anything especially novel in this post. It's the obvious next step from the now-cliche "The best companies start out looking like toys" to "how do I distinguish between the companies that really are toys and the ones that can get big?" The answer is to imagine a way in which they could become big. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but at least you can weed out the ones that can't.
- blazespin 12y ago
  The answer is to look at the team, not to look at the idea.
  - ganeumann 12y ago
    WebVan.
    - ojbyrne 12y ago
      and, more recently, Color.com.
      - tim333 12y ago
        It's kind on interesting that a lot of the above companies success of those mentioned correlates with founders being smart / high IQ. Gates & Zuck got near perfect SATs, the Google guys are obviously smart, the Airbnb CTO was a Harvard CompSci. The Color guys on the other had went to second string colleges. The exception is Louis Borders at Webvan who did Math at MIT and presumably was smart but still he did ok at Borders and you can't win them all. Maybe the trick is to have smarter guys than the competition. Paul Graham himself kinds of fits - I suspect Viaweb won out against 30 or so competitors not so much because he used lisp as because he was a guy smart enough to design his own lisp.
ph0rque 12y ago
I gotta agree with you about Google; if anything, it was too good to be true. My boss and I discussed it, and he wrote it up in a blog post: https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe084a7da https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe0...
- nostrademons 12y ago
  It's interesting for me to look at your boss's "Good ideas" circle, because for me, Amazon was an obviously bad idea, Uber is still a bad idea, and I thought DropBox was a good idea but when I look at their initial Show HN a good number of other people did not. I think the problem we all suffer from is that we all have a very limited perspective. Things that we think are bad ideas - because we don't have an immediate need for them, or because we don't understand them - may be an obvious good idea for someone sitting somewhere else. And the trick to picking good startups is to get out of that personal bubble, and understand what is it about the users of that startup that differs from us, and whether that characteristic is going to be shared by more people in the future.
acqq 12y ago
Yes, Altair BASIC was definitely great. If I understand correctly, Microsoft (at that time, BillG and Paul Allen) were the first that managed to pack the whole thing in 4 KB for the 8080 processor. Google was also great: before them the best search engine was AltaVista where I often had to load a a few tens of pages in order to find the link relevant for me, the one that Google returned typically at the first page. Other engines were even worse, as in not even indexing most of the sites on the internet.

nostrademons 12y ago

PCs were lame for their time. They cost a couple thousand dollars, there was no software for them, and you really couldn't do much with them. Search was lame for its time. You couldn't actually find anything, that's why we all had to use portals and directories instead. Social networking online was lame for its time. What are you, some kind of nerd who doesn't have any friends? I think the meta-lesson here is that you don't want your product to be lame. You want your product to be exceptional, given what's already out there. You want your market to be lame, but very fast-growing, such that in a couple years people won't think it's so lame anymore.

rwmj 12y ago
PCs had a huge ecosystem of software, certainly after a year or two. Google search was awesome. Even Altavista was awesome back at the beginning before they let their search results become polluted by spam.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  When Altair Basic came out? PCs had a huge ecosystem of software by the time I was born, in the 80s. The Altair was released in January 1975 and Altair Basic was released in March 1975. Ditto Google - I don't recall search being all that useful. I went to Yahoo to find websites until I was introduced to Google in 2000.

S_A_P 12y ago

I was in college when google first launched. I remember distinctly at the time AltaVista was the best search engine, but I still rarely got relevant pages from searches. I dont think that in the early days I remembered getting much better results from Google, but eventually it was pretty clear cut for me. I do remember in around 2004-2005 some folks I worked with were thinking of starting a "new" search engine, and that it would far surpass Google. I can say I thought that was a pretty lame idea. Of course to a large degree I think that Uber and AirBnb are a bad idea, but you cant argue with valuations....

veb 12y ago
For the group I ran around with it was how easy and uncluttered Google was back then that made us like and switch to it. I wish it were still the case.
vram22 12y ago
>I was in college when google first launched. I was working in a company at the time. Happened to be one of the early people there to know about Google. Tried it out. A few days later told a friend, who was sitting at the desk next to me, about it. He tried it with a search; results came back in 0.x seconds (even in those days, 1997 or so), then muttered: "That's fast."

Tloewald 12y ago

Setting aside Facebook -- Apple, Microsoft, and Google were all technically impressive early on -- it's as a business that they were kind of pathetic. It's easy to think of similarly technically impressive products that never turned into megacorporations -- e.g. UCSD Pascal did not create a software empire.

acqq 12y ago
UCSD Pascal was very slow compared to the (later) Turbo Pascal. It was the "Java before Java" always interpreting the bytecode.
- jloughry 12y ago
  And that was my impression of the p-System too. The key thing that made Java fast, and wasn't clearly appreciated (except by a few people, not me) at the time was that the JVM was small enough to execute entirely in the CPU's cache. When the p-System came out, caches were tiny, a handful of bytes at most. By the time Java was defined, caches were growing larger, and the language designers knew it.
  - dbenhur 12y ago
    When the p-System came out cpu caches were not yet a thing. Main memory was fast enough to match cpu speeds. Your cache was your register set.
    - kragen 12y ago
      CPU caches were not a thing on microcomputers. The 360 Model 85 had a CPU cache in 1968.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  UCSD Pascal allowed you to write compiled binaries on the Apple II -- that's very impressive technically when everyone else was either coding in BASIC or having to code in assembler. My point being that this was, in its way, far more impressive than MS BASIC, but did not create a software behemoth.

ganeumann 12y ago

They weren't lame products, they were lame companies. Yeah, Google had a better way to search. But it was obvious that Google, without any viable revenue model (they planned to lease their tech to other search engines) could never compete with the might Yahoo! or Excite. Likewise the Altair. Sure it was a great personal computer, but who wanted a personal computer? What would you do with it? (Remember that some of the first Apple Computer commercials showed the Apple ][ being used to store recipes...What do you do at home? You cook. What would you do with a PC? Um, use it to help cook?) I don't think PG is saying anything especially novel in this post. It's the obvious next step from the now-cliche "The best companies start out looking like toys" to "how do I distinguish between the companies that really are toys and the ones that can get big?" The answer is to imagine a way in which they could become big. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but at least you can weed out the ones that can't.

blazespin 12y ago
The answer is to look at the team, not to look at the idea.
- ganeumann 12y ago
  WebVan.
  - ojbyrne 12y ago
    and, more recently, Color.com.
    - tim333 12y ago
      It's kind on interesting that a lot of the above companies success of those mentioned correlates with founders being smart / high IQ. Gates & Zuck got near perfect SATs, the Google guys are obviously smart, the Airbnb CTO was a Harvard CompSci. The Color guys on the other had went to second string colleges. The exception is Louis Borders at Webvan who did Math at MIT and presumably was smart but still he did ok at Borders and you can't win them all. Maybe the trick is to have smarter guys than the competition. Paul Graham himself kinds of fits - I suspect Viaweb won out against 30 or so competitors not so much because he used lisp as because he was a guy smart enough to design his own lisp.

ph0rque 12y ago

I gotta agree with you about Google; if anything, it was too good to be true. My boss and I discussed it, and he wrote it up in a blog post: https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe084a7da https://medium.com/@snootymonkey/paul-graham-is-wrong-411fe0...

nostrademons 12y ago
It's interesting for me to look at your boss's "Good ideas" circle, because for me, Amazon was an obviously bad idea, Uber is still a bad idea, and I thought DropBox was a good idea but when I look at their initial Show HN a good number of other people did not. I think the problem we all suffer from is that we all have a very limited perspective. Things that we think are bad ideas - because we don't have an immediate need for them, or because we don't understand them - may be an obvious good idea for someone sitting somewhere else. And the trick to picking good startups is to get out of that personal bubble, and understand what is it about the users of that startup that differs from us, and whether that characteristic is going to be shared by more people in the future.

acqq 12y ago

Yes, Altair BASIC was definitely great. If I understand correctly, Microsoft (at that time, BillG and Paul Allen) were the first that managed to pack the whole thing in 4 KB for the 8080 processor. Google was also great: before them the best search engine was AltaVista where I often had to load a a few tens of pages in order to find the link relevant for me, the one that Google returned typically at the first page. Other engines were even worse, as in not even indexing most of the sites on the internet.