- A little more historical context. Rhapsody had two or three big problems:
- There was no transition plan for Mac apps other than Blue Box emulation. Adobe, Quark, Microsoft were the essential Mac developers and all of them completely refused to port to AppKit, full stop.
- Adobe refused to license Display PostScript under terms that would make it possible to ship as a consumer OS (supposedly they didn’t want to support DPS anymore, and refused to budge on a high per-seat price, as a way of tanking it the entire thing).
- Rhapsody was slower than classic MacOS on a wide variety of tasks, and unusable for others. The UI was a weird mashup of NeXT and Mac idioms
Note that it took until 2003 or 2004 for Mac OS X to become usable for non-technical end users. OpenStep had a lot of rough edges for non-Unix people; Rhapsody was the (false) start of a _long_ journey. (Ironically, given better engineering management, Apple could have shipped Copland well before then.)
- Piracy did not take Dreamcast out -- the PS2 did
- might also need to be handy with a soldering iron and maybe general EE skills -- late-period LaserDisc players were generally reliable, but they're quite old now
- I do sort of wonder if the article is mixing him up with a different Dr. Ed Roberts on the west coast -- I wasn't previously aware that he worked with AIDs patients or had anything more exciting going on than a humble country practice. It's the kind of thing AI might easily be fooled by. But maybe.
- The Japanese firms should not have given up so completely on software. This is how you get to Sony being reduced to using Google's awful Android TV stuff on their otherwise compelling television lineup. If they didn't need tighter control over the kernel for performance reasons for PlayStation, it wouldn't be shocking to see PS6 powered by Google Gaming OS(tm), which would be a real shame.
- These aren’t “four-digit codes”; they are unterminated strings of exactly four 8-bit characters in the MacRoman text encoding.
- Win95 was viewed as an abomination by the rest of the tech industry at the time. Nostalgia for it was inevitable since it became a lot of people's first computing experience, but it's jarring if you were an adult in tech in 1995. Or simply a Mac user.
I think retrocomputing is an important way to think about an alternate history of personal computing where something other than Unix and Wintel won, and possibly viable alternate futures where we could still change to different paradigms.
- Yes! I often draw from experiences during that time.
SGI made absolutely fantastic workstations, for example.
I was 3D gaming with full video and audio chatter in the mid to late 90's, viewing models in stereo, running powerful applications remotely over X, with the 3D GLX extensions.
Man so many good ideas in the Indigo Magic Desktop!
Package management that included the ability to pause on events such as disk full so a guy could remove other software, or add disk, whatever.
8 bit machines have relevance in embedded spaces.
And it is fun to wonder what would have happened had the Amiga gained traction.
It really was a beautiful time filled with all sorts of great tech people can draw inspiration from today.
- Title could use minor clarification - the iMate was a cheap (in every sense) ADB -> USB adapter, not the keyboard itself
- Good point. I still have 2! I used old Apple keyboards for a couple decades into USB because of them.
- They usually fillet me if I don't keep the OG title from the article. I usually only deviate if it's > 80 characters or if its too obscure to be known to a wider audience. In this instance, I added on the bit about being a classic apple keyboard for context.
- Impressive investigation!
For what it's worth, this has been corroborated by people I know who worked on the GS. Apple wanted to make more and faster IIgs's, but was stymied by 65816 supply issues to the very end of the IIgs' lifespan.
- Warhol was so impressed by how usable the Amiga was he thereafter ignored it and all other computers for the rest of his life.
- Don't get me wrong -- a lot of cool stuff got done with the Amiga. But Warhol was an interesting footnote at best.
- It just legitimized computer art even if it was ever fleeting. Shows he could excel in any medium. Just as nobody really talks about the sculptures of Picasso or a Jackson Pollock still life
- You didn't need an Amiga for that; many artists did 1-bit art on early Macs: https://www.macpaint.org/historical_gallery.html
- More
After computing Ed Robers did go to medical school and become an MD
Bio for Ed Roberts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Roberts_(computer_engineer)
More explicitly: I'm wondering if this wasn't at least partially AI-written, because that's a pretty fundamental error and you'd think a human researcher/writer would easily tell the difference between two Dr Ed Roberts's with no particular relationship on different coasts.
Or maybe we're learning something new about Ed Roberts (Altair guy) -- but given the world today I suspect not.