- This is a fascinating document. This was like a year after Windows 3.1 started eating the PC world, and a year before NeXT threw in the towel on hardware entirely, and approx. three years before the Internet became mainstream.
John Perry Barlow is the interviewer, very tech savvy, and he seems to have been convinced NeXT had finally figured it all out and was going to make it big in the business world. Didn't really see Windows coming, I guess, or didn't understand that high-end PC hardware would rapidly become cheap enough to make NeXT's hardware irrelevant in that space.
- The two things that stunted Java from a creative-projects perspective were (a) nobody built a native (x86 / PowerPC / etc) compiler for it early on and (b) the UI class library was utter garbage.
(a) People got way too enamored with the runtime possibilities and didn't see the opportunity to replace C++ -- by the mid-90's the serious C++ footguns were certainly widely recognized -- with a better language.
(b) I still don't know why anyone at Sun thought AWT was acceptable. They literally bought a superior class library from another company and threw it away. And every attempt to fix it became this endless parade of crap grafted on top of AWT.
- AWT known with affection as the Awful Window Toolkit.
- (a) I always thought that was unfortunate. Java would have been the perfect successor to C++ with its pleasant syntax and its powerful standard libraries. Perhaps it would have been a good option to disable the garbage collector to avoid performance bottlenecks and interruptions. Or maybe the successor could have been D.
(b) Interesting, can you tell us more about what this UI library was that Sun bought?
- Get a Mac? You could certainly take screenshots on the Mac by the late 1980's.
- Not to be a pedant but I am not sure how a Mac would be able to capture AutoCAD screens running on a PC . AutoCAD for Mac didn’t ship until ‘92.
The AutoCAD business was interesting. So many gadgets like extended memory cards, math coprocessors, crazy video cards. Anything to give a speed up in rendering and processing.
- It's really a shame that Unix ate the world. I've never had a chance to use Pascal in a professional context (other than reading old code) because C/C++ had taken over for OS development by that point.
- > It is a stripped down system that does not include systemd, wayland,
Serious indictment of systemd and wayland, tbh. How is it possible wayland is more difficult to build on than X11?
- These demonstrate exactly what Apple understood firsthand from Xerox and what they developed in house. This is valuable because Bill Gates wanted people to believe Windows and Mac developed in parallel from the same source, and these Polaroids show that it just isn't so.
- Lee Felsenstein:
"In 2008, Homebrew member Lee Felsenstein recalled similar doubts about Gates' $40,000 number: "Well, we all knew [that] the evaluation of computer time was the ultimate in funny money. You never pay that much for the computer time and I think that research will show that they were using someone else's computer time; someone else was paying for that. It could have been Honeywell where Paul Allen was working. So we all knew this to be a spurious argument."
- I always thought color cycling was underused on platforms where it was possible. You could do it in the classic Mac palette color modes too.
- One reason for this is that to make something worthwhile, you have to sacrifice a lot of palette indices. This leaves very few colors left for static parts of your image, especially on a 32 color Amiga screen.
A few games used it for "free" animation-like effects on title screens and similar semi-static displays.
Jim Sachs used it a lot on Amiga (Defender of the Crown, Ports of Call) for things like water and fire, where relatively short cycle ramps can produce good results. His best color cycling work is probably in the unreleased 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVnOAy_9VMU
Mark Ferrari achieved even better results (IMHO) but he had higher resolution (better dithering) and 256 colors. Although striking, it was still mostly used for the same kind of effects Sachs did: water, clouds, snowfall, etc:
- Nah, it was:
- People who wanted a Unix workstation could build one cheaply on commodity hardware with Linux
- SGI, HP, Sun, and others didn’t adapt to Linux’s disruption quickly enough. So much fucking about with Itanium.
- NT became good enough such that if you didn’t care whether it was Unix, you could actually use Windows.
- Mac OS X — the only Unix that’s ever managed to be user friendly in the true meaning of the term — ate the rest of the market. (You _could_ build a version of Unix that has a nice GUI and isn’t the Mac, but people are so wedded to X11’s 30 years of misfeatures.)
- I wonder just how much of this article was written by AI. It has the stylistic flourishes ("it wasn’t just a processor—it also housed the audio processing unit") and the pseudo-accuracy, like
> Unlike other consoles at the time, the NES pushed a different modular design approach
This is a really weird thesis statement. The NES is different from other consoles that preceded it due to the copy protection and particulars about the implementation, but architecturally it wasn't that distinct in the way this article implies; even the Atari 2600 could be expanded through use of additional chips.
- More
Sigh.
(Of course, it was also fundamentally a Unix workstation and still had a lot of rough edges that the classic Mac, for example, didn’t have. And those edges were so rough they didn’t get fully sanded down until approx. Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4.)
Forever an urban legend I supose.