Slashdot Mirror
Interview with John Scully
worm eater writes "CNet news has an interesting interview with John Scully, CEO of Apple back in the day. He talks about problems and potential in the computer industry, and expresses regret over the opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."
"Tonight, on CNET, we reveal the interview they didn't want you to see."
Scully VS Jobs
Only, on CNET Cable...
The newton was origionally going to be called the iPalm. However, when someone wrote that into a prototype iPalm, the thing read it as 'Newton'. And so it remained.
... some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton.
Now call me ignorant, but I haven't heard very much about those two technologies recently at all.. Are/were they really that 'key'?
John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water? Or do you want to change the world?
John Sculley is the first of several stupid assholes who ran Apple into the ground after Steve Jobs was deposed from power, and before his triumphant return as iCEO. He is to blame for the dark ages of Apple.
Runtime Revolution
Compile on any platform, to any platform- including a ton of *nix variants. A very nice cross-platform rapid application development tool with a very complete set of functionality (interface, database, tcp/ip ports, etc.), all coded in a HyperTalk-descended language.
X-Builder
Mostly designed for multimedia, I don't know as much about this one...
That's what killed me in the mid 80s to the early 90s - the prices. I love Apple products, but at the time, I just couldn't afford them. Whereas PCs were becoming cheaper and cheaper.
There is no spoon or sig.
The Newton was the sole creation of Steve Sakoman (ex-Be, now back at Apple) under the supervision and the "protection" of ex-Be's JLG (ex-Apple executive as well). Sculley had VERY LITTLE to do with the Newton, at least in the beginning.
I remember using HyperCard in 6th grade. There really was not too much programming involved, just placing buttons and having them perform actions. It was really the first time I ever had experience with GUI based programming. It seemed to have some potential, but once Visual Basic 3.0 came out HyperCard really didnt seem to matter to most people.
I haven't checked it out myself but PythonCard is supposed to be good.
Scully mentions how hypercard was sort of a predecessor to HTML interfaces. I disagree, it was more like an early version of Visual Basic or Python.
I learned how to program on Hypercard in highschool. It was a huge thing to be able to code simple visual applications quickly because before that it required alot of work to get GUI apps working. Its too bad that Apple ditched hypercard because it could have turned into a very useful tool to teach people how to program.
In linux libertas
Hardware and software have different volume relationships..
while software once created can be sold at huge volume with low fixed startup costs..
Hardware has high fixed costs to produe it it high volume..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I will have to give it a try.
photosMy Photostream
His last name is Sculley, not Scully.
The poster, and the editors apparently did not, as the man's name is not John Scully, but John Sculley. I can't wait until the fascinating interview of Steve Bobs.
Remember back in the day when the original line of Macs and their immediate successors had maybe not a huge, but at least somewhat significant market share? You could see that looking in the Byte magazine articles of the mid-to-late 80s. They actually made software for Macs! You don't see too much of it anymore, sadly.
You are absolutely right. They were able to charge more because they worked better, offered better features than the Wintel boxen with its myriad, incompatible graphics adapters, and were generally a hell of a lot easier to use. But as soon as Windows was released and a common set of standards for graphics cards and buses were introduced, thus allowing the price to drop, Apple did not follow suit. Arrogantly, I believe they thought that their platform was still better. It might have been, but is it really worth the 50-80% premium in price?
Anyway, what Apple needs to do now is lower their prices even further to bring them on par with the likes of the mass-market Dells. Otherwise, Apple may find itself a thing of the past.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Argh!!! It's "Sculley"! "Scully" is the "Jones" of the county of Kork, Ireland (i.e. the correct spelling). Sculley's ancestors didn't bother to explain the proper spelling to the folks on Ellis Island, apparently.
There's nothing interesting about an interview with a coulda-shoulda-woulda Monday morning quarterback, especially Sculley. He damn near killed Apple singlehandedly with his poor leadership. Why would anyone think his opinions today are any better?
What about SuperCard?
I don't know how good the OS X version is, but eight years ago, you could seamlessly import most HyperCard stacks into SuperCard...
I miss the days of HyperCard. I spent most of my middle school years in a small little computer lab teaching myself how to you it. Then the school got read of it for that bastard program hyperstudio with its color and sound. I weep every day for those lost days.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
... then it wouldn't be spelled "Sculley," now, would it?
Yes, but Sakoman's Newton had very little to do with the Newton that eventually shipped. It was a much different project, more along the lines of the Jaguar, than what became the PDA.
I hate to point this out, but the pedantic ass immediately before your post made yours redundant. Please throw yourself off a cliff.
HAHAHAHA if they spelled it "Correctly", then his last name would be "Correctly." Dolt..
Scully was a marketer -- he never invented anything except possibly the term "PDA".
Scully is associated with the Newton because he staked his entire reputation on it -- he spent several years telling the world about the upcoming handheld revolution long before the Newton even shipped. When Apple started to get their asskicked in the PC market, Scully told people that it was OK because they would own the PDA market. Etc etc etc.
opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."
Atleast, Newton did not miss his opportunities with an apple.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
And now I'm online every day....
Ever consider that the reason RedHat keeps crashing might be the x86 you love so much?
I bet you prefer cars that are cheaper because they haven't been redesigned in two decades, too.
OK, it's been said a million times before, but Apple is a hardware company.
Mac OS X is a great product, but its sole purpose is to sell Macs. If they ported it to run on generic X86 boxen, they'd never sell enough to recoup the losses on hardware sales. Plus supporting the myriad combinations of hardware would cost a fortune, and lose them the "it just works" factor.
Forget Sakoman's Hobbit-based Newton.
Forget Swatch.
Newton never would have become what it did without Sculley. Sculley latched onto the idea and get behind it big time. It was his largest effort as the CTO. It was a whole technology, it was going to be a whole new branch of Apple, an entire family of products.
Sculley was so Newton-crazy that he "used" a mock-up (no, not a Nuttin') on stage at one of the Apple employee meetings. He was up there acting as if he were taking notes on it and instead I guess just getting a feel for it.
Anyway, leave Sakoman out of it. Hell, leave Michael Tchao out of it too. You can talk about inventors all day. People can't even agree who invented the television. Skip all that.
Newton became what it was because of Sculley. It never would have seen the light of day without him.
HyperCard was an incredibly powerful and flexible tool for development. You just had to know how to code for it so you could extend its capabilities.
Any tool today that allows for drag-and-drop interface design is a descendent of HyperCard. Macromedia lives off it, by creating products like Flash, Director and Authorware. Even high end development tools, like Metrowerk's CodeWarrior borrows from it.
It's easy for people who only saw the technology later in the game to blow it off. But for those of us who have seen and worked with the technology since it was first released in 1987, it was a major deal. HyperCard showed us that Apple was already preparing for the multimedia-governed future we take for granted now.
This was later proven in 1993, when Cyan used HyperCard to create its smash hit game, Myst. The game showed us all the true power hidden inside the deceivingly simple-looking HyperCard, and ultimately shaped the multimedia industry we know today.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I pick my cars based on number of cupholders.
Wouldn't that make it the "Apple Newton"?
Couldn't that be confused with a cookie?
Disclaimer: This product not to be eaten.
Back in the day, Apple computers were loaded with custom chips that gave them unique capabilities. The downside to this design was that it limited Apple's ability to manufacture machines.
So, they basically had more potential customers than they had computers. There's two ways they could deal with this situation:
a) Move to an 'open' architecture and bring in 3rd party manufacturing
b) Keep raising prices until the demand curve falls off.
Scully chose Plan B, which pretty much permenently doomed them to a nitch player. The upside is that their profits were so high that they built that $4 Billion bank account that people are always talking about. Apple is really more of a mutual fund now days than a computer manufacturer.
There's a history of Apple by Jim Carlton that covers the decision not to allow 'cloning' in great detail.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
If you read the book 'Startup' it details how the guy who came up with the Pen computer idea (and went on to try and compete with Microsoft's Windows for Pen Computing, Apples Newton, and the EO communicator among others) had originally told his friends about his idea. One of his friends was this apple guy [sakoman i guess, it's been a good 6 or 8 years since i read the book] who then talked about it there and got the funding and encouragement of Gassant and Apple as mentioned above. But originally the guy who had the idea and shared it with him, he did not intend for the other guy to go off and work on it with big funding at Apple without him!
Which Jaguar are you referring to? I know you don't mean the feline. Maybe you mean Atari's Jaguar game system, or a version of OSX?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a slot A athlon 700 running gentoo linux and it's been up for 45 days or so now. In that time I have compiled KDE several times, all hail gentoo! :) The point is, that's a trivial uptime. It's an x86-compatible system. It's a kitbashed clone assembled from all the crap I had lying around at the time, and it is completely reliable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously. Several middle school classes in my district used hypercard quite a bit, to do presentations. It was easy to use for that purpose, and for sixth graders anything that involved computers was fun. And messing around with Hypercard, inserting pointless slide transistions and odd sounds was lots of fun.
Then while I was in high school we made the transistion to PCs and Powerpoint. And with Powerpoint everything became less fun and more work. It was not as easy to do things like linked slides for non-linear type presentations.
So as a result, I always thought that Hypercard was just for creating nifty presentations (which easily impressed most parents) and was the precursor to Powerpoint. And like most ideas MS lifted from Apple, they didn't do it near as well (or so it seemed to me).
...that big hairy dude from Monsters Inc.?
he was hired away from Pepsi to work at Apple. I think Jobs gave him that old "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?" speech.
The Newton was fine, except that it cost more than the average person was able to pay, and the handwriting recognition needed work. They fixed it later.
Sculley brought about the Color Macs, under Jobs it was still greyscale and B&W. I have a Mac IIcx under my desk which I don't use. One day I may hook it back up. Maybe run Linux on it or System 7?
Microsoft beat down Apple, Windows kept taking marketshare, and Apple did the best it could to compete. The Creative Content market was the bulk of Apple's marketshare. This helped to cotribute to Apple's Dark Ages and loss of revenue. Microsoft was to blame there, even if it did make software for the Mac, it favored Windows first.
Sculley tried to fill Jobs' shoes, but couldn't. He didn't have the reality distortion field or the creative marketing genius that Jobs had. Meanwhile Next wasn't doing so well and could barely hold it's own. Unix was the future, few people saw that at the time. Jobs knew it because he invested in Unix technology for Next. Meanwhile Linux was getting started and slowly started to gain marketshare. Apple's A/UX needed work, but was put on the back burner to favor MacOS.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Imagine if you could easily pull up cards from stacks on other computers across an AppleTalk network -- it would have very much resembled an early version of HTML -- only more powerful.
Yeah, but remember that just like Word, hypercard has them crazy macroviruses... it would be a bitch to get a trust-model worked out that would protect against macrovirus and cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. Even under OSX, where you could chroot / su it into a very small sandbox, you have to worry about CSS: if it could redefine a procedure in memory, used by more trusted stacks, you could end up screwed anyway.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
the iBooks would normally cost $1500, but every other week would be on sale for $799, or $699 with bonus card, limit 4
I have blog like everyone else
Oh yes, Hypercard was WAY more than a slide show! My dad has been running his business off Hypercard for over fifteen years! He tracks his time and expenses on projects, which autocalculates the billing, which autogenerates the invoice that gets him paid. It also tracks if the client has paid or not, keeps a 'credit rating' for clients in his hypercard 'rolodex', and handles all the family finances.
My Chemistry teacher and I made a test-at-your-own-leisure testing system for our science department in high school, it was network enabled, and pretty secure. It let us take short tests after we completed our lab work, or during off-hours and study halls. The test was randomized so nobody could make cheat-sheets.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Yeah, right. x86 has only 16 general-purpose cupholders and PPC has 32.
There is FreeCard - a project hosted on sourceforge.net, more info is available under http://www.FreeCard.org
he shoulda stuck with the sugar water.
m l
After bonehead moves with Apple, he aquired the program/company Live Picture.
Back when RAM would cost you over $6K/gig, it allowed you to do retouching and composites of really big files on a 256meg machine. They also promoted the Flashpix format, which let you zoom into pictures online.
After ignoring many suggestions of how the tech could be used to do some really innovative, useful things, and more bonehead moves, the company dies (assets bought by MGI)
a good page about this can be found at:
http://www.goingware.com/tips/resignation.ht
and
http://www.goingware.com/tips/misery.html
quote:
"The bad VC comes up with ideas about what might appeal to Wall Street or to a possible corporate purchaser and orders you to drop what you're doing and pursue his misguided goal.
A specific example of this was when John Scully directed Live Picture, the company, to abandon development of Live Picture 3.0, the program, and instead pursue development of internet technologies involving the very complex and proprietary Flashpix file format.
You could do really cool things with FlashPix, admittedly, but it's not really what users wanted. Very few people use Flashpix these days, even though Kodak, Microsoft and Live Picture went to no end of trouble to develop and promote it. Instead, people who browse the web still get JPEGs, plain and simple.
But the specific reason John Sculley felt it was important to develop and promote Flashpix - he said as much in a company meeting - was because we were preparing for an IPO, and "Wall Street is not interested in tools companies. It is interested in Internet companies".
No, I mean Jaguar, the 88k project at Apple. You might be interested in reading the BeOS Bible for more clarification of the history than I can do from memory.
You are saying Apple would lose sales if they dropped their prices. What errant nonsense! The only customers they would lose that way would be snobs. They would gain a whole heck of a lot more customers than they would lose. But they would lose net income because their software and hardware is a low volume specialty niche.
The only possible change for Apple would be to port their software to wintel PCs, and then their hardware would be in direct competition with Dell at al. It would be a gamble that increased software sales would make up for lower hardware sales. Certainly some people would continue to buy expensive Apple hardware, but most people would take the lower price for ordinary style. Some people would take even lower prices and put up with crappier hardware. The lower hardware sales might be counterbalanced by cheaper components, but that's just part of the equation they must consider.
Infuriate left and right
FreeCard lives as open source on Sourceforge and FreeCard
Who is Hell is John Scully? He is a fraud. A sanctimonious fraud. I mean, really, who died and made John Scully into Ghandi?
... She is gone! ... In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."
Vin Scully, however, brings tears to your eyes. Transcendental. To quote, "High flyball into right field.
The entire industry is pretty grim right now, and I wouldn't be fooled into thinking the economy is picking up much. You can be fooled by all the garbage such as "Bull Market" and crap like that, but if you look at stock charts, you'd see it pretty much is in the same state as things were a few years back.
There are too many uncertainties nowadays for companies to spend spend spend on R&D and other things which really sucks, so I would hold my breathe waiting for the 'next big thing'.
Latest Comprelated/Financial news
Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Milunovich offered a plan to revive "bloated, underachieving, unfocused" server-computer maker Sun Microsystems -- including a personality makeover for Chief Executive Scott McNealy.
Warning that Sun is headed for a ravine "filled with carcasses" of defunct computer companies, the analyst wrote a research report as an open letter to McNealy and Sun's board. He said they should slash as much as 19 percent of the company's staff members and settle on a single new mission. [Full story
A Wall Street analyst's warning that Sun Microsystems could end up as another corporate carcass has led at least one rival to smell blood.
In an aggressive move, Hewlett-Packard said Friday that it is offering $25,000 in services and other incentives to Sun customers who move their computer systems to HP products.
Full article
No one will spend money (real money) until this government gets their act together. Iraq, Korea, Iran, etc., there is too much to lose in investing, when there is no stability over here.
MoFscker
I was also one of those who were fascinated by HyperCard...
Anyway, I have a vague impression that the combination of the Interface Builder and Project Builder was a HyperCard on steroid on NeXTSTEP that still lives in the Mac OS X.
Where was that Scully when the technology was closed? Why wasn't it at least open-sourced?
So many stupidy-based decisions were, are and will be driving Apple.
Less is more !
John Sculley did a pretty good job. Michael Spindler is the problem. Michael Spindler is personally responsible for honestly the majority of Apple's past and present problems.
It has never been "obvious" that the x86 architecture would take over the world. In the beginning it was an inferior design to the 68000 series. When Apple (quite correctly) decided to change architecture, it made a lot of sense to move to a design which expanded the register capability of the 68000 and was much cleaner than the x86, which was increasingly a series of kludges held together with string. It has only recently been apparent that Intel's sheer sales volume could keep it in the lead for technical capability, and now with the G5 even that is doubtful. Intel may well stay ahead for consumer applications but in the mathematical, statistical and database areas it isn't obvious that the x86 will stay ahead of the Power architecture. Apple's ability to leverage a cleaner processor architecture on a better regulated platform enables them to do more per development dollar than Intel/Microsoft.
Meanwhile, I continue to save up for the G5 Powerbook, when it comes...
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
That was the only time he ever scored!
They haven't gone out of their way to cripple Darwin, though. It's just that all the graphics layer stuff (which is really what make Mac OS X good for desktops, obviously). What someone needs to do is write a drop in replacement for cocoa that runs on top of X. Plus, I'd be willing to bet there is an x86 port of some kind, floating around Apple (just because that seems to fit the sense of humor over there). You're right though, Apple currently sees itself as a hardware company, and always has. I think, as an arm-chair commentator, that they would do better for themselves if they didn't limit their vision so.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
The room was badly lit and the air damp, as if already used by hundreds of people.
Scully sat down, facing the interviewer. He had introduced himself as Mr. Kawamoto. Kawamoto. She had to admit, he certainly was inventive.
Scully scanned the room with a quick glance, can't let him notice. He started asking his questions. "As the IT industry restructures, how would you describe its turnaround?" Kawamoto said. She answered his questions, all the while thinking about what the man had said, last night, before kicking the chair he was standing on from underneeth his own feet. The gun had slipped from his hand after a long minute. That was one place she was never going back to. "The man with the funny face you want!" he had screamed while choking on the rope and swaying back and forth. "The man with the funny face!"
Kawamoto was still asking questions, something about Wi-Fi and their profit margins, but that wasn't what made her tense. She couldn't see his eyes behind his dark sunglasses, but his whole body had twisted a bit. His right leg a bit higher than his left, his shoulders turned to the left, just a little bit, hardly enough to notice, and his head had gone up a bit. Whenever he'd stop speaking his mouth wouldn't entirely close, but just hang open a bit. She could hear him breath. A soft sighing noise. Hissing and sighing. She heared herself saying "The chance for entrepreneurs and innovators to create new things will probably come..." but before she could answer her sentence her phone started beeping. Beep beep. Beep beep. Kawamoto didn't appear to be aware of the phone. He just kept on looking at her from behind his dark glasses. Sighing. The scar that run from his left ear over his nose and up across his right eye seemed to pulse, barely noticable.
"Excuse me," she murmered and reached for her cell phone in the inside pocket of her coat, which she had hung over the back of her chair before sitting down. Her gun was in there too. She touched it slightly before taking out her phone. The gun made her feel comfortable. Which made her even more scared. She knew that when guns make you feel comfortable you are in serious trouble. Pressing the green button and holding the phone to her ear she heared Mulder's voice: "Scully, get out of there. Get out of there now. The man you told me about? The man with the funny face? He's him. He is him. Get out of there now, you hear me?"
Scully turned her face to Kawamoto. He had taken off his glasses. Where the scar had gone out of sight behind the darkness of the glasses at his right eye was nothing. His eyebrow was twisted down in an awfull way, leaving only a small space where his eye was supposed to be. But it wasn't. There was only a blackness leading to a gory, infected hollow. His mouth was in a twisted grin..
What someone needs to do is write a drop in replacement for cocoa that runs on top of X.
Some people are trying. Check out the GNUStep project.
Be aware though, that the X window system is roughly equal in capabilities to the original color quickdraw environment, and simply can't handle the sophisticated visual effects that the Quartz engine can.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That would be an easier statement to support if they distributed their OS for free... but they don't, it costs $100+. Likewise if they distributed their hardware for free and only charged for their OS, it'd be entirely supportable to say they were solely a software company. They are both a hardware and a software company. Apple's purpose is not to sell macs, it's to make money and remain in existence. That's why the measure of whether they're a hw or sw outfit must be defined via money, instead of how many employees work on hw vs sw, or how gratifying the hw or sw is to polled users. And by this measure they are now also a media company.
They may make much more money on hardware than on software (I don't know), but that would not answer the question of whether they could profit by porting their software on other platforms. It would be too simplistic to say that their profits would go down due to fewer people buying their hardware. They could, for example, realize greater profits from disproportionately greater software sales. They could get into x86 hardware themselves. They could see increased migration to PPC hardware by x86 users who appreciated their software and wanted to go fully "apple native" and see the benefits of controlled hardware integration.
The fact that they haven't ported OSX to another platform shouldn't be thought of as logical proof that they never will or shouldn't. If the only reason their OS sells now is because they have a monopoly on their hardware, they are guaranteed to have their lunch eaten by competition in the not too distant future; their advantage in ease of use could be erased by advances in KDE/Gnome, and on the hardware side Dell could decide to foray into something competetive and lower priced. Apple will have to adapt.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Sculley's years at Apple were Apple's some of it's most successful during Apple's entire history. Profits, marketshare, etc were at their highest during Sculley's reign.
While Jobs has arguably done a good job since his return, profits are minimal, market share is weak and product quality, while still innovative, is lower that during the Sculley era.
Don't forget that HyperCard was definately one of the first visual UI editors - if not the first. When I used Visual Basic for the first time I couldn't believe how similar to HyperCard it was, and probably still is.
While I wouldn't call Sculley an asshole, Apple's boom years during Sculley's tenure as CEO were the result of projects conceived and decisions made before he became CEO. He got to enjoy the fruits of the Macintosh, the Laserwriter, PageMaker, etc. He milked these markets for what they were worth at the expense of moving Apple into new markets (like the doomed "Star Trek" project, MacOS on PCs). He was a mediocre leader at Apple. Michael Spindler, and to a lesser extent, Gil Amelio are the ones that killed Apple.
But.. they could port it, and make the x86 version opensource? So we can run it on our PC's for free? They can even set up BitTorrents for the ISOs so our d/l will be fast. And then apple would be really cool. So why don't they do that?
u r a true genius man
something around 0x200 IQ
more telligent than an alien!!
John Sculley probably did the right thing booting Jobs out of Apple at the time, as Jobs was simply too young and brash to take responsibility for his actions. I think the time at NeXT where Jobs had no one else but himself to blame for the company's failure to promote the Cubes and Stations was what taught Jobs to think about what he did before doing it.
Sculley certainly had good idea, the Newton being the chief one amongst them, but he didn't have Jobs' feel of design appeal to get that thing to a point where everyday joes would want one. Take a look at the phenomenal success of the Apple iPod and you realise what Jobs could have done with the Newton if he had been the one to introduce it. It's sad but it's the way things are and Jobs is certainly correct in not getting Apple to try and compete in the desasterous PDA market of today, which is dying due to competition from mobile phones.
I think that there were many other technologies that Apple introduced that could have made more of an impact in the market, but which, mainly due to Apple's poor marketing and market position at the time, never made. Hypercard was one, although Applescript can today do a lot of what Hypercard did then. OpenDoc/Cyberdog was another. openDoc was such a phenomenal innovation that Bill gates made it part of Microsoft's contract forbidding ex MS employess to work on OpenDoc for 3 years after leaving MS. The concept was in competition to and superior to MS' OLE and that worried Microsoft a lot at the time. It would have meant that components could be placed from one programe into another, such as being able to, say, do image editing in word processing and vice versa. Brilliant.
The strange thing today is that the services which are part of OSX are very neglected und undermarketed although they serve a similar purpose. Perhaps Jobs just doesn't get it?
When he made all educational sales direct.
He made the fatal assumption that all of the schools were loyal to Apple as opposed to being loyal to their local dealers.
When those local dealers couldn't sell Apple products anymore, they started to sing the praises of Compaq and HP, the schools believed them and slowly started to switch.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
But sir! A Newton is not a Cookie! A Newton is Fruit and Cake.
...with particularly finiky handwritting recognition.
Global Thermonuclear War!
Die Zedminos!
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Not only that, but Ward Cunningham has stated that HyperCard was an inspiration for some of the concepts of Wikis.
I'm wirtcg tpis on a nykton!
I'm now trying to create a database with Filemaker that is no more complex than either of those and so far it's been a nightmare. HyperCard was so simple and elegant, and when you wanted to dig further it was actually enjoyable learning hypertalk. Filemaker just makes me want to put off doing this job :(
What is your definition of "obvious"?
/Apple thing blindly.
After reading what you wrote, your definition is only about technical, and biased one a little.
Is x86 still inferior to the Power? Yes. Why not. However is it bad for using desktop PCs for the purpose? No!
Even back in 1990s, x86 was in that level of technical and business status. It was clear leader than 680x0. Even with PowerPC, x86 has more strength in markets.
Although I use Macintosh, I don't like to compliment on PowerPC / Motorola
Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. Made in HyperCard. Also by Cyan. A sweet little game.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Don't forget that HyperCard was definately one of the first visual UI editors - if not the first. When I used Visual Basic for the first time I couldn't believe how similar to HyperCard it was, and probably still is.
VB struck me as a weird cross between BASIC, HyperCard and JavaScript.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
In some fairness to Gil Amelio, he didn't really have time to show if his ideas would work. He came in and did a bunch of cutting, and then was removed before he had any time to rebuild. I'm not saying that he would have done a great job, we'll just never know what kind of job it would have been.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Due to industry pressures. Period. The fact that you could make modules for OD and string modules together to make an application meant, essentially, that you could drop a type module and a paint module together... and a spell checking module... and BLAMMO! Be running what Adobe didn't get around to doing with Photoshop until v.7 back in the days of OS 8.
:P
Adobe and several other major software houses took notice of this, realized what it could do, and essentially told Apple "Drop this shit like a ton of bricks or we drop support for your platform. Now." (this may also answer your question as to why it was never opened- though asking why older software wasn't open sourced is kind of like asking why I can't get m '57 Chevy with factory air and CD player...)
Same thing with the memory management system that had been planned for MacOS 9.3. Publishers pissing an moaning about "OOOOH WE'LL HAVE TO REWRITE OUR APPS AND YOUR A NICHE MARKET SO IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO JUST DROP IT" has kept Apple hogtied in more ways than one for some time.
Fortunately, OS X and Final Cut Pro are serious coups in this department- Adobe dropped Premiere (which sucks rocks regardless) in response to having to compete against Apple. The fact it was Apple must have pissed them off something fierce- if Macromedia had continued FCP development instead of selling it to Apple, I'm sure things would be a bit different.... and I'm sure FCP would suck.
Anyway. That's the long form. The short form: Get a clue. Talk to a few developers who've actually been to the Apple campus and have been doing work on the platform since the 80's. Get their views.
That said, OD was whacked after Jobs came back, and the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8.
quite a bit. At a previous employer, the department had a Newton that no one was using. I adopted it until I left, using it for everything from taking notes in class to keeping track of my schedule and tasks. The handwriting recognition did work, sort of, but it took a good six weeks of heavy use to get it really working smoothly.
:|
I honestly wish I had outright stolen that Newton when I left.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Jimbo Jones: "Make a note on your Newton to beat up Martin!" Dolph:
I remember playing with hypercard in Grade school, making flip-book like movies. Anyways....
HyperCard is a wierd animal. I heard you could actually boot into hypercard with a Mac Plus with no MacOS. People who are interested should look into Hacintosh. Its little known atl UI(or OS, I cant tell) for that mac made in hypercard. It looks damn cool. Go see for yourself.
http://www.creysoft.com/hackintosh/main.htm
%\
Here we have the soft drink guy who didn't think he had to know anything about computers to run Apple. Now the talking heads are trying to sell copy with an interview with him. How ironic.
what are you moderators smoking?
the original post refared to the period where Scully was incharge of apple, back in the mid80 to early 90s - where Apple could have monopolised the PC market easly - by pricing thier machines to get 20% profit margins and not 50-60% as Scully priced them.
THERE WAS NO COMPETITION from the PC market to the mac os at that time. NONE. what? DOS4? windows 1.0?! there was no GUI worth talking about on the PC, untill win 3.11 (which was still years behind the mac) if apple would have shaved the prices down, if not by streamlining the manufacturing by outsoursing, then by licencing the os - they WOULD have control over the PC market today.
an israeli company, who had some interesting web stuff going on in the early 90s. he turned it into gizmoz.com - a charecter animation "web-charecters" company.
It died. big surprise.
"but eight years ago, you could seamlessly import most HyperCard stacks into SuperCard"
You still can, and the OSX version is great.
How incredibly useless,
I know a local artisan-geek who makes up flyers for bands entirely in PostScript with a text editor. His posters come out looking like fractal-hypnotic-demonic designs that really catch the eye. Anyone walking by who knows computers can tell that he's not using Photoshop/Illustrator to just rotate and copy an image, it's quite obvious that he's actually PROGRAMMING his posters.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Interface builder lets you draw your windows and controls, but you still need to write and compile your own code to manage it.
...and dressing up as one on the cover of a magazine was probably the most incredible insult he could have perpetrated against Sony, their only ally at the time. Like pretty much all mahogany-row-kids he had absolutely NO sense of what he was saying or doing or how it appeared. The day he stepped down I literally jumped for joy. Yeah, Spindler and Amelio did their share of damage, but Sculley made them look like fools.
You illiterate buffoons - 'Sculley' has an 'e'.
Let's rescue
Isn't this the guy that had Steve Jobs kicked out, and almost put the last nail in Apple's coffin? Putting this guy in charge was about as good an idea as those Apple infomercials.
(However, the stack I am trying to update needs to print a portion of a card, not the entire card, and I can't figure out how to do this in SuperCard. All I can convince SC to do is print the entire card. If anyone knows how to get it to print a part of a card, defined by xy coordinates like HyperCard did, please let me know.)
And that's the very strength of HyperCard, right there. It made non-programmers think they could do a lot of cool things. I am a non-programmer myself, essentially, but I sat down with HyperCard one day in the late '80s and said "I want a program that does x. There is no program that does what I want the way I want. Maybe this HyperCard thing will help." And I messed with it and messed with it some more, and found out that yes, I could create a stack with the functionality I needed, without any actual training or prior experience. If I didn't know the syntax for something, I could just guess and half the time it would work! It made me feel like I could accomplish anything. And I have a box of postcards from users of the stack I later released as postcardware, to prove that I really could.
SuperCard is great, but like many, I think Apple really dropped the ball the minute they stopped making a scriptable version of HyperCard free with every Mac. An OS X HyperCard, from Apple, with all the features a modern HyperCard would have... well, that would be fantastic. I can dream...
//
I was under the impression that Jaguar was investigating a whole bunch of RISC chips.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember reading something in Macworld aloooong time ago.
Basically, Jaguar was supposed to be beyond Macintosh, a business-only type of machine that wasn't even backwards compatible. The case designs were really harsh and geometric.
Maybe it was the PowerPC team that was trying all different RISC architectures with 68k emulators.
Maybe I'm being distracted by the pretty pictures in this book:
AppleDesign: the Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group, by Paul Kunkel
Wrong...Jobs did this when he returned.
One time even he said that they screwed up with respect to educational sales that were lost to Dell.