With the availability of TONS of historical data on computing at the click of a mouse, the job of a
Computer Historian is pretty much obsolete. (No pun intended.)
I disagree. I think this argument is tantamount to saying that there's no point in being a Shakespeare scholar because we've already found all of his plays. A historian must tie together information from disparate (and sometimes contradictory) sources into the best, most cohesive account possible. Like it or not, he must introduce and defend an interpretation of what happened, what aspects of the event were significant, and why the event as a whole was important. Since a historian can only make these judgements based on the context of his time and the assumed context of the time he studies, and since both change as new knowledge and ideologies develop, at least a few historians will remain gainfully employed for years to come.
Anyone can hit up a search engine, and search for....say, ENIAC or EDVAC, and be presented with truckloads of material. The internet was spawned from computer history, so it's only natural that it has plenty of reference material regarding it's roots.
True for these machines, but not for others - before 1996 or so, the Apple Lisa (for example) was virtually unheard of on the Internet. Besides,
most online computer material is reference, not notes on the research and development that go into a computer.
There are a few other reasons for computer historians. First, computer hardware and software degrade remarkably well. Some software on magnetic media has been lost forever. Second, we live in a remarkable time where some people who have effected dramatic change in the computer world (and the world in general) - Dennis Ritchie (if you like), Bill Gates (whether you like it or not), to name a few - aren't dead yet! These people should be interviewed and quizzed about what they did, why they did it, and how for the sake of future scholars, as some have been already.
Unlike, perhaps, Gutenberg's contemporaries, we know great things are afoot. We need to record them.
There's a computer museum in Boston, and Bruce Sterling has written about it.
I don't think this is the case anymore, at least as far as computer history is concerned. The Computer Museum History Center broke off from The Computer Museum in Boston as early as 1996 or so and moved to a building on Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California. You can visit, but you need to get clearance to get onto the site.
Also of interest (and closer to Boston): the Retrocomputing Society of Rhode Island. Their website is here. There are more museums scattered here and there, but I believe these two (and, perhaps, the Smithsonian) are the foremost.
Not only that, but any decrease in the number of 5300s and 190s are liable to elevate them to the status of "collector's items" on eBay - a term often synonymous with "sucker bait". I wouldn't be surprised to see this recall mentioned in a year or so by someone trying to offload their old PowerBook. "EXTREMELY RARE!!!"
--Tom
If one is truly a superior knackwurst chef, that fact is likely to become known without much effort. Or something
Pink, announced in 1989, was Apple's first public attempt at producing a modern operating system.
Rhapsody was renamed Mac OS X Server (to distinguish it from Mac OS X), and was Apple's first attempt at a modern OS that actually shipped.
Lest ye forget, in 1983 Apple came out with the doomed Lisa computer, whose operating system supported (cooperative) multitasking, memory protection, paging, and other modern amenities. It may not be on par with what we call a modern operating system today, but relative to those of contemporary PCs it was exceedingly advanced.
Apple has created modern OSs before, but until Rhapsody/OSX (or perhaps AU/X) only with the luxury of designing concurrently the computers to run them.
I find it interesting that the John Couch that runs Doubletwist is the same one that headed the Apple POS (Personal Office Systems) team in the early 80s, the group that brought us the Apple Lisa and much of the research that went into the Macintosh. Not sure what significance that has in his current job, but it's an interesting piece of background info...
I own two Lisas, a 2/10 and an original Lisa 1. I have never experienced an operating system crash, and the only time I have seen the office system tank (office system = finder and integrated office apps) was when a bug in one of my programs started eating up too much memory. When this occured, the Lisa put up a polite dialog box, saved everything in running apps, and rebooted itself. Beats a BSOD any day. <OSFLAME>
Yes, the Lisa was a doomed project, but it wasn't poor design that made Apple take it off the market - not by a long shot. Here were the strikes against Lisa in 1984:
Cost. The Lisa started out costing $9,995 US, and prices never really dipped beneath $4,000 in later models. It should be noted that this price does not include the $3,000 ProFile external hard drive (5 MB!) for the Lisa 1 and Lisa 2/5.
Macintosh. Apple was making a cheaper, yet incompatible machine that was perceived as a 'baby Lisa' by many onlookers - and even Apple said that it had 'Lisa Technology' (i.e. a WIMP interface and 'Visual Fidelity' - IMHO a much better term for WYSIWYG). It was hard for buyers to justify the extra $3,000 or so.
Poor developer support. Apple sold Lisa language Workshops, where language includes Pascal, Clascal, C, BASIC, and COBOL. Unfortunately, the Workshops did not initially have support for Lisa Office System apps - their programs would have to be run from the Workshop or as their own shells (a shell is an operating environment run on startup - the Office System was a shell, as was the Workshop). Thus no office app integration or standard GUI for anything but Apple programs. Apple never did quite get around to finishing up the Lisa Toolkit, the programmers' library of standard Office System routines.
Speed. The Lisa was slow - it ran at only 5 MHz so that video accesses to memory could be interleaved with CPU accesses; it used a subset of the 68K instruction set to facilitate virtual memory and multitasking; and the OS and Office System (i.e. almost everything but the ROMs) was written in Pascal. Even writing a letter with a Lisa requires patience.
But the Lisa had these attributes in its favor:
Memory protection/preemptive multitasking/virtual memory. These are exciting new technologies that will finally reach mainstream Mac users in sum with the release of MacOS X. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
Robust file system. Inspired by the one at Xerox PARC, the Scavenger program automatically detects FS damage and fscks the disk. This may be part of the reason that my Lisa media has lasted so long.
Data sharing between Office System apps. By later versions of the Office System, graphs could be placed in text documents, terminal data could be pasted into spreadsheets, flowcharts could be copied into draw documents, etc. This is not news now, but in 1984...
Modular construction - all the low-voltage components of a Lisa (well, except for the speaker) can be accessed without a screwdriver.
Other niceties - soft power off, software contrast control, privacy dimmer (hit option-shift-keypad 0 to blank the screen), screen dimming after a preset time, session management (all open windows are noted at power off and restored at power on), and more.
So the Lisa was not at all a poorly designed machine.
http://www.semaphorecorp.com/ss/ Archives of Semaphore Signal, which started out as as a mag for Lisa owners. Track the surging importance of the Macintosh over the months of 1984...
Who else thinks it would be cool to have a Game Boy cartridge with a flash ROM, a couple A/D inputs, a serial port, etc.? Kinda like a bargain Handyboard, since you already have the display and CPU. Dunno if it's really practical, but I'd buy one...
While I admit that having everything open sourced sounds quite dubious, let's humor Steve and assume it will happen. My next question is whether Apple will publish the older NEXTSTEP source code somewhere, which would be a great help to those of us who still love our old black hardware. And while they're at it, how about older versions of the MacOS, and the Lisa Office System, and ProDOS, etc. This is part of a larger question regarding legacy software that hasn't been part of a company's sales lineup for years, or was developed by a company that is now out of business. There is almost always somebody who would like to get their hands on a legitimate copy, but cannot. For folks interested in preserving their old hardware (for whatever reason), the OS source code would be a boon to have, and releasing it for free or at a low price would hardly hurt the company. Understandibly, businesses usually ignore these sorts of appeals - they have bigger fish to fry. Incidentally, the new and revolutionary 'dock' seems a lot like the one in NEXTSTEP, which makes sense. I'm glad to see it and look forward to the release. -F
First question: If I understand the culture of the early days of Apple Computer correctly, there was very much the feeling among many of the employees that the small company was singlehandedly changing the world. It is clear now that what happened then shaped the personal computer industry for years to come. By comparison, today's computer industry seems dominated by large corporate concerns (e.g. Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, or even the present Apple), and the idea of a plucky little firm causing a revolution anywhere near the scale of Apple's and remaining commercially viable (c.f. Microsoft's war against Netscape) appears somewhat less likely than it used to. Are large corporations, the complexity of computers today, and/or the cost of innovation making it harder for small concerns to make big changes? This concerns me, as sometimes I doubt the ability of big business to do business with the best interests of progress in mind (not that Apple was anywhere near perfect, but...). Do you feel this way? Do you think Open Source may be an answer to this problem?
Second question: I got into computers a bit too late to have the life-changing Apple ][ experience that so many people here have mentioned. Nevertheless, now that I style myself a "computer historian", I have one of my own and have learned how influential the machine was. During your tenure at Apple Computer, which computer were you most excited to have a hand in creating? If it was an Apple ][, which one? Was it because of how much fun it was to make, or the people you worked with, or how important you'd thought it would be?
Third question: Did you have any part in the creation of Apple's Lisa computer? (it's my specialty, so I admit I've been curious for a while.)
Slashdot Mirror
OT: The plural of opus is opera. Not a flame - as nerdy as it sounds, I happen to be rather fond of this pluralization.
--Tom
I disagree. I think this argument is tantamount to saying that there's no point in being a Shakespeare scholar because we've already found all of his plays. A historian must tie together information from disparate (and sometimes contradictory) sources into the best, most cohesive account possible. Like it or not, he must introduce and defend an interpretation of what happened, what aspects of the event were significant, and why the event as a whole was important. Since a historian can only make these judgements based on the context of his time and the assumed context of the time he studies, and since both change as new knowledge and ideologies develop, at least a few historians will remain gainfully employed for years to come.
Anyone can hit up a search engine, and search for....say, ENIAC or EDVAC, and be presented with truckloads of material. The internet was spawned from computer history, so it's only natural that it has plenty of reference material regarding it's roots.
True for these machines, but not for others - before 1996 or so, the Apple Lisa (for example) was virtually unheard of on the Internet. Besides, most online computer material is reference, not notes on the research and development that go into a computer.
There are a few other reasons for computer historians. First, computer hardware and software degrade remarkably well. Some software on magnetic media has been lost forever. Second, we live in a remarkable time where some people who have effected dramatic change in the computer world (and the world in general) - Dennis Ritchie (if you like), Bill Gates (whether you like it or not), to name a few - aren't dead yet! These people should be interviewed and quizzed about what they did, why they did it, and how for the sake of future scholars, as some have been already.
Unlike, perhaps, Gutenberg's contemporaries, we know great things are afoot. We need to record them.
--Tom
I don't think this is the case anymore, at least as far as computer history is concerned. The Computer Museum History Center broke off from The Computer Museum in Boston as early as 1996 or so and moved to a building on Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California. You can visit, but you need to get clearance to get onto the site.
Website: http://www.computerhistory.org/
Also of interest (and closer to Boston): the Retrocomputing Society of Rhode Island. Their website is here. There are more museums scattered here and there, but I believe these two (and, perhaps, the Smithsonian) are the foremost.
--Tom
--Tom
If one is truly a superior knackwurst chef, that fact is likely to become known without much effort. Or something
Rhapsody was renamed Mac OS X Server (to distinguish it from Mac OS X), and was Apple's first attempt at a modern OS that actually shipped.
Lest ye forget, in 1983 Apple came out with the doomed Lisa computer, whose operating system supported (cooperative) multitasking, memory protection, paging, and other modern amenities. It may not be on par with what we call a modern operating system today, but relative to those of contemporary PCs it was exceedingly advanced.
Apple has created modern OSs before, but until Rhapsody/OSX (or perhaps AU/X) only with the luxury of designing concurrently the computers to run them.
--Tom
--Tom
Whatchew talkin' bout, Willis?
I own two Lisas, a 2/10 and an original Lisa 1. I have never experienced an operating system crash, and the only time I have seen the office system tank (office system = finder and integrated office apps) was when a bug in one of my programs started eating up too much memory. When this occured, the Lisa put up a polite dialog box, saved everything in running apps, and rebooted itself. Beats a BSOD any day.
<OSFLAME>
Yes, the Lisa was a doomed project, but it wasn't poor design that made Apple take it off the market - not by a long shot. Here were the strikes against Lisa in 1984:
- Cost. The Lisa started out costing $9,995 US, and prices never really dipped beneath $4,000 in later models. It should be noted that this price does not include the $3,000 ProFile external hard drive (5 MB!) for the Lisa 1 and Lisa 2/5.
- Macintosh. Apple was making a cheaper, yet incompatible machine that was perceived as a 'baby Lisa' by many onlookers - and even Apple said that it had 'Lisa Technology' (i.e. a WIMP interface and 'Visual Fidelity' - IMHO a much better term for WYSIWYG). It was hard for buyers to justify the extra $3,000 or so.
- Poor developer support. Apple sold Lisa language Workshops, where language includes Pascal, Clascal, C, BASIC, and COBOL. Unfortunately, the Workshops did not initially have support for Lisa Office System apps - their programs would have to be run from the Workshop or as their own shells (a shell is an operating environment run on startup - the Office System was a shell, as was the Workshop). Thus no office app integration or standard GUI for anything but Apple programs. Apple never did quite get around to finishing up the Lisa Toolkit, the programmers' library of standard Office System routines.
- Speed. The Lisa was slow - it ran at only 5 MHz so that video accesses to memory could be interleaved with CPU accesses; it used a subset of the 68K instruction set to facilitate virtual memory and multitasking; and the OS and Office System (i.e. almost everything but the ROMs) was written in Pascal. Even writing a letter with a Lisa requires patience.
But the Lisa had these attributes in its favor:- Memory protection/preemptive multitasking/virtual memory. These are exciting new technologies that will finally reach mainstream Mac users in sum with the release of MacOS X. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
- Robust file system. Inspired by the one at Xerox PARC, the Scavenger program automatically detects FS damage and fscks the disk. This may be part of the reason that my Lisa media has lasted so long.
- Data sharing between Office System apps. By later versions of the Office System, graphs could be placed in text documents, terminal data could be pasted into spreadsheets, flowcharts could be copied into draw documents, etc. This is not news now, but in 1984...
- Modular construction - all the low-voltage components of a Lisa (well, except for the speaker) can be accessed without a screwdriver.
- Other niceties - soft power off, software contrast control, privacy dimmer (hit option-shift-keypad 0 to blank the screen), screen dimming after a preset time, session management (all open windows are noted at power off and restored at power on), and more.
So the Lisa was not at all a poorly designed machine.Some sites for learning more about Lisa:
http://galena.tjs.org/tom/
http://galena.tjs.org/lisa/ (many screenshots here, and tour of the Lisa's guts).
--Tom Stepleton
Read all about it in the original newspaper article (courtesy David T. Craig) at http://www.dydex.com/~tom/lisabur ialloganut89.pdf.
Who else thinks it would be cool to have a Game Boy cartridge with a flash ROM, a couple A/D inputs, a serial port, etc.? Kinda like a bargain Handyboard, since you already have the display and CPU. Dunno if it's really practical, but I'd buy one...
-F
While I admit that having everything open sourced sounds quite dubious, let's humor Steve and assume it will happen. My next question is whether Apple will publish the older NEXTSTEP source code somewhere, which would be a great help to those of us who still love our old black hardware. And while they're at it, how about older versions of the MacOS, and the Lisa Office System, and ProDOS, etc. This is part of a larger question regarding legacy software that hasn't been part of a company's sales lineup for years, or was developed by a company that is now out of business. There is almost always somebody who would like to get their hands on a legitimate copy, but cannot. For folks interested in preserving their old hardware (for whatever reason), the OS source code would be a boon to have, and releasing it for free or at a low price would hardly hurt the company. Understandibly, businesses usually ignore these sorts of appeals - they have bigger fish to fry. Incidentally, the new and revolutionary 'dock' seems a lot like the one in NEXTSTEP, which makes sense. I'm glad to see it and look forward to the release. -F
If I understand the culture of the early days of Apple Computer correctly, there was very much the feeling among many of the employees that the small company was singlehandedly changing the world. It is clear now that what happened then shaped the personal computer industry for years to come. By comparison, today's computer industry seems dominated by large corporate concerns (e.g. Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, or even the present Apple), and the idea of a plucky little firm causing a revolution anywhere near the scale of Apple's and remaining commercially viable (c.f. Microsoft's war against Netscape) appears somewhat less likely than it used to. Are large corporations, the complexity of computers today, and/or the cost of innovation making it harder for small concerns to make big changes? This concerns me, as sometimes I doubt the ability of big business to do business with the best interests of progress in mind (not that Apple was anywhere near perfect, but...). Do you feel this way? Do you think Open Source may be an answer to this problem?
Second question:
I got into computers a bit too late to have the life-changing Apple ][ experience that so many people here have mentioned. Nevertheless, now that I style myself a "computer historian", I have one of my own and have learned how influential the machine was. During your tenure at Apple Computer, which computer were you most excited to have a hand in creating? If it was an Apple ][, which one? Was it because of how much fun it was to make, or the people you worked with, or how important you'd thought it would be?
Third question:
Did you have any part in the creation of Apple's Lisa computer? (it's my specialty, so I admit I've been curious for a while.)
Thanks,
--Tom