My friend, I was online and programming on a Unix machine the day the Morris Worm [wikipedia.org] took it down along with a big chunk of the Internet running BSD [wikipedia.org] (the ancestor of OSX).
The difference is that Unix OS developers have learned from the Morris worm. Microsoft, on other other hand, has developed their OS to be a worm farm.
"Whichever way you look at it, Apple cut lots of corners to beat others to market"
Um, no.
They were making a product for the market existed, and even then, it *barely* existed.
The market you're talking about, the market of regular home, business, and education users for $15,000 workstations, did not exist.
Even NeXT, which probably "cut corners" by your estimation, was just over the price limit of feasibility, in 1989. And that was with underpowered hardware.
You can click your heels together as much as you want, and wish really hard, but you can't change the economics of technology of the 1980s.
Why has Ashley Simpson, who can't sing, and probably can't play, and probably can't write a song, sold far more records than Neko Case, who has far more talent?
"If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble."
That's not clear to me.
The Unix workstation aspect may have been required of Jobs by terms of his departure from Apple. By going for a high-end workstation, he was staying well out of Apple's 1985 market.
Had he stayed at Apple, he may well have stayed closer to the Mac/Lisa concept, and the MacOS, and not ventured into Unix, Objective-C, Display Postscript, etc.
So it's probably for the best that NeXT got started.
Perhaps the best scenario would have been for Apple to have not gotten involved with Taligent, and for them to have bought NeXT around 1994/1995, before NeXT de-emphasized the OS in favor of OS-independent products.
The time around MacWorld Expo has a tendency to be a bit more full o' news than other times of year. There's a rumor run-up beforehand. And the fakes. Then the reports of a site taking things down due to legal threat. Then the MacWorld reports. Then the financial results. Then the reports of the Expo things shipping.
Soon enough, things will probably quiet down until WWDC, when it'll start again. Then it'll quiet down again for a while.
The optical disk was cool. The decision to make it the boot device was definitely not.
At some point it was supplemented with a 40MB swap drive, but it was still sloooow. Imagine swapping to an optical drive which required a pass of the head to heat the media so that the second pass could write at that position.
When I bought my Cube, from Cornell when they emptied a Cube lab, it was listed as having a non-functional Optical Drive (OD). When I got it home to Philly, I found that, in fact, it did work. Kinda. I was able to boot from it. And it was slow. (The Cube was an 040 with 8MB of RAM.)
My OD didn't last long, though. It eventually did crap out. The OD would make a distinct sound when it was going bad. I eventually took the heavy damn thing out and smashed it on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Long before that, I'd installed some SCSI discs, and some more RAM, and made it a nicely usable machine.
Also, it might have been for the best
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 5, Funny
If the 'horror stories' are true, having an unmellowed Steve Jobs raise a child during its formative years might not have been such a good thing.
"Daddy, I drew a pony!" "Pony? That looks like a lizard. This is shit. You're fired." "Daddy, you can't fire me." "Then learn to draw."
By high school she was living with him
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
(if not earlier) and had taken his name:
"Fronting the band is Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs's teenage daughter, remembered by most of the crowd as the namesake of the ill-fated Lisa computer"
She apparently went on to Harvard, and possibly Kings College, London.
Seems to have turned out okay. Harvard doesn't exactly come cheap.
I even added RAM to it, and a "Zip Chip" accelerator.
Buy Sun? What's exciting about that?!
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 1
Sun's been languishing at $5/share for months.
What exactly do they have that is exciting?
My word. The only good thing they might get out of that would be the code to the old Lighthouse Design NeXTSTEP apps that Sun bought and then stuffed under a mattress when, apparently, they realized that Java ports were infeasible.
Sun's in a definite malaise, with no signs of being able to pull out any time soon. If Apple wants anything of theirs, it would be better to wait. It'll be cheaper to buy at the liquidation, for pennies on the dollar.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company
What, did he outsource those functions to the Psychic Friends Network?
Personally, I don't think it's that important. Lots of people spend lots of money on games, but probably just as many people don't particularly care about games.
$1200 seems like a losing price anyway, stuck between the more expensive high-end gaming PCs, and the low-cost consoles.
Late in their hardware-producing era, NeXT had a mouse which was like the hockey puck, except it had two buttons on sort of a wedge shape extending from the front of the mouse.
Of course, Sully was a GOD compared to Spindler (*Spit*).
Spindler must have been some board member's lackluster nephew who needed a job. Even if it was in some other parallel dimension, and that reality leaked through into ours and he still wound up CEO of Apple despite not being anyone's nephew here.
It's a bit aggravating trying to decode which model Mac you've bought these days.
Do I have a G4 "Mirror Drive Doors"? Or an essentially identical G4 "FW800".
Then there's my iBook, which is best described as "2001 Dual-USB 500MHz iBook".
It would seem to be much easier if they were just given simple, distinct product names that would distinguish the otherwise identical models.
Re:Flops at Apple are predictable
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Apple has also had significant trouble with Jobs at the helm. It's hard to say whether they've been better off with, or without the man. Let's not forget that he was responsible for bringing Markkula and Sculley on board. That worked out real well, didn't it (rhetorical question.)
Well, he was young. Whaddya want?
He went on to run both NeXT and Pixar. Pixar's doing fantastic, and he kept NeXT going long enough that it outlived Apple's own OS development projects and was acquired.
Now, he's got BOTH Apple and Pixar going like gangbusters.
Most companies would be lucky to be afflicted with such management.
"After a couple days of using a NeXTcube and watching the the beautiful UI update in slow-motion and the machine constatly swapped you'd be begging to be back to using twm and X11R4."
Was it a 68030 Cube?
That would be slower than hell. The 68040 cubes and slabs were pretty good performers, though.
In order to save space on my 040 Cube, I set it up so that all the developer docs were compressed, but were still indexed by Digital Librarian. Double-clicking a documentation file in Librarian would cause the file to be decompressed into a temp file and then opened. There was very little performance hit when opening a file, but the space savings was significant.
I think I only had about 16MB of RAM in there. If the 040 Cube were as slow as you say, I don't think my system would have been feasible.
I agree, but a fake degree points to a lack of character, IMHO. If I discovered that any candidate for a job had presented me with a bogus degree, I'd conclude from that that the person in question was a poseur, and not qualified for any job but politics.
Government might be a bit weird, though.
I could imagine, in some circles (non-politically-appointed/non-elected government staff, for instance), where the fake degree would not be for the purpose of fooling the employer, but rather for outsiders. It'd be a social status thing, not so much an experience thing.
Consider a very competent ex-military guy, with a highschool degree or a BS from some non-impressive school. Based on his experience, he gets into career circles where his peers, and reporters he may deal with, are policy wonks with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and that sort. I could see someone getting a bogus graduate degree to level the social playing field, at least a little. His peers may very well harbor a bias against undegreed persons, regardless of their proven ability.
I could also see someone in that position being coaxed by his supervisors to get a bogus graduate degree, to make the supervisors look good.
Having a PhD on your staff looks better than having a high school grad, even if the high school grad has more skill and experience than most PhDs. It's hard to communicate that level of skill more succinctly than the few words describing a degree. Leave out such detail, and the person without the degree is assumed to be less capable than others. In that context, a degree, even a bogus one, could provide a shorthand representation of the person's true qualifications. Especially in a culture that relies on degrees to represent qualification.
On the other hand, most bogus degrees certainly are truly fraudulent, and are used to conceal incompetence, not add redundant credentials to a highly competent person.
A no-tolerance policy is probably best, but in some cases the person probably deserves a bit more sympathy, and perhaps a lighter treatment. If there are, in fact, cases where a person has obtained the bogus degree due to pressure or suggestions from the boss, that person certainly ought to be given a break. And the supervisor ought to be reprimanded.
I would have to say that it would be worse if someone uses a fake degree from a prestigious school. Then they really are trying to exaggerate their abilities. If the fake degree comes from some diploma mill school nobody's ever heard of, then most people will probably assume it's some third- or fourth-tier school they've never heard of, and won't inflate their estimation of the person's ability. "Oh, you went to Foo Bar College? What a historic school!"
(This is probably especially true in Washington, where they probably have mental slots for the top 20 or 30 schools, and all the rest fall into a bucket called "other" or "great unwashed").
Depending on when this video was made, perhaps it was a pre-production "Nitro" NeXTStation Color, one running at 40Mhz. Word about them got out around October 1992.
"How many Nitros exist?
Personal e-mail from someone who for now shall remain nameless "there was more than 5". He had one, the release control guys had at least one for builds, there was one around that was used by the NRW group and later for porting cross builds, Steve Jobs had one in his NeXT for a long time, and there were various versions around in hardware. He also says he thinks a few were given to important customers as part of trials."
Anyway, despite the impressive hardware specs of the i860, what Jobs is doing doesn't appear to be remarkably fast, compared to more typical NeXT hardware. It could have been a stock 33Mhz Color Turbo.
The performance you see in that video certainly didn't require super-high-end hardware or special co-processors.
"The world was ready for both an open, Unix-based OS and object-oriented development, as the rise of Linux and Java prove. NeXT had technology that was years ahead of either one at the time"
You're missing the point that Linux is free, and Java is also given away free. Sun had sufficient revenue from their hardware business that they could afford to fund Java and give it away. Linux, in theory, doesn't depend on paid labor (though in reality it does).
I'm not sure NeXT ever had the kind of revenue stream for them to survive a low-cost strategy. And it's by no means clear that there ever existed a large enough market to support them on a lower-cost strategy.
Be tried an approach closer to what you suggest, even giving their OS away at one point, if I recall correctly.
They failed.
It's easy enough to wave one's hands, ten years later, and say how it should have been done. But only if you willfully ignore unpleasant market realities.
Slashdot Mirror
The Darwin port to X86 is a descendant of NeXT's ports of their operating system to X86, Sparc, and HP PA-RISC.
In fact, x86 was the primary platform on which NeXT's operating system ran at the time of the merger.
Apple more or less got it free with the acquisition.
It has no connection to Star Trek.
My friend, I was online and programming on a Unix machine the day the Morris Worm [wikipedia.org] took it down along with a big chunk of the Internet running BSD [wikipedia.org] (the ancestor of OSX).
The difference is that Unix OS developers have learned from the Morris worm. Microsoft, on other other hand, has developed their OS to be a worm farm.
"Whichever way you look at it, Apple cut lots of corners to beat others to market"
Um, no.
They were making a product for the market existed, and even then, it *barely* existed.
The market you're talking about, the market of regular home, business, and education users for $15,000 workstations, did not exist.
Even NeXT, which probably "cut corners" by your estimation, was just over the price limit of feasibility, in 1989. And that was with underpowered hardware.
You can click your heels together as much as you want, and wish really hard, but you can't change the economics of technology of the 1980s.
Apple boxes are way too high priced for what you get
Starbucks sells coffee that costs about $4 more than the ingredients.
There are probably lots of people who don't even flinch at dropping a Mac Mini's price-worth of money at Starbucks over the course of a year.
Some probably spend an iBook's-worth.
Why has Ashley Simpson, who can't sing, and probably can't play, and probably can't write a song, sold far more records than Neko Case, who has far more talent?
"If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble."
That's not clear to me.
The Unix workstation aspect may have been required of Jobs by terms of his departure from Apple. By going for a high-end workstation, he was staying well out of Apple's 1985 market.
Had he stayed at Apple, he may well have stayed closer to the Mac/Lisa concept, and the MacOS, and not ventured into Unix, Objective-C, Display Postscript, etc.
So it's probably for the best that NeXT got started.
Perhaps the best scenario would have been for Apple to have not gotten involved with Taligent, and for them to have bought NeXT around 1994/1995, before NeXT de-emphasized the OS in favor of OS-independent products.
And, before Sun got Java off the ground.
The time around MacWorld Expo has a tendency to be a bit more full o' news than other times of year. There's a rumor run-up beforehand. And the fakes. Then the reports of a site taking things down due to legal threat. Then the MacWorld reports. Then the financial results. Then the reports of the Expo things shipping.
Soon enough, things will probably quiet down until WWDC, when it'll start again. Then it'll quiet down again for a while.
The optical disk was cool. The decision to make it the boot device was definitely not.
At some point it was supplemented with a 40MB swap drive, but it was still sloooow. Imagine swapping to an optical drive which required a pass of the head to heat the media so that the second pass could write at that position.
When I bought my Cube, from Cornell when they emptied a Cube lab, it was listed as having a non-functional Optical Drive (OD). When I got it home to Philly, I found that, in fact, it did work. Kinda. I was able to boot from it. And it was slow. (The Cube was an 040 with 8MB of RAM.)
My OD didn't last long, though. It eventually did crap out. The OD would make a distinct sound when it was going bad. I eventually took the heavy damn thing out and smashed it on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Long before that, I'd installed some SCSI discs, and some more RAM, and made it a nicely usable machine.
If the 'horror stories' are true, having an unmellowed Steve Jobs raise a child during its formative years might not have been such a good thing.
"Daddy, I drew a pony!"
"Pony? That looks like a lizard. This is shit. You're fired."
"Daddy, you can't fire me."
"Then learn to draw."
(if not earlier) and had taken his name:
"Fronting the band is Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs's teenage daughter, remembered by most of the crowd as the namesake of the ill-fated Lisa computer"
She apparently went on to Harvard, and possibly Kings College, London.
Seems to have turned out okay. Harvard doesn't exactly come cheap.
I even added RAM to it, and a "Zip Chip" accelerator.
Sun's been languishing at $5/share for months.
What exactly do they have that is exciting?
My word. The only good thing they might get out of that would be the code to the old Lighthouse Design NeXTSTEP apps that Sun bought and then stuffed under a mattress when, apparently, they realized that Java ports were infeasible.
Sun's in a definite malaise, with no signs of being able to pull out any time soon. If Apple wants anything of theirs, it would be better to wait. It'll be cheaper to buy at the liquidation, for pennies on the dollar.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company
What, did he outsource those functions to the Psychic Friends Network?
Personally, I don't think it's that important. Lots of people spend lots of money on games, but probably just as many people don't particularly care about games.
$1200 seems like a losing price anyway, stuck between the more expensive high-end gaming PCs, and the low-cost consoles.
Gamers are too fickle anyway.
Late in their hardware-producing era, NeXT had a mouse which was like the hockey puck, except it had two buttons on sort of a wedge shape extending from the front of the mouse.
There's a picture at the bottom of this page.
I rather liked that mouse. The puck, though, I did not like.
Nor do I like the current Apple mouse. I use a Microsoft trackball with my Mac and my PC.
Of course, Sully was a GOD compared to Spindler (*Spit*).
Spindler must have been some board member's lackluster nephew who needed a job. Even if it was in some other parallel dimension, and that reality leaked through into ours and he still wound up CEO of Apple despite not being anyone's nephew here.
I dunno.
Was it true about him hiding under his desk?
The bundle of cash Apple blew on Taligent and Kaleida ought to be on there.
Maybe Taligent should be wrapped up with Copland and their other aborted OS development efforts.
It's a bit aggravating trying to decode which model Mac you've bought these days.
Do I have a G4 "Mirror Drive Doors"? Or an essentially identical G4 "FW800".
Then there's my iBook, which is best described as "2001 Dual-USB 500MHz iBook".
It would seem to be much easier if they were just given simple, distinct product names that would distinguish the otherwise identical models.
Apple has also had significant trouble with Jobs at the helm. It's hard to say whether they've been better off with, or without the man. Let's not forget that he was responsible for bringing Markkula and Sculley on board. That worked out real well, didn't it (rhetorical question.)
Well, he was young. Whaddya want?
He went on to run both NeXT and Pixar. Pixar's doing fantastic, and he kept NeXT going long enough that it outlived Apple's own OS development projects and was acquired.
Now, he's got BOTH Apple and Pixar going like gangbusters.
Most companies would be lucky to be afflicted with such management.
"After a couple days of using a NeXTcube and watching the the beautiful UI update in slow-motion and the machine constatly swapped you'd be begging to be back to using twm and X11R4."
Was it a 68030 Cube?
That would be slower than hell. The 68040 cubes and slabs were pretty good performers, though.
In order to save space on my 040 Cube, I set it up so that all the developer docs were compressed, but were still indexed by Digital Librarian. Double-clicking a documentation file in Librarian would cause the file to be decompressed into a temp file and then opened. There was very little performance hit when opening a file, but the space savings was significant.
I think I only had about 16MB of RAM in there. If the 040 Cube were as slow as you say, I don't think my system would have been feasible.
I agree, but a fake degree points to a lack of character, IMHO. If I discovered that any candidate for a job had presented me with a bogus degree, I'd conclude from that that the person in question was a poseur, and not qualified for any job but politics.
Government might be a bit weird, though.
I could imagine, in some circles (non-politically-appointed/non-elected government staff, for instance), where the fake degree would not be for the purpose of fooling the employer, but rather for outsiders. It'd be a social status thing, not so much an experience thing.
Consider a very competent ex-military guy, with a highschool degree or a BS from some non-impressive school. Based on his experience, he gets into career circles where his peers, and reporters he may deal with, are policy wonks with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and that sort. I could see someone getting a bogus graduate degree to level the social playing field, at least a little. His peers may very well harbor a bias against undegreed persons, regardless of their proven ability.
I could also see someone in that position being coaxed by his supervisors to get a bogus graduate degree, to make the supervisors look good.
Having a PhD on your staff looks better than having a high school grad, even if the high school grad has more skill and experience than most PhDs. It's hard to communicate that level of skill more succinctly than the few words describing a degree. Leave out such detail, and the person without the degree is assumed to be less capable than others. In that context, a degree, even a bogus one, could provide a shorthand representation of the person's true qualifications. Especially in a culture that relies on degrees to represent qualification.
On the other hand, most bogus degrees certainly are truly fraudulent, and are used to conceal incompetence, not add redundant credentials to a highly competent person.
A no-tolerance policy is probably best, but in some cases the person probably deserves a bit more sympathy, and perhaps a lighter treatment. If there are, in fact, cases where a person has obtained the bogus degree due to pressure or suggestions from the boss, that person certainly ought to be given a break. And the supervisor ought to be reprimanded.
I would have to say that it would be worse if someone uses a fake degree from a prestigious school. Then they really are trying to exaggerate their abilities. If the fake degree comes from some diploma mill school nobody's ever heard of, then most people will probably assume it's some third- or fourth-tier school they've never heard of, and won't inflate their estimation of the person's ability. "Oh, you went to Foo Bar College? What a historic school!"
(This is probably especially true in Washington, where they probably have mental slots for the top 20 or 30 schools, and all the rest fall into a bucket called "other" or "great unwashed").
Depending on when this video was made, perhaps it was a pre-production "Nitro" NeXTStation Color, one running at 40Mhz. Word about them got out around October 1992.
"How many Nitros exist?
Personal e-mail from someone who for now shall remain nameless "there was more than 5". He had one, the release control guys had at least one for builds, there was one around that was used by the NRW group and later for porting cross builds, Steve Jobs had one in his NeXT for a long time, and there were various versions around in hardware. He also says he thinks a few were given to important customers as part of trials."
Anyway, despite the impressive hardware specs of the i860, what Jobs is doing doesn't appear to be remarkably fast, compared to more typical NeXT hardware. It could have been a stock 33Mhz Color Turbo.
The performance you see in that video certainly didn't require super-high-end hardware or special co-processors.
What are they gonna contribute, a PointCast clone called "PropagandaCast"? Or maybe Pentagon-supplied spyware?
They could call it the Volkskomputer.
"Guess what chip the demo machine has as a graphics coprocessor."
I don't think so. In the video, it looks like that monitor is sitting on top of a pizzabox workstation.
The i860 was only available on the NeXTDimension card for the NeXTCube. It wasn't available for NeXT's pizza boxes.
So, I don't think the demo machine is a NeXTDimension-equipped Cube with an i860.
"The world was ready for both an open, Unix-based OS and object-oriented development, as the rise of Linux and Java prove. NeXT had technology that was years ahead of either one at the time"
You're missing the point that Linux is free, and Java is also given away free. Sun had sufficient revenue from their hardware business that they could afford to fund Java and give it away. Linux, in theory, doesn't depend on paid labor (though in reality it does).
I'm not sure NeXT ever had the kind of revenue stream for them to survive a low-cost strategy. And it's by no means clear that there ever existed a large enough market to support them on a lower-cost strategy.
Be tried an approach closer to what you suggest, even giving their OS away at one point, if I recall correctly.
They failed.
It's easy enough to wave one's hands, ten years later, and say how it should have been done. But only if you willfully ignore unpleasant market realities.