I would highly recommend putting a terminal in the bathroom accessable from the throne. Perhaps a swinging laptop that can reach the bath too. I'd love to be able to e-mail and surf from the security of a warm bath...
Alas, my wife nixed the ethernet port in the bathroom. (Worried about those webcams, perhaps.) Still, it would have been cool to sit in the Japanese ofuro and surf the net...
Well, I'm on my way as it is. We're remodelling part of the house (and will do the rest when we have more money) and getting a head start on this. Some of what we're doing:
Maybe hooking up my BarCode reader for easier ordering
Be ready for the controllable microwave oven, coffee pot, etc.
Bedroom computer (possibly an iMac?) to:
Do all the stuff that the living room machine does
Read Slashdot in bed
"etc" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more...)
My work computers and my wife's
The internet gateway machine (I wish I could afford a FreeGate box!)
The File Server with big hard drive to share files and hold 400 CD's worth of MP3's (for instant access anywhere in the house)
Wireless link to my Land Rover to upload stories, pics, etc. from the road
Okay, so it's not that high-tech, but some of the technologies that make it possible for someone with no time to figure out include:
IP Forwarding
Samba
NetATalk (eventually)
The overall elegance of ethernet
A lot of very helpful friends
All I need now are simple instructions for setting up a webcam under Linux (and a source of cheap webcams), to get NetATalk up and running (My wife's a school teacher, and has mac's at home to match the ones at school) and to find something that will let a Linux box see a directory on another system as if it were one of its one (like mapping a network drive with Windows/Samba.)
There can be no dispute that DeCSS is not required to copy a DVD. You could purchase a DVD writer and make perfect copies, completely ignoring the CSS. Of course, you'll need a DVD player that can decrypt CSS to play your copy.
But the MPAA isn't worried about that, because a professional DVD copying setup costs many thousands of dollars.
They're worried that you will remove the copy protection and dump the movie onto your hard drive. You could then take a week or two and upload it to the internet for others to download.
All sarcasm aside, (sarcasm is my life!), the thought is that soon, hard drives will be big enough to hold multiple movies (how many gigs on a roll of scotch tape?) and that DVD writers will be cheap enough (like CD-R drives) for people to make copies of movies for their friends.
But just as 500GB hard drives will soon be $50, and DVD-writers will be $25, so will the professional DVD-copiers fall in price.
The fact of the matter is that what CSS does is not prevent copying, but controls how I access the movies that I've purchased.
I am currently ripping my CD's into MP3's and putting them on my network file server so I can listen to them from anywhere in the house, on any platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc -- We've got 'em all.) Now I don't have anywhere near enough disk space to put even the few DVD's I have on the network, but I would like the opportunity to view them on whichever machine I like.
But the MPAA/DVDCCA wants me to only be able to view them with a player that can decrypt CSS -- that is, one from a company that has paid them a hefty fee.
Now, if I wanted to, I could write a CD player program with whatever features I want. I could write an image viewer that lets me look at jpeg's upside down. But I can't write a program to let me look at my own DVD's. (Unless I pay the DVDCCA.)
It really depends on the subject, but in many cases, if you don't know what to look for, the best search engine won't do you a wit of good.
When I took basic physics during my short college career, the professor let us bring a 3x5 card to class for the test. We could write anything we wanted on it -- the all-important formulas, the entire textbook, Verdi's opera scores.
Of course, the only thing that would really help were the formulas that applied to the subject matter, but you had to know which formula to use, and how to use it. The professor wanted to test our understanding of the subject matter, not our memorization skills.
Sure, one could possibly find the exact problem on-line, but unless this is an unlimited-time test, you'd be a lot better off knowing the subject matter (and perhaps looking up some formulas) than trying to do your studying during the test.
This looks like absolutely fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, I don't have time to read through it and really get into it, much as I'd like to.
What I do (did) have time to do was to go to the site and download the software. That way, if Mattel succeeds in getting the list of IP's that downloaded the software, they'll have one more person to track down and try to bully.
Just think if everyone who reads slashdot did the same... It would sure cost them a pretty penny to have the lawyers track everyone down, send them notices, etc. It wouldn't take long before the postage and legal fees would far outstrip any profits they might get from selling their software.
EV infrastructure is practically non-existent in this country (not that it's all that swell elsewhere).
Actually, if you have a charger that can use 110v, you can charge just about anywhere. A lot of people use the outlets intended for block warmers in the colder parts of the country. For commuting, it's usually not too dificult to get an employer to let you charge there, if necessary.
But for travelling across country, it's not so much the charging facilities as it is the time needed to charge. You go 50-100 miles, then you have to stop and charge for a few hours. Not too practical, but it forces you to really see the country.
Of course, your best bet for long drives is a rental car.
But trains and subways do have their own advantages. Have you tried to read or sleep as you drive your car every day to and from work?
Therein lies the real advantage of public transit. I could drive to my main client (about 45 minutes) or ride the train (about an 1.5 hours.) But in a car, I have to drive. On the train, (electric, of course!) I can work, read e-mail, or even sleep. That hour and a half is worth a lot more to me than saving a couple of dollars a day (which I would end up paying for gas anyway.)
It comes down to do you want to have a small amount of unusable time, or more usable time?
Ah, the old "I drive from Akron to Detroit everyday" argument...
When I can jump into an electric car and drive from Akron to Detroit non-stop, heater, defroster, wipers, headlights and stereo all going full-blast, I'll take electric cars seriously.
Someone once said (I can't recall who, unfortunately) "The best way to extend the range of an Electric Vehicle is a rental car." (or something like that.)
How often do you drive from Akron to Detroit? How far do you really drive on a daily basis? One of the problems is that the general public is conditioned to thinking of refueling as a pain in the butt, hopefully done no more than once a week (Often in the rain or snow, or late at night when you'd rather be in bed, or when you're late for a meeting.)
Not so with EV's. You come home at the end of the day, pull into your nice warm garage, and plug the car in. The next morning, you've got a full charge. Around here, (San Francisco Bay Area) there are all kinds of places for an "opportunity charge." Offices have EV charging stations in the parking lot, as does BART (the local, inter-county train system,) and even Fry's Electronics. Even in Akron or Detroit, I'm told that many parking lots have public outlets for block heaters -- which work fine for most EV chargers.
For driving across country, generally speaking, EV's are not the answer. But for day-to-day commuting of, say, 50 miles or less each way, (and if you commute more than that you need to re-evaluate the value of your time!) they work great. For running errands around town, they're great.
You don't want to use your EV to drive to visit your mother-in-law, but how often do you do that? You don't want to use an EV to drive the kids to Disneyland, but that's not an enjoyable task in any vehicle -- you're better off flying anyway. You're a travelling salesman and you drive 150 miles a day? You need gas. But for the rest of us, EV's would work for most of our driving.
On a side note, I was in Yosemite a few years back (9/22/95, to be exact) to do a little backpacking and attend the unveiling of some electric busses that were to be used in the valley. There were quite a few EV luminaries in attendance with samples of their work, including one gent who had just driven his electric Honda CRX from Washington DC. (He used, of course, a high-efficiency gas generator built into a trailer to get something like 60mpg.)
But pound for pound, gasoline rules over batteries.
If you're looking at distance per pound, yes. But that is not the only criteria. There are others such as cost per mile (EV's win), convenience of refueling (EV's win for day-to-day, Gas wins for the unusual), noise (EV's win), power (EV's win), and so on.
acceleration power has traditionally been the major weakness of these cars
Actually, as I understand it, acceleration is one of the strengths of EV's. You have instant torgue -- no revving up. But, keep in mind that I'm not much into the racing side of EV's; I want an electric Land Rover.
Will this still work even if someone tries to add lots of context words to the search engines so it comes to their page instead?
Perhaps one of the keywords should be the previous URL? In fact, perhaps a better solution would be a new Meta tag of "Prev-URL" (or something similar) that search engines could look at and use to update their databases?
On an anecdotal note (or is that redundant?), I remember searching once, for the web site of a Land Rover owners club (I think it was Ottawa Valley Land Rovers in Canada) and was directed to a auto parts store in Australia -- turned out that the web pages had the names of lots of auto clubs in meta tags. The idea was to get people searching for the clubs to go to the store's site.
...being beat up as a kid, many times, for being what one tormentor called a "walking dictionary"; or knowing people who have been subject to, or threatened with, violence (by the state or by private citizens) because of their personal lifestyle choices...
"Flamboyant eccentrics" does not necessarily equate to above-average-in-intelligence, socially-inept, or even non-mainstream. Some examples, perhaps, of what Brin may have been referring to are Elton John, Prince, Richard Branson, Judge Judy, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, the entire cast of the World Wrestling Federation, and anyone who's ever been on the Jerry Springer show.
While you might be eccentric, you probably aren't all that spectacularly flamboyant. Compare yourself to Emperor Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. How many major bridges have you ordered to be built, and actually had it accomplished?
both Presidental front-runners describe themselves not just as Christians but as "born-again" Christians...
I did not know of this. Are you referring to Bush and Gore?
Last week I set a Toshiba T5200/100 out with the rest of the rubbish. I once had a Compaq Portable 386 but that preceded the Toshiba to the curb by a month or two.
Both of those machines would have been a great machine for someone who couldn't afford the latest and greatest. Certainly, there are collectors out there who would be happy to take them.
Folks, please, before you toss a computer, look around to see if someone might either be able to use it or if someone wants to save it for posterity!
They heavily relied on usability testing to gauge how well the target audience would use the product. Aside from the research done by Englebart etc. al. at Xeros, I suspect this is the first real usability sone on the computer industry. I find it hard to believe that a lot of the early PC stuff was usability tested at all.
I don't recall Englebart as being at Xerox; he's best known for his work 10-15 years prior at Stanford. Of course, I know that members of his team definitely did go on to work at Xerox Parc and worked on the Alto and such, which of course led to the Lisa, Macintosh, Windows, and a host of other things we take for granted today.
However, please remember that the computer industry was around for at least 30 years before the Lisa (take a look at this page for a bit of PC history.) It might have been the first such testing for the Personal Computer industry, but certainly not for the computer industry in general.
Their tests showed what people have claimed all along... that multi-button mice are more productive than single button mice. But, since single-button mice made the initial learning experience for the naive user easier
And therein lies one of the fundamental differences between GUI's and CLI's -- The former is much easier to figure out which the latter is far more efficient.
Actually, there are those who say its appearance was derived from the (for the time) nearly ubiquitous IBM terminals that littered desks throughout corporate america. This was to make sure it was "immediately recognizable as a computer."
Furthermore, there was no real standard for microcomputer appearance at the time -- the IBM PC slab was not yet universal -- many businesses had Apple II's, Radio Shack Model II, III, and 12's, and Sol-20's, none of which were necessarily computer-ish looking. (Most people in the early 80's thought of computers as huge things (PDP-11, HP-3000, IBM 360) with spinning (reel-to-reel) tape drives.)
In terms of functionality, the Lisa lacked alot of commonly desired features which were in demand at the time (heh, like color)
Um, the target market was Business. It has only been in the last 10 years that color has started to become an important part of business computing; hard copy is still mostly black and white. Perhaps you are thinking of video games?
I know that at the time, I was recommending avoiding color monitors (CGA) for business use as the resolution was terrible (320x240, iirc) as compared to Hercules monochrome (720x?)
Whatever you _could_ do with one often took a great deal of time to accomplish, and the box itself would crash fairly frequently.
Sure, it was slow, as were most personal computers then. The Lisa was trying to do an awful lot with the limited hardware available. And yes, like the rest of the personal computer industry in those days, it was not the epitomy of reliability. (Like that has changed much...)
Above that, it wasnt abundantly clear to the first-time user how to go about operating one,
Excuse me, but do you expect a first-time user to be able to do anything at all with Unix/Linux the first time they sit down in front of it? With a GUI, the user can at least move the mouse, notice a correlation between its movement and the movement of something on the screen. When the Lisa was introduced, most people had no experience with a computer at all. The Lisa was intended to get them up to speed in the shortest possible time. The first 10 minutes might have been sheer hell, but after that it would make sense.
(This, of course, is where the MacOS succeeded and Windows failed -- there is one key combination, for example, that will close any program on the Mac. (Command-Q, iirc) Under Windows, you might have Ctrl-Q, Ctrl-X, Alt-F4, or something completely different. On the Mac, once you knew one program, you kinda knew them all. Not so under Windows.)
and why this sort of design was better than the conventional command-line driven concept used in personal computers in common usage at that time.
For new users, there was nothing to remember. No secret incantations to be typed. Click on a menu, then select a option. Click on icons. It's all there. With CLI's, you need to remember the commands, the options, etc. Much more efficient in the long run, but not easy to use at first.
I think Apple's main motivation for killing the Lisa was that it would have been a public-relations disaster anyway. Better to drop the curtain on a bad product than to have the public drop the curtain on you.
We'll never really know for sure, but the reasons I've heard (with reasonable credibility) include internal politics and competition with the Macintosh group.
wasnt even a processor powerful enough to make all the pretty widgets work.
The Lisa was based on the Xerox Alto (See here, here, here, and here) from the early 70's, so it was certainly doable, although perhaps not with the single-chip-CPU concept that seems to be the only thing the kids of today can conceive of.
Translation 1: I'm too lazy to learn how to do anything -- someone do my work for me.
I didn't say I (or anyone else) couldn't write code; I said that our strengths lay elsewhere. You must be a true newbie if you've never run across someone who really just wasn't such a great programmer, no matter how hard they tried, or how much they studied.
And of course, when you want to see a movie, you go film/act/direct/produce it yourself. And you do all your own cooking (you never eat in restaurants since you've yet to find someone who can cook as well as you do.) You don't bother to play any video games other than the ones you developed, since you're the best game designer there is. You write your own novels, too. Naturally, you do all your own auto repairs, and home repairs, and you take your own trash to the dump, and you only listen to music you've written/performed/recorded.
My, my, aren't we the Heinleinesque ideal?
Translation 2: I'm best suited for telling others what to do.
Well, not me personally, but yes, there are those whose strengths lie in managing projects. They know how to motivate people, and can effectively run interference between the people that do the work and those whose job it is to prevent them (upper management). Generally, they aren't what would be called a geek, but the better ones (in the high-tech industries, anyway) are at least technologically aware.
But of course, you're the ultimate superman, doing everything yourself because your the best person for every job.
As for me, personally, I've been told that I'm really good at designing usable interfaces and explaining things to the non-technical. So I've done some teaching, a fair bit of tech support, a lot of specs, and quite a bit of coding. (Mind you, I wouldn't bet I was coding before you were born, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
Oh, no, wait a sec -- I've got a list of nifty ideas for projects right here. As soon as I dig 'em up, I'll expect you to get to work...
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm currently working way too much, and have a ton of projects of my own, ranging from writing documentation, to rewriting a couple of systems in Java, to finishing a number of web sites, to getting the stupid computer in the bedroom to see the network again, after swapping ethernet cards.
But sure, e-mail me with your list of projects. If any of them have merit, and I can find the time, I'll work on them, and make the money from them. I'm not too proud to think that others may have good ideas (perhaps even better than my own) and put them to use.
Which leads me to the point I made originally (and that you missed) -- when someone offers a suggestion in an area that is not your area of expertise, take advantage of it.
you can get and hack your own private copy of Mozilla
Yes, in theory.
For some of us, our strengths lie not in writing code, but in identifying valuable features and usable interfaces.
Those that ignore such talented (albeit different) voices are doomed to live in a world where the majority settles for crap (like windows) because it is at least usuable, even if it isn't elegant or efficient from a technical point of view.
My interest is mainly in portable computers, which NeXT never made, afaik. There are images out there of them. Try the NeXT Information Page or this NeXT site or this one if you speak German.
I don't recall Apple as having pawned their Apple ][ off as being "portable." (Apple ][ was introduced in 1977) Neither was the Altair (1975).
I don't think Commodore marketed the Pet as a portable either.
But, it's a matter of viewpoint. Looking back from today, where we have visors and psions and sony vaios and so on, a young person of today could look at an Osborne and say, yeah, I could see where that might be considered portable back in the dinosaur age.
But someone from the 60's or even 70's computer industry, looking forward to the Commodore Pet (or the IBM 5100 or the TRS-80 Model III) would see a small, all-in-one, computer that they could pick up and move themselves to another cubicle without having to call a bunch of specialists and schedule it 3 months in advance (hoping the air-conditioning guys actually show up before then.)
Take a look at my other response (with a subject of What's the point? or something like that.) You need to know your history to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.
A few years back, I was working with a company that had a 15-year-old software package and, at the same time, was developing a new, PC-based package. I sat there with the old guys, updating the existing package, and listened to the young micro-weenies trying to figure out solutions to the same problems others had solved 20 or even 30 years prior.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
As to your terminal and 2400bps modem -- I doubt you type or read more than 240 characters per second, so why not use it as a dial-up terminal to a unix box? No X-windows, of course, but then that's for micro-weenies anyway. 8^)
Did anyone notice that the article said that it was PORTABLE?! HAH! Has anyone seen the PET 2001? Its portable if your definition of portable is neither bolted to the desk or chained to alarm system!
Portable had a different meaning back then. IBM called their 5100 a "portable" computer as well, causing some to (mistakenly!) consider it the first portable computer. (It's not, that's most likely the STM Systems Baby! 1).
Today, people think of a "portable" computer as one that you would normally take with you during the everyday course of business, to be used in many different locations. These can range in size from wearables to Handspring Visors, to notebooks, to lunchboxes, all the way up to the sewing-machine-sized osborne 1 and similar.
But back then, "portable" would have meant a computer that didn't need to be in a specially-built, air-conditioned, extra-clean room, and you didn't need to hire a team of specialists from the manufacturer just to move it to another part of the office. You could unplug it, put it on a cart, wheel it over to where ever you wanted it, and plug it back in. It was relatively portable.
These were not something you would move around all the time; they were something you could move when you had to.
Later, a new level of functionality began to emerge -- computers designed to be taken with you and used in multiple locations, perhaps even during the same day. "Portable" computing took on a new meaning, fostered by such innovative or popular computers as the Osborne 1, GRiD Compass, Sharp PC-5000, Panasonic HHC, Epson HX-20, TRS-80 Model 100, and of course the Compaq Portable.
You can see more venerable portable computers in my collection, or elsewhere on the web. You can see many of them in person at the next Vintage Computer Festival.
At the last three Vintage Computer Festivals, there has been at least one Commodore Pet up and running on display, as well as many other fascinating, historic machines. There are also plenty of great talks and a swap meet where you can start your own collection, or just pick up your own first computer.
There is a lot of work going on to preserve the history of the computer industry, but there is still a lot that needs to be done. Much of our past is disappearing before our eyes as we continue to move forward.
(You can see part of my collection on-line as well.)
Slashdot Mirror
Alas, my wife nixed the ethernet port in the bathroom. (Worried about those webcams, perhaps.) Still, it would have been cool to sit in the Japanese ofuro and surf the net...
Okay, so it's not that high-tech, but some of the technologies that make it possible for someone with no time to figure out include:
All I need now are simple instructions for setting up a webcam under Linux (and a source of cheap webcams), to get NetATalk up and running (My wife's a school teacher, and has mac's at home to match the ones at school) and to find something that will let a Linux box see a directory on another system as if it were one of its one (like mapping a network drive with Windows/Samba.)
This is fun stuff!
But the MPAA isn't worried about that, because a professional DVD copying setup costs many thousands of dollars.
They're worried that you will remove the copy protection and dump the movie onto your hard drive. You could then take a week or two and upload it to the internet for others to download.
All sarcasm aside, (sarcasm is my life!), the thought is that soon, hard drives will be big enough to hold multiple movies (how many gigs on a roll of scotch tape?) and that DVD writers will be cheap enough (like CD-R drives) for people to make copies of movies for their friends.
But just as 500GB hard drives will soon be $50, and DVD-writers will be $25, so will the professional DVD-copiers fall in price.
The fact of the matter is that what CSS does is not prevent copying, but controls how I access the movies that I've purchased.
I am currently ripping my CD's into MP3's and putting them on my network file server so I can listen to them from anywhere in the house, on any platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc -- We've got 'em all.) Now I don't have anywhere near enough disk space to put even the few DVD's I have on the network, but I would like the opportunity to view them on whichever machine I like.
But the MPAA/DVDCCA wants me to only be able to view them with a player that can decrypt CSS -- that is, one from a company that has paid them a hefty fee.
Now, if I wanted to, I could write a CD player program with whatever features I want. I could write an image viewer that lets me look at jpeg's upside down. But I can't write a program to let me look at my own DVD's. (Unless I pay the DVDCCA.)
When I took basic physics during my short college career, the professor let us bring a 3x5 card to class for the test. We could write anything we wanted on it -- the all-important formulas, the entire textbook, Verdi's opera scores.
Of course, the only thing that would really help were the formulas that applied to the subject matter, but you had to know which formula to use, and how to use it. The professor wanted to test our understanding of the subject matter, not our memorization skills.
Sure, one could possibly find the exact problem on-line, but unless this is an unlimited-time test, you'd be a lot better off knowing the subject matter (and perhaps looking up some formulas) than trying to do your studying during the test.
Personally, I'm more into classic computers.
What I do (did) have time to do was to go to the site and download the software. That way, if Mattel succeeds in getting the list of IP's that downloaded the software, they'll have one more person to track down and try to bully.
Just think if everyone who reads slashdot did the same... It would sure cost them a pretty penny to have the lawyers track everyone down, send them notices, etc. It wouldn't take long before the postage and legal fees would far outstrip any profits they might get from selling their software.
Actually, if you have a charger that can use 110v, you can charge just about anywhere. A lot of people use the outlets intended for block warmers in the colder parts of the country. For commuting, it's usually not too dificult to get an employer to let you charge there, if necessary.
But for travelling across country, it's not so much the charging facilities as it is the time needed to charge. You go 50-100 miles, then you have to stop and charge for a few hours. Not too practical, but it forces you to really see the country.
Of course, your best bet for long drives is a rental car.
Therein lies the real advantage of public transit. I could drive to my main client (about 45 minutes) or ride the train (about an 1.5 hours.) But in a car, I have to drive. On the train, (electric, of course!) I can work, read e-mail, or even sleep. That hour and a half is worth a lot more to me than saving a couple of dollars a day (which I would end up paying for gas anyway.)
It comes down to do you want to have a small amount of unusable time, or more usable time?
Someone once said (I can't recall who, unfortunately) "The best way to extend the range of an Electric Vehicle is a rental car." (or something like that.)
How often do you drive from Akron to Detroit? How far do you really drive on a daily basis? One of the problems is that the general public is conditioned to thinking of refueling as a pain in the butt, hopefully done no more than once a week (Often in the rain or snow, or late at night when you'd rather be in bed, or when you're late for a meeting.)
Not so with EV's. You come home at the end of the day, pull into your nice warm garage, and plug the car in. The next morning, you've got a full charge. Around here, (San Francisco Bay Area) there are all kinds of places for an "opportunity charge." Offices have EV charging stations in the parking lot, as does BART (the local, inter-county train system,) and even Fry's Electronics. Even in Akron or Detroit, I'm told that many parking lots have public outlets for block heaters -- which work fine for most EV chargers.
For driving across country, generally speaking, EV's are not the answer. But for day-to-day commuting of, say, 50 miles or less each way, (and if you commute more than that you need to re-evaluate the value of your time!) they work great. For running errands around town, they're great.
You don't want to use your EV to drive to visit your mother-in-law, but how often do you do that? You don't want to use an EV to drive the kids to Disneyland, but that's not an enjoyable task in any vehicle -- you're better off flying anyway. You're a travelling salesman and you drive 150 miles a day? You need gas. But for the rest of us, EV's would work for most of our driving.
On a side note, I was in Yosemite a few years back (9/22/95, to be exact) to do a little backpacking and attend the unveiling of some electric busses that were to be used in the valley. There were quite a few EV luminaries in attendance with samples of their work, including one gent who had just driven his electric Honda CRX from Washington DC. (He used, of course, a high-efficiency gas generator built into a trailer to get something like 60mpg.)
If you're looking at distance per pound, yes. But that is not the only criteria. There are others such as cost per mile (EV's win), convenience of refueling (EV's win for day-to-day, Gas wins for the unusual), noise (EV's win), power (EV's win), and so on.
Actually, as I understand it, acceleration is one of the strengths of EV's. You have instant torgue -- no revving up. But, keep in mind that I'm not much into the racing side of EV's; I want an electric Land Rover.
Perhaps one of the keywords should be the previous URL? In fact, perhaps a better solution would be a new Meta tag of "Prev-URL" (or something similar) that search engines could look at and use to update their databases?
On an anecdotal note (or is that redundant?), I remember searching once, for the web site of a Land Rover owners club (I think it was Ottawa Valley Land Rovers in Canada) and was directed to a auto parts store in Australia -- turned out that the web pages had the names of lots of auto clubs in meta tags. The idea was to get people searching for the clubs to go to the store's site.
"Flamboyant eccentrics" does not necessarily equate to above-average-in-intelligence, socially-inept, or even non-mainstream. Some examples, perhaps, of what Brin may have been referring to are Elton John, Prince, Richard Branson, Judge Judy, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, the entire cast of the World Wrestling Federation, and anyone who's ever been on the Jerry Springer show.
While you might be eccentric, you probably aren't all that spectacularly flamboyant. Compare yourself to Emperor Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. How many major bridges have you ordered to be built, and actually had it accomplished?
I did not know of this. Are you referring to Bush and Gore?
Both of those machines would have been a great machine for someone who couldn't afford the latest and greatest. Certainly, there are collectors out there who would be happy to take them.
Folks, please, before you toss a computer, look around to see if someone might either be able to use it or if someone wants to save it for posterity!
I don't recall Englebart as being at Xerox; he's best known for his work 10-15 years prior at Stanford. Of course, I know that members of his team definitely did go on to work at Xerox Parc and worked on the Alto and such, which of course led to the Lisa, Macintosh, Windows, and a host of other things we take for granted today.
However, please remember that the computer industry was around for at least 30 years before the Lisa (take a look at this page for a bit of PC history.) It might have been the first such testing for the Personal Computer industry, but certainly not for the computer industry in general.
And therein lies one of the fundamental differences between GUI's and CLI's -- The former is much easier to figure out which the latter is far more efficient.
Actually, there are those who say its appearance was derived from the (for the time) nearly ubiquitous IBM terminals that littered desks throughout corporate america. This was to make sure it was "immediately recognizable as a computer."
Furthermore, there was no real standard for microcomputer appearance at the time -- the IBM PC slab was not yet universal -- many businesses had Apple II's, Radio Shack Model II, III, and 12's, and Sol-20's, none of which were necessarily computer-ish looking. (Most people in the early 80's thought of computers as huge things (PDP-11, HP-3000, IBM 360) with spinning (reel-to-reel) tape drives.)
Um, the target market was Business. It has only been in the last 10 years that color has started to become an important part of business computing; hard copy is still mostly black and white. Perhaps you are thinking of video games?
I know that at the time, I was recommending avoiding color monitors (CGA) for business use as the resolution was terrible (320x240, iirc) as compared to Hercules monochrome (720x?)
Sure, it was slow, as were most personal computers then. The Lisa was trying to do an awful lot with the limited hardware available. And yes, like the rest of the personal computer industry in those days, it was not the epitomy of reliability. (Like that has changed much...)
Excuse me, but do you expect a first-time user to be able to do anything at all with Unix/Linux the first time they sit down in front of it? With a GUI, the user can at least move the mouse, notice a correlation between its movement and the movement of something on the screen. When the Lisa was introduced, most people had no experience with a computer at all. The Lisa was intended to get them up to speed in the shortest possible time. The first 10 minutes might have been sheer hell, but after that it would make sense.
(This, of course, is where the MacOS succeeded and Windows failed -- there is one key combination, for example, that will close any program on the Mac. (Command-Q, iirc) Under Windows, you might have Ctrl-Q, Ctrl-X, Alt-F4, or something completely different. On the Mac, once you knew one program, you kinda knew them all. Not so under Windows.)
For new users, there was nothing to remember. No secret incantations to be typed. Click on a menu, then select a option. Click on icons. It's all there. With CLI's, you need to remember the commands, the options, etc. Much more efficient in the long run, but not easy to use at first.
We'll never really know for sure, but the reasons I've heard (with reasonable credibility) include internal politics and competition with the Macintosh group.
But yes, many were scrapped, by Sun Remarketing, on Apple's order, iirc. They still sell Mac parts and used to have some Lisa stuff.
The Lisa was based on the Xerox Alto (See here, here, here, and here) from the early 70's, so it was certainly doable, although perhaps not with the single-chip-CPU concept that seems to be the only thing the kids of today can conceive of.
And no, I don't have one in my collection. Yet.
I didn't say I (or anyone else) couldn't write code; I said that our strengths lay elsewhere. You must be a true newbie if you've never run across someone who really just wasn't such a great programmer, no matter how hard they tried, or how much they studied.
And of course, when you want to see a movie, you go film/act/direct/produce it yourself. And you do all your own cooking (you never eat in restaurants since you've yet to find someone who can cook as well as you do.) You don't bother to play any video games other than the ones you developed, since you're the best game designer there is. You write your own novels, too. Naturally, you do all your own auto repairs, and home repairs, and you take your own trash to the dump, and you only listen to music you've written/performed/recorded.
My, my, aren't we the Heinleinesque ideal?
Well, not me personally, but yes, there are those whose strengths lie in managing projects. They know how to motivate people, and can effectively run interference between the people that do the work and those whose job it is to prevent them (upper management). Generally, they aren't what would be called a geek, but the better ones (in the high-tech industries, anyway) are at least technologically aware.
But of course, you're the ultimate superman, doing everything yourself because your the best person for every job.
As for me, personally, I've been told that I'm really good at designing usable interfaces and explaining things to the non-technical. So I've done some teaching, a fair bit of tech support, a lot of specs, and quite a bit of coding. (Mind you, I wouldn't bet I was coding before you were born, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm currently working way too much, and have a ton of projects of my own, ranging from writing documentation, to rewriting a couple of systems in Java, to finishing a number of web sites, to getting the stupid computer in the bedroom to see the network again, after swapping ethernet cards.
But sure, e-mail me with your list of projects. If any of them have merit, and I can find the time, I'll work on them, and make the money from them. I'm not too proud to think that others may have good ideas (perhaps even better than my own) and put them to use.
Which leads me to the point I made originally (and that you missed) -- when someone offers a suggestion in an area that is not your area of expertise, take advantage of it.
Yes, in theory.
For some of us, our strengths lie not in writing code, but in identifying valuable features and usable interfaces.
Those that ignore such talented (albeit different) voices are doomed to live in a world where the majority settles for crap (like windows) because it is at least usuable, even if it isn't elegant or efficient from a technical point of view.
There's a picture in Hal Layer's collection, or check out Deep Space Tech if you want to buy one.
And of course, we have to have the obligatory Linux on NeXT link.
I don't think Commodore marketed the Pet as a portable either.
But, it's a matter of viewpoint. Looking back from today, where we have visors and psions and sony vaios and so on, a young person of today could look at an Osborne and say, yeah, I could see where that might be considered portable back in the dinosaur age.
But someone from the 60's or even 70's computer industry, looking forward to the Commodore Pet (or the IBM 5100 or the TRS-80 Model III) would see a small, all-in-one, computer that they could pick up and move themselves to another cubicle without having to call a bunch of specialists and schedule it 3 months in advance (hoping the air-conditioning guys actually show up before then.)
A few years back, I was working with a company that had a 15-year-old software package and, at the same time, was developing a new, PC-based package. I sat there with the old guys, updating the existing package, and listened to the young micro-weenies trying to figure out solutions to the same problems others had solved 20 or even 30 years prior.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
As to your terminal and 2400bps modem -- I doubt you type or read more than 240 characters per second, so why not use it as a dial-up terminal to a unix box? No X-windows, of course, but then that's for micro-weenies anyway. 8^)
Portable had a different meaning back then. IBM called their 5100 a "portable" computer as well, causing some to (mistakenly!) consider it the first portable computer. (It's not, that's most likely the STM Systems Baby! 1).
Today, people think of a "portable" computer as one that you would normally take with you during the everyday course of business, to be used in many different locations. These can range in size from wearables to Handspring Visors, to notebooks, to lunchboxes, all the way up to the sewing-machine-sized osborne 1 and similar.
But back then, "portable" would have meant a computer that didn't need to be in a specially-built, air-conditioned, extra-clean room, and you didn't need to hire a team of specialists from the manufacturer just to move it to another part of the office. You could unplug it, put it on a cart, wheel it over to where ever you wanted it, and plug it back in. It was relatively portable.
These were not something you would move around all the time; they were something you could move when you had to.
Later, a new level of functionality began to emerge -- computers designed to be taken with you and used in multiple locations, perhaps even during the same day. "Portable" computing took on a new meaning, fostered by such innovative or popular computers as the Osborne 1, GRiD Compass, Sharp PC-5000, Panasonic HHC, Epson HX-20, TRS-80 Model 100, and of course the Compaq Portable.
You can see more venerable portable computers in my collection, or elsewhere on the web. You can see many of them in person at the next Vintage Computer Festival.
There is a lot of work going on to preserve the history of the computer industry, but there is still a lot that needs to be done. Much of our past is disappearing before our eyes as we continue to move forward.
(You can see part of my collection on-line as well.)