[HN Gopher] What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
___________________________________________________________________
What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
Author : Austin_Conlon
Score : 320 points
Date : 2020-11-24 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quora.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quora.com)
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Wow, 81 comments and not one mention yet of the NeXTcube. That
| perfect 305mm x 305mm x 305mm (1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot)
| magnesium cube was hell to produce, but gorgeous to look at. And,
| it was the machine that the original web server ran on at CERN.
| [0]
|
| I've kind of always wanted one of them, but I've also kind of
| wondered if I'd be disappointed by it, if I got one. After all,
| it only ran at 25mhz.
|
| What I'd _really_ like to do is get an empty case and put a
| modern PC inside it. That would be awesome. You 'd probably have
| to gut the case and put in new mounting hardware, but a mini-ATX
| or micro-ATX board would definitely fit in there. There should be
| room for drive rails and a PSU, but I wonder if ventilation would
| be a problem.
|
| Perhaps the most fitting thing to stuff in there would be a Mac,
| or, maybe, a Hackintosh.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-
| comput...
| rektide wrote:
| I dunno, just seems fetishistic & insular. Physical product
| design is not why I personally got into computers. Quite the
| opposite, the liberation of feeling like you had joined a plane
| of of thoughts & ideas, decoupled yourself from the material.
| Apple still kicks out ultrapowered trash cans & cheese graters,
| & while sometimes the density is impressive, the showmanship of
| it has always been off-putting & encouraging bad-think to me,
| takes away g distracts from far more important realities.
| mattl wrote:
| It was called the NeXT Computer. Only later models were called
| the Cube.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I'm not a fan of taking old computers and "harvesting" their
| cases. People used to do this a lot with the original Macintosh
| models. Often they would turn them into aquariums. Now all
| those computers are collectors' items, and many of them have
| been butchered. The original NeXT computers are much more rare
| than those Macintoshes. In my opinion they deserve to be
| preserved for history.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That's a good thought. I wonder if such a case mod as I
| propose could be done non-destructively. That is, if you were
| done with the modern PC inside, could you easily re-convert
| it back to a NeXTcube? I have no real idea, since I've never
| seen inside of one. :/
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It
| was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent
| whole; one would hope this was where we were going as we got
| _better_ at architecting software (as individuals, as a field),
| but disappointingly in retrospect it appears as a kind of high-
| point, after which we continued to descend into ball-and-twine
| mediocrity. For Reasons economic and and social that I think
| people could argue about a lot, but we don 't because in part
| because as a field we don't seem to even agree on what excellence
| in software architecture/design even means anymore.
|
| But what I want to talk about instead is:
|
| > Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to
| shame.
|
| I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise
| Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years
| programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that
| ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning
| multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on
| first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome
| feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger
| the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to
| implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?).
|
| But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to
| shame". ActiveRecord is _very_ similar to EOF in design, by 2020
| nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features.
|
| Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is
| _mostly_ as good as EOF haha (and doesn 't have anything of note
| that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any
| ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it
| really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to
| EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my
| experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark!
|
| AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of
| it's designers had experience with EOF.
| boris wrote:
| > I am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally.
| It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a
| coherent whole [...]
|
| The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software
| is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you
| boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple
| exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the
| impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I couldn't say how similar a 2020 MacOS bootlog is at this
| point to anything that was in NeXT, and wouldn't assume that
| whatever you're seeing now that you find inelegant was there
| in NeXTStep 20 years ago or longer. I mean, maybe, but I
| wouldn't just assume it and judge NeXT for it. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| In any event, the boot log is not something I had occasion to
| pay attention to in NeXTStep, I couldn't speak to it.
| nemo wrote:
| NeXTStep/OpenStep had a great development environment and was
| full of innovation but even in the '90s it had old BSD
| components that were rarely updated and it really wasn't a
| great unix. Mac OS X has followed that pattern. Also Mach was
| inherently slow so running OpenStep on x86 hardware was
| slower than Linux or Windows - in Mac OS X they finally gave
| up on a pure microkernel and flattened the kernel to reduce
| the overhead of message passing through the BSD personality
| layer to Mach. But folks running OpenStep were running it for
| the RAD development tools and EOF that let you quickly design
| a UI with a very usable ORM that allowed you to take a
| desktop app and turn it into a webapp via WebObjects
| seamlessly. They complained about the *nix layer even then,
| but the unix layer was adequate and you could compile newer
| versions of tools you needed then as now.
| lukeh wrote:
| After Apple bought NeXT, they upgraded the Mach component
| from 2.5 to 3.0 (from Apple's MkLinux project). But it was
| always a hybrid kernel in both NEXTSTEP and macOS.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| "Mac OS" pre-"X" (9.x and prior) or "macOS" post-"X" (11.x
| and newer)?
| ido wrote:
| They obviously don't mean pre-x as that would have no
| bearing on NeXT. Probably just collqually using the current
| name to mean mac os(x) >= 10.0
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Ah yes. That makes sense. And the rep hit I got shows
| what happens if you comment when you just woke up
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| And I'm upset I didn't get an opportunity to properly work with
| WebObjects. WebObjects with Swift would revolutionize the web -
| IMHO - it was gone too soon.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Seems like some demos around 2019 are still available:
| http://www.alwaysrightinstitute.com/wo-intro/
| grecy wrote:
| I coded fulltime in WebObjects from 2006-2008 making webApps
| in the health care industry.
|
| During my Software Engineering degree I learned the
| difference between a Library and a Framework, but it wasn't
| until actually using the WebObjects Framework that the light
| bulb went off in my head. It was a pleasure to work with, and
| clearly very, VERY well thought out.
|
| EOF was great, and every time I made a new NSArray() it
| brought a smile to my face.
| wpietri wrote:
| As a former NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) who started a
| company that did custom NeXT development, I both strongly agree
| and strongly disagree.
|
| The technology really was great. Their understanding of object
| orientation was superior. The developer tools were wonderful.
| The user experience was generally a delight. We could develop
| custom software in a fraction of the time of people using the
| tools of the day. NeXT had a true vision of the future.
|
| However, what they didn't have was much understanding of
| economics. The only reason that NeXT wasn't a complete
| commercial failure was that Apple's board wanted Steve Jobs
| back. If not, Apple might instead have bought out Be. And if
| Apple had succeeded in developing their own next-gen OS, both
| NeXT and Be might be minor footnotes these days. Even prior to
| the deus ex machina buyout, NeXT was on a slow and steady path
| to failure. They'd gone from an integrated hardware vendor to
| an OS-on-other-hardware vendor to a dev-tools-on-other-OSes
| vendor, and it's not clear that would have worked either. Once
| the acquisition was announced, they promised to take care of
| the people who had stuck with them and then did jack.
|
| I took a few lessons away from my time with NeXT. 1) Just
| because I thought something was technically superior didn't
| mean it was commercially viable. 2) Being too far ahead of the
| market is worse than being behind it. 3) Never trust a
| "visionary leader" to look out for you, no matter what he says.
| He's in it for himself and the vision; the little people are
| expendable.
|
| But you're definitely right that it made using other stuff
| painful. I stopped doing GUI development altogether rather than
| shift to Windows, which was incomparably awful by comparison.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Can you elaborate a bit why GUI
| development for NeXT was (and probably is) superior comparing
| to Windows GUI development (even if we include Borland's
| effort).
| alblue wrote:
| At the time of NeXT's heyday in the early '90s, most GUI
| programming was textual. You'd call add(button) and
| button.text = "Hello World" to build up your GUI, and have
| to wire up the events from your button to take specific
| actions. Quite a lot of GUI programming is still like this,
| even now.
|
| What NeXT brought was a GUI editor that allowed you to drag
| a button from a palette and onto a window (or view). You
| could then change the text on the button by double clicking
| on it and renaming the default text. You also got to
| determine where and how large the button was in relation to
| the rest of the window.
|
| Most GUI builders could do this, so what was special about
| Interface Builder?
|
| Two things stood out. First, you could specify how the
| button reacted to window resizing. There was a "springs and
| struts" layout mechanism that allowed you to say which
| parts were fixed offsets and which were variable. You could
| also say if the button would resize, and if so, in the X or
| Y or both directions.
|
| The second thing was the ability to connect the button to
| an action. By Ctrl clicking and dragging, you could wire up
| the default action to a "selector" -- in effect, a virtual
| method call, on the owner of the button. This owner would
| be populated at startup, typically the application
| (controller). So you could have your code with the
| responder and another team build the UI, and they would
| join together at runtime.
|
| You could also use properties generated by code as well -
| you could connect the button's field to an object's
| property (aka an outlet) so that changing the code changed
| the UI.
|
| The fact that you could drag and drop connections from UI
| to code, and from code to UI, as well as building a
| responsive UI, was really what stood out.
|
| This still lives on in Xcode today; IB and PB begat Xcode
| and IB which begat Xcode. The "nib" format - Next Interface
| Builder - was a binary format file containing the
| descriptive state of the Ui and the wiring requirements,
| which was renamed "xib" when XML became all the rage is the
| same thing. The fact that IB has been subsumed into Xcode
| still hides the fact that is what's happening under the
| covers.
|
| I think it's important to realise that this was in an age
| when Windows 3.1 was all the rage, and we had only just got
| out of 256 colour VGA while Next station had 16 million.
|
| Nowadays with everyone doing MVC programming with the web,
| it doesn't seem so important. But then there was a time
| when no one wrote unit tests because it was seen as
| pointless; but it is from these seeds that ideas become
| mainstream.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| And original Interface builder was developed in Lisp :)
| [1]
|
| [1] https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-
| builders-altern...
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks. This looks slick and ahead of its time. GUI
| development has also been a bit messy or heavy and I wish
| we had easier solutions nowadays.
| pdfernhout wrote:
| Try using plain ES7+ (with async/await) JavaScript with
| Mithril (for defining components and their behaviors) and
| Tachyons (for Atomic CSS for styling). I like that
| combination best after having used Smalltalk and a
| variety of GUI builders (including Delphi and ones for
| Smalltalk and NewtonScript) and Angular and React.
| (TypeScript is OK too for bigger projects where
| documenting interfaces wins out over speed of development
| in plain JavaScript...)
|
| And having dealt with GUI builders with special formats
| and coding implication related to objects sending special
| events, I'd much rather just write plain code in one
| language in a text editor than wrestle with a limited
| WYSIWYG tool.
|
| Mithril's brilliance is assuming the UI is dirty if you
| have touched it in some way (mouse click, keystroke,
| etc.) and always rerendering after the event is handled
| (except if you want to optimize that). That leads to UI
| code which is much easier to reason about than arbitrary
| networks of dependencies like older UI toolkits
| emphasized. That style of UI development feels a lot more
| like, say, programming a continually-rerendering video
| game in for OpenGL than programming a dependency-based UI
| for VisualWorks/NeXTSTEP/Delphi/VB/etc..
|
| More on all that by me:
| https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril "tl;dr:
| Choose Mithril whenever you can for JavaScript UI
| development because Mithril is overall easier to use,
| understand, debug, refactor, and maintain than most other
| JavaScript-based UI systems. That ease of use is due to
| Mithril's design emphasis on appropriate simplicity -
| including by leveraging the power of JavaScript to define
| UIs instead of using an adhoc templating system. Mithril
| helps you focus on the essential complexity of UI
| development instead of making you struggle with the
| accidental complexity introduced by problematically-
| designed tools. Many popular tools emphasize ease-of-use
| through looking familiar in a few narrow situations
| instead of emphasizing overall end-to-end simplicity
| which -- after a short learning curve for Mithril --
| leads to greater overall ease-of-use in most situations."
|
| And I say that even having been an official NeXTSTEP
| developer once upon a time -- after I gave Steve Jobs my
| business card when I met him after he gave a talk at
| Princeton and he got me into the developer program (after
| my paperwork to join that developer program had
| previously apparently been ignored with its aspiration to
| build a system where any piece of data could be linked to
| any other piece of data). Even reading through all the
| glorious NeXT developer info, I never felt I could afford
| the NeXT hardware though as much as I wanted it (the
| short warranty gave me pause too) -- so my career as an
| independent software developer went in different
| directions. After reading the article and comments here,
| I can wish I had just thought to go work for NeXT instead
| of wanting to be a customer...
| altcognito wrote:
| I'm sure that your aware that Ms access, Delphi, Visual
| Basic, progress as well as a host of other tools existed
| at the time, and you're fine to point out that Next was
| superior but given that really none of these systems
| survived, something else must be going on.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| What? Delphi and the Microsoft tools are still available.
| They did survive they just didn't prosper I suppose you
| could say.
| alblue wrote:
| Sure, but Delphi was released in 1995 as the first
| version, whereas this was something I was programming in
| 1992 (and I came late to the party with Nextstep 3).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Delphi_(software
| )
|
| Visual Basic came out in 1991, by which time Nextstep was
| already at version 2.1
|
| So yes, these things existed, but after Next had
| demonstrated them.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I don't think you are disagreeing with anything I said, let
| alone strongly -- I didn't say anything about economics!
|
| Thanks for sharing though!
|
| I suppose it may be that technical excellence has never been
| economically viable, and NeXT survived as long as it did only
| by fluke.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I suppose it may be that technical excellence has
| never been economically viable
|
| Probably more like:
|
| 1. It's generally orthogonal to economic viability
|
| 2. ...unless you have such a lack of technical excellence
| that it actively sinks the company because you can't
| execute at all
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| > technical excellence has never been economically viable
|
| I think Google search would like to have a word with you.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Google could have -- and probably would have -- failed if
| not for Google Ads. The great search results drove people
| to use their product, but it didn't actually earn them
| money directly.
|
| You can have the best product on the market and fail, and
| you can have a terrible one, yet succeed. Google has as
| much business acumen as they do technical chops, and
| that's why they are such a success. Same with MS and
| Apple.
| chungus_khan wrote:
| NeXT was also mostly ahead of the market on the software
| side. Their machines were a very tough sell compared to the
| price and performance of other UNIX workstations of the time
| (which is why I know SunOS and not NeXTStep).
|
| All the vision and all the software quality in the world
| won't make you competitive in the 90s UNIX workstation market
| if your machines are underpowered, and we were used to
| garbage software anyway. Chasing the "personal
| workstation"/PC market also would never work. DOS/Windows was
| far too strong and the Macintosh deep in a niche. It's very
| unfortunate.
| kjs3 wrote:
| NeXT failed on the hardware cost side because they wanted
| to be a personal computer and _not_ a workstation. They
| were priced for neither market.
|
| I looked very seriously at Unix machines around the time
| NeXT came out, having been converted to that religion in
| college. NeXT started at around US$6500, and that was with
| the optical disk only. The equivalent-ish Sun box (Sun
| 3/80) started at around US$15k with disk as I recall and
| went up in price really fast if you wanted more
| memory/disk/etc. About the cost of a new Honda Accord at
| the time. And the Sparcstations were out at much higher
| performance (and price...I seem to recall around US$22k for
| a usable config).
|
| On the other hand, you could get a nicely decked out 386/33
| for maybe half the cost of the NeXT, or a 486 for a grand
| or so more. And it ran tons of software, even if it was
| garbage. Even Unix.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| The low-end NeXTstation was $2999 if I recall correctly.
| I had one. For the price you couldn't get a faster
| machine.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| This is a good comment. To put more data here:
|
| 1st NeXT Computer 1988: Motorola 68030/25Mhz w/68882 FPU,
| 64MB RAM max. MIPS: 4
|
| Sun Workstation 1988 Sun-4 line: Spac @ 16-33Mhz,
| 32-768MB RAM MIPS: 7-114
|
| Now having used both, the desktop and usability on the
| NeXT was so much better.
| wwweston wrote:
| RE: EOF -- have you ever worked with CoreData, and if so, how
| would you say it compares to EOF (or ActiveRecord, for that
| matter)?
| jegea wrote:
| Personal experience: Around 2005 I was looking for a platform
| for a new web app, after some years out of development but
| having worked extensively with NeXTstep and EOF in the 90s.
|
| After watching DHH's video and reading the Rails book, it
| reminded me so much of my previous experience with NeXT
| technology that I had no other choice but to go with Rails.
|
| The dynamism of Ruby had a lot in common with ObjC's runtime.
| And reading about ActiveRecord at that time I also had the
| feeling that its authors had worked with EOF before.
|
| All in all, NeXT built great stuff. I still own a NeXTstation
| Color that I got in 1992 (one of these days I should try to
| turn it on again). And it's a testament to the quality of that
| software that some pieces that I'm still running today, like
| Apple Mail, trace back almost directly to tools I started using
| back then (NeXTMail).
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Yep, people don't often comment on how similar ruby and ObjC
| are, in fundamentals.
|
| I think it's because both of them were so influenced by
| smalltalk, more than ObjC influencing ruby necessarily. But
| not sure.
|
| But I'm still very curious if AR's creators knew EOF, yeah. I
| haven't found DHH mentioning it; not sure if there might be
| forgotten other person/people central to original AR
| architecture.
|
| WebObjects itself was nice in many many ways (I think it's
| encapsulation of form handling is far better than anything
| anyone's managed in Rails)... but made a fundamental mistake
| in trying to keep a fundamentally stateful architecture and
| apply it to the web by putting what was effectively an opaque
| state ID in every single URL. This was a basically bad design
| for the web (although also provided for forementioned good
| encapsulation of form handling. :) ).
|
| But yeah, the sense I get in my career is that we spend a lot
| of time trying to reinvent something that already existed,
| and getting _close_ to being as good as it... then
| collectively moving on to the next language /platform and
| doing it again. With not a lot of progress. Up to and through
| the 90s, it seemed like there was actual progress in software
| design and architecture at the high-level, the level of
| affordances for developers to efficiently create reliable
| maintainable software, but it seems to me have stalled --
| perhaps in favor of huge advances in more low-level stuff,
| better/different languages/language paradigms, etc.
| [deleted]
| jcims wrote:
| One of my first experiences with Unix was getting an angry email
| from Steve Jobs.
|
| He had a default message in the NeXT mail client back in the
| early '90's. I for some reason felt it was a good idea to send
| him an email and enable 'return receipt'. He replied, fuming at
| the violation of his privacy and never answered my question.
|
| Edit: The internet never forgets, the default email in question -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4
| alisonkisk wrote:
| He was mad at you because he didn't like his software made by
| the company he owned?
| jcims wrote:
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| wpietri wrote:
| That is perfectly, perfectly believable. He was never
| interested in being accountable to others. As Steve Wozniak
| said, "He had very, very, very negative sides and he didn't
| seem to care what other people felt."
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Actually a lot of success people are like that. For
| successful careers you got to be comfortable stepping on
| others' toes and persuading others to do things in your
| way. Human nature. Most of us are just herds who secretly
| want to be led by a strong, charismatic leader.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Top level executives very often lean to psychopthic
| tendencies than your average worker bees at corporations.
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-
| are-... . You have to be a cold person to do a lot of
| what they do or at the very least have a very strong
| conviction that what you're doing is for some greater
| good (good chance it's yourself). I also suspect that
| ratio increases the larger the corporation.
| moonbug wrote:
| Sounds exploitative.
| perardi wrote:
| Would Steve Jobs' have been tolerated these days, in a post
| #MeToo era?
|
| Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But
| hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards
| pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be
| less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as
| tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today?
|
| _(Assuming he didn't mellow or adapt with age.)_
| biddit wrote:
| > Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he
| was still around today?
|
| Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive
| behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him.
| Certainly some awe over how scary he was.
|
| I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he
| was _despite_ his terrible behavior.
| reaperducer wrote:
| One generation's "drive" and "focus" is another generation's
| "trigger" and "abuse."
| Razengan wrote:
| Elon Musk is basically Jobs 2.0 and he's doing fine.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I would, uh, say Musk is not doing fine. Among other things,
| he got his company investigated by the FCC for basically no
| reason at all. Jobs had his moments but when he went crazy,
| he didn't go nearly as crazy as Musk, at least not in public.
|
| To be fair, Jobs also didn't have a Twitter account. I don't
| know why, but that seems to do weird things to people.
| wpietri wrote:
| His golden aura would have been dented for sure. Like a lot of
| abusive people, he did very well when he could control the flow
| of information. But social media is undermining that.
|
| However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc
| this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on,
| it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter
| furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business
| partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the
| other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could
| have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at
| concealing it.
|
| But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it
| would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an
| asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money
| keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable.
|
| [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-
| atar...
|
| [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-
| jobs-...
|
| [3] E.g., this from 2011.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
| cultus wrote:
| There definitely would have been pressure to change. I highly
| doubt he would ever have been cancelled, though. Nothing he did
| ever rose to anywhere near that kind of level, except for
| possibly aspects of his family life. Jobs was brilliant product
| guy, but verbal abuse never helps teams become more productive.
| All that he did was in spite of his temper.
| ralfd wrote:
| It is interesting to note though that despite all his faults
| Jobs had very long, sometimes decades long, extremely fruitful
| work relationships. Woz, Andy Herztfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie
| Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive... etc. And
| at Pixar too. Such high caliber people wouldn't stay around if
| it was so terrible or there was no redeeming quality.
|
| The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having
| worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled.
| Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to
| succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging
| each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude
| it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an
| A-player you can hold your ground?
|
| Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on
| objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin,
| dealt best with Jobs?
| freehunter wrote:
| Abusive/abrasive bosses are still celebrated today. Jeff Bezos
| runs a company where employees urinate in bottles because they
| aren't given time for a bathroom break and asks employees in
| meetings "why are you wasting my life". Tim Bray has some
| stories to tell about AWS too. Elon Musk abuses his employees,
| his shareholders, his companies, and everyone else on Twitter
| nearly every time he opens his mouth. It's almost cheating to
| mention Elizabeth Holmes. Same with Travis Kalanick.
|
| I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were
| around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who
| produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for
| a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely
| tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many,
| loved by many, merely tolerated by most.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Even ignoring the specific movement, hopefully we all pressure
| our bosses to be less abusive (no abuse is acceptable).
|
| I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn't have put
| up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked.
|
| Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was
| power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked
| for him.
|
| This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked
| for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than
| governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to
| them.
| [deleted]
| crazyjncsu wrote:
| The problem is when "no abuse is acceptable" and at the same
| time we continue to redefine these types of terms to apply to
| lesser and lesser offenses.
|
| I personally am tired of working at a firm where everyone has
| a voice that they're always using.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| Can you list some examples of these "lesser and lesser"
| offenses?
|
| I'm a manager, I treat my employees with respect, and no
| one has ever complained about me abusing them. I'd like to
| know how "small" these claims are getting.
| shuckles wrote:
| I could imagine having to demo on Saturday and needing to
| work all day to incorporate feedback by Sunday would be
| called abusive, even at small startups, these days.
| PretzelPirate wrote:
| If that's not something the employee agreed to up front
| and they aren't compensated for it, it may very well be
| abuse of the employer-employee power dynamic.
|
| Asking an employee to suddenly work all weekend when they
| don't have the expectation and potentially aren't in a
| situation to say no would certainly be considered an
| abuse of power (what if they miss their kid's birthday).
|
| I coach all of my employees that they own their time. I
| can't ask them to work late or work more days, because I
| don't own them.
|
| It is my job as a leader to ensure that their time is
| protected, and I've pushed back on management multiple
| times when last minute changes were requested and my team
| would need to work more to fill that request. I put
| myself in the line of fire and say that I don't have the
| capacity in my team to fulfill that without cutting work.
|
| I ask my team to tell me if I ever overstep and they feel
| uncomfortable saying no when they really want to.
|
| I also encourage all of my employees to interview outside
| the team/company so they know their worth and understand
| that they have the ability to leave if they ever feel our
| power dynamic is being abused and I don't do anything to
| fix it.
|
| Leaders can effectively manage teams and deliver on
| vision without abusing the employer-employee power
| dynamic. It makes leadership more difficult since you
| have less flexibility in the capacity of your team
| (capped at 40 hrs/week and can't suddenly expand to 80
| hrs/week), but it makes for better teams and happier
| people.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I can give you an example that I witnessed back when we
| were still in the office pre-COVID.
|
| Someone was making copies at the copy machine. Another
| person made a joke comment about him running off copies
| of his resume. A harmless remark that's been made
| millions of times in thousands of offices for as long as
| copy machines have existed.
|
| The next day the commenter got hauled into HR for
| "harassment."
| sib wrote:
| That... is a very good example. Thanks for making it
| real.
|
| At my last in-office role, I had employees (direct
| reports) give me similar comments if I happened to come
| into the office dressed particularly nicely. Certainly
| didn't feel like harassment!
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Isn't part of it that Steve was able to sell people on his
| vision though? So it's not just that he had power in the way
| that a judge has power or a school principal has power--
| those are powerful figures that you submit to because the
| alternative is punishment. Rather, he had power in the way
| that a beloved family member has power. People _wanted_ to
| please him because they had bought into what the vision was
| and how their piece of the puzzle fit into making it a
| reality.
|
| Was there abusive stuff going on there? Absolutely! And
| there's almost certainly some overlap here with other cases
| (actress submits to famous film executive because it's part
| of his "creative process"), but I don't know if the
| current/recent reckoning would do much to prevent a small,
| dedicated technical team from overworking themselves and
| tolerating abusive management practices in service of a new
| charismatic, visionary leader like Jobs apparently was.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| These people still exist. They run some of the major tech
| companies that produce products tech people love.
|
| The difference is that top engineers have more options these
| days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google
| or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive
| relationships with the CEO.
|
| Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high
| ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into
| an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious,
| early-career people to extract as much work as possible before
| they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their
| skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.
|
| I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was
| high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or
| a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the
| abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.
|
| The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible
| the working environment was, because it would only devalue
| those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let
| everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for
| were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be
| self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.
| cbozeman wrote:
| How'd you like Amazon?
|
| I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and
| wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on
| to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability
| Engineering.
|
| She has since moved on from that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't believe that the backend ordering system changed
| much between 1996 and 2000, which means that either she
| didn't write a shitload of it, or she rewrote the system I
| wrote :)
|
| Maybe you could ask her?
|
| [ EDIT: realistically, it probably did change a lot during
| those 4 years, given the new product ranges that were
| already happening ]
| radu_floricica wrote:
| The real question isn't if he could have lasted or had to
| adapt. The real question is if the next Steve Jobs will be able
| to do the things the old one did, while avoiding post-
| progressive pitfalls.
| bodhiandpysics1 wrote:
| Elon seems to do fine
| jansan wrote:
| Elon is different. People called and still call Jobs a jerk
| (as James Gosling in his interview with Lex Fridman). Elon
| shows erratic behavior from time to time, but I do not
| think people would call him a jerk.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| I think his transphobic and downplaying covid tweets got
| him called a jerk. Oh and the pedophile accusation
| against that guy that rescued the kids from the cave. I
| think he was a jerk for that one.
|
| I still respect him though.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| A lot of people actually do
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| #MeToo concerns sexual abuse in the workplace. I'm not sure why
| you thought it was necessary to cite that as your milestone
| marker, and then back out to talking about abuse in general.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| #MeToo also had that disturbing element of liberal, feminist
| icons being the sexual abusers all along. (Harvey Weinstein)
|
| I think the parent is using #MeToo as a catch-all for
| intolerance of any alleged abuse of power and cancel culture
| in general. And as others have mentioned Jeff Bezos and Elon
| Musk are doing fine, so no Steve Jobs would have probably
| been fine in the current time.
| danbolt wrote:
| > feminist icons
|
| Maybe you could explain a little more here? I don't think
| anyone had thought Weinstein was a feminist icon as far as
| I can tell.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Some people thought so because he made a lot of movies
| about women and supposedly helped some very famous women
| with their careers. It was even used in part of his
| public perception campaign that he deserved some credit
| for helping these women.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/16/harvey-
| weinstei...
| danbolt wrote:
| I can see in the article you linked that Weinstein is
| using said claims in his public perception campaign, but
| I can't find any other resources about the "some people"
| part. Maybe I'm not in the know about the film industry,
| but I'm not seeing a lot of consensus that he was a
| paragon of feminism. Or, as far as high-profile feminists
| go, I wouldn't suspect him.
| sib wrote:
| Although Jeff has definitely moderated his approach
| significantly over time. Not sure OG Jeff would be as fine
| today as modern Jeff is.
| jboog wrote:
| Who thought Harvey was a Feminist OR liberal icon?
|
| This is post-hoc revisionist history by people with
| political motivations.
|
| He was a small fry Dem donor compared to the real money. No
| idea at all where "feminist" comes from, seems to have no
| basis in reality.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| He was a long time and well known Democratic donor and
| hosted a fundraiser at his home for Obama in 2012, which
| Obama attended. Admission was $36,000 a person. That's
| not small fry.
|
| See below comment on feminist. I don't think he was one,
| but the image of being one was knowingly cultivated.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Assuming he didn't mellow or adapt with age.
|
| He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography
| actually latched onto this as a key narrative element--a way to
| construct Jobs's personal arch--and I do believe it's genuine
| based on everything else I've read about the guy.
|
| And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in
| these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch,
| but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had
| much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration
| of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He
| was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are
| relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute.
|
| Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the
| end of his life (and I would _not_ have wanted to work for
| him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat.
|
| 1:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
| dep_b wrote:
| Slightly off-topic but still relevant: I remember seeing a NeXT
| vs IBM development demo featuring interface builder.
|
| I have sought it again a few times but couldn't find it anymore.
| Anybody here still remembers?
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| I think you mean the NeXT vs. Sun demo, here it is:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-
| NICzg&lc=UgidKu1gsNhVQ....
| dep_b wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| Java was not made from "his" ideas. Not by a long shot
| sbuccini wrote:
| When I was an intern at Apple, I somehow finagled my way into
| some long-time manager's backyard cookout. A lot of Apple old-
| timers were there, including Blaine. Really neat guy and a great
| raconteur. That's when I realized engineers of that era were cut
| from a different cloth.
| dleslie wrote:
| Many of that era are/were formally educated as electrical
| engineers.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Yep, you really needed to know the intimate inner workings of
| the CPU and each digital chip from the keyboard input to the
| display output to produce code that would make a quality
| product.
|
| It took years of experience that you could only gain through
| hands-on work, to know how to debug hardware that's why gray-
| beards are so valued in hardware vs in software where people
| talk of ageism.
|
| When your hardware/low level software doesn't perform as
| expected you can't _google /stack overflow_ yourself out of
| the problem, you need to grab the datasheets, the schematics,
| an oscilloscope, a soldering iron, hunch over patiently and
| devise a way to debug the issue out as no one else can help
| you.
|
| Hardware engineering is now just as challenging as it was
| back then but due to the commodization of hardware along with
| the rise of China and the downfall of high-tech giants like
| IBM, Philips, Siemens, Motorola, Nokia, Blackberry, Nortel,
| Ericsson, etc most hardware jobs disappeared or moved
| overseas and pay went significantly downhill compared to
| software engineering(at least in Europe).
| WWLink wrote:
| You find a lot of these guys in the space industry.
| faichai wrote:
| Yep, ain't no better Software Engineer than an Electronics
| Engineer. This is particularly true for systems programming.
| justapassenger wrote:
| I'd dare to say that there were educated as engineers.
|
| Majority of software engineering courses doesn't really teach
| you how to be an engineer. It's much closer to trade school
| than proper engineering.
| keyanp wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what it means to you to be "educated
| as engineers"? What qualities or learnings are stressed in
| that model that you think current CS education misses?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think it means thinking a problem through and actually
| "proving" or at least "estimating" that your solution
| works before you set off to design and build.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Isn't that what literally every algorithms course teach
| you?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| a) I worked in the industry for 20+ years before I took a
| single algos course, and so do many other people
|
| b) Algos is only a small part of it. It is not just
| individual bits of code, but the whole system you're
| designing, all the moving pieces, how they connect
| together, network effects, etc.
| simonh wrote:
| Not the OP, but Computer Science is a scientific
| discipline not an engineering discipline and is generally
| taught as such. Unless you take specific Software
| Engineering topics you're unlikely to learn things like
| unit testing, build and integration tools, how to use a
| debugger effectively beyond maybe a brief introduction at
| best, etc.
|
| If you were being taught software engineering as an
| engineering discipline, these should be absolute bread
| and butter core components of the course.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| There are very good reasons why whiteboarding focuses on
| computer science, and not the actual practice of writing
| software.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| This got me to wondering what an interview about "the
| actual practice of writing software" would look like, and
| having a look at Glassdoor's mechanical engineering
| interview questions [1] for comparison, it doesn't seem
| these kinds of questions would elicit much better quality
| candidates.
|
| I'm increasingly convinced that the apprenticeship
| program approach would yield far better, deeper results
| than how we're going about recruiting these days, but
| most business leadership is fiscally addicted to short-
| term hire-fire cycles instead of looking for ways to
| exert more control over their destinies. I suspect that
| recruiting model is an ingredient to systematized
| innovation (the "deeper" part I mentioned, which I use to
| denote internalized concepts, procedures, mental models,
| _etc._ necessary to fluent application and craft that I
| believe are absolute table stakes in innovation).
|
| [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/mechanical-
| engineer-inte...
| fgonzag wrote:
| Trade school? What kind of college did you attend? Most CS
| curriculums I've seen are full of math (science), computer
| science (compilers, algorithms, etc) and engineering
| (computer architecture, etc).
|
| It's a mixture of science and engineering, leaning towards
| the science. Far far away from a trade school which would
| teach you practical skills (java, git, web development) and
| try to get you into the labor force ASAP
| MisterKent wrote:
| Care to elaborate?
| peatmoss wrote:
| My biggest regret from all this was that Apple became the sole
| inheritor of the NeXT workstation vision.
|
| I feel more now than ever that an Open Source OpenStep (OSOS?)
| could have been an epically productive relationship for the Mac
| and Linux communities.
| AprilArcus wrote:
| GNUstep existes but it never really took off.
| mattl wrote:
| GNUstep is Cocoa, not the OS. OPENSTEP the OS (aka NeXTSTEP
| but with new OpenStep APIs) and OpenStep the thing that
| became Cocoa are frustratingly named.
| danbolt wrote:
| It's miles away, but I kind of feel like System76's Thelio
| tries to inch a little in that direction.
| jonsno56 wrote:
| I had two professors who worked for Steve. They loved him
| absolutely
| nemo wrote:
| Oh that brings back some memories. An old manager of mine at
| Apple had moved into Apple from NeXT with the WebObjects team. We
| had a lot of black hardware and tons of NeXT docs, etc. and ran
| the Austin corp NetInfo server. He worked with Jobs for
| WebObjects demo/keynotes. He told some stories about Jobs, mostly
| about things he would throw when demos went badly.
|
| I still have a lot of NeXT swag that was eventually given away
| and have a color turbo slab gathering dust.
| mattl wrote:
| What swag do you have? I'm working on a private collection
| museum to showcase NeXT to Mac OS X via Rhapsody...
| nemo wrote:
| I'll try to follow up this eve. I have a S3 Project Team
| magic 8 ball for my work on the Mac OS X Server 1.0 release
| (sadly the fluid somehow leaked/dried, but I still cherish
| it), a lot of magazines and developer docs, and I think some
| stickers as well as other branded materials.
| mattl wrote:
| Thank you. Email is my username here at hey.com if you want
| to do that instead :)
| bogomipz wrote:
| From the Blaine Garst post:
|
| >"We lost our custom hardware. The any workstation you want
| sprints (solaris, hp, alpha) didn't pan out. The Microsoft tax
| (later judged monopolistic, too late, as Ray Noorda of Novell
| confessed to me as had happened to him) killed our PC business.
| We ditched the OS and ran on Windows. We sold our source code to
| Sun to make a multiplatform OpenStep. No cigars. (They made Java
| out of it using many of our/my ideas)
|
| This is interesting. This is the first I've heard about a link
| between NeXT and Java. Does anyone have any further information
| about this? I thought James Gosling developed Java from a
| language called Oak. That's the earliest origin story I've heard
| until I read this post.
| panic wrote:
| Java interfaces are based on Objective-C protocols, which were
| one of Garst's contributions to the language. But I don't think
| you could say they "made Java out of it".
| ransom_rs wrote:
| > NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high
| concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative
| technical minds
|
| This line really interests me. As someone graduating pretty soon
| - are there tech companies out there that that still have this
| culture? Everything seems marketing / product focused today.
| Besides going to graduate school, does anyone here feel like they
| are at a company like this?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| Chatting with national lab folks gave me a feel like this.
| Especially LANL.
|
| I suppose Bell Labs might feel the same. I have a prof who goes
| to work there on summers occasionally taking a couple
| undergrads with him. He is one of the best teachers.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Yes, research labs like CERN have that culture. Startups,
| particularly those sharing incubator space, are often
| friendly. (I'm at a startup now, and we play table football
| every lunchtime).
| rhodysurf wrote:
| Some small DoD S&T/R&D contractors have similar culture, but
| they can be hard to find.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think within big tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/etc.) you
| can find teams that have this kind of culture. IMO any team
| that does serious system programming
| (Compilers/OS/Libraries/etc.) should have it.
| bognition wrote:
| I love reading stories about Steve Jobs at NeXT. He had been
| fired from Apple and wasn't on the winning team but he was still
| fighting to build great products. I know he's a controversial
| figure but he did great things.
|
| Personally I find that Steve at NeXT is far more relatable than
| post iPhone Steve.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Here is a rare instance of Steve Jobs actually backing down
| from an argument... with Paul Rand, over the specific shade of
| yellow used on the letter 'e' in the NeXT logo:
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3056684/remembering-the-design-l...
| [deleted]
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Heard a lot of story and this about him talk to the story guy
| about his wife passing away. Can't imagine it happened in Steve
| I. It is cruel to say the best thing happen to Beethoven is his
| deaf. And Steve his being fired. But life service you lemon and
| sometimes it is the good thing. Less arrogance as he was quoted
| to say.
| tekproxy wrote:
| Hello gpt3
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Wait this is some AI?
| st1x7 wrote:
| Or a person. We're achieving human-level AI by keeping AI
| where it is and bringing human intelligence down.
| iratewizard wrote:
| It's an alternate solution to the Turing test, but it is
| a valid solution.
| sugarpile wrote:
| Idk, could be but given some anti-mainland posts I've seen
| from them I lean towards non-native speaker from HK
| randallsquared wrote:
| Probably just not English-as-a-first-language. GPT3 will
| typically have great grammar/spelling but nonsense meaning,
| but if you allow for slightly odd or near-correct word
| choice, the gp comment is pretty clear.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Yeah it's like the inverse. A bot would never draw an
| analogy between Beethoven's deafness and Jobs's firing,
| but then say "life service you lemons".
| odonnellryan wrote:
| GPT-3 would surprise you, I feel like you could get it to
| make analogies, which is kind of frightening.
| [deleted]
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| accessibility link: https://archive.vn/HGkBb
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| As someone who worked on NeXTStep and OpenStep, when it came to
| UI it buried anything else. Years ahead.
| lizknope wrote:
| This is a 3 hour interview with Blaine Garst by the Computer
| History Museum. Blaine is one of the people quoted in the main
| link. I listened to it the last time Blaine was mentioned here
| and it is pretty interesting.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEIq7fe_KQ
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Also here's the PDF version, though he's the kind of
| personality I preferred watching and listening to instead: http
| s://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20....
| jbirer wrote:
| I am a sucker for these type of stories.
| echelon wrote:
| > The Microsoft tax (later judged monopolistic, too late, as Ray
| Noorda of Novell confessed to me as had happened to him) killed
| our PC business.
|
| Do as I say, not as I do.
|
| Apple is every bit as monopolistic as old Microsoft. They need to
| be forced to open iOS. They sell generic computers you can't run
| freely, and they're screwing over small businesses that just want
| to write and sell software.
|
| Prior to iOS, you distributed your program. Now you go through
| the gatekeeper, follow mundane rules, and pay absurd tax.
| blub wrote:
| No it's not at all as monopolistic as MS was. MS was the alpha
| and omega of software at one point, you couldn't get around
| them if you wanted to sell to consumers _or_ to businesses.
|
| This is not true of Apple, one can build a business and
| completely ignore them. Google on the other hand, good luck
| with that.
| rvense wrote:
| > This is not true of Apple, one can build a business and
| completely ignore them.
|
| These days, there is a very, very large class of "potential
| businesses" that are only realistically realizable as
| smartphone apps. In my country, iPhones that can only run
| Apple-approved apps account for over half of the installed
| base for smartphones, as far as I know.
|
| Making and selling a better smart phone is not as simple as
| making a better hammer, and there was never such a thing as a
| hammer that would only work with nails approved by the
| manufacturer of the hammer you had. This is really a new
| situation with no pre-tech analogies. We cannot rely on pre-
| tech laws to cover it. And it's clear that consumers and
| small businesses are not being protected very well, if at
| all, from Apple. I should not be forced to be spied on by
| Apple or Google to park my car, but this is the situation we
| are in, since there aren't meters in all places in my city,
| only an app. A lot of supermarkets are developing their own
| apps for scan + pay, how long before I can pick between Apple
| and Google when I want to get food? There are more scenarios
| like this by the day, and in my mind there is no question we
| will need regulation to address it.
| mikestew wrote:
| _They sell generic computers you can 't run freely_
|
| So go buy a generic computer that hasn't had Apple's fingers on
| it. Contrast that to the 90s, when finding a computer without
| Windows and IE on it was much more difficult. And if you _did_
| find one, you 'd still pay for a Windows license because that's
| the kind of deals Microsoft bludgeoned OEMs with.
|
| _Prior to iOS, you distributed your program._
|
| And now Apple doesn't allow one to write Android programs? I
| missed that one.
|
| Your comparison is poor. Starting with the fact that a minority
| of devices run Apple operating systems.
| echelon wrote:
| In the US, iPhone has a 50% market share [1].
|
| Apple taught people that apps should only cost $1 and have
| free updates for life, meanwhile they reaped profits off
| developers. That isn't healthy, but Apple doesn't care.
|
| I get that you like your Apple device, but this company is
| destroying our freedoms, making it harder to run a profitable
| business, and taking advantage of their market position and
| customer base.
|
| There isn't a lot of room for competition to grow. Their
| draconian behavior is staunchly anti-ownership. They have a
| ball and chain around our ankle.
|
| If iPhone had 5-15% market share, you might have a point. But
| it doesn't. We're running out of freedoms and breathing room.
| The giants are taking everything away.
|
| Stop worshiping a dumbass phone and the company "protecting
| you" by taking away everyone's freedoms. It's a stupid little
| computer - worth far less than our liberty to write code,
| distribute it, and reuse/upgrade the things we own as we see
| fit.
|
| Apple has the advantage in that their particular computer is
| wildly popular and widely used. All it takes is for the DOJ
| to come and tell them to lighten up - and that's exactly what
| we need.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-
| us-...
| Veen wrote:
| > Apple taught people that apps should only cost $1 and
| have free updates for lift.
|
| Taking a quick glance at my iPad's Home Screen, I see
| PCalc, Omnifocus, IA Writer, Overcast, Drafts, Carrot
| Weather, Soulver, and some more. A mixture of subscription
| and non-subscription apps. All very high quality and all of
| which I pay considerably more than one dollar for.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Apple taught people that apps should only cost $1_
|
| A big ol' [citation needed] on that one, because from where
| I stand The Market(tm) taught people that.
|
| _Stop worshiping a dumbass phone_
|
| You would do well to watch your tone. I'm merely pointing
| out that the Microsoft of the 90s, who is a convicted
| monopolist, is nothing like the Apple of 2020 that you're
| complaining about. Your follow-up doesn't seem to support
| your point, but rather just further complains about Apple.
| Melkman wrote:
| Apple is in no way like Microsoft of old. Microsoft did not
| build generic computers of their own. Other companies like
| Gateway, Compaq, HP, Dell or Packard Bell did. The Microsoft
| tax was the agreement between Microsoft and those companies to
| install Windows on any and all computers they made and pay
| licenses for all of them. Since Windows had a 95%+ OS market
| share every computer manufacturer needed an agreement with
| Microsoft and no generic PC without a Windows license could be
| bought.
|
| Apple only forces their software on hardware they manufacture
| themselves. If you want other software, just buy hardware made
| by a different company. There are still many of them.
| hikerclimb wrote:
| It sucked.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people
| there understood all aspects of the machine. Software people
| could talk about ASICs and CPU instructions, and the hardware
| people understood the software stack. Every aspect of what it
| takes to make a computer work was represented in one building:
| analog hardware, chip design, motherboard design, compiler design
| (objective C), loader, operating system, windowing system,
| application layer, and applications. Where other companies had
| engineering teams, NeXT would have a single individual.
|
| This is in stark contrast to most of today's companies, where you
| have front-end engineers who don't know anything about the
| backend they are interacting with, backend engineers who don't
| care about the frontend they are serving data to, database
| engineers who care about neither, etc.
|
| And that's just software. The hardware might as well be a black
| box for the vast majority of software engineers working at your
| average software company today.
|
| Where did we go so wrong?
| tclancy wrote:
| I don't think we did; there's a bit of selection bias at play
| for NeXT where they had a large network of stars to choose from
| and a reputation that would attract a large pool of other
| people worth choosing. It's just that a lot more people are
| involved in the industry now so there's a lot more entry-level/
| grunt work to be had.
| triceratops wrote:
| Specialization is a natural response to increasing complexity.
| samhuk wrote:
| I think you are misunderstanding.
|
| Do you think that engineers designing the plumbing system of
| the F1 rocket engine knew pretty much anything about "compiler
| design" or "motherboard design"?
|
| What you are in fact observing is a human system's tendency to
| adapt to growing complexity. Human systems adapt to growing
| complexity by specializing it's members to particular skills
| (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization).
|
| It's just a fact that way back then in the NeXT days, the
| computer was not as complex, the understanding of which was
| just about achievable by 1 human. Eventually, that metric
| exceeds 1.
|
| For the case of the first apple computer, it was ~1 (Wozniak),
| in the case of Apollo, it was >100.
|
| Cognitive Specialization is an aspect of all living things, but
| is very apparent in the Human species. Computers got more
| complex in just the same fashion as how farming went from a
| farmer, a bull, and a blacksmith, to gigantic conglomerates to
| make the fertilizer, tractors, watering system, etc., that
| comprise of >10,000 humans.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Partly ad tech. It changed the reward profile away from
| inventing cool new stuff towards lowest-common-denominator
| monetisation.
|
| The real change was the change in the culture of computer use
| from original creation to consumption and distribution of
| certain limited kinds of creation - which are mostly imitative,
| nostalgic, and either backwards- or (at best) sideways-looking
| rather than genuinely original.
|
| Real invention is now actively disfavoured. Google did a fair
| amount in the 00s but has slowly abandoned most of it, Amazon
| does a bit of blue sky but is mostly focussed on consumerism,
| Musk's idea of blue sky is straight out of a 1950s Tom Swift
| novel, and Facebook and Twitter are both hopeless. Netflix is
| cable TV done right - finally. But it's still cable TV.
|
| There are some exceptions at Apple, which still has a kind of
| legacy tradition of doing cool new stuff (see also, M1) but
| even that is a mix of invention for the sake of it and
| strategic lock-in as a goal.
|
| The result is a landscape full of development geared to
| comfortable suburban consumerism and associated corporate
| bureaucracy. There's very little interest in game changing
| technical development for the sake of it - which was more or
| less what NeXT was about. And there's even less interest in
| computing as subversion and empowerment, which was - believe it
| or not - a big interest in the 70s.
|
| FOSS doesn't change this. (It likes to believe it does, but
| practically it really doesn't.)
|
| Quantum computing and AI may be on the cusp - but even if they
| do something interesting they're going to be coopted by ad tech
| as soon as the paint dries.
|
| So it's not about technical scope so much as imagination
| failure. The real loss is the loss of _imagination_ - something
| that tech and media have both done a lot of damage to over the
| last couple of decades.
| uxp100 wrote:
| I think part of the problem is you comparing to a fairly
| different industry. Companies that employ "Front End" and "Back
| end" engineers are very different than NeXT, which had products
| from asic to high level.
|
| If you work at a hardware company, even in a role that's very
| far from hardware, you become aware of this stuff because it
| effects you. Even if you don't understand ASIC at all, you
| still know about, oh, such and such process node has this
| issue, because it impacted our schedule and somebody told me
| about it at a lunch table. And you may not even know how to
| solder, but you can say, oh this needs rework, 0 ohm resistor
| at point such and such to make the display work, because you
| need to know it to go to the lab and have the work done.
|
| Really the thing I understood the least working at a company
| like that was actual productization. You hear about something
| you worked on a year and a half ago being a tablet, or an
| embedded device, and you'd be like, oh, that old thing is just
| being released now? And it's in that form factor? huh.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Where did we go so wrong?_
|
| By getting it right, which saw an explosion in the market,
| leaving us in a position now where there is more work to be
| done than the people who understand systems from top to bottom
| can handle alone. If those pioneering efforts had failed, the
| tech industry would now be insignificant and those superstars
| would be struggling to find work, never mind those who have a
| lesser understanding/care.
| rektide wrote:
| Random note, i- for no reason- went looking at WebObjects, which
| hailed from NeXT I understand. I liked the idea of entity based
| systems.
|
| Discovered that Apache Tapestry, which I used a decade ago, was
| inspired by WebObjects. It was a very interesting fairly seamless
| backend centric web development experience, worked quite well, &
| I say this as someone who loves JS, thick client architectures,
| client side architecture. I didn't see a ton of objects seeming
| like generic web objects like ideas though. In WebObjects it
| seems primarily like there were objects, then different bindings
| to re-expose and/or convey updates between the object & the
| various front ends it might show up on. I'm probably over
| glamorizing how shared, how web, objects in WebObjects really
| were.
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