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Quotes from 1992

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Re: Quotes from 1992

#61

Post by charlesism »

jonstewart wrote: post #19

I obsessively read I, Cringely when I was in college in the late 90s. It was the Stratechery of its time, and taught me an immense amount about the tech business.

I don't know that anyone is popular, yet respected enough, to be an equivalent today. I'd say Leo Laporte had a similar impact circa 2010. Maybe Kara Swisher? Maybe Marco Arment? Some Youtuber?

At any rate, none of those exactly fit the bill, because Cringely's two "Nerds" documentaries† hold a special place in popular tech reporting history.

† https://youtu.be/sX5g0kidk3Y † https://youtu.be/Pk2BWphDfvc

Re: Quotes from 1992

#62

Post by schwartzworld »

amelius wrote: post #22

> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not the way it happened. This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix, just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers connect to the cloud…

Humans and chickens share 65% of their DNA. Both have a lot of similar anatomical features: bones, brains, feet. And yet a human is not just a larger chicken.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#63

Post by pjc50 »

simonh wrote: post #2

>On big things failing to scale down: It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.

One key aspect of this was that on the "big iron", software was under the control of the administrator and generally trusted, while the users need to be protected from one another. On "small iron", there is one user, but the applications come from a variety of sources which may not be trustworthy, so the user needs sandboxing between the apps.

On interaction design: the iPhone may not have been quite the first consumer device with a capacitative touchscreen that worked brilliantly without a stylus, but it certainly felt like it was. Styluses were the bane of pre-iPhone touch devices and I'm surprised that Samsung tried to bring them back.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#64

Post by pjc50 »

jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

Not to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper, Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#65

Post by ryandrake »

apo wrote: post #58

One of the most interesting characters from the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" was Kildall. His company created CP/M, and depending on who's telling the story either lost the deal with IBM to create the operating system for the PC, or just didn't care about it. Here's the quote about him: Let's say for a minute that Eubanks was correct, and Gary Kildall didn't give a shit about the business. Who said that he had…

I'm convinced that, with few exceptions, to succeed in business requires you to destroy that part of your brain that understands the word "enough". What salary next year is enough? How many assets is enough? Business leaders will never say. How much profit this year is enough? Shareholders will never give you a figure--more is always better than less. These people might have goals, but they are meaningless because when they reach those goals, they don't stop. Unending accumulation is the only way. Anyone who does have a concept of "enough" gets out-competed by the ones who don't.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#66

Post by ChrisSD »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

Not to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper, Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.

Windows 95 also had Hover! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21

A while back they made an online version: http://www.hover.ie/

Re: Quotes from 1992

#67

Post by lowercased »

jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

Somehow donkey.bas always gets overlooked :)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#68

Post by grayed-down »

jhbadger wrote: post #53
purplezooey wrote: post #47

It's weird seeing 1992 associated with some kind of far off distant time.

I tend to think of the "modern world" as starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but now that I am beginning to work with adults with graduate degrees that weren't even born then, it's beginning to be a bit absurd.

Berlin wall? Imagine my distress at having tuned in to the modern world during the Watergate fiasco. My father had to explain to me that it was the name of a hotel and not some sort of earthworks.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#69

Post by usrusr »

simonh wrote: post #2

>On big things failing to scale down: It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.

Towards the very end of the 90ies, some introductory CS course had a nice diagram of how general architecture features like memory management, multitasking, networking, multi-CPU, multi-user OS, virtualization and maybe some others had slowly trickled down from research prototypes to mainframes to personal computers to handheld devices to embedded controllers. Everybody in the lecture hall was mentally continuing the lines and I remember prodding my neighbor, joking about when a successor of the Palm III he was using for taking notes would run a multi-user OS. Android, with its full-blown Linux kernel underneath, came just in time.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#70

Post by cubano »

Ahhh 1992....the year I discovered QNX and Mosaic.

This post brings back so many memories...Novell! the first damn network system that was ever worth a shit on a IBM PC-compatible. Installing that software finally put and end to the nightmare of "sneaker-netting" all my office PCs.

OS/2 failure! Who would have thought that shit-DOS would withstand the challenge of such a superior (see QNX!) and deep-pocketed competitor? What were we all smoking back then??

Jobs and NeXT!...man did I covet one of those ridiculous priced machines, but with no market penetration and my company focused on cheap compatible hardware, it made no sense to develop with it.

Linux!...see QNX!

I could go on and on...it's rather amazing...without me knowing it I've become my own history book.

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