91–100 of 149 posts
Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate. That is why his writing stands the test of time because he saw things accurately and wasn't just a hype pedeler or mindless trend follower. I feel he doesn't get enough credit for that.
(1996 documentary by Cringely. Excellently presented) There's a part 2 too.
I enjoy the quote referencing Gary Kildall: Gary Kildall's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a factor in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you are still expected to want more, but he didn't. I would very much liked to have known Gary Kildall. Everything I've read about him gives me the impression he'd be an immensely interesting person to know. The persona that…
> 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…
And he wasn't wrong. Those machines were completely different than the "big iron" of the day -- they were single-user, single-tasking systems with no meaningful memory protection or other features to protect the system against poorly written or malicious applications. Microcomputers were supposed to be personal computers, with "personal" in this context meaning that the operator had complete control over 100% of the system's resources, up to and including the ability to shoot themselves in the foot. The big iron world was all about multi-user paradigms like time-sharing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing), so the micro mindset was definitely a radical departure.
The irony, of course, is that the micros ended up eating the world, and then the Internet came along and completely demolished their entire philosophy. It turned out that there's no way to connect a single-user, single-tasking computer to a global public network without it running into fundamental performance and security problems. The two microcomputer OS vendors left standing by the 1990s, Microsoft and Apple, both ended up having to throw out their old systems and spend enormous amounts of time and money building new ones (Windows NT and OS X) that could actually be used practically in the new internetworked world. And, not coincidentally, those new systems looked a lot more like the systems that ran on the old big iron than they looked like the systems that had made the microcomputer revolution. The only way for the "little computers" to survive was to become the "big computers" they had so loudly put up against the wall.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=... Pinball game was licensed, not developed by Microsoft AFAIK
This guy sounds pretty ungrateful. He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to Archive.org's "virtual library card" service. This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you, scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time. Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do is moan about how "aggressively user-h…
Having UI feedback doesn't mean you don't appreciate what was done well. If the reply to a bug report is "but look at all I've done for you!" you're not going to fix many bugs and no one improves. (I have definitely been there, though.)
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.
This was how Microsoft taught people to do things like double-click, click-and-drag, and a number of other things that we take for granted today but were completely foreign back then.
This guy sounds pretty ungrateful. He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to Archive.org's "virtual library card" service. This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you, scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time. Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do is moan about how "aggressively user-h…
On those rare occasions I want a an e-book these days, I go to iBooks or Nook because the library programs (including Bibliowhatsits) are so bad.
Mostly I just buy the physical book, or order a physical copy from the library. It might take a few weeks to get from the other side of the country, but that's less hassle than dealing with the current state of library lending DRM.
... has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? That Adobe DRM is the industry state-of-the-art.
has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? To be fair I don't know anybody who has either. I know it's possible and I know my local library offers this, but I've never met anybody who's actually used this service.
Going to libgen is a much better experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minicomputers are just smaller and cheaper versions of their mainframe counterparts. It's only a small step in evolution, and not an important distinction in this context (imho).
From what I understand, the greatest difference between mainframes and minicomputers (and later, microcomputers), is that mainframes were batch-oriented machines, while minicomputers were interactive-oriented. Mainframes (pretty much "IBM only" today - I don't know of any other actual mainframe computer manufacturer; to be honest, I am not even sure if IBM is still making mainframes? Ok - just looked, I guess they do…
Actually, a lot of early interactive computing was done on time-shared mainframes. I learned to program in 1968 when I saw a Teletype machine in our high school math classroom and found out it could dial into a timesharing system where you could write and run programs interactively.
At first we were dialing into a General Electric mainframe, and partway through the year switched to an SDS Sigma 5 at a local Phoenix timesharing company, Transdata. I got my first job there that summer.
The next year I moved to the Bay Area and started working at Tymshare, where we used a variety of mainframes to provide interactive services, along with some minicomputers for network routing. It was the biggest timesharing company of the day, and there were many others.
Timesharing was a big business from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Of course there were many mainframes doing batch processing too, but interactive computing certainly wasn't exclusive to minicomputers or microcomputers.
In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters ( https://amzn.to/2EJjvHG )
is pretty good, although he gets some things pretty wrong himself, like the rise of open source.