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Quotes from 1992

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Re: Quotes from 1992

#101

Post by 0815test »

smacktoward wrote: post #93
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…

When he talks about "little computers," he's talking about the microcomputers of the '70s and '80s, like the IBM PC, Apple II and Macintosh, Commodore 64 and Amiga, etc. 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 malic…

> Those machines were completely different than the "big iron" of the day -- they were single-user, single-tasking systems with no meaningful memory protection

The PDP-7 and PDP-11 were also like that. (And yes, they were used for multi-user scenarios, but even an early micro could be so used, if you e.g. ran a BBS on it.) Memory protection and the like are important features to be sure, but they don't define a segment class. And the micros quickly gained these features anyway, with machines like the Motorola 68020 and the Intel i386. The early OS's like MS-DOS/Win 9x and Classic Mac OS didn't make use of them, but this was entirely due to performance concerns, combined with running a CPU-intensive GUI. The transition to a memory-protected, secure-by-default OS was entirely foreseeable, even aside from the sensible concerns about an "internetworked world".

Re: Quotes from 1992

#102

Post by JeremyReimer »

velcrovan wrote: post #56
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 read it too in highschool. I even found a Dover Art book containing a copy of that suited-frog spot art sketch he used and cribbed it for my blog. Wonder what old Cringely is up to these days

You can find out on his blog (cringely.com). The TL;DR is that he mostly does consulting for startups and writes his own columns on the tech industry at his own pace. A few years back he did a Kickstarter for a $100 Minecraft server with his teenage kids that failed. The blowback from the failure and his poor communication about it has at times taken over the blog comments.

For a while he did a series of columns exposing the decline and mismanagement at IBM; he eventually turned these into an ebook that I purchased and thought was a reasonably interesting read.

More recently he had cataract surgery and had to move to a new home after his old one was damaged in the California wildfires.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#103

Post by DonHopkins »

mcguire wrote: post #86

" A little-known partnership between IBM and Apple to try to make a new OS (Pink) that would finally beat DOS: " IBM has 33,000 programmers on its payroll but is so far from leading the software business (and knows it) that it is betting the company on the work of 100 Apple programmers wearing T-shirts in Mountain View, California. " Quote from a co-worker who spent a lot of time at Taligent: "They don't realize mice…

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

https://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true

(I worked for Kaleida!)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#104

Post by dwags »

ChrisSD wrote: post #66
pjc50 wrote: post #64

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.

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/

what about Fury 3?!

Re: Quotes from 1992

#105

Post by ken »

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.

Story I was told from someone who worked on the early-2000's "Tablet PC":

Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements, technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the benefit over a laptop, and it never took off.

Sounded to me like the classic "faster horse". It's not so much that they needed to make everything a PC, and more that they were such experts at enterprise sales that they didn't have confidence in their own new ideas.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#106

Post by simmons »

rbanffy wrote: post #6
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.

If we trace personal computers to their root origins, we'll see the LINC. The LINC was designed to be used by a single person. This was before time-sharing and interactive computing happened and, due to the differences in their use, the two kinds of computers diverged into what we saw in the 70's until today in every way - from the hardware to the software to the way they are used. OTOH, my laptop has more in common…

> OTOH, my laptop has more in common with a VAX running Unix than it has with a Commodore PET.

This was my thought upon reading the "Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts" quote, and it's also something I've been thinking about lately. Personal computers definitely represented a distinct development track from the multi-user/multitasking industrial/academic computing systems of the time. However, as PCs became more capable and merged key innovations from the higher-end computing branch (e.g. virtual memory, protected execution environments, and the operating systems that can leverage such features), we seem to have arrived at the same point -- a phone in my pocket that's more like a VAX 11/750 available in 1981 than an IBM PC from the same year. The "microcomputer" development track that included the Commodore PET and 8086-based PC systems was greatly useful for jumpstarting the PC industry, but was ultimately set aside.

So maybe it's not so much that small computers are completely different beasts than large computers, as their initial development required a unique approach to fit the constraints of that particular era.

As someone who has personally installed UNIX on a VAX 11/750, I do appreciate the attention to human factors that the microcomputer era has contributed to computing. :)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#107

Post by DonHopkins »

Stratoscope wrote: post #81
amelius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you are saying is that big computers and little computers were fundamentally the same?

Definitely the same, at the level Steve and I were talking about. The 6502 has instructions that manipulate registers and memory, logical and arithmetic operations, branches and calls, status flags, and so forth. Just like all the "mainframe" CPUs I'd been programming. The word size is different, the special areas of memory are different, it has different opcodes, and so on. But any competent machine language program…

Steve always had a problem with heavy big blue computers:

"Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN'T LIFT." -Macintosh

https://youtu.be/pptb1Uzn7SQ?t=3m04s

Re: Quotes from 1992

#108

Post by DonHopkins »

Stratoscope wrote: post #40
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…

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

You'd be a billionaire with a bullet in him.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#109

Post by msla »

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…

Unix wasn't a mainframe OS to begin with. It was a minicomputer OS which eventually scaled up to mainframes, but it was still born on minicomputers and retained a minicomputer design: Character terminals as opposed to block terminals, no channel I/O, and batch support sidelined as opposed to front and center.

VMS also wasn't a mainframe OS: It ran on the VAX, a high-end minicomputer.

Looking at what early microcomputers looked like and what their OSes were based off of (CP/M in particular) it would be more reasonable to say that early microcomputers were scaled-down minicomputers, which were still in a different league from mainframes in terms of number of concurrent users, I/O design, and focus on interactivity.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#110

Post by F_J_H »

gitgud wrote: post #37

It takes new ideas a long time to catch on - time that is mainly devoted to evolving the idea into something useful. This fact alone dumps most of the responsibility for early technical innovation in the laps of amateurs, who can afford to take the time. Only those who aren't trying to make money can afford to advance a technology that doesn't pay. This is how I feel about hacker news. People who have the time to adv…

Obligatory Feynman quote Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
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