Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quotes from 1992

apenwarr.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 149 posts

Re: Quotes from 1992

#111

Post by sedachv »

bhouston wrote: post #14

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.

> Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate.

Quite the opposite: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht...

Cringely is a good writer and storyteller. The stories he tells are often hearsay or wildly inaccurate recounting of events by third parties. His writings should in no way be treated as being accurate, and should not be referenced as historical sources or anything like that.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#112

Post by EvanAnderson »

jdsully wrote: post #92
EvanAnderson wrote: post #42

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…

I don’t think it’s true he had limited ambition. His later turn to alcoholism which lead to his death in a bar fight was a direct result of losing to DOS. That’s not the reaction one has if they were content with their accomplishments.

I don't get the sense that the true details of the latter part of his life are publicly known, and perhaps aren't even documented. That makes me somewhat uncomfortable to speculate about it. It fits my view of his character and public persona that being known as "the guy who lost to DOS" (or "the guy who went flying and blew off IBM"), rather than the actual "loss" itself, would be the biggest source of discontent for him. (For too many people that's all of Kildall's legacy, and that makes me very sad.)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#113

Post by reaperducer »

Stratoscope wrote: post #90
bdickason wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great story - thanks for sharing :) In hindsight, do you think it was any different? (Microcomputer vs mainframe for the disassembled you were talking about building)

Thank you! I went into more detail in another comment in the thread, but going from one instruction set to another just felt like having more than one way to say the same thing. Every instruction was different, but the concepts and kinds of instructions were pretty much identical. Once you've seen an overflow flag and a carry flag and registers and bit shifts and memory load and store on one CPU, you'll certainly rec…

I guess Steve thought the CPUs really were different, like, say, the difference between a CPU and a GPU.

There's a lot of revisionist history on the internet about Steve Jobs not being technical, but he had an incredibly detailed understanding of the 68000 by the time the Macintosh project was launched. Perhaps your encounter encouraged him to delve into that area of study.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#114

Post by reaperducer »

cr0sh wrote: post #85
amelius wrote: post #34

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…

pretty much "IBM only" today - I don't know of any other actual mainframe computer manufacturer

Does Cray count?

Re: Quotes from 1992

#115

Post by msla »

justanother wrote: post #31
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…

What I took from this quote was that IBM and even DEC were shipping enormous devices that were engineered like digital tanks, with redundant data paths, redundant power supplies, somewhat hot-swappable component cards, and a guarantee of several nines worth of uptime, when combined with their first-party operating systems. Breakthrough home computers, by contrast, tended to emerge from "good enough to play games and…

> Breakthrough home computers, by contrast, tended to emerge from "good enough to play games and play with balancing your bank account," having a strong emphasis on arcade graphics, but not so much on reliability.

That was true after 1977, certainly, but going earlier, the S-100 bus computers which ran CP/M had text terminals (and front panels with lights and switches!) and were cheaper than any other kind of real computer, but were more in the mold of the small-scale business machines of the era, called minicomputers, than the Apple II or Commodore-64 were.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#116

Post by rbanffy »

simmons wrote: post #106
rbanffy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Desktop PCs of today evolved past the level of minis of the 90's, gaining many features minis never had, but, while minis are no more (our current servers that replaced them are overgrown versions of PCs and RISC workstations), mainframes didn't stand still and continued to evolve hardware and software features that reflect the demands of their segment: reliability, throughput, IO, security, and so on.

Their evolution is pretty cool. And their software is very alien to people who grew up on personal computers.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#117

Post by Godel_unicode »

Can_Not wrote: post #39
avian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how these days it's the inverse, isn't it? Everyone, including Microsoft with Windows 10, seems to be obsessed with making PCs into large hand-helds and phones as far as user interfaces are concerned.

I didn't use a windows computer in all of 2018 and 2019. MS's "let's make PC GUIs more like a 2006 flip phone" strategy and other random instabilities and anti-user designs have inverted the difficultly of switching to linux to now being difficult to stay on windows.

Windows 10 doesn't come with the tablet experience on by default, you have to put it into tablet mode to get that. That's been true for several years now.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#118

Post by jdsully »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #112
jdsully wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s true he had limited ambition. His later turn to alcoholism which lead to his death in a bar fight was a direct result of losing to DOS. That’s not the reaction one has if they were content with their accomplishments.

I don't get the sense that the true details of the latter part of his life are publicly known, and perhaps aren't even documented. That makes me somewhat uncomfortable to speculate about it. It fits my view of his character and public persona that being known as "the guy who lost to DOS" (or "the guy who went flying and blew off IBM"), rather than the actual "loss" itself, would be the biggest source of discontent fo…

I read a lot into the fact that the half released auto biography ends where the IBM PC is released. His family saying they censored it because it doesn’t reflect his true self.

FWIW I’ve researched this time period extensively and I think Gary was much kinder than Bill and a great guy. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say he wasn’t ambitious. And certainly inaccurate to say that he was content having had a good run and not winning.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#120

Post by JdeBP »

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.

... and Microsoft Tinker in Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. (-:
Post reply on HN