The Lost Apps of the 80s
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The Lost Apps of the 80s
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Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#2I see what the author is saying, but I also think the "low code" stuff is catching up. I've seen things people build in O365, Quickbase, Airtable, Knack, and so on that have the same level of functionality I remember seeing in Notes/Domino.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#3Quick hypothesis on PIMs/editors/etc, from someone who worked on a PIM in the late 1980s and who misses outliners and others- the biggest "unimagined" change is from personal information management to hive-mind information management (via search engines).
It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites. The second order effect is a change in demand for personal information authoring/management/etc.
A small number of tools, like Scrivener, that may have been competitive in the 1980s, have a market today. The idea of an isolated, focused, non-networked writing environment, surviving like the crocodile.
I don't have a hypothesis for the lack of innovation in the spreadsheet space. The incentives are certainly there. Literally billions/trillions of dollars of assets are subjected to all kinds of spreadsheet risk. Yet that workflow persists, and small and large businesses that attempt to tackle it rise and fall by the wayside.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#4Ben Evans has thought about this: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
I could quote at length but basically for most people there are now better ways of doing work than using word processors and spreadsheets.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#5I'm actually missing working OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). I used to like it in MS Works in the 90ies: I could insert an area from a Works spreadsheet into a Works document and have it auto-update (you could choose if it should link the data or copy it.)
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#6I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode.
D version:
https://github.com/DigitalMars/med
C version:
https://github.com/DigitalMars/me
The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language.
I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty interface.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#7Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about finding, archiving and curating those lost apps. Instead, it's just a complaint about how "it was better in the old days."
What gets me about this line of thought is that the technology didn't disappear. Anyone who wants to recreate "the lost apps of the 80s" just needs to grab a text editor and start coding.
Everyone has the power to create any app they like. Stop pointing the finger at other people asking why they don't do the work for you.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#8People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more options, how much less concentrated.
Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29. It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source.
It wasn't just word processors. Here is a different cover: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-05-17. It boasts tests of 43 different consumer-level database products. And magazine covers like these two weren't extraordinary.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#9I wonder if Ozzie considers Groove to be one of the products he expended energy on and failed. From my perspective it seemed to actually be succeeding as a deeply network-aware thick client for collaborative knowledge work when Microsoft acquired it and killed it off. Or if not outright killed it, then managed it to death by strapping it to the SharePoint boat anchor. I wouldn't count that as a failure per-se. It didn't succeed, but wasn't really given the chance to do so, which seemed to be what Microsoft wanted to get out of the transaction.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#10The desktop app scene is so different today with more and more apps moving to SaaS. In the 90s, they were so many interesting and well-made desktop apps that were full of interesting ideas. Lotus Improv was certainly one of them. ( A 1990 video demonstration can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4 )
Lotus Word Pro also took a refreshingly different UI approach to MS Word. Long before Microsoft introduced the Office 'ribbon', Lotus Word Pro essentially had the same idea with their floated tabbed property box. The low resolution of screens at the time meant the design of the property box was a bit cramped. But it was still much better designed and organised than the Office 'ribbon' that would come later. See the Lotus Word Pro example below: