I'd still be writing SMB apps in Approach if I could
The Lost Apps of the 80s
81–90 of 123 posts
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#82> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…
> One could say video, but live TV existed before. Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel? TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope. It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases…
OTOH, talking on a screen is not really a novel invention. OTOH, while Tiktok,instagram etc make it easier for someone to begin a TV career (because that's what it is, we just use different words), and remove the middlemen, it's not really turned "everyone to a broadcaster", only a few manage to become popular and dominate the market. As video apps become more mainstream, fewer and fewer people will test the waters in it, as the dominant influencers keep raising the barrier to entry. Same thing happened with blogs which bifurcated (good writers became "blogojournalists", bad writers ended in the gutter of facebook). So yes, we have a "new TV", but that's not fundamentally different than ... TV . Same could go for podcasts, a rehash of radio / talk shows.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#83> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…
> One could say video, but live TV existed before. Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel? TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope. It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases…
That is still just improvement on what's already available. Next level will be obvious when it is available. It could be VR or AR or something so radical we can't imagine it but it has to be like computer to typewriter improvement. It does everything old technology did but it also opens the door to a whole new level of development.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#84I just want to point out that you are free today, as you have always been, to use the text editor of your choice - and then paste the text into whatever app requires some text. If I'm typing, it's in Emacs. That includes this HN post.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#85People 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…
Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special from HP/Epson or Canon.
Exactly. I was recently considering a purchase of an ink jet printer for a specific purpose that requires very high black ink resolution. (I already have a laser printer, but its real resolution is 1200dpi). It was next to impossible to find the real black ink specs of few cheap printers available. Numbers like 5000dpi are being thrown around, but it is impossible to find out what they actually mean before you buy and test the product by yourself.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
How "cloned" do you want? as far as I know Quantrix Modeler https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/ started as a clone and has continued on with the same idea, though by now I assume it's accreted enough bells and whistles to be just barely recognizable. ETA: also it's 2.5 grand a seat so...
Aha! Yeah, that's the Java GUI client I mentioned. But yes, $2500 a seat is a bit more than I would like to pay for my use case. :) (I'm not saying it's Not Worth That, but I definitely would not get back my investment for what I use spreadsheets for.)
> $2500 a seat is a bit more than I would like to pay for my use case.
This is big part of why the application market place consolidated and dried up. I peeked at the PC mag word processor roundup that was posted in this thread, and one thing that struck my eye was that Word and WP cost like $450-$495 in 80s dollars, which is about $1000 in todays dollars. Its pretty hard to imagine anyone paying $1k for a word processor alone these days. And in that scale $2.5k for a spreadsheet doesn't seem all that preposterous. Also if the high-end software cost that much, it would leave more room in the lower end for smaller software to compete.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#87Isn't Notion pretty close to what's being described here? Sort of weird combination of networked spreadsheet, relational database, writing + notetaking app? There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too. Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.
Notion wanted to be this I think. But it knows really few for a spreadsheet, it isn't enough flexible for a database, it is not really set up for writing (because of the blocks, at least for me...) and it is slow for note taking. Also they still do not have offline working and you cannot back up properly.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#88People 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…
Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special from HP/Epson or Canon.
At that time journalists couldnt just throw together three paragraphs and throw them in an eyeball pit in the hope they might trap someone with a clickbait title.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
A surprising remark! The usability of Lotus Notes was so bad that it earned itself an entire section on a site called the User Interface Hall of Shame.
A proper and well-deserved honor. For some perspective, this was an app developed by 5 core devs that grew to ~125M+ users who by necessity were split across implementations concurrently released for Windows 3/95, NT, OS/2, Mac, Motif, OpenLook, because we were an early enterprise product and needed GTM help offered by each of those platform vendors. Our tiny dev team chose to prioritize platform breadth thru a "port…
Thanks for the perspective! It's always good to get a look at what the situation looked like to the people who were there at the time. And yes, I can certainly understand that you had to get a product to market within the applicable constraints.
Re: The Lost Apps of the 80s
#90> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there. That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying sli…
> One could say video, but live TV existed before. Okay but, could anyone broadcast on TV? Could anyone have their own TV channel? TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch... preceded by JustinTV, Vine, Periscope. It's a different ballgame. There's whole new revenue streams, individual content creators are collectively making a ton of money . Consumers are directly (or nearly directly) compensating creators in many cases…
A lot of people did streaming on ShoutCast.