101–110 of 131 posts
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom. But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
Yeah, Hypercard or MacPaint (really a demo for Quickdraw). Had he done only one of those two he would still rank as a genius.
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Idk 2003-2009 was very much the days of the sort of malware and spyware that showed developers in a company didn’t deserve rights anymore
I don't see what that has to do with Hypercard. If anything, Hypercard (or modern HTML) is living proof that you can create and share a secure software runtime with the world. If developers "didn't deserve rights" for what they did with that, then I don't see how we should let Apple off the hook for PRISM compliance and backdoored Push Notifications.
"In 1990, with John Sculley's blessing, I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator." Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should have been begging them to do it in-house.
Sometimes the smart think is to encourage folks to do their thing, and if it's successful buy it back in-house.
"In 1990, with John Sculley's blessing, I left Apple with Marc Porat and Andy Hertzfeld to co-found General Magic and help to invent the personal communicator." Sculley really wasn't the right person to lead Apple. He should have been begging them to do it in-house.
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It’s purely luck driving success. The book _thinking fast and slow_ illustrates it quite eloquently. Real geniuses are rare and even then they do not necessary become successful
Thinking Fast and Slow is in the center of Replication Crisis. Basically large parts of it were written based on research that later was found out to be fabricated.
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Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.
Yeah in London, I was sitting next to Tony Fadell. I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t know about this show. Thanks for the recommendation I’ll check it out. Is it based on a true story?
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom. But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
The word you are looking for is enshittification.
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Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.
I love h&cf but it’s important for people who are curious about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized AMC piece akin to mad men. It’s basically mad men but PCs lol. It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol
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It's very localised and Californian. There were really two big tech scenes - one around MIT and Mass, and one around CalTech/Stanford and adjacent areas - with some also-rans in other areas that were mostly gov mil/aerospace spinoffs. The Mass scene sort of fizzled in the 90s for various reasons - not dead, but not dominant - and the centre of gravity moved to the West Coast. So if you were born in CA and studied the…
FWIW CalTech is in southern California and far away (both geographically and socially) from Stanford. Its strengths also tend to be primarily in physics, rocketry, and astronomy, rather than in CS - its primary ties are with JPL and NASA. The Bay Area tech scene is anchored by Stanford and UC Berkeley, though most Stanford alums would probably say it's just Stanford.
Don't really buy Levy's thesis of the migration from east to west and Stallman as "the last hacker" hasn't aged well.
But Boston/Cambridge (really Massachusetts generally) did sort of empty out of a lot of tech for a time as minicomputer companies declined and Silicon Valley became the scene. I actually decided not to go that direction because, at the time in the nineties, it would have been a relative cost of living downgrade.
I'm always blown away by the vision behind stuff like HyperCard. It was all about giving non-techies the keys to the kingdom. But looking at today's tech landscape, with its walled gardens and app stores, I can't help but feel we've gone backwards.
What's worse, in context here, is Apple's distinguished primary role in bringing this about.
It's also designed to be usable and educational for kids.