Apple History At folklore.org 223
oaklybonn writes "Andy Hertzfeld seems to be the primary author on this fascinating site, which details many of his experiences in the Macintosh (Bicycle??) development efforts. It includes such choice commentary as: "we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.", on a page describing a game bundled with the original IBM PC." Reader themexican adds "As a plus, Hertzfeld notes in the faq that the python code running the well-designed and easy to navigate site will be made public in the near future."
Mac Anniversary (Score:4, Interesting)
Folklore (Score:2, Interesting)
Cool. This looks like a neat software setup for a website. I'll be interested in trying it out after it gets released.
Love Andy Hertzfeld (Score:1, Interesting)
The man is a Geek God. Turning a printer into a scanner? Sheer genius.
Re:Folklore (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Interpreted code and high volume traffic (Score:1, Interesting)
PHP would have puked its guts all over the place by now.
Re:Bicycle (Score:5, Interesting)
It was right about at that time that the number of bicycles in America once again outnumbered cars.
In 1980 in think there like 10,000 people in America who had ever heard of the Tour de France. In 1984 it was nearly as commonly known as the World Series.
Bicycle was actually a buzzword.
There is a species of albatros that lives entirely at sea for months at a time, generally soaring at little more than wave hight. It is so adapted to this enviroment and so efficeint in flight that it can sleep while so soaring.
Even though water is a dense medium animals that are adapted to it do not have to expend energy supporting their own weight. I've got the chart from MIT around here somewhere, but can't lay hands on it immediately, as I recall the dolphin and tuna and salmon topped the list for animal motion by its own power (a soaring bird may use little energy, but that's because it's not doing much of anything. Air and gravity are.) A Portugese Man-o-War simply floats with the tide, as a man in an innertube might. Torpor is very energy efficient.
So what animal is the most efficeint will change with your definition of "motion."
It is interesting to note, however, that not only is a man on a bicycle more energy efficient than a swimming dolphin, but he is more energy efficient than the same man riding a horse.
This is why the invention of the bicycle was such a stunning technological step that transformed society even before the advent of the motor car. The first smooth paved roads were made for the bicycle. The cars uspurped them.
KFG
iPods predicted in 1984? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? (Score:3, Interesting)
Making a UI easy enough for a first time user to just turn the machine on and instantly have things act like they would like them to, or expect them to has always been a feature that Windows never accomplished. I remember sitting and using a Mac for the first time when I was 6 (in 1990) and I didn't need any help from our teacher to use it (no comp at home till later). It just worked and acted like I thought it should. My first Windows experiece was Win3.1 in '94 and that peice of junk just stank. My comp at home by that point was using Mac OS 7.1 and functioned amazingly while this Win3.1 thing was barely useable.
As I grew up and PC's did too eventually Windows came to being a fairly useful OS, while it still seems to fail miserably with it's UI, it has gotten some things right. Apple has responded with the greatest UI I have ever experienced on any platform, Windows, *nix, Mac. OS 10.3 is just amazing, it's slick, user friendly, colorful (but not cheezy), and best of all IT WORKS!
The thing that Apple has done with it's UI is amazing, it has changed with the landscape of the computing world, and always been the forefront of what every other UI seems to want to become. Sadly for the average user (aka Windose drones) they won't get to see an interface this user friendly ever. Apple just keeps pushing forward the computing experience for people, and I am glad people are starting to finally take notice
Re:MS co-founder? (Score:5, Interesting)
DOS was not an MS product, they bought the code from a Seattle based company. As far as I know MS were in the compiler business before 1981, and I doubt Gates wrote a single line of DOS code, he definitively was not in any shape way or form the main architect/coder of DOS. And if you even had any remote idea about what you are saying, you'd know that the DOS that gates and CO. bought was a quick and dirty copy of CP/M-86.
Gates may be a good marketer and commercial thug, he is by no means a decent coder. And BTW next time try harder, pulling a never existing article from Byte out of your arse is just too boring.
Re:iPods predicted in 1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nostalgic (Score:4, Interesting)
At my university, they replaced them pretty quick with *REAL* mice. (Yes, I risk of sounding like a troll... but you know what I mean if you've ever used one of those mice)
But the Macintosh Classic brought back some fond memories of elementary school. I remember sitting in computer class, and the teacher would say, now double click on clarisworks, and then she'd lecture for about 5 minutes then let us use the program.... because clarisworks took that long to load.
Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, Apple invented the double click, which totally breaks the motif that Apple intended to create with the introduction of the mouse.
Secondly, by getting rid of the right mouse button, Apple introduced things such as "control click.. no, control, not option.. no, not alt.. control.. yeah" You will never convince me that control clicking, or click-and-hold (which doesn't even work outside of the finder) is an adequate replacement for a second mouse button.
Of course you can plug in a multibutton mouse into the mac and it works, this doesn't help people with laptops.
The lack of a right mouse button and a scrollwheel on mac laptops makes things very frustrating.. and we have to resort to installing things like SideTrack to do things with the touchpad that PC touchpads do by default.
In fact, Apple should just integrate SideTrack into the OS, or add a damn scrollwheel.
Don't forget other UI disasters Apple is responsible for like Home and End keys that never seem to do what you expect.
For example, in Safari, I expect that when I'm editing a text field, if I hit home, the cursor should move to the beginning of the field, not scroll to the top of the page. If I'm selecting emails in mail.app, hitting up and down selects the next and previous emails, but hitting home doesn't take me to the top of the email list, it scrolls the currently selected email.
Re:I'll play devil's advocate (Score:1, Interesting)
Ironic that that machine immediately made the Mac ancient history...
Re:iPods predicted in 1984? (Score:2, Interesting)
Speaking of Apple History... (Score:5, Interesting)
Very early MS history. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsft DOS came from Seattle Computer Products QDOS; MS licensed QDOS-86, told IBM they had an exclusive (a lie) and the rest was history.
QDOS was a bad clone of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, which was sold to Novell which was sold to Caldera, now SCO. Gary originally worked at Shugart and, lucky devil that he was, ended up with a very expensive 8" floppy drive. He decided to write a disk loader for it, hence "Disk Operating System" or "DOS". The rest of us loaded software from casette tapes using the BIOS; disk drives were very evry expensive.
Back in the day, Digital Reaserch sold Operating Systems and Microsoft sold languages. When DR decided to sell a langauge around '83 the rumor was MS retaliated by selling an OS. The motivation may be a myth, but it was a popular one back then.
Gates pubilshed some undocumented Z-80 instructions in, I think, Dr. Dobbs. It was the last usefull thing he ever did.
Mac information (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is true. The single menu bar does save space, and it is consistent (two bonuses in my book), but it does feel like it isn't part of the app. I think that most users forget the menu is even up there.
To many people, the toolbar has become the menubar.. originally the toolbar was a place to put the most common things from the menubar, but now it has become a place to jam everything. The menubar has become almost completely redundant.
It also violates HIG which says that UI elements shouldn't ever be context sensitive. i.e. a button shouldn't disappear and reappear based on what you are doing (it should grey out instead).
Re:I'll play devil's advocate (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you'll find that it was IBM's name that made it the platform of choice - IBM had a reputation for business computing, therefore the IBM PC was a serious computer. It took a long time for the PC architecture to become open, and this happened long after the PC was the platform of choice.
Re:Why is Apple's UI so much better than the rest? (Score:1, Interesting)
But by exactly the same argument it is a horrible mistake to have min/max buttons and scroll bars on each window. The scroll bars should be at the very right of the screen, and min/max buttons at the top of the screen.
Design is always about compromise. Jef did some great work, but again: don't forget that his original studies were done with the premise of a single-tasking system.
The 1 or 2 button mouse preference comes down to the same thing. No, he did NOT prove that a 1 button mouse "is better". What they did show is that under the presumption that it is more important for a novice (who is unlikely to ever control-click or command-click) to use the system than a power user, then it is better to have a one-button mouse. This lead to the compromise that many power users have to put up with a single button on their trackpads, or lug around an extra mouse with their laptop.
Jef has also published a lot of nonsense IMHO, like "red being a bad color for the close button since it attracts attention".
Re:I'll play devil's advocate (Score:2, Interesting)
The BIOS was propriatary and it was the clean room reverse engineering of such that allowed the true clone.
KFG
So What Ever Happened To Burrell Smith? (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple let their UI experts go? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I cannot figure out what motivated it. Changes could have easily been made without throwing the whole thing out.
Anyone know what happened politically at Apple that resulted in such a change in UI design (from design-for-ultra-usability to design-for-eye-candy)?
Moore's Law and the Mac (Score:2, Interesting)
As it happens, while advising a friend on how much memory to buy in 2004, I had just looked at how Apple's nominal RAM stacks up against Moore's Law. Pretty much confirmed, if you ask me:
Re:mod parent up, please. (Score:2, Interesting)
Another reason the bicycle ended the reign of the horse. And all that shit happens because an idle horse burns fuel and requires maintainence, a lot of it.
Bicycles don't run up $3000 dollar vet bills and then die anyway either.
KFG
Re:Apple let their UI experts go? (Score:3, Interesting)
A need to sell. Apple had been promising OS X for many many years (not always in that name) and had failed to deliver. There were lots of high expectations, and when writing a new OS like this, it's obvious your first version released is not going to be up to par. As such, they needed something pretty. Something that looked astheticaly pleaseing to offset the lack of comfort from a sub-par version. And so they generated OS X without a lot of the HIG and a lot of flare. And it worked. You'll notice that the flare has over the past revisions been toned down, and the usability has come back. In all, it was a trade off untill they could get some really well optimized code.