I love computer history…
Great post about the early history of PC-DOS and MS-DOS. I remember those days well.
Archive for March, 2004
HyperCard is no more…
I remember HyperCard. Nobody could really describe it, but like anything new and powerful, somebody would do some app in HyperCard and change everybodys views and expectations on it. (For example, when ID did Wolf3d on the PC, nobody thought the PC could really do games since it didn’t have dedicated hardware like the Amiga).
HyperCard had it’s flaws. For example, on the new Macintosh II in the late 80’s, HyperCard didn’t work so well since it (and a few other apps by Apple), expected a black-white original Mac screen. They would draw a mess on the screen instead of nice graphics.
Still, a neat program and it shows how Apple innovates, and then drops the ball. Apple engineers clearly had a “Not Invented Here” bent after their success. They also tended to not follow through on products or respond to competition.
What if they followed through and improved HyperCard (or their development environments). Imagine if HyperCard started using TCP/IP back then…
Yep css…
Yes, I’m working on the CSS on this site. The style part is fairly easy to handle. The problem is layout. I need to figure out a nice layout and get both IE and FireFox to agree.
All of this is not that surprising, though. Layout has been an eternal problem with HTML/Web. The people who designed this stuff couldn’t get things right in this dept. I mean if graphics API’s were this way, people would have complained loudly. Example. When you define the width on a rect, it is not enough to just say width: 600; and assume that the width will be 600. You have to mentally include the margins as well as the padding. Crazy!
Oh well, at least the syntax is nice and easy.
One note..
A little late, but my sympathies really go out to those people in Spain. Such an enormous loss.
Hi There
First post. Amazing how long it has taken me to get here… not that anybody was waiting. Usually, I have this problem. Usually… I say, “Yeah, I’ll do that… just as soon as I have some time to throw some code together to do it right(ie. my way).” Internet eons (years) later. Here I am.
Ok, so… why even do this?
Well, that requires some history. When I was back at eGroups (1999/2000), I started noticing that these things called ‘blogs’ or ‘weblogs’ were starting to get attention. I also remember when RSS came out… one of the eGroups engineers made a script that could feed any eGroup as RSS. It’s 2004 and just now this stuff is starting to hit mainstream. Another connection was Jerry Michalski (sp?). He was on the advisory board at eGroups and I remember him encouraging the VP of Eng. at the time to go check out this company called Pyra (where Jerry was also on the board/investor). At the time, Pyra was still pushing their web based collaboration/project management app and just starting this site called Blogger.com. I think the bigger web app taught them that the small and simpler stuff was more effective. I watched the company grow, concentrate on Blogger.com, grow, run out of bandwidth, grow, beg for money/sell stickers, grow. All the while, I found myself enjoying the blogs out there more and more. I couldn’t exactly nail down why this new web site ’style ‘ was effective.
(Note, because of my interest in Smalltalk, I was also interested in Wiki’s back then as well, but that is another story…)
Still, why do this? Well, hindsight makes this obvious. Just like the web before commercialization, you could see that something might be there, but maybe it wasn’t there yet. As soon as you heard that FedEx let you track packages via a web site, you knew the web was going big. Now, the Blogs combined with RSS feeds show an obvious next step for news, information, and collaboration on the internet. Previously, people used web forums or email lists. Both were a bit challenging for people to set up and use. Blogs and RSS are much more simple and decentralized. This gets them around the problems with those earlier forms (ex. for email lists, spam is a huge problem). These new blog systems also tend to fit better with services like Google and the sites that monitor the blog entry cross-linking. Also, the interesting content is there in a big way, and it is only getting better.
Ok, so what does this mean?
It means that a little voice, if it can attract the attention, can now use a Blog as a microphone to the world.
It also means that a lot of little voices can now be recognized as one voice that isn’t one of the multiple-choice options (Ex. Republican/Democrat; Male/Female; White/Black/Other). A triumph for the ‘Other’.
It means that the big company journalism is no longer between all of us. A new path.
It means that we can now keep track of a lot of little news sources, rather than accepting what the big ones offer.
It means that that the granularity just got smaller and still manageable.
So, I want to contribute to this. I want to get a small voice out there as well.
It will be a fun experiment…
