Thread by @jhamby

Time to watch the second half of this fascinating 1997 "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs at WWDC about the future of tech and Apple. He had really good taste about technology when few did.

Fortunately, YouTube is letting me watch it in a window on my Android phone even though I didn't pay to unlock the multitasking feature.

Someone asked Jobs about putting people in charge of their PCs and not feeling like their PC is controlling them. Jobs said with his NeXT setup at home, he sometimes felt pressured to answer emails right away, which wasn't good for home life, but otherwise he didn't agree.

Then they mentioned something about some visual programming language called Prograph (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph), and whether Jobs thought it had any merit. Jobs said he thought the goal was making lines of code per developer more effective, and not expecting devs to write more.

And I should note that 22 years later, Apple Xcode, which is essentially a very refined version of NeXT's Interface Builder (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface…) is still the gold standard for visual UI design tools. Android Studio includes a buggy, flawed knockoff of IB.

The biggest flaw to me about Xcode is that they put Storyboards in XIB and Storyboard files that are hard to merge. But two Android devs working on the same layout XML file will have similar problems.

I had to help a coworker who's learning Android from an iOS background to add a new button to a screen. He asked me "what's ContraintLayout?" and I said it's the layout manager you're supposed to use now, and there's an Xcode-like editor for it, but I usually edit it directly.

So he tries to add the button with the GUI and then by hand and in the preview window all the icons got really big and neither of us could figure out from looking at the XML file what was wrong. So I went to my Mac, added the button by hand, and Slacked him the layout file.

Steve Jobs would be laughing at how bad Android dev is today compared to what he built at NeXT and sold to Apple for $400 million at the end of 1996. They got their money's worth and then some. cnet.com/news/apple-acq…

One benefit of being in my early 40's is that when something like #SwiftUI comes out, I can look at it and say "I remember when declarative UI programming was the new thing back when it was called Tcl/Tk". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(softw…

This video really confirms the description of the state of Apple in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs and other sources, and of Apple enthusiasts as being one of deep despair and confusion at how badly Apple had strayed from common sense and building a solid ecosystem.

At the time, I was an ex-Amiga fanatic and a fan of any OS I could get my hands on, from OS/2 to Windows NT to Linux to FreeBSD to buying a BeBox to run BeOS. I got an internship at Be in the second half of 1997 that set the entire trajectory of my career path. Merci, @gassee!

If not for Be, I wouldn't have met Baron Arnold, who later worked for Danger at the time I just happened to be looking for a job in the Bay Area in 2005, and the rest is history. Ah, memories.

47 minutes in, someone asks why Apple doesn't have kick-ass TV commercials. Jobs says Apple is still on the upswing and he thinks they shouldn't have TV ads at all this year. Instead, he thinks they should be spending money on print ads telling journalists that Apple's back.

This guy asks a question in a very accusatory way: "Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man…" (Jobs says "here it comes"), "it's sad and clear that on several accounts that you don't know what you're talking about. I'd like you to express in clear terms how Java, …

…in any incarnation expressed Java, and when you're finished, perhaps you can tell us what you yourself personally have been working on for the last seven years."

Jobs says, "uh… ya know, you can please some of the people some of the time, but… one of the hardest things when you're trying to effect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas. I'm sure that there are some things OpenDoc does, and probably more that…

…I'm not familiar with, that nothing else does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app, that demonstrates those things. The hardest part is how does that fit into a larger cohesive vision that's going to allow you to sell $8-$10 billion a year."

$8-$10 billion of product a year. "And one of the things I've always found is that you've gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made…

…that mistake probably more than anyone else in this room and I've got the scar tissue to prove it. We've got to start with the customers… I remember with the LaserWriter, we had" all of these technologies, but when he saw the first printout, he realized "we can sell this."

He apologized for OpenDoc being a casualty of this, but he says the team is burning the midnight oil and making hard decisions. "They're all getting calls to make three times as much working here, working there, the Valley's hot right now." He says mistakes will be made, but it…

…means that decisions are being made.

The last few questions are great. At ~60 minutes, someone asks about intelligent agents and "knowledge navigator" and Jobs says he thinks intelligent software agents are years away and it's best to focus on improving 5x with what we know can be done.

Someone asks about Newton and Jobs says, "you had to ask that", then says he knows he's in the minority view, so his opinion doesn't really matter (this was in 1997 when Jobs was still an "advisor" and Gil Amelio hadn't yet been ousted), but that juggling 3 stacks made no sense.

He said Apple was going to be juggling two software stacks with Mac OS and Rhapsody "which is a superset of Mac OS" and he didn't see how a third stack would fit into those plans. Then he complains about how the Newtons didn't have wireless connectivity or a keyboard.

For him "the high-order bit" (an expression he uses in several different places) to a portable device was connectivity, but also that you needed a keyboard until we perfect speech-to-text. And then he says "what would be really neat" and describes the iPhone. 10 years early. 🤯

He also is describing the Danger hiptop, which came out 5 years before the iPhone and offered everything but the touchscreen by the time the iPhone came out. We had an excellent copy-and-paste and MMS, and an app store, by 2005, when I was hired. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Hi…

In retrospect, I regret not stealing a copy of the Perforce source tree with all the Danger hiptop / Sidekick source code and utilities. That would have been a crime, so I didn't do it. I really wish an executive at Microsoft would authorize open sourcing the old Danger code.

They could put it up on GitHub no problem. I remember that part of the Microsoft acquisition included them having a third-party scan our entire tree for "undeclared open source" with GPL licenses, or anything we didn't own. The code is all clean to open source, AFAIK.

Then we could unlock all the Sidekicks to work with any SIM card and change the APN to connect to the regular Internet data connection instead of the special Sidekick APN that no longer exists. Right now they're only good for voice calls and SMS because of that.

Not to mention that open-sourcing the game "Bob's Journey" would delight a lot of people. It has a very cool and unusual game mechanic that worked well with the Sidekick's physical controls.

Newton OS was produced from 1993 to 1997, killed by Steve Jobs. It was written entirely in C++. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_OS

Many Newton apps were written in a prototype-based scripting language called NewtonScript, which was influenced by the Self language (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(pro…). The other language you've heard of that was inspired by Self is one you know: JavaScript. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewtonScr…

BeOS was written in C++: C++ compilers using vtables for virtual function lookups, suffered a bit from the "fragile binary interface problem", which you can work around by adding some padding to your public classes for future vtable additions. A bit hacky. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_b…

Any questions? 😃