We are three friends with a shared love of reading and researching various topics that may seem boring, but have fascinating stories.
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Obscure. :) It (the 'regular' EIAS) had a place in our production pipeline from roughly 1991-1999. Wrote lots of custom plugins and shaders for that one. Retired it step by step after Maya took the professional VFX market by storm in early '98. Still, the renderer delivered excellent quality while being blazingly-fast. edit: Back in the day Form·Z was one of the recommended 'companions' to EIAS for modelling. I think it is still on the market.
I was a developer (called an Analyst/Programmer at the time), starting in 1990. I was a Clipper Programmer working for a large bank and we had 386SX IBM PCs with small LANs that held the database, of which there were many at the time, I think we used Sybase. We didn't need NEXT machines to get the job done. Yeah they were very pretty, but too expensive, and we got the job done with DOS machines. NEXT is a classic case of what's called "Gold-Plating" in Project Management - overengineering a product in a very expensive way.
16:45 I was informed sometime around 1992 that it was pretty much a requirement in the computer science department at Virginia Polytechnic that incoming students purchase a NeXT computer.
15:10 Famously, it is not a perfect cube as Jobs desired. It turns out that it is nearly impossible to extract a perfect cube from an industrial mold. That's why ice cubes are NOT perfect cubes; but rather, have a more trapezoid like shape. This is just an example of the kind of ignorant arguments that Jobs would engage in with his subordinates that were pointless and wasted time / resources / money. Sometimes these episodes may have resulted in the team he flogged achieving their best; at others, it just exhausted an otherwise excellent team who could have been very productive pursuing some more reasonable / achievable goal.
24:25 Now that's an accurate statement about Steve Jobs (I would think). His obsession with the aesthetics of product design (because, after all, you can only grossly overcharge your customers for products if they are neatly packaged and presented) was incessant. Forcing those you lead to pursue unobtainable goals and capitulating only when they have exhausted themselves in such pursuits ... he excelled at that. I would liken him to having been a bit like a coachman driving his team of horses to exhaustion across the plains and discarding the team for a new one after he has lamed them.
I can tell you exactly what would have happened if Steve Jobs had been in charge of the Amiga Team. It would have cost 5 - 10 times the price that Commodore charged for them. LOL. It would have been packaged in a rather elaborate and elegant box (for which Apple would have charged an exorbitant price for the privilege of opening).
It isn't really a fair comparison to compare OS/2 to NeXTStep. OS/2 was a new operating system (from the ground up) built to take advantage of all of the protected mode features of the Intel 80386 microprocessor. I believe that it is "to date" the only operating system that ever fully exploited all the levels of the 386 hardware based call gate protection ring mechanism for segregating parts of an operating system. NeXTStep ran on top of a BSD 4.3 Unix kernel which NeXT essentially got for free. So, there wasn't really a great deal of work done to innovate in terms of operating systems at NeXT. The innovation was in the adoption of an object-oriented development environment and the creation of a class library to facilitate GUI-based application development (i.e. the NeXTStep class library of objects). However, Objective-C is a horrible kludge (although I find it very interesting). It borrowed heavily from SmallTalk in terms of its philosophy of programs being composed of objects that communicated with each other via message passing.
Jobs didn't really upend any industries. The person who designed and built the first Apple computer was Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs merely seized upon his passion for tinkering and to have his own microcomputer (what we called home computers / PCs in the 1970s) and capitalized on his friend's passion. Neither did jobs create the first GUI-based computing system. That was the folks Xerox' Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) who created the "Alto." Again, Jobs merely capitalized on their work. Finally, Jobs didn't revolutionize the music/recording industry. What really revolutionized the music/recording industry was the advent of the MPEG Level 3 (MP3) algorithms for storing and playing back audio recordings in conjunction with peer-to-peer protocols for file sharing a few years after the spread of dial-up Internet service became ubiquitous in the Western World with such applications as Napster, Limewire, etc. Jobs merely recognized that he could create his own such service along with an MP3 player (the iPod) and become the broker between the public (who was otherwise stealing commercial music recordings via Napster, Limewire, etc.) and the music/recording industry. Was Jobs able to recognize a good thing, see how to repackage it for commercial sale so that it would appeal to the masses to whom he could grossly overcharge for such products and services to generate fantastic profits by creating appealing branding / packaging? Yeah! But, so was every snake oil salesman during the late 19th / early 20th Century. If anyone can show me one thing that Jobs created personally, by himself (even while working at Atari), that was revolutionary ... I will happily eat proverbial crow.
I am SO GLAD I found this video! I'm beginning to learn more about Excel now. After learning about how PivotTables analyze data, how important spreadsheet files are for analytics (especially .csv files), and how many plans Microsoft has for Excel (A F*** TON), I wanted to know if the pioneers of spreadsheets already knew about it's potential. (Especially knowing that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were among those heavily involved in the commercialization of spreadsheets, I am pretty sure they know a lot!) Will be back to update on what I learned here, but I am looking forward to it!
I have just posted the provisional final draft of the script for part 2, check it out on our free Substack anotherboringtopic.substack.com/p/steve-jobs-and-the-rise-and-fall
4:27 "intelligent recalc" is still a thing on Excel in 2024 on a current i9 with plenty of cores, just because there are real excel sheets with multiple iterated pivot tables and SUMIFs, with 100k+ lines and dozens of columns.. resulting to "update all" to take minutes. that might sound silly, but it's how it's used by many.
Unbelievable to amount of research you did for this and your ability to present the information in a coherent interesting manner. This is awesome. Clearly a labour of love.
Hmmmm Sorry? what? the vast amount of original IBM PCs with 8088 processors? really? hmmm Ok Let's see the Mac ran on a Motorola 6800 but PCs yaaaaaaaa Na! they ran on 8086 Intel processors (then 286...386 and 486 the Pentium) you robot repeating stuff mindlessly and especially fucking up your notes between the Mac and the PC ... fucking up that too in the process (lol)(look up time 8:45 in the clip on the whiteboard behind Gates),,, the Macintosh by the way didn't sell poorly neither ... in 1984 it was actually a revolution in personal computing (I was there) .. a nuclear bomb that took 20% of the personal computer market by storm ... the original Windows 95 (the first seriously real version of Windows) is a cheap copy of the Mac system.. a poor's man copy made by Microsoft (as the cut-copy-paste keyboard functions exactly the same as the original Macintosh in 1984 fully demonstrates but only in 1995... 10 years later... otherwise furthermore why would the numbers 6800 and 8086 do on that whiteboard next to each other when talking about Windows Manager viewed at time 8:45 in this clip?,,, hmm yeah! exactly right... I rest my case... defense rests your Honor... lmao)... had Steve Jobs decided to port it to the PC (which he didn't...his greatest mistake in my humble opinion) you would run MacOS and not Windows right now today on your PC (fucking millennials who pretend to know shit about something or anything just because they happen to have an Internet connection and the RU-vid web address) ...Lmao... just (btw)... millennial... like anybody else... everybody has Internet... baby (lol) ,,, yeah! hmmm! I mean everybody ,,, (lol) just wake the f* up (and shit)... every day is a day of school every day... baby (Lmao)
When I was a kid, we had a weird kinda data entry part of our "ICT" classes, and the program was made with FileMaker Pro 4 I think. It was annoying and easy, so I spent my time in the class learning how databases work using FileMaker, and made my own rather than do the data entry. So, thanks FileMaker, for giving me an intro into databases when I was a kid.
This is fascinating. Thank you for preserving this history in our collective memory. It's so easy to forget how products get started and why they succeed. Especially when the real history gets replaced by fake history coming either from advertising materials or from sensationalized films.
Would someone explain to me just why YT content providers add "music" racket such as in this video, to their videos? It does nothing but distraction and irritation? This must be clear to the providers, yet they do it anyway. Why?? Why o why??
The problem with NeXT was the 030 and 040 Motorola chip(s). They couldn't do CAD. If they could, it would have been right there with Sun, HP, and Silicon Graphics and would have likely saved the company. CAD was just starting to come into it's own and still required more computing power then Windows could handle. Of course Windows NT did away with all of the above names, but it would have given NeXT another 10+ years. Looking back it's clear that Steve was just writing the next version of the Mac OS. He used all of us employees to further his personal agenda, and it worked. For him.
What Steve couldn't comprehend was, that Walmart was the reason PCs ever existed. He couldn't get past stooping so low to sell via Walmart which is why Steve didn't matter. That was Steve's mental problem.
Fiesta Bowl was never in Austin Texas. No bowl game has ever been played at the University of Texas. Tempe Arizona is another story. Austin...Arizona. I understand the confusion. hah
I'm about half way through and it's interesting, but the "perifrial" pronunciation is starting to make it hard to watch and I may have to give up. Per-iph-er-al.
Windows was superior. I used OS/2 back in those days and it was shit. Don't lie. Windows was way better. Maybe you hate Microsoft, as other stupids do, but the fact is that Windows was better. Not the best, but better.
