I learned to stop worrying and love Hypercard (1990)
rileystew.art
rileystew.art
- the human-interface purists were trying to get the CDE nailed down
- Apple sued Microsoft for Windows design "look and feel", and so
- Xerox sued Apple for the Lisa, a Smalltalk/Star re-implementation
- NeXT pushed it all further, beautifully, but stalled out of cash, and so
- Apple/IBM hired people to bring object API and UI purity back with Taligent, while
- Apple/?? had teams breaking all the GUI rules at Kaleida because multimedia is so hot right now, while
- across the street, Silicon Graphics took over Hollywood (sure, kid. It's a Unix system. You know this.)
- BeOS did all the above very low latency, almost affordable hardware, arguably a better PowerPC Mac
... and so on. X/Open and the Common Desktop Environment specs let workstation vendors deliver their various hardware platforms, while convincing [citation needed] programmers that targeting the CDE was a worthwhile investment, a stable path to the future.
By that point, it was clear [to whom?] that none of the above mattered, because the Windows/PC platform was good enough for the mass market, and was flexible enough to accommodate applications that only months ago had required those expensive workstations. Configuring a PC to target the workstation app still brought price up to parity with high-end kit, but next year it would cost significantly less. (Except RAM. Industry supply couldn't meet demand. That cost was almost offset by a step change in hard-disk capacity per dollar, though, nearly at the same time.)
Steve Jobs didn't have more millions to pump into NeXT because he had just spent it all on Pixar.
That was all in March. A few weeks later, we all started hearing about this web browser thing. The Rolling Stones did this gig, some corporate party in Seattle.
Yeah so that's how we mis-spent our summer vacation in 1995.
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actually, from about 1988 to 1997, but seriously it all happened at the same time. Not to mention the hand-held PDA things, which re-lived that whole experience, from the simple purity of PalmOS to the Taligent-esque cutting-edge purity of Magic Cap, only to get obliterated by Java