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Tuesday, April 08, 2003 |
The secret history of VisiCalc. Bob Frankston, the lead programmer for VisiCalc and co-inventor of the computerized spreadsheet, has posted a long history of the project. It's fascinating reading, a kind of computer paleontology, describing the origin of commercial software products.
Before discussing keyboards, it's worth noting that back in 1979 people viewed the keyboard as an impediment to using computers. After all, only secretaries could type and the rest of us need to be able to talk to the computer. Hence the decades spent on trying to get computers to understand speech. It turns out that most people could type (at least those who used spreadsheets) since it was a basic skill necessary for getting through college. In fact, speech is a very problematic way to interact with a spreadsheet. In fact, the spreadsheet itself is used as a communications vehicle rather than speech.
The Apple ][ had a simple keyboard that only had upper case letters and only two arrow keys. There were no interrupts nor a clock. If the user typed a character before the keyboard input buffer was emptied it would be lost.
Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
This reminds me of how we precieved of PCs when we started MacroMind in 1983 (while still working for Bally-Midway.) At the time - only the C64 (Commodore 64) had built-in audio as a standard feature.
This was crucial to building videogames (which is what we all were doing before 1984 with stand up, video arcade machines) - but the C64 only had 64K of memory (hence it's name.) Our arcade machines had up to 512k of RAM and ROM at the time, and in fact our Professor Pac-Man game, (which was based upon a Z-80 processor) had TWO banks of 512k ROM - the MOST any game had - in 1982. And needless to say most of this RAM and ROM was taken up with either graphics or audio data. The logic was trivial (written in FORTH BTW.)
Then we heard about this computer called the Macintosh - which not only had TWICE the amount of RAM (128K) that 'high-end' PCs had at the time, but it also had built-in audio! Built-in graphics card was another plus, but the Mac was ONLY the personal computer - which could do spreadsheets, word processing, databases, etc. - that had sound (this stayed true for the rest of the decade.)
That was enough for us - to get us to develop for the Mac. We got a call from Guy Kawasaki - who heard we were game guys, and he asked us if we wanted to do games for the Mac. We said we wanted to do "creativity tools". He said cool and away we went.
Little did we know - about the Mac toolbox, GUIs, the fact that we didn't have to develop with the Lisa (we bought three of them mistakenly) and how insufficient a measily 128K of RAM was. But the whole thing started with our requirement of audio. MusicWorks was our first product - Oct. 1984.
Broadband's Third Wheel. Skepticism remains over power line connectivity [Broadbandreports] This story quotes an analyst stating that power line networking needs 30 percent share of the "broadband" market to be viable. I disagree. If intelligent consumers discover the vested interests crippling the "broadband" offerings of phone and cable companies (to excessively protect legacy voice and content distribution systems) then they could flock to power line networks, where no such vested interests exist, providing power utilities don't start merging with telcos or cable companies (now there's a disturbing idea).
[Scott Mace's Radio Weblog]
I agree with Scott. This consolidation, bottom fishing trend will continue. Warren Buffet is writing a new chapter is the remaking of telcos. Energy companies WILL merge with telcos - as it's all about establishing billing relationships with customers. Not only will digital services drive this trend, but content and hardware will also be part of the play - as well. When Michael Eisner is ready to bail out of Disney, he'll dump the stock and merge with SBC or PG&E.
Just like Cendant merged hotels, rental car companies and insurance - there's no reason to say that telephone, internet access and power won't all be offered by the same company.
Family ties spur USA Interactive change. With online dating service Match.com to travel agent Expedia and a home shopping site as siblings, the company's CEO says an all-encompassing name change is in order. [CNET News.com - Entertainment & Media]
 The on-going USA Interactive jugernaut continues. I consider Barry Diller's empire to be the leading example of how to do dot com correctly. Each unit is profitable, each a well-known brand (though I hate Expedia's policies) - I met my wife via Match.com. I buy tickets through Ticketmaster and hope to work with these guys - one day.
Their convergence strategy is so right-on, I just wish AOL, Yahoo and MSN would pay more attention. Less hype, more real value. And now Barry's got a a coupon play happening. Man oh man, this guy is all about execution.
My comments on the Schwartz piece, with a place for other people to comment. [Scripting News]
Dave's got a great reply to this article - which I highly recommend everyone read.....
Jonathan Schwartz: Open source versus open standards
This is an important piece, written by a vice-president at Sun Microsystems. While I don't support much of what Sun does in software, I do support what Mr Schwartz says in this piece. Having source, does give the users a little power, but not nearly as much as having the ability to switch, and that's what open formats enable. 
Schwartz talks about standards not formats, and that's where he and I part. The standards processes enormously favor large companies, because they have the resources to send people to meetings around the globe, and the patience to wait the years it takes for them to get baked, and they don't really care about what Schwartz writes so passionately about -- user choice. In fact, they prefer if they can lock users in and still conform to the standards. That's why the standards tend to get so convoluted, to allow lock-in while providing the appearance of conformance.
That's why I've invented formats independently of the standards organizations, and then evangelized them to people and organizations I want to compete with. It's worked really well, much to the chagrin of big companies, like Sun. 
Nonetheless, much of what he says here is right on the money.
My comment I left on Dave's Harvard blog.....
Right on brother.
It's that gentle balance between open-ness and entrepreneurial chutzpah that sets you apart from "the rest of them". Not only do you passionately fight for your beliefs, but you put your efforts where your virtual mouth is - in working code.
Thank you for RSS, XML-RPC, OPML and Frontier.
Matrix: Reloaded's awesome CGI. Steve Silberman -- far and away my favorite Wired feature-writer these days -- wrote a terrific piece on the CG developments made by the production crew on The Matrix: Reloaded.
 If the dojo fight in The Matrix was a kung fu sonata, the Burly Brawl is a symphony. Neo tears the sign from the ground and wields it as a kendo sword, vaulting pole, and battering ram. A woman walking by can't believe what she's seeing; suddenly her body is hijacked, she drops her grocery bag, and another Smith charges into the fray. Whole battalions of Smiths arrive, mount assaults, attack in waves, scatter, regroup, and head back for more. (At ESC, one massive pile-on was dubbed the "Did someone drop a quarter?" shot.) In the thick of it, Neo is dancing, chucking black-tied bodies skyward, pivoting around the signpost, and using shoulders as stepping-stones over the raging river of whup-ass.
Fans will wear out their remotes replaying the scene on DVD, but what they won't see, even riding the Pause button, is a transition that happens early on. When Neo and Agent Smith walk into the courtyard, they are the real Reeves and Weaving. But by the time the melee is in full effect, everyone and everything on the screen is computer-generated - including the perspective of the camera itself, steering at 2,000 miles per hour and screaming through arcs that would tear any physical camera apart.
Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
Oh man - how do you say: "I can't wait" in Japanese? :-) Another post to our theMatrix TopicExchange channel!
W3C advances Semantic Web drafts. Aiming to rehabilitate both the technology and the image of its Semantic Web initiative, the standards group issues a number of updates and promises an education campaign. [CNET News.com - Entertainment & Media]
I'm sorry - I couldn't resist the obvious connection between OWL and the so-called "efforts" at making the Semantic Web more understandable. This also ties into the debate Dave was having with this guy - Danny - on Joi's RSS post comments (which has hit 50 comments BTW.)
Read this stuff - and tell me if you understand cardinalities, taxonomies, ontologies or anything else these people are talking about? They even have a "usage" section and talk about furniture categorization and wine - which I guess is their way of acknowledging that humans use computers.
I'd sure like to see them come off their Ivory Towers and help us standardize Reviews, Conversations, Media, Topics or People.
MPlayer 0.90 released; MPlayer Maintainer Leaves [Slashdot]
Congratulations to the MPlayer team for a stable build. Linux folks can now enjoy stable media playback - in almost every format there is. I've been monitoring the progress of this project - for years - as it represents a great cross-view of the life of open source projects done "the Freshmeat/Sourceforge" way.
Started in Hungary, it has evolved as a leading app/toolkit in the "Slashdot" world. But now the leading maintainer of the project - is calling it quits. Now what happens?
  
  
 Tivo opened up a developer page. Hmm, yet more distractions.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
I've been waiting for this for a while now - and it's finally arrived. Support for the TiVO Series 2 networking capabilities. Customers will be able to connect their TiVO's together, connect it to the WWW (but not flow recorded programs out of the home!) and listen to music and look at photos - coming off of their PCs.
OK - so it says here how to get your media into your TiVO and that you can bake this capability into your own app - and there's the usual creative assets, style guide and license limitations - but where does it say - that if I have a commercial service - (say I wanna charge for flowing content or services down onto a TiVO) - do they expect a piece of the action?
 This is key. Now that RePlay has gone bankrupt, TiVO is the only existing independent PVR manufacturer left. I know there are others coming, but if they continue the limitations they've instigated on sharing recorded programming, then they're really shooting themselves (and US) in the foot.
The style guidelines all make sense, so you complain there.
It's GREAT that they have these capabilties now - and that they supporting such open standards as MP3, .jpg. .png., .gif, etc. - but they need to make clear if there are any other gotchas.
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