
PDC 1996 Keynote with Bob Muglia and Steve Jobs [video] - DemiGuru
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs
======
omarhaneef
Without going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a
particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO
didn’t see the web, or mobile, or VoIP and other technologies rising.

But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one
— it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will
be.

Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I
think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big
time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how
things will turn out.

~~~
Roritharr
I find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is
rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous
quotes where basically details were misjudged.

I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when
talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the
capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely
different.

This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are
also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of
reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.

~~~
theferalrobot
As an aside and for my own curiosity, where do you think accounting software
is going in the future? (It isn't my industry but I hear occasional mentions
of it more frequently than I would expect)

~~~
Roritharr
Lot's of vertical integration & automation, with the depth depending on
business size.

There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses
accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way
towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do
the accounting.

I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for
example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger
payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory
hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in
most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring...

Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it
in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road.

I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic.

I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.

------
TooCreative
Displays with wrong aspect ratio for me. Which makes Steve Jobs look pretty
fat.

On YouTube, it has the correct aspect ratio:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek)

How do we find the car of the uploader?

Relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1187/](https://xkcd.com/1187/)

Some perspective on the presentation:

At 13:20 or so, Jobs says "Of course you need a compiler, because a scripting
language would be too slow for the server if it is used by a lot of users".
Little did he know ... PHP was out for about a year when this presentation was
given. Still lives today and powers most of the web.

~~~
cma
But Facebook compiles PHP into C++ or something right (I think now they have a
newer approach than c++)?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP)

~~~
lclarkmichalek
It's a JIT compiler nowadays:
[https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/](https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/)

~~~
saagarjha
HHVM now mainly only targets Hack these days.

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xmodem
WebObjects was very ahead of its time, but unfortunately crippled by its high
price tag

~~~
iamgopal
Almost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.

~~~
Austin_Conlon
The high prices crippled the cube and cylindrical shaped ones.

~~~
lostgame
The cylindrical shaped ones were just crippled, de facto, according to Apple's
own admission.

------
physicsguy
'Not really sure why anyone would wanna do that, but that's what you can do!'

Web technology in a nutshell...

~~~
alexis_fr
Interesting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week”
(3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the
permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone
would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet
Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a
connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say
that out loud.

Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the
production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at
that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.

~~~
solarkraft
> or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud

Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I
know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows
intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all
good things.

Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors',
because they want to show it as in a completely different class.

~~~
Austin_Conlon
This describes part of why I thought Steve Jobs interviews at the D conference
were so interesting. Nowadays interviews with Apple executives are them just
sticking to a PR script and pretending competitors don’t exist, except maybe
if it’s with Craig Federighi.

~~~
rbanffy
> except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.

He must be a decent stand-up comedian.

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reimertz
Very inspirational to see Jobs being so sure about what is the future of the
web. Dynamic Servers.. Server-side rendering.. Almost like Windows, but in the
browser....

At the same time, I feel sorry for him and his alikes; it most have been tough
to constantly work upstream, trying to inspire people that just don't get it.

------
jka
The segment from 18m10s onwards -- a demo of making a flight reservation via
an application built for OAG -- is pretty wonderful in a tech-nostalgic kind
of way. Simpler times!

------
pyreal
I was already using the beta of Microsoft Active Server Pages when this
presentation was given. ASP 1.0 was released in December 1996 and changed my
web development career.

~~~
tbyehl
Buried in this video[1] are a couple demo sites built on Internet Database
Connector (IDC/IDX). IDC launched with IIS 1.0 in NT 3.51 SP3, late '95 or
early '96\. Microsoft was iterating incredibly fast -- the famous "Internet
Memo" was mid-1995.

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keyno...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-
with-Todd-Warren)

~~~
pyreal
Thanks for this link! I was trying to remember the predecessor to ASP while
watching the Jobs video. I hoped that one of the others might have contained
an ASP demo, but never realized they would be still demoing IDC. I recall the
pace of change being incredibly fast, as you said.

I was experimenting with IDC for a client project at the time but quickly
switched to ASP as soon as the beta became available.

------
weinzierl
At the beginning Jobs introduces a few websites: NeXT, Microsoft, Intel. Then,
at 1:59 he mentions a fourth one but I can't understand what he says and there
are no subtitles. Could anyone understand what website he mentioned?

EDIT: I think it is Toy Story. I thought this was much later but apparently it
fits the time frame. Unfortunately Wayback Machine doesn't have: 302
redirecting to Disney:-(

------
dboreham
I remember not understanding that talk.

------
lr
Still my all-time favorite web framework. To date, I still find so many other
frameworks lacking the vision that brought about WO.

~~~
trixie_
Looks like it's still kicking

[https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder](https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder)

------
Austin_Conlon
He takes questions from developers at 25:00.

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watersb
I might have been at this one.

Object remoting via NeXT Smalltalk (Objective C) messages seemed so much
easier than CORBA or DCOM. Or Sun RPC. HP was a big supporter of the NeXT
approach.

It was a complicated time.

------
someonehere
Strange to see a Jobs keynote and you can see audience members getting up and
leaving, “like who the eff is this guy?” A couple years later that mentality
gets flipped on its head.

~~~
ralfd
There are other meteoric rises. Facebook is only 15 years old. I wonder if it
must feel surreal to Zuck.

Still, Steve Jobs has such a unique comeback story of being in 1996 head of
two interesting but commercially mostly failing companies, one of which is
shortly later being bought by an Apple skirting on going out of business and
riddled by intense technical debt. And only a decade later he presents the
iPhone and had Pixars stunning success.

------
blazespin
It's one thing to talk about it, it's another to build.

------
imglorp
When you could buy a car under $10,000.

~~~
coldtea
Do you know how much some enterprise software / specialized SDKs charged then
and even today?

Those are not uncommon prices...

You can get into the million territory easily...

~~~
gtirloni
I have no idea. Could you share some rough numbers?

~~~
pizzapill
SAP - Price for the base package of a couple million. Price of customization
can bankrupt international corporations.

~~~
enjoy-your-stay
>Price of customization can bankrupt international corporations.

Doesn't stop them trying though!

------
bluedino
Did WebObjects live on?

I wonder if Apple could have positioned Mac OS X server to run that sort of
thing

~~~
tootie
I was a dev when WebObjects was new and absolutely no one ever used it for
anything serious. CGI was already the default standard for web servers by 1996
and by 2000 there was a raft of commerical products from Microsoft and Java-
based systems that were adopted much more widely.

Instead of Stack Overflow, we had Matt's Script Archive

[https://www.scriptarchive.com/](https://www.scriptarchive.com/)

~~~
setpatchaddress
Dell’s online store would like to have a word.

~~~
andrekandre
not to mention the infrastructure behind itunes and the apple online store

(though i have met a few haters of wo here and there, i could never get a good
reason why)

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scotth
Bring back this JavaScript logo!
[https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum](https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum)

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theboywho
I find it amusing to think that today's equivalent would have been kind of
like if Mark Zuckerberg was introducing GraphQL.

~~~
Austin_Conlon
Zuckerberg seems similarly deflated in public appearances as Jobs was at the
time.

~~~
hossbeast
Deflated?

~~~
rbanffy
To be fair, AOC deflated him very thoroughly in their last encounter.

