
Quotes from 1992 - panic
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190207
======
EvanAnderson
I enjoy the quote referencing Gary Kildall:

 _Gary Kildall 's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a
factor in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you
are still expected to want more, but he didn't._

I would very much liked to have known Gary Kildall. Everything I've read about
him gives me the impression he'd be an immensely interesting person to know.
The persona that comes across in his co-hosting of the Computer Chronicles
show (something, to itself, that you should look up if you're not familiar) is
one of great technical competence combined with a gentle humbleness.

(Edit: If you're into learning more about Kildall there's a good prior
discussion of an unpublished biography on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12220091))

~~~
jdsully
I don’t think it’s true he had limited ambition. His later turn to alcoholism
which lead to his death in a bar fight was a direct result of losing to DOS.
That’s not the reaction one has if they were content with their
accomplishments.

~~~
EvanAnderson
I don't get the sense that the true details of the latter part of his life are
publicly known, and perhaps aren't even documented. That makes me somewhat
uncomfortable to speculate about it. It fits my view of his character and
public persona that being known as "the guy who lost to DOS" (or "the guy who
went flying and blew off IBM"), rather than the actual "loss" itself, would be
the biggest source of discontent for him. (For too many people that's all of
Kildall's legacy, and that makes me very sad.)

~~~
jdsully
I read a lot into the fact that the half released auto biography ends where
the IBM PC is released. His family saying they censored it because it doesn’t
reflect his true self.

FWIW I’ve researched this time period extensively and I think Gary was much
kinder than Bill and a great guy. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say he
wasn’t ambitious. And certainly inaccurate to say that he was content having
had a good run and not winning.

------
gitgud
_It takes new ideas a long time to catch on - time that is mainly devoted to
evolving the idea into something useful. This fact alone dumps most of the
responsibility for early technical innovation in the laps of amateurs, who can
afford to take the time. Only those who aren 't trying to make money can
afford to advance a technology that doesn't pay._

This is how I feel about hacker news. People who have the time to advance
technology. And I'm grateful to witness so much of it here.

~~~
F_J_H
Obligatory Feynman quote _Science is like sex: sometimes something useful
comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it._

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is one of my favorites, although I often substitute 'learning' for
'science'.

------
simonh
>On big things failing to scale down:

It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft
was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and
all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface
technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.

~~~
ken
Story I was told from someone who worked on the early-2000's "Tablet PC":

Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't
entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate
customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it
has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be
Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements,
technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the
benefit over a laptop, and it never took off.

Sounded to me like the classic "faster horse". It's not so much that they
needed to make everything a PC, and more that they were such experts at
enterprise sales that they didn't have confidence in their own new ideas.

~~~
kristianc
> Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't
> entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate
> customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or
> it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to
> be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements,
> technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the
> benefit over a laptop, and it never took off.

This is not so obviously wrong. It's fairly well acknowledged that the biggest
barrier to the iPad becoming a general computer for most people is iOS. It's
unclear that the answer is 'Windows on a touch screen' but it's also equally
clear that Apple hasn't done anything like enough to make iOS work for the
larger form factor.

------
jhbadger
From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight
Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time
(long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games
before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure
called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports
game.

~~~
pjc50
Not to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper,
Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.

~~~
ChrisSD
Windows 95 also had Hover!
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21)

A while back they made an online version:
[http://www.hover.ie/](http://www.hover.ie/)

~~~
dwags
what about Fury 3?!

------
mcguire
" _A little-known partnership between IBM and Apple to try to make a new OS
(Pink) that would finally beat DOS:_

" _IBM has 33,000 programmers on its payroll but is so far from leading the
software business (and knows it) that it is betting the company on the work of
100 Apple programmers wearing T-shirts in Mountain View, California._ "

Quote from a co-worker who spent a lot of time at Taligent: "They don't
realize mice can have more than one button."

(I worked for the IBM Taligent Project Office in Austin. We were an AIX
(mostly) and OS/2 (to an extent) shop.)

(Advice: Don't work for IBM.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
And another one of those weird tidbits of obscure knowledge...

When the Java group was trying to come up with a name for the browser that was
going to ship with the Alpha 1 code it was called "WebRunner", that was the
name we used up until we discovered through a trademark search that the name
was currently registered to Taligent. Sun couldn't get anyone at Apple or IBM
to acknowledge it, much less talk to us about licensing or transferring it, so
we renamed the browser to 'HotJava' (which I at the time wasn't aware of the
sexual innuendo there but it was what it was). I still have my jacket that has
Fang on it and says "WebRunner." I have never had the heart to throw it out.

------
bhouston
Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate. That is why his
writing stands the test of time because he saw things accurately and wasn't
just a hype pedeler or mindless trend follower. I feel he doesn't get enough
credit for that.

~~~
sedachv
> Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate.

Quite the opposite: [http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-
raskin/writings/holes.ht...](http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-
raskin/writings/holes.html)

Cringely is a good writer and storyteller. The stories he tells are often
hearsay or wildly inaccurate recounting of events by third parties. His
writings should in no way be treated as being accurate, and should not be
referenced as historical sources or anything like that.

~~~
leoc
Oh, he's certainly sometimes observant (and indeed sometimes accurate), it's
just that he's far from being particularly _reliable_.

~~~
AceJohnny2
Indeed, I recall the mid-00's when Cringely's predictions would show up on
Slashdot to be roundly mocked. I think it was the first time I understood the
practice of making outrageous claims just to drive traffic.

Thus, I only remember Cringely as a bloviating laughingstock. It's interesting
to see where his authority came from, this book seems very interesting.

------
apo
One of the most interesting characters from the documentary "Triumph of the
Nerds" was Kildall. His company created CP/M, and depending on who's telling
the story either lost the deal with IBM to create the operating system for the
PC, or just didn't care about it.

Here's the quote about him:

 _Let 's say for a minute that Eubanks was correct, and Gary Kildall didn't
give a shit about the business. Who said that he had to? CP/M was his
invention; Digital Research was his company. The fact that it succeeded beyond
anyone's expectations did not make those earlier expectations invalid. Gary
Kildall's ambition was limited, something that is not supposed to be a factor
in American business. If you hope for a thousand and get a million, you are
still expected to want more, but he didn't._

If this is true, he was the polar opposite of almost everyone else in the
story. It reminds me of that line in _Breaking Bad_ when Jesse asks Walter how
much is enough. Kildall knew the answer, and stuck with it. I didn't get that
sense from any other character, except maybe Woz.

Kildall spent the later part of his career hosting _The Computer Chronicles_ ,
a PBS weekly news show that ended up documenting the entire early history of
personal computers. The shows are on YouTube and are fascinating to watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkJ6eQKpHZgsZBla4JgKj3A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkJ6eQKpHZgsZBla4JgKj3A)

~~~
ryandrake
I'm convinced that, with few exceptions, to succeed in business requires you
to destroy that part of your brain that understands the word "enough". What
salary next year is enough? How many assets is enough? Business leaders will
never say. How much profit this year is enough? Shareholders will never give
you a figure--more is always better than less. These people might have _goals_
, but they are meaningless because when they reach those goals, they don't
stop. Unending accumulation is the only way. Anyone who does have a concept of
"enough" gets out-competed by the ones who don't.

------
cubano
Ahhh 1992....the year I discovered QNX and Mosaic.

This post brings back _so many memories_...Novell! the first damn network
system that was ever worth a shit on a IBM PC-compatible. Installing that
software finally put and end to the nightmare of "sneaker-netting" all my
office PCs.

OS/2 failure! Who would have thought that shit-DOS would withstand the
challenge of such a superior (see QNX!) and deep-pocketed competitor? What
were we all smoking back then??

Jobs and NeXT!...man did I covet one of those ridiculous priced machines, but
with no market penetration and my company focused on cheap compatible
hardware, it made no sense to develop with it.

Linux!...see QNX!

I could go on and on...it's rather amazing...without me knowing it I've become
my own history book.

------
jonstewart
I obsessively read I, Cringely when I was in college in the late 90s. It was
the Stratechery of its time, and taught me an immense amount about the tech
business.

~~~
velcrovan
I read it too in highschool. I even found a Dover Art book containing a copy
of that suited-frog spot art sketch he used and cribbed it for my blog. Wonder
what old Cringely is up to these days

~~~
JeremyReimer
You can find out on his blog (cringely.com). The TL;DR is that he mostly does
consulting for startups and writes his own columns on the tech industry at his
own pace. A few years back he did a Kickstarter for a $100 Minecraft server
with his teenage kids that failed. The blowback from the failure and his poor
communication about it has at times taken over the blog comments.

For a while he did a series of columns exposing the decline and mismanagement
at IBM; he eventually turned these into an ebook that I purchased and thought
was a reasonably interesting read.

More recently he had cataract surgery and had to move to a new home after his
old one was damaged in the California wildfires.

------
ddebernardy
The book's Wikipedia page mentions that Cringely made it available online for
free, complete with link:

[https://www.cringely.com/tag/accidental-
empires/](https://www.cringely.com/tag/accidental-empires/)

------
ilamont
_On the value of limiting yourself to standards:

...which was why the idea of 100 percent IBM compatibility took so long to be
accepted. "Why be compatible when you could be better?" the smart guys asked
on their way to bankruptcy court._

It sounds a bit like a jab at Apple (or maybe even NeXT, which I believe was
struggling in 1992 with its hardware releases). AFAIK neither company ever
went bankrupt.

Or was it referring to the crop of other personal computing platforms from the
late 70s/early 80s? (Vic20/C64, TRS-80, Sinclair, Heathkit, etc.)

Or something else? Big SGI workstations, etc.

~~~
simonh
There were tons of almost-PC-compatible manufacturers back then, selling their
proprietary very slightly better, but incompatible systems. They'd have a
slightly faster but incompatible bus system, slightly higher capacity floppy
disks with a custom format, a proprietary interface that was quicker but only
worked with their own printers, a higher resolution display or with more
colours but which required special software to take advantage of it.

The Unix workstation market that NeXT, Sun and SGI competed in was a bit
different and didn't really overlap much with the PC market.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Many included "better" features that depended on a somehow non-compatible
BIOS. Quite a few of those had dual modes so you could get PC compatible but
slower or worse, or incompatible but better. They eventually died out.

One company I remember that was pretty successful for a while were Apricot:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC)

------
renholder
> _And the old blood is getting tired - tired of failing in some cases or just
> tired of working so hard and now ready to enjoy life._

I think that this is, perhaps, the most apt quote that will live-on in a state
of permanence throughout the generations.

------
jancsika
> lend it out digitally, one person at a time

Think about how much better off we'd be if books were available digitally like
Wikipedia articles are, and social media posts were restricted to "borrowers"
one-at-a-time.

------
evo_9
Cringley was involved in adapting this book into a 3 part documentary called
Triumph of the Nerds. It's a fun glimpse into the early days of computing.
Cringley managed to interview Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and a
whole host of figures from those days (too many to list).

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

------
AceJohnny2
The quote about reorgs practically gives me PTSD. Certainly irrational anger:

> _The rest of the company was as confused as its leadership. Somehow, early
> on, reorganizations - "reorgs" \- became part of the Apple culture. they
> happen every three to six months and come from Apple's basic lack of
> understanding that people need stability in order to be able to work
> together. [...] Make a bad decision? Who cares! By the time the bad news
> arrives, you'll be gone and someone else will have to handle the problems._

I worked for 6 years at STMicro, and the group I was in (Nomadik SoC) did
reorgs every 18 months, practically like clockwork. This was a huge
multinational company, and it was my first job so I didn't have any context to
weigh it against, but in hindsight it was a huge sign of disfunction and
leadership that didn't know WTF it was doing. As expected, the group shut down
a few years down the line.

The place I currently work hasn't had a reorg since I joined, almost 4 years
ago. But I'm sure that's largely attributable to a steady and successful
product line.

It can be either a vicious or a virtuous cycle...

~~~
AceJohnny2
And Apple's 3-6 months reorg cycle is _insane_! That sounds like
organizational panic. Makes it all the more impressive that Steve Jobs pulled
them out of that nosedive.

------
purplezooey
It's weird seeing 1992 associated with some kind of far off distant time.

~~~
jhbadger
I tend to think of the "modern world" as starting with the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989, but now that I am beginning to work with adults with graduate
degrees that weren't even born then, it's beginning to be a bit absurd.

~~~
grayed-down
Berlin wall? Imagine my distress at having tuned in to the modern world during
the Watergate fiasco. My father had to explain to me that it was the name of a
hotel and not some sort of earthworks.

------
skmurphy
I found this quote the most interesting:

"Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the
first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market
research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is
the real product." Robert Cringely in "Accidental Empires"

------
asaph
> I was recently recommended to read the book Accidental Empires by Robert X.
> Cringely, first published in 1992 (or was it 1991?) and apparently no longer
> in print...

You can buy a new copy on Amazon.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887308554/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887308554/)

~~~
flippyhead
Hey look, the audio cassette (what's that??) is only $869!

~~~
leoc
That's right everyone, we live at a pivotal moment in history where trading
algos are making wild-arsed guesses at the market value of low-sales-volume
prerecorded compact cassettes.

------
rbanffy
I used to listen to his podcast during my morning commute. I'll miss him when
he retires.

~~~
jordanlev
Got a link to the podcast? I’m unable to find it in Overcast or Google.

~~~
rbanffy
I'm sorry, but I couldn't find it. He may have taken them down. Not even the
PBS years seem to be available.

------
amelius
> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created
> by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume
> that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not
> the way it happened.

This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix,
just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers
connect to the cloud, which is just like a mainframe. If anything, history is
repeating itself.

~~~
Stratoscope
The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different
goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun
Natural Foods in Palo Alto.

Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just
started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of
the apple, get it?"

He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that was right
up my alley. I'd been programming for eight years and had done low level
assembly and binary machine code on several different architectures, so this
looked like a fun little project.

We didn't talk money, not that he had any, it just seemed like an interesting
weekend diversion.

Steve called me a couple of days later and said, "Mike, I've been thinking
about this. Your experience is all with mainframe computers. The 6502 is a
_microcomputer_. It works on fundamentally different principles than those
mainframes. There's no way you could possibly write this disassembler, so
forget it."

I tried to explain that I'd gone through the 6502 reference, and it was just
another instruction set with concepts similar to the others I'd worked with.
Steve wouldn't have any of it: "I'm sorry, I've made up my mind. You just
don't know anything about microcomputers, all you know is mainframes.
Goodbye."

Naturally I said to myself, "Who is this Steve Jobs guy telling me I can't
program?" So I went ahead and wrote enough of the disassembler to show that I
did indeed know how to do it.

I was about to call Steve back to tell him the good news, but then I thought,
"The last phone call didn't go so well. Maybe I'd better drop by his office
and show him the code."

So I looked up the address for Apple Computer and found it at 770 Welch Road
in Palo Alto. I walked into the building and looked around. It didn't look
like a computer company, all I saw was a row of telephone switchboards - the
old kind with plugs and jacks - with an operator at each one.

I asked one of the operators where Apple Computer was. She hesitated a moment
and said, "Uh, this is their answering service."

Well, of course no successful business used an answering service. I turned
around and walked out the door, saying to myself, "These guys are flakes.
They're never going to make it."

To this day I don't know if I missed out on becoming a billionaire, or if I
dodged a bullet.

~~~
bdickason
Great story - thanks for sharing :) In hindsight, do you think it was any
different? (Microcomputer vs mainframe for the disassembled you were talking
about building)

~~~
Stratoscope
Thank you! I went into more detail in another comment in the thread, but going
from one instruction set to another just felt like having more than one way to
say the same thing. Every instruction was different, but the concepts and
_kinds_ of instructions were pretty much identical. Once you've seen an
overflow flag and a carry flag and registers and bit shifts and memory load
and store on one CPU, you'll certainly recognize them on another.

I guess Steve thought the CPUs really _were_ different, like, say, the
difference between a CPU and a GPU.

~~~
reaperducer
_I guess Steve thought the CPUs really were different, like, say, the
difference between a CPU and a GPU._

There's a lot of revisionist history on the internet about Steve Jobs not
being technical, but he had an incredibly detailed understanding of the 68000
by the time the Macintosh project was launched. Perhaps your encounter
encouraged him to delve into that area of study.

~~~
glhaynes
Where did you hear he had such a deep understanding of the 68000? (Not
questioning whether he did, just curious because I've never heard that.)

~~~
reaperducer
Reading old computer magazines from the library.

------
davidw
If you're interested in older Silicon Valley history,

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters (
[https://amzn.to/2EJjvHG](https://amzn.to/2EJjvHG) )

is pretty good, although he gets some things pretty wrong himself, like the
rise of open source.

------
Unikaca
Apenwarr podcasts are really good, recommended to everyone.

~~~
jordanlev
Been reading his blog for a long time, but didn’t know there was a podcast.
I’m unable to find it though — do you have a link?

~~~
apenwarr
He definitely doesn't have podcasts (though there are a few recorded talks).
His blog posts seem popular though. :)

------
0898
This guy sounds pretty ungrateful.

He was able to read Robert X. Cringley's book "Accidental Empires" thanks to
Archive.org's "virtual library card" service.

This is a service where Archive.org sources a physical copy of a book for you,
scans it, and lends it out to you digitally, one person at a time.

Sounds like a useful service. But all this monumentally ungrateful guy can do
is moan about how "aggressively user-hostile" is it because you have to double
tap to open a book from the list.

~~~
reaperducer
A few of the local library systems I've used have the same Adobe Editions
lending scheme, and it's terrible in so many ways that I just gave up on
e-books from the library.

On those rare occasions I want a an e-book these days, I go to iBooks or Nook
because the library programs (including Bibliowhatsits) are so bad.

Mostly I just buy the physical book, or order a physical copy from the
library. It might take a few weeks to get from the other side of the country,
but that's less hassle than dealing with the current state of library lending
DRM.

------
ForHackernews
... has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library? That
Adobe DRM is the industry state-of-the-art.

~~~
dagw
_has this person never checked out an ebook from their local library?_

To be fair I don't know anybody who has either. I know it's possible and I
know my local library offers this, but I've never met anybody who's actually
used this service.

~~~
FroshKiller
My county library has a poor electronic collection. Still, I tried to check
out a book and got put on a waiting list with 30 other people. That was before
Christmas. I haven't heard anything else about it.

~~~
jhbadger
Waiting lists happen with popular new books with physical copies as well. If
you look for books that are a year or so old, or are something other than
popular fiction (science or history for example), normally you can get a book
immediately in my experience.

------
starpilot
[From the tech scene], not just general quotes about the state of the world or
life.

