Looking Back at WWDC 97

Apple invited me to present at WWDC97 as a young independent developer with a startup making software for "webmasters" on the Apple internet platform; "What cool sites use" according to Apple's marketing back then. Little did I know what a turning point it would be for Apple, although I had already placed my eggs firmly placed in their basket.

I got to demo my Common Lisp based social web application server and showcase how to extend it with dynamic, hot-loaded components. Apple said I could talk about pretty much whatever I wanted within the scope of the conference, so I included an introduction to how it used what I labeled Light Weight SGML, soon better known as XML.

It was a blast from the past seeing my presentation again 20 years later. I had prepared the slides to be displayed in a web browser, generated from extensible markup using my WebSlides tool, but my handler at Apple insisted on converting them to PowerPoint. They weren't all sold on the web eating the world yet.

Despite having a complementary ticket for the conference, I had no time to stick around, flying straight back home the day after to prepare the next product release. The following years were quite a ride, like having a tiger by the tail. Then came 2001.

I found this one [0] particularly interesting :

- speech recognition as input

- support for Microsoft devices

- Marathon game engine details

[0] http://s3.bslabs.net/wwdc/1997/107%20Game%20Sprockets.pdf

I didn't go to this one, but I was at the 96 WWDC. I remember all the shocked faces in the audience when Apple couldn't demo all the System 8 features in one build, and the weakened memory protection to be almost useless. There was a realisation that Apple's software story was bogus and they couldn't build a modern OS.

The purchase of Next was an acknowledgment of this. It's amazing how it turned out.

Always interesting to read about Apple in the 90s. As someone who was born in the late 80s and by no means could afford Apple until after my secondary education, I grew up a Windows guy. I'm somewhat of a diehard Linux/Apple guy now but it's great to see the parallels of then and now...a lot of distrust of Apple these days but I knew nothing of it at the time(back then).

Interesting to see Craig Federighi as a presenter, since he left Apple in 1999 and did not return until 10 years later.

I stopped going to the WWDC almost a decade prior to this.