Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple. OpenDoc is one of the most interesting technologies to be developed during this time period. OpenDoc would have dramatically disrupted the desktop applications market; people would have bought component-based software instead of monolithic applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned (I suspect the main reason for this is because Apple desperately needed Microsoft's and Adobe's continued support for Mac OS back when Apple's situation looked precarious), something that I've pondered a lot recently is what would have happened had the free/open source software community had developed something like OpenDoc to build component-based applications for Linux, where the community could spend its time developing components, instead of imitating the Mac and Windows approaches of building large, monolithic applications, which unfortunately have resulted in a very long game of catchup (compare GIMP to Photoshop, or compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office).

> There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple.

The situation seems to have been similar in Sun Microsystems around the same era: a number of different high-level language/runtime projects kicking around (eg. Self), and a generally deflating outcome.

> While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned

I don't know enough about OpenDoc to comment about the merits of what happened, but here are a few things. First, Jobs and Apple were pushing Rhapsody (Cocoa as a cross-platform API for applications) https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ when OpenDoc was cancelled. It's easy to see the cancellation as the ex-NeXTers killing anything that competed with the NeXT technology or just didn't particularly integrate with it. OTOH, OpenDoc was definitely seen as a big commercial and consumer-adoption flop before Jobs killed it. Finally, it has to be noted that OpenDoc's inspiration and competitor OLE is still around, perhaps underloved.

Having worked with OpenDoc (and never shipped -- I wonder how many of us reached that point!), it was dire -- the concept was a super good idea and all that, but the implementation was so incredibly complicated that it took a huge amount of work to do.... anything really. And then all your work was a 'component' that had no real branding, identity or way to the market, anyway..

It was the time when Apple APIs went completely overboard in the amount of code required to do /anything/; OpenDoc was incredible in it's complexity; but even something like OpenTransport was fantastic amount of work to do anything simple -- especially compared to BSD sockets!

AppleScript was another one, being 'scriptable' was a lot of work, but being 'recordable' was a complete nightmare, and implementing the most complex language clauses was borderline suicide, the 'whose' clauses were amazing in their complexity for a feature absolutely nobody would use.

But, still, I miss Classic -- I think there was a lot of good that was thrown with the bath water when OSX arrived; sure, the underlying got a serious upgrade, but the user interface and anything associated got a serious downgrade, to this day really. I think the modern Finder is abhorrent, the Classic Finder was a beauty of consistency and ease of use in comparison. Yeah sure you got a couple of gadgets, that's it.

Somewhat famously, the first question Steve Jobs took at his developer Q&A at WWDC ‘97 was about OpenDoc & the bullet he put in its head.

https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8

Honestly, the “component software model” had at least hundreds of millions of dollars in development thrown at it by all the major players and went essentially nowhere at the application level.

It had some nice architectural properties for developers, and COM at least has had a long and prosperous history as a building block. But it’s hard to imagine any possible world where business or consumers spent a significant fraction of their software dollars on components rather than full applications. So Steve was probably right.

Thanks for linking to the 1997 WDC (only 1 "w"!) Q&A with Jobs. For those hoping to cut to the chase, the timecode for Jobs' prompt and the hapless attendee who asks "What about OpenDoc" is 4:26 [0]

The four and a half minutes prior are interesting (thoughtful introduction, Jobs' framing of the session and his brief thoughts about Apple's current position), but what he says in response to the questions following the OpenDoc question is deeply thought-provoking.

Many of the ideas Jobs shares show the general shape of recent and current Apple business decisions macOS and iCloud, for example. Especially interesting are his discussions of NIH syndrome, networking, and more.

Thanks, twoodfin, for pointing to this session which punctuates Jobs' return to Apple the year previous.

[0] https://youtu.be/yQ16_YxLbB8?t=266

Microservices are the new components.

After all, the network is the computer.

I am with you on that, for a while I thought that either GNOME or KDE would win the desktop wars, providing on GNU/Linux the same desktop development experience of Macs, Amigas, BeOS, Windows, OS/2 with their respective component libraries.

Instead the GNU/Linux wars replaced the UNIX wars, and while GNOME and KDE do strive to provide that experience, everyone is using Electron apps instead.

The closest to that MacOS development experience turned out to be Android, where the actual kernel being used is irrelevant to user space.

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