Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

What many people thought was that the shift to object-oriented development, object oriented RPC systems (CORBA, "JavaBeans", some stuff in J2EE, OLE, etc) and CASE/modeling tools (UML, Rational Rose etc.) would turn the market into more of an automated component oriented system, with a marketplace of ready made components and more reliable systems with a faster time to market etc. Lots and lots of books sold about OO patterns, methodologies, etc.

IMHO that didn't happen, the integration morass remained, and I'd consider much of that model a failure in retrospect.

On the infrastructure front, I seem to remember a lot of talk about Frame Relay (EDIT: actually I was thinking of ATM, thanks for correction below). And fiber installs all over the place, lots of money in getting fiber into downtown areas, etc. Also I don't think people really predicted the possibility of the dominance of the "cloud" as it is now, really. I mean, hosting services were I'm sure a growth market but "serious" companies were seen as wanting to have their own DCs, and I don't recall major talk or trend away from that until the mid 2000s ("SaaS" etc. became the buzzword around then, too).

Also JavaScript as a serious presentation layer system wasn't much talked about until the 2000s.

There is this Jobs interview when he also discusses how there will be a marketplace for objects and people will buy and sell objects instead of software.

In one sense it failed because all it ever saves you is the typing. You still have to learn the whole model, sometimes it is like learning a programming language from scratch.

On the other hand, it may have succeeded. Objects don't exist in isolation but as a library with other objects and frameworks, and APIs are basically object models. You could think of React or the stripe api as object universes.

What is interesting is that you can't sell a developer product like a commercial products. Developers need access to the code so you either make it open source, and sell consulting, or else you make it a web api and rent it out.

I've been trying to find that interview. Do you maybe have a link?

I think he has said a few times, almost certainly also mentioned in "the lost interview".

He usually says something like: They showed me three things are Xerox Parc, first, the windows mouse graphic interface, second, networked computing and the third thing I didn't notice at the time which is object oriented software.

Then he mentions how at Apple they did the first, and the internet is the second. At Next, they are doing the third, and then brings up objects.

It was during the NEXT era. Here is the lost interview: https://youtu.be/Jk4dzQs859M

But, as I said, I think he has also said it at other places.

Maybe not the exact interview, but I came across this interview from Rollingstone where Jobs was super pumped about Objects oriented programming https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/steve-jobs...

There was a market for components back in the nineties. People were buying VBX's and OCX's for Visual Basic and Delphi applications. Component Source had a huge catalogue.

Open source killed it all.

More generally speaking, markets were killed by oligopolies.

It happened, it's called restful APIs

Frame relay? I’ll do you one better: remember when the Bellheads thought we’d be using ATM with virtual circuits for everything?

I still re-read this every few years: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

Ah yes, it was actually ATM that I was thinking of. Thanks. I have never been a network nerd, but I remember the buzz about ATM.

One of my prouder possessions is the Southwest Bell CO badge they issued me to let me go into their phone switching buildings. I was pretty happy to have survived my teens without ending up on their bad list.

I had to reread this part a couple times:

"How do you scare a Bellhead?" he begins. "First, show them something like RealAudio or IPhone.

Haha, I forgot IPhone was a trademark before the iPhone.

My first exposure to IOS was telnetting into a 7513.

Walked into new multi-campus hospital; fiber and an ATM core. Didn't take much to configure and start up an IP instance, some token ring I think, and associated support daemons. It worked very well and left me impressed. Oh, and synchronizing two sniffers to actually force our management to apply pressure to AT&T when it wouldn't acknowledge dropping packets.

In some ways this is how things have panned out. A SaaS is effectively an elaborate object.

re UML & CASE

Yes and:

Executable architectural models & designs.

Round tripping, models to code and back. (aka two-way translation?)

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