Hacker News Reader

Comment by NovaDudely | Hacker News Reader

One amission that I always see from this period of Apple is the impact of Gil Amelio's decisions and how much gets attributed to Jobs. This is not to undermine Jobs, he was absolutely the right person in the right place and figured out how to really sway project into shape and communicate the changes the company was making.

Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.

That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh for internet - 7400E'.

View on HN

But Jobs was the one who partnered with Ive on the design of the iMac. If the iMac had launched with a similar design to the Power Macs it would have been ignored by the media and consumers.

But true that many of the operational changes of the company mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and hardware teams.

The 1998 ‘Power Macintosh G3 All In One’ is an interesting stepping stone to the iMac. Beige, blockier than the iMac, but noticeably curvier than preceding Power Macs. A return to the single unit design, and the first use of translucent plastic.

https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_All-In-One

I believe the first use of translucent plastic by Apple was the Newton eMate 300, designed by Jonathan Ive and released in early 1997 when Gil Amelio was still CEO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300

The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal, fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.

If you wanna dig real deep, the first use would have been on the Power Macintosh 9600. It's subtle -- you can just about see it in the Wikipedia photo -- but it has a translucent blue plastic latch button on the top of the machine that I believe is the same shade as the eMate. It was introduced about a month earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_9600

Similarly, Apple was experimenting with new metal casting techniques and used them to create the Sim Removal Tool included with every iPhone. The theory at the time was they were going to use this new cast in upcoming iPhones. But ended up going with milled stainless steel instead.

Oh, that's cool. Sneaky Bondi button.

Also reminded me that Apple actually sold a dual 604e / 200 MHz system in the OS 8 era. I'm guessing the only software that could have made use of the second processor would have been some specially optimized routines in Photoshop or similar.

I had one and can confirm - it’s about the same as bondi blue.

There was a huge push around that time for Apple to make a thin client style thing. Sun was doing it with java stations and it seemed to be “the buzz” and obvious direction. I don’t think anyone expected a consumer push in response.

Steve Jobs was a huge fan of the thin-client model because he had been using it full-time at NeXT.

Could you elaborate? NeXT machines were quite the opposite of thin clients. They were very expensive and had a lot of memory etc. for computers of the early 90ies.

Did they have big storage though?

I get what you're saying — I'm just remembering Jobs demoing how his NeXT user account was remote and any NeXT machine he sat down on and logged into suddenly became "his" computer.

That's the "thin" client I'm thinking of. But maybe that's just "client".

I one time saw a talk where they discussed the issue of having to make sure the mouse was in the same location on logout and login for his home slab and later dell laptop.

NeXT rendering engine was display postscript and they had a common set-up of rendering the DPS on a remote computer while logged in over a network. The overall set-up meant that all the data was at headquarters and users could login in from any location and have a local DPS rendering of the centralized user account.

NeXT hardware was also massively underpowered, running on 680x0 in the early 90’s when other workstation vendors had moved on to RISC (Sun Sparc, etc.) Sun was actually the Unix leader in the thin client space. All their systems could network boot, mount home directories off NFS, share a common user directory (NIS), etc.

But that doesn’t make it a thin client I think? Next to all NeXT applications ran locally.

NeXT didn't have thin clients because the concept never took off anywhere other than a few niche banking applications.

But it had many of the core pillars e.g. remote home directories, remote/RPC applications. NeXT in particular with frameworks like EOF/PDO pushed for more network centric desktop applications.

It doesn't sound like much today but were pretty new concepts for GUI users.

The reason I mentioned it was that there was talk that the iMac was going to be potentially the first consumer-grade thin client.

But the Sun UNIX workstations and their thin clients were different lines of devices.

The JavaStation ran JavaOS, not Solaris. Not sure about the Sun Rays.

Yes, but the thin clients used the same concepts that they pioneered with SunOS / Solaris, like X11. Sun's "thin clients" were mostly just X terminals.

But the Sun (and NeXT) workstations were not just mostly X terminals, that’s the point I’m trying to make. They were workstations, pretty much the opposite of a thin client.

Ok. I view "thin" as shades of gray: example a diskless, net-booting Sun is "thinner" than a full blown workstation. Those foundational technologies (like NFS, NIS, X...) made it easier for Sun to build and promote full blown thin clients later on.

To my knowledge, NeXT never supported a diskless config. (Or did they?? Did anyone work with that?)

Pretty sure diskless was an option for NeXT. Everything was configured in NetInfo where I think a remember a boot file location setting.

The NeXTcube and NeXTstation did not come in diskless configs.

Diskless may have been an option when NeXT software was detached from NeXT hardware, though.

I understand that couldn't be purchased without a disk but I kind of remembering booting cubes and slabs from a network file. This was probably 5 years after dropping hardware.

I did find mention of it in the docs! Perhaps it was supported, they just never shipped systems in that configuration.

It’s also part of the directions for running multiple motherboards in a single cube.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/NeXTcube_running_68030_and_6804...

Ok I see your point. Thin for me is basically dependent on where the actual (bulk of) computation happens.

AFAIK, what Steve had and liked is that his desktop moved with him between at home and at work.

That’s something that thin clients also promise, but doesn’t require using thin clients.

Microsoft Windows Briefcase has enteted the chat.

Its claim to fame was bringing the term Architecture Astronaut into common parlance.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

In retrospect, it's quite funny in light of how webapps and Cloud evolved. As Spolsky predicted in 1998:

"between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us"

Man, I normally have some respect for Spolsky's writing, but this one is overly-dismissive crap. Sure, Microsoft really needed to reel in the 13 versions of OneDrive they kept releasing and rereleasing, but that's the only part of the article that aged even remotely well.

"And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn’t stop him."

Go ahead, try and take away that feature now, see if any customers complain.

Quite the opposite I’d say…

The iMac is the first New World ROM. That’s most assuredly the project that was underway at Apple under Amelio. It was vital to allow a Mac to use USB for all its interactions. But it means nothing if the marketing of the device wasn’t good. For that, I’m inclined to believe Jobs and Ive are responsible for how they made the device.

Yes, the iMac was ready but Jobs set Ives loose on the iMac. The 9600 and the 8500 printer were both beige boxes but they had greenish translucent plastic bits were humans would touch. This was during the spindler/amelio/Jobs era but pre-dates the iMac.

>the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out.

Amelio simplified the product categories down to four. They were still full of garbage--Jobs made the real difference there. He got rid of all the trash peripherals and replaced the (many) computer lines with only the iMac.

Yeah the GP sounds like it's apologizing a bit much for Amelio. The quadrant-based product lines was not really in place until the release of the iBook in 1999.

Amelio failed to cut the printer/accessory divisions which were mostly just selling rebadged hardware from other companies. He kept the Newton division even though it was not on a trajectory to success (I say this as a long time Newton fan). He also kept around far more Mac SKUs than were necessary (Performas, education-only SKUs). That's all stuff Jobs cut when he came back.

Amelio had the unenviable task of righting a sinking ship. He didn't necessarily do a bad job at it but acqui-merging with Next and getting Jobs back was the best choice he made during his tenure.

That is very fair. It felt like Gil had some good ideas, had a reasonably good feel for what needed to be done, just didn't have the intuition to execute it well. Jobs did.

In a way Gil probably would have done very well working under Jobs but once you are in the CEO seat, there is no chance of taking that demotion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com