Eazel, ex-Apple led Linux startup | Hacker News Reader

Eazel, ex-Apple led Linux startup

en.wikipedia.org

147 pointsazinman265 comments

What "ex-Apple" Andy Hertzfeld is most famous for, is for being a co-founder of General Magic [1]. General Magic's social interface was seen as a threat by Microsoft, and they responded to the threat with Microsoft Bob [2]. Sun found the agent technology of General Magic interesting, and they responded with Oak, which later became Java [3]. After General Magic collapsed Hertzfeld founded Eazel. I remember attending an Eazel demo, and notably Hertzfeld did not have a good answer when someone in the audience asked "how will you make money?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

[3] https://www.tech-insider.org/java/research/1995/07.html

We need a term for: (This is Tech Specific, but all Industries need this)::

When a memory long forgot is resurrected and a whole dormant pathway of neurons get fingerd, pinged, and tracert with a new TTL, and now that I commented - added to my AI.PII.MS-NSA-OAI.AWS.gov.json.py (I wonder how many records I have under any given TLD?

(I remembered a lot about this just by seeing this post that I had long forgot just how much I knew back then...)

---

If anyone is spry, on the internet make a "sqlK-box" we can be prompted with a random word/phrase/picture within a given category (like "Silicon Valley" "GPUs" "COMPANY" - but with a date range "Silicon valley 2000s" - or "COMPANY 2020") and you have N time to relive a memory on that topic - then you compare responses from others to the same temporal topic to see what the shared memory landscape looks like. or deltas.

> Susan Kare designed new vector graphics-based iconography, having designed the original Macintosh icons

> […]

> On March 13, 2001, Eazel simultaneously launched the first release of Nautilus (version 1.0), and laid off most of its 75 employees in an attempt to secure funding in its final few months.

> […]

> The Nautilus file manager was received positively, and has been incorporated into GNOME since GNOME version 1.4.

Here’s the Nautilus docs from GNOME 1.4, complete with some screenshots of the version of Nautilus that came with GNOME 1.4:

http://www.fifi.org/doc/gnome-users-guide/html/gnome-users-g...

There are multiple pages with more screenshots of Nautilus in those docs. Keep clicking next at the bottom of the page to see more of those Nautilus screenshots from GNOME 1.4

Btw, does anyone know if the version in these screenshots are using any iconography that Susan Kare created?

She sells really nice prints of her icons in case you are interested in that: https://kareprints.com

Quite the illustrious kareer (sorry I had to).

Who designed the icons in MacOS up to Mavericks and iOS 6? Those were IMO the peak icon design on Apple devices. Would be great to hire that person for some Linux UI.

I think Louie Mantia was an icon designer at Apple back then https://lmnt.me/. Maybe Sebastiaan de With as well https://sdw.space/.

Quite a blast from the past!

I actually remember the arrival of Nautilus and how nice it was compared to the other similar utilities of the day.

It looks quite different these days, as GNOME has now flattened the heck out of everything (for better or worse) and killed off the buttons. However, much of that original design did live on within Nautilus for many years.

I remember the hype when Nautilus first came out. I was a teenager, but even then, I had my doubts as to how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business. IIRC there were conversations about how to monetize it using premium add-ons which seemed pretty ridiculous at the time.

A user's "home page" is valuable real estate for good reason. If they could have become the home page for a large number of users then they might have been able to monetize without losing those users, but that's a pretty big if on a convoluted path.

> A user's "home page"

We'd (sadly) call that Facebook nowadays.-

No, it's generally talking about the page that comes up when you first open the browser, generally this is google or bing nowadays, or some portal your company or ISP redirects you to.

That homepage. Stand corrected. Thanks.-

yeah it might theoretically mean the first page they navigate to, but generally I think they mean the first page they start at. we had years of browsers and sites and malware all trying to hijack your homepage because it's valuable and often non-technical people don't know how to change it back and will just roll with it being what it is. I remember helping people who were confused if their homepage changed from aol or yahoo because they literally had no real concept of how to browse the internet and check their mail and such if the links weren't on the homepage.

>how a file manager make sense as the centerpiece for building a business

Well, there are Total Commander and other commercial file managers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers

But you will note in the cost column that the ones making money are on windows/mac. Its possible to sell commercial software on linux, just not desktop software as such. Between the small and very fragmented marketshare between the distros there is a pretty strong user distaste for commercial offerings. Which means the headwinds for a successful product are a lot worse. If one wants to create a new filemanager/whatever a far better plan is to target windows/macos as the primary offerings/focus rather than linux in the beginning. I guess some of that is application specific (ex a git frontend might work) but one better have a reason other than "I like linux" if they want it to be something other than a hobby.

Yeah, I also remember. It was the frothy time of the dot-com era where anyone with a novel idea could raise a couple millions. I was also scratching my head how you'd make money off Linux desktop users, considering there were very few of them, and they hated commercial software.

>Yeah, I also remember. It was the frothy time of the dot-com era where anyone with a novel idea could raise a couple millions.

It's still like that today, you build something attractive to users and assume you'll figure out the monetization later. It was more of a wild west back then because they were throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick since everything was still too new to guess at what would work though.

They died only 6 years before Dropbox was founded and had a plan to have cloud storage and an app store. It seems possible they could have executed well on those fronts and have nautilus "just" be a high-end frontend to the services. It probably required a very different mix of engineering focus though.

So extra context that may help at least understand the perspective:

There was a considerable amount of overlap between the browser and the file manager originally. The notion of the modern day internet wasn't really here, and instead a lot of companies saw "browsing the web" as mostly equivalent to "browsing your files - but remotely".

Even Microsoft did this - "Windows Explorer" (The file manager) and "Internet Explorer" (The browser) shared a huge amount of code. To that point that I could still write COM browser helper objects that run in both of those programs as late as 2018 - only stopping when MS finally killed IE in favor of Edge-Chromium.

Basically - Back then the web was just files to be browsed, and that was the job of the file manager, and people correctly identified that the web had monetization opportunities. They were just bad at identifying exactly what they were.

Add to that, all the hype on file systems as well with BeOS FS or WinFS ( I had too look up the name of the abandoned Vista FS, I am almost sure it had another name), plenty of new FS were created during that era as well.

File management was a key activity at that time.

>Even Microsoft did this - "Windows Explorer" (The file manager) and "Internet Explorer" (The browser) shared a huge amount of code.

And famously got sued for closely tying the browser with the OS, despite the design making technological sense.

KDE's first browser and file manager was also the same app - Konqueror.

I believe you could type a web address into Explorer and it loads the site... or the other way around, my memory is hazy

You can still do that to this day. But it seems like now it hooks into edge or presumably the default browser.

It was more than that. If you look at beta builds of Windows 95* they essentially integrate outlook into explorer. Effectively you would have a hierarchy for each layer of internet communication available from the file management.

*http://toastytech.com/guis/chicago4.html

I guess they figured it would be more profitable to sell that as a standalone product in the office suite.

Their plan was to make people pay for image thumbnails? It all makes sense now! /s

At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of loyal users. The practical issues of how to make a profit were almost ignored for most companies of that era. So it is not surprising to see that a company creating a new file explorer would be consider valuable, especially if that browser made lots of people switch to Linux (something that many people believed to be possible).

> At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of loyal users.

Right, at the time...

As I was reading through the article, a thought experiment occurred: if a new Eazel emerged tomorrow (another Linux-focused startup led by ex-Apple "rock stars"), how would they best contribute to the Linux desktop? Join GNOME? Join KDE? Would any of their Apple-influenced paradigms even be accepted among the developers of mature DEs? Would they go create their own desktop environment ala Pantheon/elementaryOS? Would they go distro-agnostic and just contribute some "polish" to major Linux applications?

It unfortunately strikes me that the window when such a team might have had a major influence on the Linux ecosystem has passed, and most of the distros are happily entrenched in their own little fiefdoms.

> if a new Eazel emerged tomorrow (another Linux-focused startup led by ex-Apple "rock stars"), how would they best contribute to the Linux desktop?

Probably by joining elementary OS:

https://elementary.io/

Or instead of Linux they could join something FreeBSD-based, like ravynOS

https://ravynos.com/

> We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So, we are creating ravynOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD.

Imagine former Apple employees joining them! That’d be so awesome!

Other players as well:

https://github.com/helloSystem/hello

The most recent release of ravyn seems to be from 2022. I'm not sure they'd take this on if they started tomorrow.

The more reason for a bunch of experts from Apple to join, right? ;)

To bring their expertise and help out with challenges that are currently blocking this project from progress.

Elementary's aesthetics are in the right place, but Pantheon is probably too closely coupled with GNOME to allow the degree of freedom such a group would desire. Depending on GTK, which has become well known for pulling rugs from underneath devs using it, is also a liability.

Considering these things I believe such a group would be best served by starting their own DE project and likely writing their own UI framework with first-class C bindings, because while Qt doesn't break things as often as GTK does it's restrictive in the languages it can be used with.

I think you can see how this would go by looking at an Eazel that already emerged and found substantial success. Does this sound familiar?

- Founders from early Apple and Apple spinoff General Magic.

- Built a new Linux-based operating system.

- Their OS used an all-new, consumer-focused UI toolkit and userspace, and avoided playing around with any of the existing concepts from legacy linux distros, using GTK or QT, etc.

- They were acquired by Google.

- By many measures, the Linux operating system they built is the most popular OS on the planet, with more devices than macOS, iOS, or Windows.

Even with all that success, I'm not sure I'd say they had a major influence on the existing open-source linux distro "desktop environment" community.

This post brings back memories from when Windows dominated the market, and many online sites—e.g., Slashdot—talked about the "year of the Linux Desktop." (Sadly, in 2024, the closest thing to the year of the Linux desktop is Android.)

I tried multiple Linux DEs at the time. I also remember "Helix Gnome" (later renamed to Ximian). I also remember that Helix Gnome used icons created by a person with the "Tigert" user alias. His icon designs were terrific and greatly influenced all the later Gnome icons.

The main Gnome problem at the time was stability: Nautilus and Helix Gnome generated core dumps constantly. At that time, I switched to KDE for my daily work (I loved KDE's architectural consistency) and later to Xfce.

In retrospect, as a user of Linux DEs at that time—nowadays, I use macOS—the KDE vs. GNOME "fight" didn't help. KDE had a more stable code base but lacked a polished UX. GNOME had the investment of a few companies (like RedHat, Ximian, Sun, and later Canonical) that improved the visuals and UX over time, but its internals were a mess.

For years I'd go back between Windows and Linux, but sometime after 2018 or so I stopped even "going back" altogether. I've been able to daily Linux, my bar is high too. If it doesnt work OOTB I go back to Windows or to a distro that does. I'm not wasting any time fighting a broken OS.

I think the era of Linux on the Desktop is already here, just wish BestBuy would sell System76 towers, might push it further along.

> "year of the Linux Desktop"

Well, Linux as a desktop is quite popular amongst IT and developer types anyway. That's good enough fo rme.

In retrospect, I think I should be grateful that the Linux desktop never really went mainstream. It would have ended up being controlled by one (maybe two) companies and twisted into something that removed all of the benefit of it being open source to begin with.

So, ChromeOS, I guess?

I have basically had a history of using whichever desktop environment got in my way the least. At various times, that has been GNOME 2, MATE, XFCE, GNOME 3 (Ubuntu edition), GNOME 3 (PopOS edition), and probably a few that I'm forgetting.

Lately I have been running KDE on Debian and it is basically everything I always wanted Linux on the desktop to be for the last two decades.

It's wild how sane (and stable) linux desktop is today when you look back at some of the crazy experimental stuff that was going on 20 or so years ago.

I moved across the world (from Perth, WA) to work on open source software with some of my heroes (Bud Tribble, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare) at Eazel. It was only a short time run, but I'm still in the Bay Area, still friends with many of the people I met there.

And I still use the software that I worked on at Eazel most days, which I can't say for anything I worked on since then.

Very cool to learn where my Linux file manager GUI app came from.

One point that is light on details in the wiki was what exactly their monetization plan was or if they even had one at all? It sounds like they wanted to integrate business/enterprise features and support, or perhaps features that plug into other internet services that they could possibly monetize. It sounds like the "network user experience" with "Eazel Online Storage" and "Software Catalog" were their initial monetization ideas.

This was 1999. Monetization hadn't been invented yet.

You make it sound like companies didn't need to make money before 2000 rolled around.

During the dotcom bubble, they really didn't.

which was the case for internet related companies

They wanted to be Dropbox before Dropbox.

Absolutely love the logo, is there a term for this design style?

edit: closest I could find was 'Corporate Gen-X Cyber' (https://cari.institute/aesthetics/corporate-gen-x-cyber)

Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection mentions Eazel several times. Ken worked there with Don Melton, who founded the Safari web browser for Apple. After Eazel failed, Apple organized a job fair for Eazel employees.

Eazel is also covered in an excellent interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xImAMe32Itg) from the Computer History Museum.

Interesting to read this in the context of COSMIC, a new Linux shell that just released a blog post celebrating their alpha release:

https://blog.system76.com/post/cosmic-alpha-released-heres-w...

The post hat-tips their "design system" - a term that didn't exist in 99, but sounds like a lot of the same type of work that Eazel would have been going through to invent a core app for a nascent OS.

Wow. I remember this. I really wanted to work for them. I dreamed of giving the Gimp a giant overhaul.

>I dreamed of giving the Gimp a giant overhaul.

Has anyone done that yet or does it still look like crap?

Honestly it would be better if Blender ported over all the image filters and such. GIMP users don't want change.

dang, consider adding [2001] to the title? This is a long-defunct company.

Title sounds like it's a live startup made of ex-Apple employees, rather than the reality, which is it's an ex-startup that got acquired by Apple.

Suggest title of: "Eazel, ex-startup, acquired by Apple (2001)"

As a former Eazel employee, I can say that indeed Eazel did not get acquired by Apple.

As the Wikipedia page states, a sizable pool of people went to work on Safari 1.0 (and some are still working on Safari). Others went to Apple to work on the Finder or Core Graphics.

Another big chunk of people went to Danger to work on the T-Mobile Sidekick.

But the company shut down. No one was left besides the CFO.

FTA:

> Staff consisted of former employees of many technology companies such as Apple, Netscape, Be Inc., Linuxcare, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.

Sounds like some of the people that founded, or at least worked at, the company did come from Apple.

FTA:

> The company attempted to sell its core development group but ceased operations on May 15, 2001.

> Hertzfeld arranged a meeting with Steve Jobs and most of Apple's high level management. In June 2001, most of Eazel's final roster of senior engineers joined Apple's Safari team

Sounds to me like your suggested title saying that they were acquired by Apple would not be an accurate way to put it.

Huh. I didn't realize there was an actual historical connection been at least some GNOME apps and Apple.

I guess this explains that god-awful default of opening every folder in a new window and the longtime lack of nice features present in competing, contemporaneous file managers (embedded terminal, tabs, split panes, etc.).

Nautilus seemed much cooler in those days.

I think the whole file manager as "browser" was interesting - the idea of blurring the boundaries between local and server, support for webdav on the major platforms came from a similar place and also would have been interesting if used more.

It was truly a time of irrational hype if people thought they could just make a File Manager and recoup millions.

looks like Steve picked up the whole team without paying a dime.

Yes, several of them are still at Apple. For example Bud Tribble helps run the privacy team IIRC and Darin Adler is in charge of Safari, iMessage, Mail, etc.

I was not involved in this in any way other than being an avid Linux user, but I remember it quite well. A very popular conversation among Linux nerds in the early 2000's was, "what if this thing actually takes off?"

There were quite a few Linux-related start-ups around this time that were fueled by dollars from the dot-com boom. As is the usual story, Eazel had same "hire people now and figure out how to make money later" strategy that caused the bubble to burst. There were quite a few high-publicized commercial ventures into the Linux space around this time: Ximian, Corel Linux, VA Linux. Others that I'm forgetting.

As to the software, when it was new, Nautilus was absolute garbage. It was memory-hungry, slow, and crashed often while doing perfectly normal things. Eazel had ambitious plans for it, but it didn't really stabilize into something useful until several years later after the community removed most of the bloat and it just became a regular file manager.

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