Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thought.

On RMS and Woz specifically, how much have they ever been opposed?

I only know a little about them, but I think of both as good-natured, high-impact, little-bit weird hackers, with substantial common ground in philosophies or thinking.

They went very different life directions, with pretty young career decisions. But I could imagine Woz today supporting what RMS has done, while not seeing a need for all the philosophy and seriousness.

RMS is certainly critical of Apple. But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

View on HN

But I suspect that the Macintosh team in '84 was closer in intentions to contemporary RMS than to contemporary Apple.

Apple has always been patronising and thought of users as exploitables to be controlled and herded; the Macintosh, and even more so the Lisa that came before it, were far more closed systems in comparison to the IBM PC.

That would be a cynical '84 TV ad. (Like the extremely common revolutionary leader who pretends to want to free the people, but actually just wants to be the dictator instead.)

I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications. And they also just wanted to build what they thought of as a nice machine. But definitely not a hacker machine, but they wanted to empower everyone who wasn't a computer nerd.

I don't know whether impression is accurate, but if it is, then I'd say they are closer -- in terms of intentions -- to RMS, than to contemporary Apple.

> I had the impression that the original Macintosh team was extremely user-oriented, and wanted to build an empowering machine, in terms of applications.

One could say exactly the same for the original IBM PC, which had infinitely more tech pubs at introduction than the Mac.

Apple was definitely not into sharing code with users.

Their vision after Lisa and Macintosh has always been computing as an appliance.

The only thing open about them were the great Macintosh Internals books, that Apple documentation team has forgotten how to write.

Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.

Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.

The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.

I used that name because I did not recall exactly the naming and was too lazy to search for the actual one. :)

Something like Hypercard naturally allowed for experimentation and playground, and if anything, a proof how to balance programming in the context of appliances.

You can find something more recent like Dreams for the PlayStation, which is also no longer.

The difference is that even environments like HyperCard and now all the sandboxed stuff create a clear division between mere "power users" and "developers", while the PC had a ROM BASIC in the beginning that effectively gave you full access to the hardware. DOS came with DEBUG that you could write short binaries in, and PC magazines would often publish source code for such utilities. These were no less lacking in power than any other software. With a PC, there was no sharp division between user and developer.

Kind of agree, which is why we are discussing Apple was always about appliances, starting with Lisa and Mac models.

As someone that started using PCs on MS-DOS 3.3, having BASIC and DEBUG around wasn't much help without having the required books, and they were not that easy to get.

There was still a divide between user and having the means to become a developer.

That's not how the Apple II -- Woz's machine -- was. It was a very open and pro-hacker device.

If we're talking about Woz specifically, it's just a different generation of Apple than after the Macintosh.

Yeah, but then Steve Jobs took over the vision how Apple was supposed to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com