knuckleheadsmif

It is a blunder that Japan could not see that they just copied other characters in to JIS and it’s also why we see duplicated Romaji characters within Unicode. The duplication is frankly bad regardless of number of bits need to encode although with 16 it was indeed a requirement.

That’s correct, it was deemed critical to making Unicode 16bits (although there were other good technical reasons but they would apply to unifying other languages as well.)

I was involved in this before Unicode be a e Unicode when it started as discussions with Xerox and Apple—Xerox at that time had their XCCS standard. Those discussions directly morphed into Unicode. [[I was even there when we picked the name Unicode for what we had home to produce.]]

Conceptually we long debated unifying everything and in an ideal perfect world we would have done it. The reason was one primary goal for a new standard was to make it easily parseable and having unique rather than repeated codes was key to that. Sadly in the end we did not unify everything only to get buy-in from all major countries to support. That’s even why you see the roman/asciii characters repeated within Unicode itself—like as romaji. This was all well in good until we came to CJK and the number characters with semantical overlap was huge that this was more seriously considered—infact we started investigating this at Xerox before even thinking about Unicode and that work predated and influenced and leveraged the work done later.

That’s correct. The best example is that of cellophane tape which was a brand but it lost protection. Xerox very aggressive in the day and wrote lawyer letters to anyone who used Xerox as a verb to protect their brand.

I’m not sure if Google has ever done similar but people use google as a verb to mean web search and I’m not sure if they worried about losing brand protection or though of it as an advantage in acquiring users.

No one knew the market at the time. Clearly this was for large businesses and not a home computer. It targeted the same demographic as the Xerox Star which shipped before it and suffered a similar fate. No one knew what would work, easy to see in retrospect but at the time it was not easy to see. Apple also had a big disadvantage in the ‘office’ marketplace having no sales force that everyone assumed was necessary. Besides price, Xerox’s other problem was while they did have a sales force they only knew how to sell copiers. I suspect only IBM at that time with a product like the Star or Lisa could have succeeded. But the Mac was a completely different product for a different marketplace and even it was a failure at first—until desktop publishing turned things around.

All these years I thought The Dragon Book referred to the “Green” Dragon book (which was the text I used in my compiler class in the very early 80s) only to Just realize that when folks refer to “The Dragon Book” that it is the red/purple book by 2 of the same authors from ‘84.

I remember that I ignored most of the stuff when I did my compiler from the book I used and did a recursive descent parser which the book really, if I remember correctly, did not cover except maybe for a brief mention. The instructor was also pushing everyone to use lex/yacc and I thought that was not the right way to go if you wanted to actually understand things. Interesting most of the folks that used lex/yacc had trouble completing the assignment whereas I thought it was straightforward.

Mesa was my first language that I used out of Collage for the seven years that I worked on the Xerox Star document editor. The job where I learned more in 6 months than I did in 4 years of collage or my entire working career afterwords.

It was by far the best language that I used for my entire working career where I had to endure such languages as PL/1 (and PL/S), C, C++, Java, JavaScript and PHP. While Java as a lang was not too bad it still paled in features and usability compared to MESA and it too was influenced by MESA.

But as was true at Xerox was it was the complete network that was revolutionary at the time in the early 80’s. The fact that I could source debug any machine remotely on the corporate would wide network of over 5000 machine and that the source code would be automatically done loaded to my machine (mean I could easily debug from any nearby random machine) was just something I could never “easily’ do elsewhere.

MESA was missing a few things (which CEDAR solved and used generally within only Xerox PARC partially because at the time it really only ran on Dorado class machine) such as Garbage collection and in the case of Star it would have been much better if the language supported OOP. For Star we had had a system called Traits to support objects but it had some serious issues IMHO (which would be fodder for a separate post.)

When talking about Mesa you also need to talk about Tajo, its development environment built onto- of the OS Pilot (Star also used Pilot.) But systems also supported a mouse and a large bitmapped monitor and had overlapping windows (although most of Star have automatic non overlapping windows that was a UI usability decision.)

There is also more because the network was very important. Print severs, file servers, mail servers, cloudless store for all of Star’s user files/desktop. All this in the very early 80’s was unheard of elsewhere. It’s very similarly to what Steve Jobs missed when he saw Smalltalk where he only really saw a new UI and missed much more that was demoed.

It was a magic place to work at the time, I had left in the very late 80s for Apple and it was a huge step backwards at the time (but did amazing stuff with their limited tools but made working not fun.)

Being a physics researcher he built a time machine and in late 2001 went back in time to post it.

More likely late 82 or even 83 when you saw it.

The desktop metaphor absolutely was in the Xerox Star and that was copied by the Lisa team (and carried over to the Mac) after they viewed it when Star was first announce. That’s well documented. The Star also had limited pull down menus mostly a single menu item on the top right of every window that was hamburger-like in design that had items in it.

The Xerox Development Environment (TAJO/XDE) was more windows like where windows were processes and shrunk down to the bottom of the screen when closed. Star was developed using Tajo but are completely separate systems with very different user interfaces. For example Tajo used cut/copy/paste and any window could be set overlapping where as Star use a MOVE, COPY where use selected the object pressed the verb action button, and then selected the destination (use that was modal!). Also Star choose to have non-overlapping tiled windows (except for modal dialogues & style sheets.) The windowing was changed in later versions to allow any window to overlap.

What’s even more confusing is that Xerox had lots of systems including smalltalk, interlisp, star, Cedar & Tajo at the time Lisa was released. They also had lots or prototypes systems including Rooms and the Alto for that matter.

Apple absolutely also did their own research and design that was unique. And in cases the duplicated earlier research but came to a different conclusion (for example the number of buttons on a mouse.)

I think Apple did more with direct manipulation than others did taking it to more extremes — but you can still see that in other earlier systems.

I was there and it’s true. Another point that people forget was the Head/CEO of Palm (which was an independent subsidiary) at the time was Jon Rubinstein who was head of software at NeXT and Apple.

I’m pretty sure the decisions were made before he was consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was dysfunctional.

I was at Palm when launched working on the device end user software startup experience. The software I think was ready but the hardware was far inferior to the current iPad at the time. However it’s possible that the next iteration could have been more competitive, they just had to stick with it. But neither the hardware or software mattered because it was the CEO who killed it through poor long term judgement As the author noted.

[I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs. They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining market share in the race to the bottom.]

There is mortality and there is quality of life and someone who is fit will have a better quality of life even if they don’t necessarily live longer.

Yes, making UI’s is not a new problem but building on top of the DOM/HTML as the backbone is.

I too am from the before times where I guess we built essentially our own frameworks to handle own unique issues and take security into our own hands (verses have to trust external libraries and external resources….)

I sadly laugh when I hear 20+ years late people are still fighting back button navigation issues. I still see sites that can’t handle double posts correctly or recovery gracefully when post responses fail/timeout.

I’m out of the game now but for all the benefits of the web it’s been haves to death to support stuff the underlying infrastructure was nit designed for.

But you can Copyright the Name of a font. But yes long standing rule says you can copyright how letters & numbers look. Note that if you make a font that contains your own “artwork’ that does not represent a letter or number you can get protection for that.

And only fairly recently (in the past 30 years—I forget when Adobe won this court case) the courts ruled you can protect the code for generating a fonts look from being copied.

We used these for my first CS class at UCSB in 1979 running the UCSD P-System and they were great machines. It was frankly a much better system than the shared university IBM mainframe clone based computers used for other first year courses which used PL/1. Playing Space Invaders was one of the more popular activities on the Terak.

The compiler/run/debug & repeat cycle was light years ahead of how we developed on the mainframe. On the mainframe, using PL/1, you had a global onerror handler that would dump all variables and do a core dump of your program failed/crashed. The output was on from a line printer that you usually got a few hours after you submitted your job. On average you got 1 maybe 2 job runs a day. At least we didn’t have to use punch cards like the electrical engineers did for their Fortran programs; we used “glass TTYs” where we could save our virtual cards to a file system and later modify. Oh, and you needed to have the magic JCL cards at the beginning or your job. Those were the days.

Later that year the CS dept got their own VAX and from then on most coursework was done on that system using BSD Unix. The EE’s still had to use punch cards on the mainframe.

We did have a few other systems for some courses but the majority of stuff ended up being C or Pascal on Unix (with the occasional language like lisp or prolog for some classes.)

In the mid 90s (1996?) So myself and 3 others worked for Intuit and we traveled, from Mountain View CA, to your tiny office near Harvard to look at acquiring the company. I believe Intuit made a lowball offer and eventually you sold yourselves to Yahoo for twice the price. At Intuit we did not offer you guys money for the product, it really was not that special at all, but for the people—I thought only 3 folks at the time? The product was a web store front builder (Viaweb?) I don’t think we actually talked to Paul that day but I remember Trever and the tiny ‘server’ room.

It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.

NYT is worth paying for and is one of the few institutions doing real journalism these days. It would be said to see if go.

Never heard of the Xerox Palo computer and I worked at Xerox for much of the 80s. Xerox made a lot of different machines (mostly but not exclusive in the D-Machine family) but if there was a Palo machine I’d be interested in seeing a photo.

Yup similar rates to PG&E although most of PG&Es customers don’t live in Silicon Valley.

Only Municipal power companies like in Sacramento, LA, Palo Alto & Santa Clara to name a few have rates that are 1/3 to 1/2 of PG&E rates. They pay a small grid interconnection fee to the other utilities but beyond that their cost structure is much lower and they don’t have to return dividends to stock holders.

Gas rates have a similar cost structure between municipal and public companies although for some reason there are fewer municipal gas companies at least for smaller cities.

In CA, in 2025, if you have PG&E it’s approx 55 cents/kwh at peak, non-peak rates are lower but the average ands up being close 50 cents. It’s close to the highest in the country.

No rates are high excluding the wildfires which has a separate surcharge to finance.

But PGE having to provide power to wilderness areas in genera costs all PG&E customers to bear the cost and it’s a cost that Municipal power companies in CA don’t have and their rates an 1/2 or even more than PG&Es.

Perhaps it is ‘undocumented’ and is used as proof of someone copying the source code some portion of the source code.

Another possibility is that is a special institution in the chip specifically for Apple that again was used as a copy write detection or protection scheme.

A little more complicated because in some settings drugs are covered by Medicare part B but generally not if administered yourself at home. Then yes it’s part D and the most out of pocket in Part D from 2025 going forward is $2K.

Also, they do negotiate for a very few drugs and the number is climbing. This was part of the IRA. However only drugs that are FDA approved for your issues are covered.

Before the IRA the government was not allowed to negotiate any drug prices by law which was/is crazy.

That’s because Medicare only covers drugs for approved FDA usage. It’s covered for diabetes but not weight loss. In general this is good policy. It is possible to challenge for some cases but generally that is the rule. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to both control costs and prevent harm.

If the drug manufacturers wanted it to be covered for weight loss there IS a process. File the correct paperwork with the FDA and do the rigorous studies that were don’t for the approved usage.

Over 65, outside drugs delivered in a clinic, hospital or doctors office you don’t get drug coverage UNLESS you pay for it through Part D Medicare, have a Medicare Advantage pan (the privatized version of Medicare that now 50% of the Medicare population has stupidly picked), or a retirement medical policy that acts like a Medicare supplemental policy that many government employees and some company’s offered their retirees.

That said it’s still a good deal and you can switch Part D policies year to year in case there are formulary issues. Plus with the IRA changes the max out of pocket is 2K which before you had no cap on—some new drugs are so crazy expensive that without this even the co-pay would wipe people out. That’s only recent fixed.

In our own case, my wife who 3 years ago our out of pocket for some daily cancer pills went from 15k in 2023, to 8K in 2024, to 2K this year as the IRA fully kicked in.

Musk firing people at random was not an exaggeration. My friend was head of all software at Tesla for the original car and much of the Model S development. Musk would routinely fire random folks in his department and he’d have to go to musk to get it undone. Often he had to put his job on the line threading to quit if he did not change his mind. Eventually musk took him up on it and my friend quit.

As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser.

You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting.

I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.

By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.

A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement.

I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.

This crap happens all the time between companies.

When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.)

The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs.

What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple.

None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.