2 May
2010
2 May
'10
4:35 a.m.
Al wrote:
On 5/1/10 11:58 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> Liam, thank you very much for the blog article. If we will become a
> cloud-oriented computing society, there will certainly be profound
> social consequences.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
I'm saddened that the company
I worked for for twenty years (Apple COMPUTER) no longer exists.
You know, I think back to 1984, when I was an avid fan of the Apple II
(by then very long in the tooth) and its huge catalog of available freeware
and commercial programs and plug-in peripheral and coprocessor boards.
I'm not saying I was a huge fan of Apple the company, but I was a
fan of the multitude of little companies that had been built around
the Apple II.
Then the Mac came out, which didn't even have Applesoft BASIC built in (never
mind the fact that it lacked Integer BASIC!!! That's a different rant),
and had no expansion bus. It wasn't obvious how to even write a program
for it... the same way that every Apple II user had typed in at least
a couple little BASIC programs. And how could you expand it with no
expansion bus?
I understand why it's happening, it's just
very sad to see the 'production'
side of the product line slipping away to high volume devices geared to
'consumption' and generating a constant revenue stream under their total control.
Again, thinking back to 1984, the thought lurking in my mind back then was
similar... that Apple saw all these other companies selling software and
hardware for the Apple II and had eliminated these possibilities on
the Mac.
I was being a little pessimistic back then, but not much.
I ended up using Macs, and even hacking them a little (in terms of hardware
mods and delving into at least a layer or two below the OS top level),
but it was never like the hackability of an Apple II.
To be fair to the S-100 vs IBM PC world, I never really liked the IBM
PC either, but it did have an expansion bus, and did ship with Basic,
and there was the "choice" (put in quotes intentionally) between MS-DOS
and CP/M-86 and then a few others.
I suppose in terms of me hacking micros, there was the "before" of the
Apple II and S-100 worlds, and the "after" of the Mac and the IBM PC.
In the "before" there were cool magazines like BYTE and Dr. Dobbs
about true hardware and software hacking; in the "after" there were
not-cool magazines telling businesspeople which software to buy (and
rudely they were still called BYTE and Dr. Dobbs). I personally feel
that moving thought from "IBM PC or Mac on my desk with no software
that I actually wrote and no hardware that I actually hacked" to the
"my world I create on the cloud and the web where I can show a schematic
of this new code practice oscillator I built from a 1U5 and a 3V$ and
a youtube movie of my magic eye blinker" may be an improvement over
the current environment. (Just to bring in what I've been hacking
this weekend).
Tim.