Podcasts about xerox alto

Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way.—What you'll learn:1. Why you sometimes need to “hide your vision” behind something people actually want—what Ivan calls “sugar-coating the broccoli”2. How Ivan and his co-founder persevered through multiple product resets and complete code rewrites3. Why Notion prioritized systems over headcount, keeping the team small and focused even at scale4. Why Ivan believes in craft and values as the foundation for product development, balancing technical excellence with aesthetic sensibility5. The surprising story of how Notion nearly collapsed during Covid when their single database almost ran out of space with only weeks to spare6. Community-led growth tactics7. Ivan's unique journey from a small town in China8. Much more—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development• Sinch—Build messaging, email, and calling into your product—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao—Where to find Ivan Zhao:• X: https://x.com/ivanhzhao• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Ivan Zhao(04:41) Ivan's early life and education(07:46) Discovering the vision for Notion(10:49) The lost years of Notion(13:56) Rebuilding and perseverance(17:14) Layoffs and company morale(18:53) Advice for startup founders(25:08) Product-market fit(29:56) Staying lean and efficient(34:27) Creating a unique office culture(37:20) Craft and values: the foundation of Notion's philosophy(38:44) Navigating tradeoffs in product and business building(41:24) Leadership and personal growth(49:11) Challenges and crises: lessons from Notion's journey(51:08) Building horizontal software: joys and pains(01:02:40) Philosophy of tools and human potential(01:06:17) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Ürümqi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• SpongeBob SquarePants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpongeBob_SquarePants• Augmenting Human Intellect: https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html• Alan Kay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay• Ted Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson• Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990): https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/• Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto• React: https://react.dev/• Simon Last on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/• Magna-Tiles: https://www.magnatiles.com/• Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-on-a-deadline-how-notion-pulled-itself-back-from-the-brink-of-failure/• Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson• Tobi Lütke's leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook• Smalltalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#:• Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/• Shana Fisher: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shana-fisher• LAMY 2000 fountain pens: https://www.jetpens.com/LAMY-2000-Fountain-Pens/• Macintosh 128K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K• Toshiba rice cooker: https://www.toshiba-lifestyle.com/us/cooking-appliances/rice-cooker• Transistor radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/• Misattributed McLuhan quote: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/• Phin Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phineasbarnes/• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/• Pablo Picasso quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629531-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal#:~• Connections with James Burke on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.484e32c5-60bd-4493-a800-e44fd0940312• The Enneagram Institute: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/—Recommended book:• The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Three-Kingdoms-Luo-Guanzhong/dp/024133277X—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

Looking back at some of This Week in Tech's best moments from 2023: Rating Google's AI Music Tool MusicLM What is Plaguing Google? Xerox Alto: 50 Year Later Lessons Learned By the SVB Collapse Is Copyright Good For Authors? What's Your (Microsoft) Copilot? Goodbye, Computer Magazines UK Emergency Alert Test A Look At WiFi Pineapple and Flipper Zero Ten Years Since Snowden's Revelations Were Revealed The Seven Deadly Sins and Tech Blind: Anonymous Workplace Gossip Earthquake! Why Apple Ended Its CSAM-Scanning Tool Meta's Uncanny New AI Avatars MIke Elgan's Meta Ray-Ban Smartglasses Host: Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: gusto.com/tech discourse.org/twit hid.link/twitdemo rocketmoney.com/twit

看了一篇介绍 Xerox Alto 电脑的怀旧文之后颇感唏嘘，所以久违地尝试了一期考古节目，让我们回到「硅谷」这个词都还没诞生的美国南加州，寻找一下这台算得上 GUI 鼻祖的电脑的足迹，以及他背后那个历史悠久的伟大公司——施乐~准备略显仓促，后期补录了一些「混浊」的声音，请大家见谅~ 另外 Leon 让我务必要在 shownotes 里告诉大家他获奖了，让大家都来恭喜他！# 内容提要04:34 · 施乐公司的历史14:21 · 著名的 PARC 实验室22:35 · 首台搭载了图形用户界面的个人电脑 Alto34:22 · 施乐、Apple 和诺基亚42:27 · Leon 说他要做个广告！# 参考链接本台聊「通用魔术」的那期播客 2:09本期播客的主要资料来源《50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World》 3:14施乐公司（Xerox) 4:04更正：复印件的发明者是 Chester Carlson，JJ 错念成了「卡斯隆」 6:36静电复印技术（Xerography） 7:31以猩猩为主角的施乐复印机器电视广告 12:05Alto 电脑的 UI 截图 13:08藤校——常春藤大学联盟 15:21美国加州城市 Palo Alto（帕洛阿托） 16:54PARC 实验室的早期员工、计算机行业的先驱 Alan Kay 18:53Alan Kay 在 1968 年构想的个人电脑 Dynabook 19:53施乐 Alto 电脑，诞生于 1973 年 22:36Alto 的后续产品：施乐 Star 工作站，诞生于 1981 年 28:13可以透过当年 Alto 的广告来看看实际用起来时候的样子 28:20面向对象的编程这个概念就来自 Alan Kay 28:42曾是内部实验室，如今早已从 HP 独立出来的安捷伦 36:48诺基亚所开发的 Symbian 塞班手机操作系统 39:06路特斯 Eletre 纯电汽车 44:41青年汽车和「莲花」汽车之间的纠葛 46:19Eletre 搭载的车机系统 Hyper OS 获得了 2023 年度的 IF 设计奖 49:01

Episode 392 avec David et Sébastien S..Sommaire :• A comme Alto (00:02:27) : 50 ans apres le Xerox Alto. Une foule de technologies ont été inventées par Xerox dans les années 70. (source) • B comme BlackLotus (00:11:24) : Un bootkit UEFI qui évite secureboot. Blacklotus est le premier exemple public de malware UEFI capable d'éviter le mécanisme secureboot et infecter une machine windows 11 entièrement patchée. (source, source) • F comme Facebook (00:20:04) : Facebook met son propre browser dans son app Android. Pour mieux vous profiler, Facebook teste l'utilisation de son propre browser pour visualiser les liens dans son app android. (source) • H comme Hotmail (00:27:13) : Hotmail va devenir payant. Les propriétaires d'une adresse Hotmail vont devoir passer à la caisse. (source) • S comme Shazaam (00:33:50) : Ils inventent le Sazaam qui identifie les bruits de votre voiture. Une IA qui écoute les bruits suspects émis par une voiture et diagnostiquer les pannes à venir. (source, source) • S comme Super Resolution (00:40:04) : Microsoft offre le VSR également pour certains GPU AMD. Microsoft a activé le support VSR sur Edge pour les GPU NVIDIA et AMD. (source, source) • S comme Sonos (00:46:20) : Sonos lance de nouveaux produits. Sonos lance le ERA100 et ERA300, succésseurs du Sonos One et Sonos Play:2. (source, source) • W comme Wemenon (00:53:42) : Mushroom Power. Une démo en laboratoire d'un PC vivant composé de... champignons. (source, source, source)

AI as parlor trick, LastPass hack detailed, Xerox Alto, TikTok ban, blogger registry Bing Chat has a secret 'Celebrity' mode to impersonate celebrities. @emollick: Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo steps down for AI-generated content role. Father Robert defines the Singularity. LastPass: DevOps engineer hacked to steal password vault data in 2022 breach. Microsoft set to win EU nod on Activision with licensing offer, sources say. Amazon Illegally Fired NYC Union Organizer, Labor Board Says. 50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. U.S. House panel approves bill giving Biden power to ban TikTok. White House: Federal agencies have 30 days to remove TikTok from devices. Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Louis Maresca, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Dan Moren Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: kolide.com/twit decisions.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit

AI as parlor trick, LastPass hack detailed, Xerox Alto, TikTok ban, blogger registry Bing Chat has a secret 'Celebrity' mode to impersonate celebrities. @emollick: Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo steps down for AI-generated content role. Father Robert defines the Singularity. LastPass: DevOps engineer hacked to steal password vault data in 2022 breach. Microsoft set to win EU nod on Activision with licensing offer, sources say. Amazon Illegally Fired NYC Union Organizer, Labor Board Says. 50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. U.S. House panel approves bill giving Biden power to ban TikTok. White House: Federal agencies have 30 days to remove TikTok from devices. Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Louis Maresca, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Dan Moren Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: kolide.com/twit decisions.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit

AI as parlor trick, LastPass hack detailed, Xerox Alto, TikTok ban, blogger registry Bing Chat has a secret 'Celebrity' mode to impersonate celebrities. @emollick: Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo steps down for AI-generated content role. Father Robert defines the Singularity. LastPass: DevOps engineer hacked to steal password vault data in 2022 breach. Microsoft set to win EU nod on Activision with licensing offer, sources say. Amazon Illegally Fired NYC Union Organizer, Labor Board Says. 50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. U.S. House panel approves bill giving Biden power to ban TikTok. White House: Federal agencies have 30 days to remove TikTok from devices. Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Louis Maresca, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Dan Moren Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: kolide.com/twit decisions.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit

AI as parlor trick, LastPass hack detailed, Xerox Alto, TikTok ban, blogger registry Bing Chat has a secret 'Celebrity' mode to impersonate celebrities. @emollick: Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo steps down for AI-generated content role. Father Robert defines the Singularity. LastPass: DevOps engineer hacked to steal password vault data in 2022 breach. Microsoft set to win EU nod on Activision with licensing offer, sources say. Amazon Illegally Fired NYC Union Organizer, Labor Board Says. 50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. U.S. House panel approves bill giving Biden power to ban TikTok. White House: Federal agencies have 30 days to remove TikTok from devices. Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Louis Maresca, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Dan Moren Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: kolide.com/twit decisions.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit

On This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte, Fr. Robert Ballecer, Lou Maresca, and Dan Moren talk about the Xerox Alto 50 years since its introduction and the imprint it has had on the computing industry. Full episode at twit.tv/twit917 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Dan Moren and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/

AI as parlor trick, LastPass hack detailed, Xerox Alto, TikTok ban, blogger registry Bing Chat has a secret 'Celebrity' mode to impersonate celebrities. @emollick: Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo. CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo steps down for AI-generated content role. Father Robert defines the Singularity. LastPass: DevOps engineer hacked to steal password vault data in 2022 breach. Microsoft set to win EU nod on Activision with licensing offer, sources say. Amazon Illegally Fired NYC Union Organizer, Labor Board Says. 50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. Biden's national cybersecurity strategy advocates tech regulation, software liability reform. Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state. U.S. House panel approves bill giving Biden power to ban TikTok. White House: Federal agencies have 30 days to remove TikTok from devices. Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Louis Maresca, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Dan Moren Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: kolide.com/twit decisions.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit

On This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte, Fr. Robert Ballecer, Lou Maresca, and Dan Moren talk about the Xerox Alto 50 years since its introduction and the imprint it has had on the computing industry. Full episode at twit.tv/twit917 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Dan Moren and Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/

Presidents Trivia Alright! This episode is all about Presidents from the United States trivia. We are grateful to have Major Data on this episode. Can you answer questions like: While many presidents have had sons, most have been grown adults by the time they were elected making it fairly rare for a boy to live in the White House. Prior to Barron Trump, who was the last boy to live at the White House? William Howard Taft was the first president to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the baseball season when he did so for the Washington Senators in 1910. To which MLB HOF 12x AL strikout leading pitcher did he throw this pitch to? Contrary to popular belief, George Washington's false teeth were not made out of wood but in fact were made out of other materials including teeth from slaves, brass, gold and ivory from which large African animal? George Washington posthumously was promoted to "General of the Armies of the United States", effectively a 6 star general, ranking him above all military officers for eternity. Which future US president promoted him to this rank? Twelve presidents have held the rank of general in the military and other held officer ranks, including James K Polk and Millard Filmore making the rank of Major. Who is the only president with military service to never become an officer and is the last president to serve in the War of 1812? Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are the only presidents with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Trump is honored with his star for his role in producing what event from 1996 to 2015? Which president was the first to have a computer in the West Wing, overseeing the installation of a Hewlett Packard HP 3000, a Xerox Alto desktop computer, and a 8 x 10 x 3 feet water-cooled IBM laser printer? In 1852, Franklin Pierce and William King won President and Vice President respectively. Unfortunately, shortly after King contracted tuberculosis and traveled out of the US to try to regain his health, making him the only vice president to take the oath of office on foreign soil. Which carribean country whose current president is Miguel Diaz-Canel did he take the oath in? Which president was featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan in an illustration by artist Bradshaw Crandell featuring him in his Navy uniform planting a kiss on his then model girlfriend Phyllis Brown? Which president served as the 1st Governor of the Indiana Territory from 1801 to 1812, and in 1811 convinced the Secretary of War to allow him to assume command of 950 soldiers 13 years after his last military action in order to face off against the Shawnee, leading to his nickname? If you like this episode, you might enjoy our Rugby episode. Music Hot Swing, Fast Talkin, Bass Walker, Dances and Dames, Ambush by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Don't forget to follow us on social media: Patreon - patreon.com/quizbang - Please consider supporting us on Patreon. Check out our fun extras for patrons and help us keep this podcast going. We appreciate any level of support! Website - quizbangpod.com Check out our website, it will have all the links for social media that you need and while you're there, why not go to the contact us page and submit a question! Facebook - @quizbangpodcast - we post episode links and silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess. Instagram - Quiz Quiz Bang Bang (quizquizbangbang), we post silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess. Twitter - @quizbangpod We want to start a fun community for our fellow trivia lovers. If you hear/think of a fun or challenging trivia question, post it to our twitter feed and we will repost it so everyone can take a stab it. Come for the trivia - stay for the trivia. Ko-Fi - ko-fi.com/quizbangpod - Keep that sweet caffeine running through our body with a Ko-Fi, power us through a late night of fact checking and editing!

Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, inventor, business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, the chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company's board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. He is widely recognized as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.Jobs was born in San Francisco to a Syrian father and a German-American mother. He was adopted shortly after his birth. Jobs attended Reed College in 1972 before withdrawing that same year. In 1974, he traveled through India seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism. He and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. A year later, the duo gained fame and wealth with production and sale of the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.In 1985, Jobs was forced out of Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took a few Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets. In addition, he helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story (1995) and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 20 films since.In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with English designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign and leading to the Apple Store, App Store, iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store. In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS), based on NeXT's NeXTSTEP platform, giving the operating system a modern Unix-based foundation for the first time. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He died of respiratory arrest related to the tumor on October 5, 2011. He was 56.

Warning: 5 minutes of pet talk.In Get Carter, Jude gets weirdly defensive about his philosophy training, we discuss relevant numbers and machine learning, and John goes full Batman. Mutant? Vengeance demon? Something like that. Fusco is actually a good cop, but also a terrible liar.In Number Crunch, we see that Jude has learned how to write a CONCISE GODDAMN SUMMARY, Ana discusses the relative merits of an IDE that doesn't auto-scroll, Finch is Sophie, and John can't act his way out of a paper bag. Does every New Yorker just know instinctively how to launder money?Connect with the show at @babylonpodjectHelp us keep the lights on via our Patreon!Justen can be found at @justenwritesAna can be found at @The_Mianaai, and also made our show art.Both Ana and Justen can also be found on The Compleat Discography, a Discworld re-read podcast.Jude Vais can be found at @eremiticjude. His other work can be found at Athrabeth - a Tolkien Podcast and at Garbage of the Five Rings.Clips from the original show remain copyrighted by their original rightsholders, and are used under the Fair Use doctrine.Music is by Arne Parrott, who can be found at http://atptunes.com/This show is edited and produced by Aaron Olson, who can be found at @urizenxvii

Episode: 2786 Creativity Leashed: How a new way of looking at computers got away.  Today, learning from an Alto.

One of my first jobs out of college was ripping Banyan VINES out of a company and replacing it with LAN Manager. Banyan VINES was a network operating system for Unix systems. It came along in 1984. This was a time when minicomputers running Unix were running at most every University and when Unix offered far more features that the alternatives. Sharing files was as old as the Internet. Telnet was created in 1969. FTP came along in 1971. SMB in 1983. Networking computers together had evolved from just the ARPANET to local protocols like ALOHAnet, which inspired Bob Metcalfe to start work on the PARC Universal Packet protocol with David Boggs, which evolved into the Xerox Network Systems, or XNS, suite of networking protocols that were developed to network the Xerox Alto. Along the way the two of them co-invented Ethernet. But there were developments happening in various locations in silos. For example, TCP was more of an ARPANET then NSFNET project so wasn't used for computers on their own networks to communicate yet. Data General was founded in 1968 when Edson de Castro, the project manager for the PDP-8 at Digital Equipment Corporation, grew frustrated that the PDP wasn't evolving fast enough. He, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman, who did sales for Fairchild Semiconductor. They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn't feel like they could do so at Digital. A few computers later, Within a year, they shipped the next generation machine, which they called the Nova. They released more computers but then came the explosion of computers that was the personal computing market. Microcomputers showed up in offices around the world and on multiple desks. And it didn't take long before people started wondering if it wouldn't be faster to run a cable between computers than it was to save a file to a floppy and get on an elevator. By the 1970s, Data General had been writing software for customers, mostly for the rising tide of UNIX System V implementations. But just giving customers a TCP/IP stack or an application that could open a socket over an X.25 network, which was later replaced with Frame Relay networks run by phone systems and for legacy support on those X.25 was streamed over TCP/IP. Some of the people from those projects at Data General saw an opportunity to build a company that focused on a common need, moving files back and forth between the microcomputers that were also being connected to these networks. David Mahoney was a manager at Data General who saw what customers were asking for. And he saw an increasing under of those microcomputers needed a few common services to connect to. So he left to form Banyan Systems in 1983, bringing Anand Jagannathan and Larry Floryan with him. They built Banyan VINES (Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) in 1984, releasing version 1. Their client software could run on DOS and connect to X.25, Token Ring (which IBM introduced in 1984), or the Ethernet networks Bob Metcalfe from Xerox and then 3Com was a proponent of. After all, much of their work resembled the Xerox Network Systems protocols, which Metcalfe had helped develop. They used a 32-bit address. They developed an Address Resolution Protocol (or ARP) and Routing Table Protocol (RTP) that used tables on a server. And they created a file services application, print services application, and directory service they called StreetTalk. To help, they brought in Jim Allchin, who eventually did much of the heavy lifting. It was similar enough to TCP/IP, but different. Yet as TCP/IP became the standard, they added that at a cost. The whole thing came in at $17,000 and ran on less bandwidth than other services, and so they won a few contracts with the US State Deparment, US Marine Corps, and other government agencies. Many embassies used 300 baud phone lines with older modems and the new VINES service allowed them to do file sharing, print sharing, and even instant messaging throughout the late 80s and early 90s. The Marine Corp used it during the Gulf War and in an early form of a buying tornado, they went public in 1992, raising $28 million through NASDAQ. They grew to 410 employees and peaked at around $75 million in sales, spread across 7000 customers. They'd grown through word of mouth and other companies with strong marketing and sales arms were waiting in the wings. Novel was founded in 1983 in Utah and they developed the IPX network protocol. Netware would eventually become one of the most dominant network operating systems for Windows 3 and then Windows 95 computers. Yet, with incumbents like Banyan VINES and Novel Netware, this is another one of those times when Microsoft saw an opening for something better and just willed it into existence. And the story is similar to that of dozens of other companies including Novell, Lotus, VisiCalc, Netscape, Digital Research, and the list goes on and on and on. This kept happening because of a number of reasons. The field of computing had been comprised of former academics, many of whom weren't aggressive in business. Microsoft ended up owning the operating system and so had selling power when it came to cornering adjacent markets because they could provide the cleanest possible user experience. People seemed to underestimate Microsoft until it was too late. Inertia. Oh, and Microsoft could outspend on top talent and offer them the biggest impact for their work. Whatever the motivators, Microsoft won in nearly every nook and cranny in the IT field that they pursued for decades. The damaging part for Banyan was when they teamed up with IBM to ship LAN Manager, which ultimately shipped under the name of each company. Microsoft ended up recruiting Jim Allchin away and with network interface cards falling below $1,000 it became clear that the local area network was really just in its infancy. He inherited LAN Manager and then NT from Dave Cutler and the next thing we knew, Windows NT Server was born, complete with file services, print services, and a domain, which wasn't a fully qualified domain name until the release of Active Directory. Microsoft added Windsock in 1993 and released their own protocols. They supported protocols like IPX/SPX and DECnet but slowly moved customers to their own protocols. Banyan released the last version of Banyan VINES, 7.0, in 1997. StreetTalk eventually became an NT to LDAP bridge before being cancelled in the end. The dot com bubble was firmly here, though, so all was not lost. They changed their name in 1999 to ePresence, shifting their focus to identity management and security, officially pulling out of the VINES market. But the dot com bubble burst, so they were acquired in 2003 by Unisys. There were other companies in different networking niches along the way. Phil Karn wrote KA9Q NOS to connect CP/M and then DOS to TCP/IP in 1985. He wrote it on a Xerox 820, but by then Xerox was putting Zilog chips in computers and running CP/M, seemingly with little of the flair the Alto could have had. But with KA9Q NOS any of the personal computers on the market could get on the Internet and that software helped host many a commercial dialup connection and would go on to be used for years in small embedded devices that needed IP connectivity. Those turned out to be markets overtaken by Banyan who was overtaken by Novel, who was overtaken by Microsoft when they added WinSock. There are a few things to take away from this journey. The first is that when IBM and Microsoft team up to develop a competing product, it's time to pivot when there's plenty of money left in the bank. The second is that there was an era of closed systems that was short lived when vendors wanted to increasingly embrace open standards. Open standards like TCP/IP. We also want to keep our most talented team in place. Jim Allchin was responsible for those initial Windows Server implementations. Then SQL Server. He was the kind of person who's a game changer on a team. We also don't want to pivot to the new hotness because it's the new hotness. Customers pay vendors to solve problems. Putting an e in front of the name of a company seemed really cool in 1998. But surveying customers and thinking more deeply about problems they face - that's where magic can happen. Provided we have the right talent to make it happen.

Welcome to your freshmen level college course on the greatness of capitalism. This course teaches why capitalism is the best economic system ever known to man. Anthony opens the show by explaining how the topic for this show is one of his favorites. Then, after a thorough explanation of capitalism and how it is rooted in both liberty and morality, he discusses his two-part test that can be used to confront anyone who claims to oppose capitalism (hint - most people will not pass the test). Finally, after some further heated discussion about how socialism and other redistribution of wealth systems are inherently driven by greed, Anthony talks about what he perceives to be the single greatest benefit of capitalism: a term called the 'Capitalism Ladder.' Discussion of the Capitalism Ladder touches on everything from the Xerox Alto computer and Apple, to the NFL and cryptocurrency. The 'Idiot of the Week' features the dumbest person in American government, while the 'Ben Shapiro Word of The Week' features a very specific word to add to your vocabulary. 'The Random Bit' features a brief recommendation for the YouTube channel of the late Rich Piana. Support the show (https://www.paypal.me/realanthonys)

Missile Command comes to Atari's VCS Handheld games lose their mojo and Scramble revolutionizes the shoot 'em up These stories and many more on this episode of the Video Game Newsroom Time Machine This episode we will look back at the biggest stories in and around the video game industry in May of 1981. As always, we'll mostly be using magazine cover dates, and those are of course always a bit behind the actual events. Get us on your mobile device: Android: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly92aWRlb2dhbWVuZXdzcm9vbXRpbWVtYWNoaW5lLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz iOS: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/video-game-newsroom-time-machine And if you like what we are doing here at the podcast, don't forget to like us on your podcasting app of choice, YouTube, and/or support us on patreon! https://www.patreon.com/VGNRTM Send comments on twitter @videogamenewsr2 Or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/vgnrtm Or videogamenewsroomtimemachine@gmail.com Links: 7 Minutes in Heaven https://www.patreon.com/posts/51570452 https://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/missile-command_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam Corrections: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50337962 https://www.patreon.com/posts/50315337 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Tim_Mott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://bestclassicbands.com/ozzy-osbourne-bat-1-20-16/ 1981: First meeting of the International association of video game manufacturers is held in Tokyo Replay, May 1981, pg. 7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Amusement_Machine_and_Marketing_Association Midway goes after Pacman and Rally X gray importers Replay May 1981 pg. 12 https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/rally-x https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/pac-man https://www.patreon.com/posts/47087268 Cinematronics wins Star Castle case Replay May 1981 pg. 12 https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/star-castle https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/court-role-and-structure Stern secures rights to Konami's Scramble Replay May 1981 pg. 14 https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/scramble https://www.patreon.com/posts/50315337 Atari ventures to Japan ... again Replay May 1981, pg. 71 https://archive.org/details/Atari_Coin_Connection_Volume_5_Number_3_April-May_1981/page/n2/mode/1up https://www.patreon.com/posts/50612798 Atari launches Asteroids Deluxe and VCS Missle Command with National Press conference Replay May 1981 Toys Hobbies & Crafts May 1981, pg. 12 https://archive.org/details/Atari_Coin_Connection_Volume_5_Number_3_April-May_1981/page/n2/mode/1up https://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-2600/missile-command_ https://www.mobygames.com/game/arcade/asteroids-deluxe Atari promotes Stephen D Bristow to VP of advanced technology consumer electronics Toy and Hobby World May 1981 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/obituary-gaming-pioneer-steve-bristow-helped-design-tank-breakout/ Atari adds $1 million in punitive damages to its suit against Activision Playthings, May 1981, pg. 32 http://podcast.theycreateworlds.com/e/activision-and-atari/ Atari slashes prices https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/05/business/company-news-atari-cuts-prices-discloses-products.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20 https://www.patreon.com/posts/44335732 https://www.patreon.com/posts/44632017 Atari wants your programs https://archive.org/details/1981-05-compute-magazine/page/n151/mode/1up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Program_Exchange Electronic games lag as Xmas sell off ripples through market Playthings, May 1981, pg. 39, pg. 122 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He-Man Mattel reports $15.5 million loss for fourth quarter Toy and Hobby World May 1981 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsUFBm1uENs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A-Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manimal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugb_TIpPoWA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWyl4k4LRRg Coleco sues Tandy... and Mattel... and well, everyone.. https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1981-05/page/n64/mode/1up Playthings May 1981 TSR licenses Escape from New York Playthings, May 1981 pg. 9 https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/731/escape-new-york https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckvDo2JHB7o Recommended Links: The History of How We Play: https://thehistoryofhowweplay.wordpress.com/ Gaming Alexandria: https://www.gamingalexandria.com/wp/ They Create Worlds: https://tcwpodcast.podbean.com/ Digital Antiquarian: https://www.filfre.net/ The Arcade Blogger: https://arcadeblogger.com/ Retro Asylum: http://retroasylum.com/category/all-posts/ Retro Game Squad: http://retrogamesquad.libsyn.com/ Sound Effects by Ethan Johnson of History of How We Play and Enzo Maida.  

Episode 0097—AFIT Archive: No PARCingThe podcast is taking a "spring break", but we thought an episode from the "early days" that many of our new listeners might have heard might a good idea.  We are working a number of exciting new episodes in the coming months, including a large number of listener-suggested topics and new guests.Here are the original show notes from Episode 22 "No PARCing"....In the early 1970s, Xerox ruled the office copier world and had the vision to establish the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as an innovation catalyst for new technologies that would enable it to expand its place as a technology leader.  PARC was the place where the first personal computer, computer network, graphical user interfaces, and computer mice all had their start—none of which became part of the next phase of Xerox.How might the world be different today if Xerox had the vision to be the company that delivered the visionary advances spawned by its own creation—PARC—to the world?The commercial for the Xerox Alto—arguably the first “personal computer”:https://youtu.be/M0zgj2p7Ww4Steve Jobs Audio: Interview from “Triumph of the Nerds” (1996)Listeners can get a FREE audiobook with theirFREE 30-Day Trial Membership from Audible CLICK HEREWebsite: www.aforkintimepodcast.comE-Mail: aforkintimepodcast@gmail.comDirect Link to Listener Survey: https://www.aforkintimepodcast.com/listenersurveyIf you enjoy the podcast, you can help by supporting us via Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/aforkintimeYou can follow A Fork In Time on….Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aforkintimeTwitter: @AFITPodcastPinterest: www.pinterest.com/aforkintimeTheme Music: Conquer by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.comSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/aforkintime)

The Xerox Alto is back with some of the earliest computer games to use a mouse! Wes and Ben also play some early games by Programma Software, look at video carts from the Fairchild, and talk about who the best developer has been over the past year of gaming!Living Computers Museum Website - https://livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Vintage-Computers/Minicomputers/XEROX-ALTO.aspxWebsite - https://historyvgpodcast.wixsite.com/historyofvideogamingVurbl page - https://vurbl.com/station/71wcQKGhp2k/Twitter - https://twitter.com/HistoryofVideo1Email - historyvgpodcast@gmail.comHosts - Ben & WesMusic - Arranged and recorded by BenCan you guess this week's transition music?

Apple found massive success on the back of the Apple II. They went public like many of the late 70s computer companies and the story could have ended there, as it did for many computer companies of the era who were potentially bigger, had better technology, better go to market strategies, and/or even some who were far more innovative.  But it didn't. The journey to the next stage began with the Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, and other incrementally better, faster, or smaller models. Those funded the research and development of a number of projects. One was a new computer: the Lisa. I bet you thought we were jumping into the Mac next. Getting there. But twists and turns, as the title suggests.  The success of the Apple II led to many of the best and brightest minds in computers wanting to go work at Apple. Jobs came to be considered a visionary. The pressure to actually become one has been the fall of many a leader. And Jobs almost succumbed to it as well.  Some go down due to a lack of vision, others because they don't have the capacity for executional excellence. Some lack lieutenants they can trust. The story isn't clear with Jobs. He famously sought perfection. And sometimes he got close.  The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC for short, had been a focal point of raw research and development, since 1970. They inherited many great innovations, outlandish ideas, amazing talent, and decades of research from academia and Cold War-inspired government grants. Ever since Sputnik, the National Science Foundation and the US Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded raw research. During Vietnam, that funding dried up and private industry moved in to take products to market.  Arthur Rock had come into Xerox in 1969, on the back of an investment into Scientific Data Systems. While on the board of Xerox, he got to see the advancements being made at PARC. PARC hired some of the oNLine System (NLS) team who worked to help ship the Xerox Alto in 1973, shipping a couple thousand computers. They followed that up with the Xerox Star in 1981, selling about 20,000. But PARC had been at it the whole time, inventing all kinds of goodness.  And so always thinking of the next computer, Apple started the Lisa project in 1978, the year after the release of the Apple II, when profits were just starting to roll in.  Story has it that Steve Jobs secured a visit to PARC and made out the back with the idea for a windowing personal computer GUI complete with a desktop metaphor. But not so fast. Apple had already begun the Lisa and Macintosh projects before Jobs visited Xerox. And after the Alto was shown off internally at Xerox in 1977, complete with Mother of All Demo-esque theatrics on stages using remote computers. They had the GUI, the mouse, and networking - while the other computers released that year, the Apple II, Commodore, and TRS-80 were still doing what Dartmouth, the University of Illinois, and others had been doing since the 60s - just at home instead of on time sharing computers.  In other words, enough people in computing had seen the oNLine System from Stanford. The graphical interface was coming and wouldn't be stopped. The mouse had been written about in scholarly journals. But it was all pretty expensive. The visits to PARC, and hiring some of the engineers, helped the teams at Apple figure out some of the problems they didn't even know they had. They helped make things better and they helped the team get there a little quicker. But by then the coming evolution in computing was inevitable.  Still, the Xerox Star was considered a failure. But Apple said “hold my beer” and got to work on a project that would become the Lisa. It started off simply enough: some ideas from Apple executives like Steve Jobs and then 10 people, led by Ken Rothmuller, to develop a system with windows and a mouse. Rothmuller got replaced with John Couch, Apple's 54th employee. Trip Hawkins got a great education in marketing on that team. He would later found Electronic Arts, one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. Larry Tesler from the Stanford AI Lab and then Xerox PARC joined the team to run the system software team. He'd been on ARPANet since writing Pub an early markup language and was instrumental in the Gypsy Word Processor, Smalltalk, and inventing copy and paste. Makes you feel small to think of some of this stuff.  Bruce Daniels, one of the Zork creators from MIT, joined the team from HP as the software manager.  Wayne Rosing, formerly of Digital and Data General, was brought in to design the hardware. He'd later lead the Sparc team and then become a VP of Engineering at Google.   The team grew. They brought in Bill Dresselhaus as a principal product designer for the look and use and design and even packaging. They started with a user interface and then created the hardware and applications.  Eventually there would be nearly 100 people working on the Lisa project and it would run over $150 million in R&D. After 4 years, they were still facing delays and while Jobs had been becoming more and more involved, he was removed from the project. The personal accounts I've heard seem to be closer to other large out of control projects at companies that I've seen though.  The Apple II used that MOS 6502 chip. And life was good. The Lisa used the Motorola 68000 at 5 MHz. This was a new architecture to replace the 6800. It was time to go 32-bit.  The Lisa was supposed to ship with between 1 and 2 megabytes of RAM. It had a built-in 12 inch screen that was 720 x 364.  They got to work building applications, releasing LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaGuide, LisaList, LisaProject, and LisaTerminal. They translated it to British English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.  All the pieces were starting to fall into place. But the project kept growing. And delays. Jobs got booted from the Lisa project amidst concerns it was bloated, behind schedule, wasting company resources, and that Jobs' perfectionism was going to result in a product that could never ship. The cost of the machine was over $10,000.  Thing is, as we'll get into later, every project went over budget and ran into delays for the next decade. Great ideas could then be capitalized on by others - even if a bit watered down. Some projects need to teach us how not to do projects - improve our institutional knowledge about the project or product discipline. That didn't exactly happen with Lisa.  We see times in the history of computing and technology for that matter, when a product is just too far advanced for its time. That would be the Xerox Alto. As costs come down, we can then bring ideas to a larger market. That should have been the Lisa. But it wasn't. While nearly half the cost of a Xerox Star, less than half the number of units were sold. Following the release of the Lisa, we got other desktop metaphors and graphical interfaces. Agat out of the Soviet Union, SGI, Visi (makers of Visicalc), GEM from Digital Research, DeskMate from Tandy, Amiga Intuition, Acorn Master Compact, the Arthur for the ARM, and the initial releases of Microsoft Windows. By the late 1980s the graphical interface was ubiquitous and computers were the easiest to use for the novice than they'd ever been before.  But developers didn't flock to the system as they'd done with the Apple II. You needed a specialized development workstation so why would they? People didn't understand the menuing system yet. As someone who's written command line tools, sometimes they're just easier than burying buttons in complicated graphical interfaces.  “I'm not dead yet… just… badly burned. Or sick, as it were.” Apple released the Lisa 2 in 1984. It went for about half the price and was a little more stable. One reason was that the Twiggy disk drives Apple built for the Lisa were replaced with Sony microfloppy drives. This looked much more like what we'd get with the Mac, only with expansion slots.  The end of the Lisa project was more of a fizzle. After the original Mac was released, Lisa shipped as the Macintosh XL, for $4,000. Sun Remarketing built MacWorks to emulate the Macintosh environment and that became the main application of the Macintosh XL.  Sun Remarketing bought 5,000 of the Mac XLs and improved them somewhat. The last of the 2,700 Lisa computers were buried in a landfill in Utah in 1989. As the whole project had been, they ended up being a write-off. Apple traded them out for a deep discount on the Macintosh Plus. By then, Steve Jobs was long gone, Apple was all about the Mac and the next year General Magic would begin ushering in the era of mobile devices.  The Lisa was a technical marvel at the time and a critical step in the evolution of the desktop metaphor, then nearly twenty years old, beginning at Stanford on NASA and ARPA grants, evolving further at PARC when members of the team went there, and continuing on at Apple. The lessons learned in the Lisa project were immense and helped inform the evolution of the next project, the Mac. But might the product have actually gained traction in the market if Steve Jobs had not been telling people within Apple and outside that the Mac was the next thing, while the Apple II line was still accounting for most of the revenue of the company? There's really no way to tell. The Mac used a newer Motorola 68000 at nearly 8 megahertz so was faster, the OS was cleaner, the machine was prettier. It was smaller, boxier like the newer Japanese cars at the time. It was just better. But it probably couldn't have been if not for the Lisa. Lisa was slower than it was supposed to be. The operating system tended to be fragile. There were recalls. Steve Jobs was never afraid to cannibalize a product to make the next awesome thing. He did so with Lisa. If we step back and look at the Lisa as an R&D project, it was a resounding success. But as a public company, the shareholders didn't see it that way at the time.  So next time there's an R&D project running amuck, think about this. The Lisa changed the world, ushering in the era of the graphical interface. All for the low cost of $50 million after sales of the device are taken out of it. But they had to start anew with the Mac and only bring in the parts that worked. They built out too much technical debt while developing the product to do anything else. While it can be painful - sometimes it's best to start with a fresh circuit board and a blank command line editor. Then we can truly step back and figure out how we want to change the world.

You can find Ken on Twitter at twitter.com/kenshirriff and his blog righto.com.- Soyuz blog post:    http://www.righto.com/2020/01/inside-digital-clock-from-soyuz.html- IBM System/370: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/370- Amdahl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl_Corporation- Build Your Own Z80 Computer:    https://books.google.com/books?id=mVQnFgWzX0AC&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false- Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler- Commodore PET: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET- TRS-80 (Trash-80): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 https://techland.time.com/2012/08/03/trs-80/- Visual 6502: http://www.visual6502.org/- MOS 6502: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502- Metallurgy microscope: https://www.amscope.com/compound-microscopes/metallurgical-microscopes.html- AM2900: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am2900- MOS transistor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET- Cray-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1- Intel 4004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004- Datapoint 2200: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200- Intel 8008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8008- Endianness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness- TTL chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor%E2%80%93transistor_logic- Big Endian and Little Endian:    https://chortle.ccsu.edu/AssemblyTutorial/Chapter-15/ass15_3.html- Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto- Charles Simonyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi- Punched cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card- Why did line printers have 132 columns?:    https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/7838/why-did-line-printers-have-132-columns- Teletype 33: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33- Analogue computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer- Analogue computer thread: https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1223675683387265024- Differential analyser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser- Bitcoin mining on a 1401:    http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old-ibm-1401.html- Mining bitcoin with pencil and paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3dqhixzGVo- Bitcoin mining on a Xerox Alto:    http://www.righto.com/2017/07/bitcoin-mining-on-vintage-xerox-alto.html- Bitcoin mining on the Apollo Guidance computer:    http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html- Colossus computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer- Accounting machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_machine- Memory phosphor: https://www.britannica.com/science/memory-phosphor- Rowhammer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer- Core memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory- Williams tube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube- Core rope memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory- Honeywell 800: https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/h800.html- Honeywell 1800: https://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/doc-4372956da1170/    http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL64-h.html#HONEYWELL-1800- SPARC delayed branching:    https://arcb.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/codeopt/codeopt00/notes/delaybra.html- IBM 360 Model 50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_50- RR Auction: https://www.rrauction.com/

Robert Taylor was one of the true pioneers in computer science. In many ways, he is the string (or glue) that connected the US governments era of supporting computer science through ARPA to innovations that came out of Xerox PARC and then to the work done at Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. Those are three critical aspects of the history of computing and while Taylor didn't write any of the innovative code or develop any of the tools that came out of those three research environments, he saw people and projects worth funding and made sure the brilliant scientists got what they needed to get things done. The 31 years in computing that his stops represented were some of the most formative years for the young computing industry and his ability to inspire the advances that began with Vannevar Bush's 1945 article called “As We May Think” then ended with the explosion of the Internet across personal computers.  Bob Taylor inherited a world where computing was waking up to large crusty but finally fully digitized mainframes stuck to its eyes in the morning and went to bed the year Corel bought WordPerfect because PCs needed applications, the year the Pentium 200 MHz was released, the year Palm Pilot and eBay were founded, the year AOL started to show articles from the New York Times, the year IBM opened a we web shopping mall and the year the Internet reached 36 million people. Excite and Yahoo went public. Sometimes big, sometimes small, all of these can be traced back to Bob Taylor - kinda' how we can trace all actors to Kevin Bacon. But more like if Kevin Bacon found talent and helped them get started, by paying them during the early years of their careers…  How did Taylor end up as the glue for the young and budding computing research industry? Going from tween to teenager during World War II, he went to Southern Methodist University in 1948, when he was 16. He jumped into the US Naval Reserves during the Korean War and then got his masters in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin using the GI Bill. Many of those pioneers in computing in the 60s went to school on the GI Bill. It was a big deal across every aspect of American life at the time - paving the way to home ownership, college educations, and new careers in the trades. From there, he bounced around, taking classes in whatever interested him, before taking a job at Martin Marietta, helping design the MGM-31 Pershing and ended up at NASA where he discovered the emerging computer industry.  Taylor was working on projects for the Apollo program when he met JCR Licklider, known as the Johnny Appleseed of computing. Lick, as his friends called him, had written an article called Man-Computer Symbiosis in 1960 and had laid out a plan for computing that influenced many. One such person, was Taylor. And so it was in 1962 he began and in 1965 that he succeeded in recruiting Taylor away from NASA to take his place running ARPAs Information Processing Techniques Office, or IPTO.  Taylor had funded Douglas Engelbart's research on computer interactivity at Stanford Research Institute while at NASA. He continued to do so when he got to ARPA and that project resulted in the invention of the computer mouse and the Mother of All Demos, one of the most inspirational moments and a turning point in the history of computing.  They also funded a project to develop an operating system called Multics. This would be a two million dollar project run by General Electric, MIT, and Bell Labs. Run through Project MAC at MIT there were just too many cooks in the kitchen. Later, some of those Bell Labs cats would just do their own thing. Ken Thompson had worked on Multics and took the best and worst into account when he wrote the first lines of Unix and the B programming language, then one of the most important languages of all time, C.  Interactive graphical computing and operating systems were great but IPTO, and so Bob Taylor and team, would fund straight out of the pentagon, the ability for one computer to process information on another computer. Which is to say they wanted to network computers. It took a few years, but eventually they brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 they'd awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS would connect a number of sites and route traffic and the first one went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET, the commonly accepted precursor to the Internet.  There was another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force, PLATO out of the University of Illinois. PLATO was meant for teaching and had begun in 1960, but by then they were on version IV, running on a CDC Cyber and the time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network.  Then things get weird. Taylor is sent to Vietnam as a civilian, although his rank equivalent would be a brigadier general. He helped develop the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. Battlefield operations and reporting were entering the computing era. Only problem is, while Taylor was a war veteran and had been deep in the defense research industry for his entire career, Vietnam was an incredibly unpopular war and seeing it first hand and getting pulled into the theater of war, had him ready to leave. This combined with interpersonal problems with Larry Roberts who was running the ARPA project by then over Taylor being his boss even without a PhD or direct research experience. And so Taylor joined a project ARPA had funded at the University of Utah and left ARPA.  There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, who wrote Sketchpad and is known as the Father of Computer Graphics, until he got another offer. This time, from Xerox to go to their new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. One rising star in the computer research world was pretty against the idea of a centralized mainframe driven time sharing system. This was Alan Kay. In many ways, Kay was like Lick. And unlike the time sharing projects of the day, the Licklider and Kay inspiration was for dedicated cycles on processors. This meant personal computers.  The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Taylor was able to pick the best of the scientists he'd helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS.  This new Computer Science Laboratory landed people like Charles Thacker, David Boggs, Butler Lampson, and Bob Sproul and would develop the Xerox Alto, the inspiration for the Macintosh. The Alto though contributed the very ideas of overlapping windows, icons, menus, cut and paste, word processing. In fact, Charles Simonyi from PARC would work on Bravo before moving to Microsoft to spearhead Microsoft Word. Bob Metcalfe on that team was instrumental in developing Ethernet so workstations could communicate with ARPANET all over the growing campus-connected environments. Metcalfe would leave to form 3COM.  SuperPaint would be developed there and Alvy Ray Smith would go on to co-found Pixar, continuing the work begun by Richard Shoup.  They developed the Laser Printer, some of the ideas that ended up in TCP/IP, and the their research into page layout languages would end up with Chuck Geschke, John Warnock and others founding Adobe.  Kay would bring us the philosophy behind the DynaBook which decades later would effectively become the iPad. He would also develop Smalltalk with Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg, ushering in the era of object oriented programming.  They would do pioneering work on VLSI semiconductors, ubiquitous computing, and anything else to prepare the world to mass produce the technologies that ARPA had been spearheading for all those years. Xerox famously did not mass produce those technologies. And nor could they have cornered the market on all of them. The coming waves were far too big for one company alone.  And so it was that PARC, unable to bring the future to the masses fast enough to impact earnings per share, got a new director in 1983 and William Spencer was yet another of three bosses that Taylor clashed with. Some resented that he didn't have a PhD in a world where everyone else did. Others resented the close relationship he maintained with the teams. Either way, Taylor left PARC in 1983 and many of the scientists left with him.  It's both a curse and a blessing to learn more and more about our heroes. Taylor was one of the finest minds in the history of computing. His tenure at PARC certainly saw the a lot of innovation and one of the most innovative teams to have ever been assembled. But as many of us that have been put into a position of leadership, it's easy to get caught up in the politics. I am ashamed every time I look back and see examples of building political capital at the expense of a project or letting an interpersonal problem get in the way of the greater good for a team. But also, we're all human and the people that I've interviewed seem to match the accounts I've read in other books.  And so Taylor's final stop was Digital Equipment Corporation where he was hired to form their Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. They brought us the AltaVista search engine, the Firefly computer, Modula-3 and a few other advances. Taylor retired in 1996 and DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998 and when they were acquired by HP the SRC would get merged with other labs at HP.  From ARPA to Xerox to Digital, Bob Taylor certainly left his mark on computing. He had a knack of seeing the forest through the trees and inspired engineering feats the world is still wrestling with how to bring to fruition. Raw, pure science. He died in 2017. He worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world at ARPA. He inspired passion, and sometimes drama in what Stanford's Donald Knuth called “the greatest by far team of computer scientists assembled in one organization.”  In his final email to his friends and former coworkers, he said “You did what they said could not be done, you created things that they could not see or imagine.” The Internet, the Personal Computer, the tech that would go on to become Microsoft Office, object oriented programming, laser printers, tablets, ubiquitous computing devices. So, he isn't exactly understating what they accomplished in a false sense of humility. I guess you can't do that often if you're going to inspire the way he did.  So feel free to abandon the pretense as well, and go inspire some innovation. Heck, who knows where the next wave will come from. But if we aren't working on it, it certainly won't come. Thank you so much and have a lovely, lovely day. We are so lucky to have you join us on yet another episode. 

Xerox เป็นบริษัทแรก ๆ ที่สร้างเครื่องคอมพิวเตอร์ส่วนบุคคลที่มีหน้าจอ คีย์บอร์ด เมาส์ และ GUI ที่เรียกว่า Xerox Alto ซึ่งในปี 1973 ในช่วงเวลาที่ผู้คนยังคงคิดว่าคอมพิวเตอร์เป็นเมนเฟรมขนาดใหญ่ในห้องคอมพิวเตอร์ Xerox ได้สร้างเครื่องจักรที่ปฏิวัติวงการอย่างบ้าคลั่งในยุคนั้น และมันทำให้เกิดสิ่งต่าง ๆ มากมายที่เปลี่ยนแปลงโลกเราอย่างที่ไม่เคยเป็นมากก่อน แล้วมันเกิดอะไรขึ้น? ที่พวกเขาแทบจะไม่ได้ใช้ประโยชน์จากมัน เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever’s Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ ช่องทางติดตาม ด.ดล Blog เพิ่มเติมได้ที่Fanpage : www.facebook.com/tharadhol.blogBlockdit : www.blockdit.com/tharadhol.blogTwitter : www.twitter.com/tharadholInstragram : instragram.com/tharadholTikTok : tiktok.com/@tharadhol.blogWebsite : www.tharadhol.com

    The first episode of this podcast went up on July 7th 2019. One year later, we've managed to cover a lot of ground, but we're just getting started. Over 70 episodes and so far, my favorite was on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. They may seem disconnected at times, but they're not. There's a large outline and it's all research being included in my next book. The podcast began with an episode on the prehistory of the computer. And we've had episodes on the history of batteries, electricity, superconductors, and more - to build up to what was necessary in order for these advances in computing to come to fruition. We've celebrated Grace Hopper and her contributions. But we'd like to also cover a lot of other diverse voices in computing.  There was a series on Windows, covering Windows 1, 3, , and 95. But we plan to complete that series with a look at 98, Millineum, NT, 2000, and on. We covered Android, CP/M, OS/2 and VMS but want to get into the Apple operating systems, SUN, and Linux, etc. Speaking of Apple… We haven't gotten started with Apple. We covered the lack of an OS story in the 90s - but there's a lot to unpack around the founding of Apple, Steve Jobs and Woz, and the re-emergence of Apple and their impact there.  And since that didn't happen in a vacuum, there were a lot of machines in that transition from the PC being a hobbyist market to being a full-blown industry. We talked through Radioshack, Commodore, the Altair, the Xerox Alto,  We have covered some early mainframes like the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, ENIAC, the story of Z-1 and Zuse, and even supercomputers like Cray, but still need to tell the later story, bridging the gap between the mainframe, the minicomputer, and traditional servers we might find in a data center today.  We haven't told the history of the Internet. We've touched on bits and pieces, but want to get into those first nodes that got put onto ARPAnet, the transition to NSFnet, and the merging of the nets into the Internet. And we covered sites like Friendster, Wikipedia, and even the Netscape browser, but the explosion of the Internet has so many other stories left to tell. Literally a lifetime's worth.  For example, we covered Twitter and Snapchat but Google and Facebook We covered the history of object-oriented languages. We also covered BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, ALGOL, Java, But still want to look at AWS and the modern web service architecture that's allowed for an explosion of apps and web apps.  Mobility. We covered the Palm Pilot and a little on device management, but still need to get into the iPhone and Samsung and the underlying technology that enabled mobility.  And enterprise software and compliance. Knowing the past informs each Investment thesis. We covered Y Combinator but there are a lot of other VC/Private equity firms to look at. But what I thought I knew of the past isn't always correct. As an example, coming from the Apple space, we have a hero worship of Steve Jobs that, for example, reading the Walter Isaacson book often conflicts with. He was a brilliant man, but complicated. And the more I read and research, the more I need to unpack many of own assumptions across the industry.  I was here for a lot of this, yet my understanding is still not what it could be. Interviews from people who wrote code to put on lunar landers, who invented technology like spreadsheets,  I wish more people could talk about their experiences openly, but even 40 years later, some are still bound by NDAs I've learned so much and I look forward to learning so much more!

Oh no, are you guys ready for some Ben rants? At least we cover some of our favorite Youtube channels and two good games - Atari's Sprint 8 and Pool on the Xerox Alto.Youtube channels - juliaplaysgrooveDavid BullMLW WiffleballJoão MedeirosDeadlySlobkurtjmacWebsite - https://historyvgpodcast.wixsite.com/historyofvideogamingTwitter - https://twitter.com/HistoryofVideo1Email - historyvgpodcast@gmail.comHosts - Ben & WesMusic - Arranged and recorded by BenCan you guess this week's transition music?

A look at the use of skunkworks projects to circumvent bureaucratic hurdles. Full transcript of the episode with links to additional sources follows. === It was 1943. The world was at war. German engineering was producing an array of terrifying weapons, and even before the war, had already demonstrated working jet aircraft.  German jet fighters and bombers could potentially leave the Allies nearly helpless to defend against this technological threat with their own outmoded fleet of propeller-driven craft.  In this ecosystem of urgency, the US government approached airplane manufacturer Lockheed Martin with an incredible challenge. They wanted an American jet fighter to be developed. It would need to fly 600 MPH, maneuver and perform in intense aerial combat, and as if that weren't absurd enough, it needed to be ready to demonstrate in 180 days. Further constraints existed. Lockheed Martin was already using all of its floorspace for the war effort. How would it come up with a way to execute on this incredible directive? The answer came in the form of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Programs (ADP), now commonly known as "Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works." The ADP is now the most famous example of the rapid solution approach now generically referred to as a "skunkworks project." In the earliest part of the 1980s the personal computer market was dominated by Apple and Commodore, but IBM - who dominated the server-rooms of the IT departments at the time - had taken notice. IBM wanted to get a piece of the home user and desktop computer market, but - as dramatically stated in the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, IBM's own estimate is that due to bureaucracy and internal controls, it would take nine months just to ship an empty box.  The solution around this was a skunkworks project.  IBM had been experimenting with "Independent Business Units" that could shrug off the limitations of normal IBM procedures and act swiftly to get things done. The skunkworks project it undertook became the IBM PC and the project's design choices became the new paradigm for business computing. The name "Skunk Works" has an interesting origin. Because the group tasked with this 180 day miracle had no floorspace, they had to set up shop under a circus tent by a plastics factory in Burbank, California.  The fumes from the factory reminded workers of a recurring feature of the popular Lil' Abner comic strip, a smelly factory outside the fictional town of Dogpatch, Kentucky known as the "Skonk Works." This became the name of the group until the copyright owners of the Lil' Abner comic strip complained in the early 1960s and Lockheed Martin formally changed it to "Skunk Works" to appease the lawyers.  The name stuck and has become synonymous with this kind of project. Another famous skunkworks project was the Apple Macintosh.  The history of that project has become quasi-mythical because of books like Insanely Great, by Steven Levy and Revolution in the Valley by pioneering Mac programmer Andy Hertzfeld.  This story was also heavily featured in PBS' Triumph of the Nerds. In 1981, Apple was primarily funded by sales of the Apple II, but it was desperately trying to create the next revolutionary personal computer. After some internal struggles, Steve Jobs took over a project that had originally been envisioned by Jef Raskin as a friendly and inexpensive home computer. Jobs changed the focus to make a revolutionary graphical user interface based machine. He embraced the "rebel" mentality for his team, famously telling them "It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy." The team took this mentality seriously enough to hoist a Jolly Roger flag over the remote office complex where the Mac team worked. While it was not an instant success financially, the Macintosh project would also change the world. You can purchase a hand-painted Mac Jolly Roger flag from original artist Susan Kare (but they are pricey!) Apple itself (and Microsoft, for that matter) took its transformative windows and desktop metaphor from an even earlier and more innovative skunkworks project - one run by XEROX. The big copier company had setup its legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) facility and by the time Apple's Mac team got to visit, they had the Xerox Alto, a personal computer decades ahead of its time. Ethernet, the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the computer mouse, object-oriented programming (OOP), email, laser printers and a full concept of what is now the "modern office" all existed almost two decades before they would become ubiquitous parts of modern business.  1979 Xerox Alto commercial There's a lesson to be learned from the Xerox Alto, but we'll get back to that. Most skunkworks projects fail. We remember the successes but can't recall the failures because they never make it across the finish line into our consciousness.  Researchers call this "Survivorship Bias" and it's important to keep in mind, but it also suggests a key concept to potential success:  a successful skunkworks project keeps trying until it finds something that works.  In Silicon Valley, where tech startups rise and fall like sparks above a campfire, the innovations and lessons learned have been distilled down into the pithy phrase "fail fast, fail often."  As with any catchphrase, it is frequently misapplied, misunderstood, and misattributed - but the core lesson is to try things, see if they work, change if they don't, and keep trying until you find the formulation that succeeds.  Of course, it helps to have a genius team. The original Lockheed Martin Skunk Works project was run by legendary engineer Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson. His team consisted of 23 designers and 30 mechanics. Under a circus tent in the smelly shadow of the plastics factory, Johnson and his team put together a prototype in less than 150 days. That jet became the P-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational jet fighter. The same "skunkworks'' approach would be used to create the U2 Spy Plane, the SR71 Blackbird and the stealth fighter. Different leaders, different engineers and mechanics, but the same "outsiders on the inside'' method would drive their success. The P-80 Shooting Star (wikimedia) Apple's Macintosh team was full of superb engineers and programmers and their work continues to influence and inspire modern computing. Having Steve Jobs at the helm of the project, while certainly interpersonally challenging for the team, was also undeniably inspiring as well. The Mac team would dissolve shortly after the initial product release despite its accomplishments. Future successful Apple products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad have not become synonymous with the skunkworks approach. The original Apple Macintosh (wikimedia) Most skunkworks projects are conducted by large businesses and should be funded accordingly, but sometimes these projects are done through stealth by rogue leadership. Often these are computer-related projects and have become known as Stealth IT or Rogue IT. As we'll discuss in a moment, the rise of such projects signals that your company has serious challenges that need to be identified. Such projects can be the result of interpersonal differences between the IT management and the business divisions, an IT delivery ability insufficiently fast at delivery, departmental functional needs not being addressed, or a variety of other causes. The emergence of such rogue efforts can also indicate that your knowledge workers have innovative ideas and are yearning to see them made real. Stealth IT is a bigger topic than we can address here, but it will be a future episode. These aren't technically skunkworks projects and therefore have to overcome not just the limits of doing the work without the blessing and funding of management but also with the risk of possible rejection of their output because of the manner in which it was created. Skunkworks projects have historically been behind amazing innovation, but they are not a magic potion for success. There are specific places where they've been most helpful.  Because of the wildly different backgrounds that have driven the use of skunkworks projects, some of the things one can infer from looking at the examples may seem conflicted, but here are a few observations: Skunkworks projects are often used to break through corporate bureaucracy to allow quick innovation. Before throwing together a skunkworks project, you need to make sure that the obstacles faced are the kind that can be worked around.  For instance, if the obstacles are statutory or regulatory, then a skunkworks project might not only be ineffective, but illegal. Kelly Johnson came up with a set of 14 rules for running a skunkworks project.  I will put a link to those in the show notes. His rules are written specifically for a government contract aeronautics industry, but some key points are still applicable.  I'm going to distill a few of these: A skunkworks project's leadership should effectively have total control of the project, reporting only to a limited and clearly identified executive management structure.  The project should have designated office space away from the regular workers. Isolation and exceptionalism are vital to making a skunkworks effective. Restrict access to the team. Use a small team. Use an exceptional team. Minimize the number of reports required. Let the team focus on accomplishment, not documentation - but appropriate documentation must be part of the effort. Fund the project adequately. Reward your team because you'll be asking it to do the extraordinary. A skunkworks project calls for exceptional workers.  It will be an extraordinary challenge to manage a team that will likely contain the arrogant and potentially iconoclastic. The lead will manage not just the technical challenges but also the interpersonal ones.  Skunkworks teams are a means for building entrepreneurial spirit in a mature - perhaps even stagnant - corporate environment. They are not typically suitable for start-ups themselves. Finally, a skunkworks project must deliver! To quote Steve Jobs, "real artists ship." Skunkworks projects fit nicely into the human need for myth. The narrative of a rogue band of genius workers saving the company or even the world from some disastrous situation is literally the formula for thousands of movies, books and TV shows. But is that really the way business should get done?   As much as I understand the visceral appeal of such narratives, it is possible that a successful company that is not using skunkworks is actually a sign of health. There are other ways to achieve innovation. Google famously has its 80/20 rule. Since the mid-2000s, it has encouraged its workforce to spend 80% of their time on primary work tasks, but 20% on innovative side projects. But even with all that, the company set up its X-project division, which is a skunkworks-style incubator.  There is another way, a second route to achieving innovation, and that is adopting an internal policy of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). In software, CI/CD means instead of producing single massive product rollouts, the engineers continuously provide updates and improvements with additional features and fixes. This becomes a reliable and continuous stream of innovation that never lets the project grow stale. This kind of corporate culture can avoid the need for a skunkworks approach because it is literally fed on the input and feedback from the users and that is a major pipeline for innovation and improvement.  The bigger a company gets, the more mired in complex organizational structures, the slower it tends to move. The corporation becomes a victim of inertia, slow to turn or maneuver. A corporation is like a cargo ship maneuvering through an icy ocean. Icebergs are a threat that requires maneuverability, but bureaucracy can also be an ice-flow that stifles movement. We could think of our skunkworks projects as a kind of icebreaker, a ship that specializes in plowing through such ice and making safe passage for the bigger cargo ships. The CI/CD in this metaphor would be a large, maneuverable ship that avoids the ice entirely.  I wondered, "Could the need for a skunkworks project counterintuitively be a canary-in-the-coalmine that a corporation is in danger of getting stuck in the ice?" But then the mixed-metaphor police gave me a warning ticket, so I decided to check and see what companies are still using this approach. Samsung, Google, Ford, Staples, IBM, and many massive corporations still use the skunkworks approach to foster innovation outside of bureaucratic constraints. I suspect there is some risk that business journalists have, to some degree, confused the skunkworks approach with the kind of "pure research" labs of the type that AT&T famously ran.  Which brings us back to Xerox.   In his book, The Master Switch, Tim Wu describes multiple examples of how massive corporations use their resources to find innovative solutions to problems, but then discover that their findings are so disruptive they threaten the structure currently funding their existence. Rather than monetize the new products at the risk of disrupting their own status quo, they succumb to the temptation to patent and bury the technologies.  Again and again, this approach gives years to decades of protection to the old ways, but inevitably some outsider will find an unpatented approach to these institutionally suppressed innovations. It is shameful, but understandable, that innovations are often stifled because it is easier in the short term to maintain the status quo. It takes extraordinary leadership and vision to risk disruption in order to overcome the inertia of the mentality of "if it ain't broke don't fix it."  Such corporate pivots are more often the result of desperation than insight.  Which brings us back to Xerox.  The PARC team handed Xerox the future of business, but Xerox leadership didn't know what to do with it.  Unexploited by Xerox, the various innovations of PARC crept out into the world either directly at the hands of individual creators, or through the emulation of their innovations by competitors like Apple. Innovations are going to happen - but who will control them? Suppression of innovation is a dead end, it just sometimes takes a decade or more to prove it. So what is the right answer to your innovation needs? Do you need a skunkworks project? Do you need to adopt CI/CD in your organization? Will your stifling of discovery make your smartest and boldest workers break off and become entrepreneurs?  There's lots to consider here. As always, Apex Process Consultants are here to help you figure this out with our team of expert consultants and software tools designed to foster innovation and help you accelerate YOUR business transformation. Check our show notes for links about the companies and people in this episode.

Today we're going to honor Larry Tesler, who died on February 17th, 2020. Larry Tesler is probably best known for early pioneering work on graphical user interfaces. He was the person that made up cut, copy, and paste as a term. Every time you say “just paste that in there,” you're honoring his memory. I've struggled with how to write the episode or episodes about Xerox PARC. It was an amazing crucible of technical innovation. But they didn't materialize huge commercial success for Xerox. Tesler was one of the dozens of people who contributed to that innovation. He studied with John McCarthy and other great pioneers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 60s. What they called artificial intelligence back then we might call computer science today. Being in the Bay Area in the 60s, Tesler got active in war demonstrations and disappeared off to a commune in Oregon until he got offered a job by Alan Kay. You might remember Kay from earlier episodes as the one behind Smalltalk and the DynaBook. They'd both been at The Mother of All Demos where Doug Englebart showed the mouse, the first hyperlinks, and the graphical user interface and they'd been similarly inspired about the future of computing. So Tesler moves back down in 1970. I can almost hear Three Dog Night's Mama Told Me Not To Come booming out of the 8track of his car stereo on the drive. Or hear Nixon and Kissinger on the radio talking about why they invaded Cambodia. So he gets to PARC and there's a hiring freeze at Xerox, who after monster growth was starting to get crushed by bureaucracy, so was in a hiring freeze. Les Earnest from back at Stanford had him write one of the first markup language implementations, which he called Pub. That became the inspiration for Don Knuth's TeX and Brian Reid's Scribe and an ancestor of JavaScript and PHP. They find a way to pay him, basically bringing him on as a contractor. He works on Gypsy, the first real word processor. At the time, they'd figured out a way of using keystrokes to switch modes for documents. Think of how in vi or pico, you switch to a mode in order to insert or move, but they were applying metadata to an object, like making text bold or copying text from one part of a document to another. Those modes were terribly cumbersome and due to very simple mistakes, people would delete their documents. So he and Tim Mott started looking at ways to get rid of modes. That's when they came up with the idea to make a copy and paste function. And to use the term cut, copy, and paste. Thee are now available in all “what you see is what you get” or WYSIWYG interfaces. Oh, he also coined that term while at PARC, although maybe not the acronym. And he became one of the biggest proponents of making software “user-friendly” when he was at PARC. By the way, that's another term he coined, with relation to computing at least. He also seems to be the first to have used the term browser after building a browser for a friend to more easily write code. He'd go on to work on the Xerox Alto and NoteTaker. That team, which would be led by Adele Goldberg after Bob Taylor and then Alan Kay left PARC got a weird call to show these kids from Apple around. The scientists from PARC didn't think much of these hobbyists but in 1979 despite Goldberg's objections, Xerox management let the fox in the chicken coup when they let Steve Jobs and some other early Apple employees get a tour of PARC. Tesler would be one of the people giving Jobs a demo. And it's no surprise that after watching Xerox not ship the Alto, that Tesler would end up at Apple 6 months later. After Xerox bonuses were distributed of course. At Apple, he'd help finish the Lisa. It cost far less than the Xerox Star, but it wouldn't be until it went even further down-market to become the Macintosh that all of their hard work at Xerox and then Apple would find real success. Kay would become a fellow at Apple in 1984, as many of the early great pioneers left PARC. Tesler was the one that added object-oriented programming to Pascal, used to create the Lisa Toolkit and then he helped bring those into MacApp as class libraries for developing the Mac GUI. By 1990, Jobs had been out of Apple for 5 years and Tesler became the Vice President of the Newton project at Apple. He'd see Alan Kay's concept of the digital assistant made into a reality. He would move into the role of Chief Scientist at Apple once the project was complete. There, he made his own mini-PARC but would shut down the group and leave after Apple entered their darkest age in 1997. Tesler had been a strong proponent, acting as the VP of AppleNet and pushing more advanced networking options prior to his departure. He would strike out and build Stagecast, a visual programming language that began life as an object-oriented teaching language called Cocoa. Apple would reuse the name Cocoa when they ported in OpenStep, so not the Cocoa many developers will remember or maybe even still use. Stagecast would run until Larry decided to join the executive team at Amazon. At Amazon, Larry was the VP of Shopping Experience and would start a group on usability, doing market research, usability research, and lots of data mining. He would stay there for 4 years before moving on to Yahoo!, spreading the gospel about user experience and design, managing up to 200 people at a time and embedding designers and researchers into product teams, a practice that's become pretty common in UX. He would also be a fellow at Yahoo! before taking that role at 23 and me and ending his long and distinguished career as a consultant, helping make the world a better place. He conceptualized the Law of Conservation of Complexity, or Tesler's Law, in 1984 states that “Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?” But One of my favorite quotes of his “I have been mistakenly identified as “the father of the graphical user interface for the Macintosh”. I was not. However, a paternity test might expose me as one of its many grandparents.” The first time I got to speak with him, he was quick to point out that he didn't come up with much; he was simply carrying on the work started by Englebart. He was kind and patient with me. When Larry passed, we lost one of the founders of the computing world as we know it today. He lived and breathed user experience and making computers more accessible. That laser focus on augmenting human capabilities by making the inventions easier to use and more functional is probably what he'd want to be known for above all else. He was a good programmer but almost too empathetic not to end up with a focus on the experience of the devices. I'll include a link to an episode he did on the 99% Invisible episode in the show notes if you want to hear more from him directly ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men ). Everyone except the people who get royalties from White Out loved what he did for computing. He was a visionary and one of the people that ended up putting the counterculture into computing culture. He was a pioneer in User Experience and a great human. Thank you Larry for all you did for us. And thank you, listeners, in advance or in retrospect, for your contributions.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate the future! Today we're going to look at one of the more underwhelming operating systems released: Windows 1.0. Doug Englebart released the NLS, or oN-Line System in 1968. It was expensive to build, practically impossible to replicate, and was only made possible by NASA and ARPA grants. But it introduced the world to the computer science research community to what would be modern video monitors, windowing systems, hypertext, and the mouse. Modern iterations of these are still with us today, as is a much more matured desktop metaphor. Some of his research team ended up at Xerox PARC and the Xerox Alto was released in 1973, building on many of the concepts and continuing to improve upon them. They sold about 2,000 Altos for around $32,000. As the components came down in price, Xerox tried to go a bit more mass market with the Xerox Star in 1981. They sold about 25,000 for about half the price. The windowing graphics got better, the number of users were growing, the number of developers were growing, and new options for components were showing up all over the place. Given that Xerox was a printing company, the desktop metaphor continued to evolve. Apple released the Lisa in 1983. They sold 10,000 for about $10,000. Again, the windowing system and desktop metaphor continued on and Apple quickly released the iconic Mac shortly thereafter, introducing much better windowing and a fully matured desktop metaphor, becoming the first computer considered mass market that was shipped with a graphical user interface. It was revolutionary and they sold 280,000 in the first year. The proliferation of computers in our daily lives and the impact on the economy was ready for the j-curve. And while IBM had shown up to compete in the PC market, they had just been leapfrogged by Apple. Jobs would be forced out of Apple the following year, though. By 1985, Microsoft had been making software for a long time. They had started out with BASIC for the Altair and had diversified, bringing BASIC to the Mac and releasing a DOS that could run on a number of platforms. And like many of those early software companies, it could have ended there. In a masterful stroke of business, Bill Gates ended up with their software on the IBM PCs that Apple had just basically made antiques - and they'd made plenty of cash off of doing so. But then Gates sees Visi On at COMDEX and it's not surprise that the Microsoft version of a graphical user interface would look a bit like Visi, a bit like what Microsoft had seen from Xerox PARC on a visit in 1983, and of course, with elements that were brought in from the excellent work the original Mac team had made. And of course, not to take anything away from early Microsoft developers, they added many of their own innovations as well. Ultimately though, it was a 16-bit shell that allowed for multi-tasking and sat on top of the Microsoft DOS. Something that would continue on until the NT lineage of operating systems fully supplanted the original Windows line, which ended with Millineum Edition. Windows 1.0 was definitely a first try. IBM TopView had shipped that year as well. I've always considered it more of a windowing system, but it allowed multitasking and was object-oriented. It really looked more like a DOS menu system. But the Graphics Environment Manager or GEM had direct connections to Xerox PARC through Lee Lorenzen. It's hard to imagine but at the time CP/M had been the dominant operating system and so GEM could sit on top of it or MS-DOS and was mostly found on Atari computers. That first public release was actually 1.01 and 1.02 would come 6 months later, adding internationalization with 1.03 continuing that trend. 1.04 would come in 1987 adding support for Via graphics and a PS/2 mouse. Windows 1 came with many of the same programs other vendors supplied, including a calculator, a clipboard viewer, a calendar, a pad for writing that still exists called Notepad, a painting tool, and a game that went by its original name of Reversi, but which we now call Othello. One important concept is that Windows was object-oriented. As with any large software project, it wouldn't have been able to last as long as it did if it hadn't of been. One simplistic explanation for this paradigm is that it had an API and there was a front-end that talked to the kernel through those APIs. Microsoft hadn't been first to the party and when they got to the party they certainly weren't the prettiest. But because the Mac OS wasn't just a front-end that made calls to the back-end, Apple would be slow to add multi-tasking support, which came in their OS 5, in 1987. And they would be slow to adopt new technology thereafter, having to bring Steve Jobs back to Apple because they had no operating system of the future, after failed projects to build one. Windows 1.0 had executable files (or exe files) that could only be run in the Windowing system. It had virtual memory. It had device drivers so developers could write and compile binary programs that could communicate with the OS APIs, including with device drivers. One big difference - Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld spent a lot of time on frame buffers and moving pixels so they could have overlapping windows. The way Windows handled how a window appeared were in .ini (pronounced like any) files and that kind of thing couldn't be done in a window manager without clipping, or leaving artifacts behind. And so it was that, by the time I was in college, I was taught by a professor that Microsoft had stolen the GUI concept from Apple. But it was an evolution. Sure, Apple took it to the masses but before that, Xerox had borrowed parts from NLS and NLS had borrowed pointing devices from Whirlwind. And between Xerox and Microsoft, there had been IBM and GEM. Each evolved and added their own innovations. In fact, many of the actual developers hopped from company to company, spreading ideas and philosophies as they went. But Windows had shipped. And when Jobs called Bill Gates down to Cupertino, shouting that Gates had ripped off Apple, Gates responded with one of my favorite quotes in the history of computing: "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." The thing I've always thought was missing from that Bill Gates quote is that Xerox had a rich neighbor they stole the TV from first, called ARPA. And the US Government was cool with it - one of the main drivers of decades of crazy levels of prosperity filling their coffers with tax revenues. And so, the next version of Windows, Windows 2.0 would come in 1987. But Windows 1.0 would be supported by Microsoft for 16 years. No other operating system has been officially supported for so long. And by 1988 it was clear that Microsoft was going to win this fight. Apple filed a lawsuit claiming that Microsoft had borrowed a bit too much of their GUI. Apple had licensed some of the GUI elements to Microsoft and Apple identified over 200 things, some big, like title bars, that made up a copyrightable work. That desktop metaphor that Susan Kare and others on the original Mac team had painstakingly developed. Well, turns out that they live on in every OS because Judge Vaughn Walker on the Ninth Circuit threw out the lawsuit. And Microsoft would end up releasing Windows 3 in 1990, shipping on practically every PC built since. And so I'll leave this story here. But we'll do a dedicated episode for Windows 3 because it was that important. Thank you to all of the innovators who brought these tools to market and ultimately made our lives better. Each left their mark with increasingly small and useful enhancements to the original. We owe them so much no matter the platform we prefer. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in for this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you.

Dans cet onzième épisode d’Apple Différemment, nous avons tout d’abord plaisir à nous retrouver et à échanger sur l’actualité d’Apple, de la sortie de iOS 13, iPadOS et de macOS Catalina. Quinze minutes avant le début de l’enregistrement, Apple rendait public ses nouveaux AirPods Pro ! Notre sujet principale traite du véritable coût financier et … Continuer la lecture de Le véritable coût d’un iPhone, les AirPods Pro et le Xerox Alto --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/applediff/message

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to cover a special moment in time. Picture this if you will. It's 1968. A collection of some 1,000 of the finest minds in computing is sitting in the audience of the San Francisco Civic Center. They're at a joint conference of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fall Join Computer Conference in San Francisco. They're waiting to see the a session called A research center for augmenting human intellect. Many had read Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” Atlantic article in 1946 that signified the turning point that inspired so many achievements over the previous 20 years. Many had witnessed the evolution from the mainframe to the transistorized computer to timesharing systems. The presenter for this session would be Douglas Carl Engelbart. ARPA had strongly recommended he come to finally make a public appearance. Director Bob Taylor in fact was somewhat adamant about it. The talk was six years in the making and ARPA and NASA were ready to see what they had been investing in. ARPA had funded his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI, or the Stanford Research Institute. The grad instigator J.C.R. Licklider had started the funding when ARPA was still called DARPA in 1963 based on a paper Engelbart published in 1962. But it had really been going since Engelbart got married in 1950 and realized computers could be used to improve human capabilities, to harness the collective intellect, to facilitate truly interactive computing and to ultimately make the world a better place. Englebart was 25. He'd been from Oregon where he got his Bachelors in 48 after serving in World War II as a radar tech. He then come to Berkely in 53 for is Masters, sating through 1955 to get his PhD. He ended up at Stanford's SRI. There, he hired people like Don Andrews, Bill Paxton, Bill English, and Jeff Rulifson. And today Engelbart was ready to show the world what his team had been working on. The computer was called the oNLine System, or NLS. Bill English would direct things onsite. Because check this out, not all presenters were onsite on that day in 1968. Instead, some were at ARC in Menlo Park, 30 miles away. To be able to communicate onsite they used two 1200 baud modems connecting over a leased line to their office. But they would also use two microwave links. And that was for something crazy: video. The lights went dark. The OnLine Computer was projected onto a 22 foot high screen using an Eidophor video projector. Bill English would flip the screen up as the lights dimmed. The audience was expecting a tall, thin man to come out to present. Instead, they saw Doug Englebart on the screen in front of them. The one behind the camera, filming Engelbart, was Stewart Russel Brand, the infamous editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It seems Englebart was involved in more than just computers. But people destined to change the world have always travelled in the same circles I supposed. Englebart's face came up on the screen, streaming in from all those miles away. And the screen they would switch back and forth to. That was the Online System, or NLS for short. The camera would come in from above Englebart's back and the video would be transposed with the text being entered on the screen. This was already crazy. But when you could see where he was typing, there was something… well, extra. He was using a pointing device in his right hand. This was the first demo of a computer mouse Which he had applied for a patent for in 1967. He called it that because it had a tail which was the cabe that connected the wooden contraption to the computer. Light pens had been used up to this point, but it was the first demonstration of a mouse and the team had actually considered mounting it under the desk and using a knee to move the pointer.But they decided that would just be too big a gap for normal people to imagine and that the mouse would be simpler. Engelbart also used a device we might think of more like a macro pad today. It was modeled after piano keys. We'd later move this type of functionality onto the keyboard using various keystrokes, F keys, and a keyboard and in the case of Apple, command keys. He then opened a document on his screen. Now, people didn't do a lot of document editing in 1968. Really, computers were pretty much used for math at that point. At least, until that day. That document he opened. He used hyperlinks to access content. That was the first real demo of clickable hypertext. He also copied text in the document. And one of the most amazing aspects of the presentation was that you kinda' felt like he was only giving you a small peak into what he had. You see, before the demo, they thought he was crazy. Many were probably only there to see a colossal failure of a demo. But instead they saw pure magic. Inspiration. Innovation. They saw text highlighted. They saw windows on screens that could be resized. They saw the power of computer networking. Video conferencing. A stoic Engelbart was clearly pleased with his creation. Bill Paxton and Jeff Rulifson were on the other side, helping with some of the text work. His style worked well with the audience, and of course, it's easy to win over an audience when they have just been wowed by your tech. But more than that, his inspiration was so inspiring that you could feel it just watching the videos. All these decades later. can watching those videos. Engelbart and the team would receive a standing ovation. And to show it wasn't smoke and mirrors, ARC let people actually touch the systems and Engelbart took questions. Many people involved would later look back as though it was an unfinished work. And it was. Andy van Dam would later say Everybody was blown away and thought it was absolutely fantastic and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact. People thought it was too far out and they were still working on their physical teletypes, hadn't even migrated to glass teletypes yet. But that's not really fair or telling the whole story. In 1969 we got the Mansfield Amendment - which slashed the military funding pure scientific research. After that, the budget was cut and the team began to disperse, as was happening with a lot of the government-backed research centers. Xerox was lucky enough to hire Bob Taylor, and many others immigrated to Xerox PARC, or Palo Alto Research Center, was able to take the concept and actually ship a device in 1973, although not as mass marketable yet as later devices would be. Xerox would ship the Alto in 1973. The Alto would be the machine that inspired the Mac and therefore Windows - so his ideas live on today. His own team got spun out of Stanford and sold, becoming Tymshare and then McDonnel Douglas. He continued to have more ideas but his concepts were rarely implemented at McDonnel Douglas so he finally left in 1986, starting the Bootstrapp Alliance, which he founded with his daughter. But he succeeded. He wanted to improve the plight of man and he did. Hypertext and movable screens directly influenced a young Alan Kay who was in the audience and was inspired to write Smalltalk. The Alto at Xerox also inspired Andy van Dam, who built the FRESS hypertext system based on many of the concepts from the talk as well. It also did multiple windows, version control on documents, intradocument hypertext linking, and more. But, it was hard to use. Users needed to know complex commands just to get into the GUI screens. He was also still really into minicomputers and timesharing, and kinda' missed that the microcomputer revolution was about to hit hard. The hardware hacker movement that was going on all over the country, but most concentrated in the Bay Area, was about to start the long process of putting a computer, and now mobile device, in every home in the world. WIth smaller and smaller and faster chips, the era of the microcomputer would transition into the era of the client and server. And that was the research we were transitioning to as we moved into the 80s. Charles Irby was a presentter as well, being a designer of NLS. He would go on to lead the user interface design work on the Xerox star before founding a company then moving on to VP of development for General Magic, a senior leader at SGI and then the leader of the engineering team that developed the Nintendo 64. Bob Sproull was in the audience watching all this and would go on to help design the Xerox Alto, the first laser printer, and write the Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics before becoming a professor at Conegie Mellon and then ending up helping create Sun Microsystems Laboratories, becoming the director and helping design asuynchronous processors. Butler Lampson was also there, a found of Xerox PARC, where the Alto was built and co-creator of Ethernet. Bill Paxton (not the actor) would join him at PARC and later go on to be an early founder of Adobe. In 2000, Engelbart would receive the National Medal of Technology for his work. He also He got the Turing Award in 1997, the Locelace Medal in 2001. He would never lose his belief in the collective intelligence. He wrote Boosting Our Collective IQ in 1995 and it has Englebart passed away in 2013. He will forever be known as the inventor of the mouse. But he gave us more. He wanted to augment the capabilities of humans, allowing us to do more, rather than replace us with machines. This was in contrast to SAIL and the MIT AI Lab where they were just doing research for the sake of research. The video of his talk is on YouTube, so click on the links in the show notes if you'd like to access it and learn more about such a great innovator. He may not have brought a mass produced system to market, but as with Vanevar Bush's article 20 years before, the research done is a turning point in history; a considerable milestone on the path to the gleaming world we now live in today. The NLS teaches us that while you might not achieve commercial success with years of research, if you are truly innovative, you might just change the world. Sometimes the two simply aren't mutually exclusive. And when you're working on a government grant, they really don't have to be. So until next time, dare to be bold. Dare to change the world, and thank you for tuning in to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Have a great day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

In the early 1970s, Xerox ruled the office copier world and had the vision to establish the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as an innovation catalyst for new technologies that would enable it to expand its place as a technology leader.  PARC was the place where the first personal computer, computer network, graphical user interfaces, and computer mice all had their start—none of which became part of the next phase of Xerox.How might the world be different today if Xerox had the vision to be the company that delivered the visionary advances spawned by its own creation—PARC—to the world?The commercial for the Xerox Alto—arguably the first “personal computer”:https://youtu.be/M0zgj2p7Ww4Steve Jobs Audio: Interview from “Triumph of the Nerds” (1996) Theme Music: Conquer by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.comWebsite: www.aforkintimepodcast.comE-Mail: aforkintimepodcast@gmail.comYou can follow A Fork In Time on….Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aforkintimeTwitter: @AFITPodcastPinterest: www.pinterest.com/aforkintimeIf you enjoy the podcast, you can help by supporting us via Patreon.https://www.patreon.com/aforkintimeSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/aforkintime)

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is about the Xerox Alto. Close your eyes and… Wait, don't close your eyes if you're driving. Or on a bike. Or boating. Or… Nevermind, don't close your eyes But do use your imagination, and think of what it would be like if you opened your phone… Also don't open your phone while driving. But imagine opening your phone and ordering a pizza using a black screen with green text and no pictures. If that were the case, you probably wouldn't use an app to order a pizza. Without a graphical interface, or GUI, games wouldn't have such wide appeal. Without a GUI you wouldn't probably use a computer nearly as much. You might be happier, but we'll leave that topic to another podcast. Let's jump in our time machine and head back to 1973. The Allman Brothers stopped drinking mushroom tea long enough to release Ramblin' Man, Elton John put out Crocodile Rock, both Carpenters were still alive, and Free Bird was released by Lynard Skynyrd. Nixon was the president of the United States, and suspends offensive actions in North Vietnam, 5 days before being sworn into his second term as president. He wouldn't make it all four years of course because not long after, Watergate broke, and by the end of the year Nixon claimed “I'm not a crook”. The first handheld cell call is made by Martin Cooper, the World Trade Center opens, Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes, Skylab 3 is launched, OJ was a running back instead of running from the police, being gay was removed from the DSM, and the Endangered Species Act was passed in the US. But many a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox Parc, probably didn't notice much of this as they were hard at work at doing something many people in Palo Alto talk about these days but rarely do: changing the world. In 1973, Xerox released the Alto, which had the first computer operating system designed from the ground up to support a GUI. It was inspired by the oN-Line System (or NLS for short), which had been designed by Douglas Engelbert of the Stanford Research Institute in the 60s on a DARPA grant. They'd spent a year developing it and that was the day to shine for Doublers Steward, John Ellenby, Bob Nishimura, and Abbey Silverstone. The Alto ran the Alto Executive operating system, had a 2.5 megabyte hard drive, ran with four 74181 MSI chips that ran at a 5.88 MHz clock speed and came with between 96 and 512 kiloBytes of memory. It came with a mouse, which had been designed by Engelbert for NLS. The Alto I ran a pilot of 30 and then an additional 90 were produced and sold before the Alto II was released. Over the course of 10 years, Xerox would sell 2000 more. Some of the programming concepts were borrowed from the Data General Nova, designed by Edson de Castro, a former DEC product manager responsible for the PDP-8. The Alto could run 16 cooperative, prioritized tasks. It was about the size of a mini refrigerator and had a CRTO on a swivel. It also came with an Ethernet connection, a keyboard, a three-button mouse a disk drive, and first a wheel mouse, later followed up with a ball mouse. That monitor was in portrait rather than the common landscape of later computers. You wrote software in BCPL and Mesa. It used raster graphics, came with a document editor, the Laurel email app, and gave us an actual multi-player video game. Oh, and a early graphics editor. And the first versions of Smalltalk - a language we'll do an upcoming episode on, ran on the Alto. 50 of these were donated to universities around the world in 1978, including Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, inspiring a whole generation of computer scientists. One ended up in the White House. But perhaps the most important of the people that were inspired, was Steve Jobs, when he saw one at Xerox Parc, the inspiration for the first Mac. The sales numbers weren't off the charts though. Byte magazine said: It is unlikely that a person outside of the computer-science research community will ever be able to buy an Alto. They are not intended for commercial sale, but rather as development tools for Xerox, and so will not be mass-produced. What makes them worthy of mention is the fact that a large number of the personal computers of tomorrow will be designed with knowledge gained from the development of the Alto. The Alto was sold for $32,000 in 1979 money, or well over $100,000 today. So they were correct. $220,000,000 over 10 years is nothing. The Alto then begat the Xerox Star, which in 1981 killed the Alto and sold at half the price. But Xerox was once-bitten, twice shy. They'd introduced a machine to rival the DEC PDP-10 and didn't want to jump into this weird new PC business too far. If they had wanted to they might have released something somewhere between the Star and the Commodore VIC-20, which ran for about $300. Even after the success of the Apple II, which still paled in comparison to the business Xerox is most famous for: copiers. Imagine what they thought of the IBM PCs and Apple II, when they were a decade ahead of that? I've heard may say that with all of this technology being invented at Xerox, that they could have owned the IT industry. Sure, Apple went from $774,000 in 1977 to $118 million in 1980 but then CEO Peter McColough was more concerned about the loss of market share for copiers, which dipped from 65 to 46 percent at the time. Xerox revenues had gone from $1.6 billion dollars to $8 billion in the 70s. And there were 100,000 people working in that group! And in the 90s Xerox stock would later skyrocket up to $250/share! They invented Laser Printing, WYSIWYGs, the GUI, Ethernet, Object Oriented Programming, Ubiquitous computing with the PARCtab, networking over optical cables, data storage, and so so so much more. The interconnected world of today likely wouldn't be what it is without other people iterating on their contributions, but more specifically likely wouldn't be what it is if they had hoarded them. They made a modicum of money off most of these - and that money helped to fund further research, like hosting the first live streamed concert. Xerox still rakes in over $10 billion in a year in revenue and unlike many companies that went all-in on PCs or other innovations during the incredible 112 year run of Xerox, they're still doing pretty well. Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, 10 years after Dell was founded. Computing was changing so fast, who can blame Xerox? IBM was reinvented in the 80s because of the PC boom - but it also almost put them out of business. We'll certainly cover that in a future episode. I'm glad Xerox is still in business, still making solid products, and still researching all the things! So thank you to everyone at every level of Xerox, for all your organization has contributed over the years, including the Alto, which shaped how computers are used today. And thank YOU patient listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History Of Computing Podcast. We hope you have a great day!

Today my conversation is with David Smith. He’s the CEO and Founder of Croquet Studios David Smith is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for over thirty years. His specialty is system design and advanced user interfaces. He is a pioneer in 3D graphics, robotics, telepresence, artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR). He creates world-class teams and ships impossible products. In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the very first real-time 3D adventure game/shooter and the precursor to today's first-person shooters. The game was developed for the Apple Macintosh and won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine. In 1990, Smith founded Virtus Corporation and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Virtus Walkthrough won the very first MacWorld/MacUser Breakthrough Product of the Year. David was Chief Innovation Officer at Lockheed Martin and a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin MST, focused on next-generation, human centric computing and collaboration platforms. Here he developed a number of key technologies and won the Lockheed Martin TLS Inventor of the Year for the last four years (every year he has been eligible). What’s really, really interesting is that he worked closely with authors Tom Clancy (Rainbow Six, Hunt for Red October) and Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park) to develop games. But that’s only the beginning. . . . David believes that the year 1968 was the most critical year in computer science. In this one year, three key individuals launched what he considers, and what he’s continuing to build upon, is this goal of enhancing humans’ ability to solve hard problems using computers to think in a different way. Again, enhancing humans’ ability to solve hard problems using computers to think in a different way. He’s building upon the work of, really the pioneers in the internet: Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, and Ivan Sutherland’s work - all focused on working with the Xerox Alto Project from a long time ago – close to 50-years ago. Some of these breakthroughs - that even amazed Steve Jobs, as you can see on some of his YouTube videos from years’ ago when he was stunned as he looked at the Xerox Alto project. At that time, what really stuck out for Steve Jobs was the gooey interface. This was really that first interface between a computer and a human. David’s passion is to continue to use his skills and his competencies and capabilities in 3D and 3D engineering and design. His goal is to develop these applications and systems and platforms that are really going to transform how we use computers and solve big problems in the coming years. He’s exploring the  use of 3D and graphical situations that we can’t even imagine right now, and problem solving and using computers to solve interesting challenges and complex problems moving forward. So, with that, I wanted to introduce you to my conversation and wonderful interview with David Smith. Read the full transcript here Major Take-Aways from This Episode: What is an Augmented Conversation? The future of turning a computer into a vehicle to exchange ideas in real-time and sophisticated areas. How a fusion of ideas reinvents and redefines the vision of what computing is. How to get in touch with David A. Smith: Linkedin   Blog  Twitter  YouTube Resources Referenced Platform for the Future of AR & VR |David Smith|TEDxBeacon Street   ARIA ARIA - AR in Action, David Smith   Croquet Demo, Part 1, David A. Smith  Croquet Demo, Part 2, David A. Smith    This episode is sponsored by the CIO Innovation Forum, dedicated to Business Digital Leaders who want to be a part of 20% of the planet and help their businesses win with innovation and transformation. Credits OUTRO music provided by Ben’s Sound: http://www.bensound.com/ Other Ways to Listen to the Podcast  iTunes | Libsyn | Soundcloud | RSS | LinkedIn Leave a Review If you enjoyed listening to my podcast, please take a minute to leave a review here! Click here for instructions on how to leave an iTunes review if you’re doing this for the first time. About Bill Murphy Bill Murphy is a world renowned IT Security Expert dedicated to your success as an IT business leader. Follow Bill on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Beyond metaphors and into the digital future : In 1973, Xerox PARC introduced the Xerox Alto. It was the first computer to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface. This began the desktop metaphor; the computer monitor as if it were the top of the user's desk. Forty-six years later, the metaphor lives on. We talk about files and documents— even when there’s nothing to print. Why are we still hung up on the desktop? Can we imagine a digital future free of off-screen comparisons? Paul and Rich ponder the possibility, and more. Links: Notability (app) DocuSign (app) History of the Xerox Alto

An airhacks.fm conversation with James Gosling (@errcraft) about: "Hello World" with PDP assembly in 1969, exciting places like universities, the University of Calgary (alumni award), dumpster diving to find usable electronics, software does not consume any resources, James loves building things, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Gort is cool, building Gort from tin foil and cans, there were no answers how to build a brain, working for physics department in the age of 14, measuring the interactions between solar winds and the upper atmosphere, ISIS-2 satellite, PDP-8 assembler, CDC 6400, Fortran, PL-1, spending all the free time with computers, teachers were worried, James enjoyed downhill (skiing), Pascal, Multics, Simula, there was no C before 1976, James wrote emacs at graduate school in C, James's emacs became standard on Unix, Bill Joy kept asking James repeatedly to join Sun, James met Andy Bechtolsheim before joining Sun, James joined Sun in 1984, James was involved with User Interfaces at Sun, Sun was missing out on stuff like telephone headsets, VCRs and IoT was already happening, IoT literally launched Java, re-inventing the wheel and repeating the errors in networking, ideas for the JVM, Three Rivers Computer like Xerox Alto was only interested in hardware and wanted to reuse software, writing software for PERQ with UCSD Pascal, porting from PERQ to VAX, James was too lazy to port and started with transcoding, translation worked surprisingly well and outperformed C, Project Green started in early 1991 and ended in Sep 1992, Java was running at the end of 1991, the implementation of the first Java compiler took a couple of months, the first compiler version was written in Python, the intermediate format was the instruction set itself, Java bytecode follows the polish notation, or execution on a stack machine, OAK was growing outside James's window, OAK was renamed to Java because of legal reasons, James likes coffee ...and tea, Sun was a wonderful place to be, John Gage was cheerleader in chief, Scott (checkout episode #19) didn't like to spend money on marketing, problem with JINIs marketing was lack of marketing, RMI fighted with CORBA (end of first part - to be continued...).

In this episode of the Unusable Podcast, Andrew & David talk about the history of computer user interfaces and early computers, where UI is heading in the future with natural interfaces, and Andy has a frustrating experience with a parking machine. Other things we discussed: The Bombe Why keyboards are QUERTY Amiga Workbench GUI The difficulty of having 2 Google Homes in the same room Not all voice interface is natural UI Mercedes' voice control joke Links mentioned: The Bombe Natural User Interfaces – What are they and how do you design user interfaces that feel natural? Photos of the Xerox Alto computer with a portrait screen Photos of the Amiga workbench GUI A Short History of Computer User Interface Design The Unusable podcast is presented by Andrew Waite & David Ball, who discuss the importance of user experience (UX) in technology & the world around us, & talk about great design that just works - or moan about it when it doesn't. Here's the link to the episode: https://podcast.theunusable.com/podcasts/005-graphical-user-interface-history.mp3 Music is by [Gold5472](https://gold5472.newgrounds.com/)

Cynde Moya, Collections Manager at Living Computers: Museum + Labs   Cynde Moya is Collections Manager at Living Computers: Museum + Labs. Located in Seattle, Washington, Living Computers is a computer museum that provides hands-on experiences using computers ranging from micros to mainframes. (Last time I was there, there was a Xerox Alto, an Apple I, and yes, an Atari 400 with a number of game carts, plus big iron like a Control Data 6500 and DEC PDP-10 - all those machines and more usable by visitors.)   As Collections Manager, Cynde takes care of the museum's collection, and catalogs it.   This interview took place on April 9, 2018.   “It's definitely not all glory when you're cleaning dead rats out of an old computer."   Cynde on Twitter   Living Computers Museum + Labs

Ícones foram criados para relacionar conceitos computacionais com objetos do dia-a-dia que as pessoas já conhecem e sabem usar. Porém, com o passar do tempo, ícones passaram a representar conceitos não necessariamente computacionais. A semiótica aplicada ao design de ícones permite estudar esses novos processos de significação e sua contribuição para a Interação Humano Computador.Slides Áudio Gravação de aula realizada na Apple Developer Academy PUCPR. Design de Ícones e Semiótica da Interação [MP3] 1 hora e 24 minutos Transcrição A palavra ícone foi utilizada primeiramente para definir certos tipos de pinturas e afrescos que expressavam a essência das divindades Cristãs. Esse formato ficou bastante popular nos primeiros séculos da Igreja Ortodoxa. Essa imagem é um detalhe do ícone mais antigo ainda existente, Cristo Pantocrátor (século VI). O ícone provavelmente representaria a posição dual de Jesus Cristo como homem e como Deus. Utilizando uma técnica de divisão e espelhamento das metades da imagem, fica claro que os dois lados da face do Cristo são muito diferentes. A face esquerda de Cristo parece mais velha e dura do que a face da direita, sugerindo o aspecto divino. A face da direita parece mais temerosa e jovial, sugerindo o aspecto humano. O ícone religioso é rico em detalhes e significados. No século VIII, emergiu um movimento iconoclasta no Império Bizantino que destruiu a maior parte dos ícones da época. Nesta iluminura, o autor faz uma analogia entre o pintor de ícones e os algozes de Cristo. O ícone estaria restringindo a divindade a uma representação fixa, que não faz jus à natureza divina. A adoração dos ícones assim como a iconoclastia são frutos de uma tensão que se acumula no cerne da sociedade moderna. Henri Lefebvre escreveu prolificamente sobre a contradição entre representação e realidade. Essa contradição foi magistralmente revelada por René Magritte na obra A Traição das Imagens (1928). A imagem de um cachimbo contradiz a frase "Isto não é um cachimbo", porém, a frase também é uma imagem. Como seria possível falar de um cachimbo sem a representação mínima dele pela linguagem? Na metade do século XX, a representação se tornou tão oposta à realidade que foi necessário construir máquinas capazes de processar signos de maneira independente da representação mecânica. Alan Turin e colegas construíram em 1939 a primeira máquina semiótica com o intuito de quebrar o código de criptografia alemã. Essa máquina desvinculava a representação do cálculo da representação mecânica. O filme "O jogo da imitação" (2014) conta essa história muito bem. A representação independente do suporte permitiu o surgimento de uma miríade de conceitos computacionais. Esses conceitos, entretanto, eram abstratos demais para quem não tinha uma formação matemática ou de engenharia. Com a intenção de tornar conceitos computacionais mais concretos e, portanto, acessíveis para especialistas de outras áreas, Douglas Engelbart e sua equipe na SRI International criaram o mouse em 1964, um dispositivo apontador que permitia interagir com representações computacionais de uma maneira mais direta. Diversas outras inovações surgiram à partir disso, tal como o hipertexto, o comando copiar e colar e outras. Nos anos 1970, surgem monitores de alta resolução capazes de exibir interfaces gráficas. David Canfield Smith defendeu uma tese em 1975 que propunha pela primeira vez a utilização de ícones em interfaces gráficas. Inspirado nos ícones religiosos, Smith propôs que ícones poderiam ser tão abstratos quanto concretos, ou seja, eles seriam representações capazes de processamento ao mesmo tempo capazes de referir-se a uma experiência concreta que o usuário tenha tido. O exemplo que ele oferece é a linguagem de programação visual Pygmalion, que ofereceria uma série de diagramas interativos. Nesta imagem, temos diversos ícones. O mais concreto são as setas da estrutura if/else que se assemelha a uma bifurcação de estradas. Em 1973, Tim Mott e Larry Tessler desenvolveram a Office Schematic dentro do laboratório Xerox Parc, uma proposta que iria definir o paradigma de representação para interfaces gráficas. Mott estava pensando como aproveitar melhor o recurso da interface gráfica e percebeu que haviam metáforas físicas para representar ações intra-documentos, tal como o comando de copiar e colar. Porém, não haviam metáforas para ações inter-documentos. Foi então que, diante de um guardanapo num restaurante, ele teve a ideia de representar um escritório na interface gráfica, onde os documentos pudessem ser movidos de um lugar a outro. O Office Schematic ficou conhecido posteriormente como metáfora desktop. Trabalhando com Mott e Tessler, Smith desenhou a primeira linha de ícones do Xerox Alto (1974), o primeiro computador a implementar uma interface gráfica com a metáfora desktop. Estes ícones representavam arquivos que podiam ser movidos para diferentes mídias de armazenamento, impressoras e outros computadores. Diversos outros conceitos de interface gráfica já estavam ali presentes, tais como a barra de rolagem, os menus e a manipulação direta. O Xerox Star que sucedeu o Alto tinha a proposta de ir além de controlar a edição e impressão de documentos. A proposta era ser um computador multifuncional para a gestão de empresas. Quatro séries de ícones foram criadas e testadas com usuários para verificar quais faziam mais sentido. Na Xerox Parc já existia uma visão de que o usuário leigo em informática deveria ser priorizado no projeto. Infelizmente a Xerox não conseguiu compreender as inovações que surgiram no Parc e acabou assinando um acordo com a Apple para que Steve Jobs e sua equipe visitasse o laboratório e conhecesse tais inovações. Ao ver a interface gráfica, Jobs teve a certeza de que era isso que precisava para realizar o conceito de Computação Pessoal que movia a empresa. Os ícones adquiriram o status que tem hoje depois que a Apple contratou Susan Kare para desenhar a família de ícones do primeiro Macintosh, lançado em 1984. Esses ícones eram muito diferentes dos ícones do Xerox Star. Ao invés de representar apenas conceitos computacionais, alguns destes ícones representam ações e emoções humanas. O objetivo era mostrar que o computador poderia refletir as preferências e interesses do usuário, o que fica evidente no ícone do Mac com um sorriso. Diversos outros ícones representavam partes do corpo humano para enfatizar essa relação pessoal com o usuário. O próximo marco na história dos ícones só viria em 2007, quando a Apple lançava o iPhone. Esse smartphone não era o primeiro com tela touch screen, porém, era o primeiro a priorizar o design de ícones. O design de produto do iPhone é extremamente simples visando colocar em evidência a interface gráfica e os ícones coloridos que ela continha. Os ícones eram o produto, o que ficaria mais claro depois que a Apple lançou a App Store e a possibilidade de desenvolvedores de fora da Apple colocarem ícones no iPhone para permitir acesso a seus aplicativos. Na versão comemorativa de 10 anos de lançamento do primeiro iPhone, a Apple novamente inovou no design de ícones com o lançamento dos animojis, que representavam através de animações sincronizadas em tempo real as expressões faciais do usuário. Aqui a Apple realizou de maneira literal a ideia antiga de que o computador poderia ser um espelho do usuário. O iPhone X também eliminou a necessidade de botões físicos, tornando o produto uma grande tela para interfaces gráficas. A relevância dos ícones na história da Interação Humano Computador se deve à: a) Relação entre conceitos abstratos a experiências concretas b) Mnemônica (fácil memorizar e reconhecer) c) Localização rápida na tela d) Economia de espaço na tela e) Internacionalização f) Afeto emocional Ao longo de sua história, ícones foram padronizados em certos elementos constitutivos. A sua "anatomia" atual consiste em sete elementos: fundo (contexto onde ele aparece), figura (forma básica ou silhueta), borda (entre a figura e o fundo), cor predominante da figura, iluminação (proveniente do canto superior esquerdo), rótulo descritivo e uma ação (representação estática de um movimento). A anatomia do ícone tem impacto direto na memorização e reconhecimento do ícone, que acontecem em processos graduais, mesmo que muito rápidos. A memorização começa à partir da imagem complexa do ícone que fica na memória de curta duração. Com o passar do tempo, a memória deste ícone se torna mais difusa e apenas traços distintivos permanecem. Após muito tempo, a pessoa lembra de características gerais, tais como a forma da figura, sua cor predominante ou a localização na tela. Em alguns casos, o ícone é completamente esquecido, porém, quando ele é visto novamente, o processo de reconhecimento acontece mais rapidamente. Ao escanear a tela, a pessoa busca primeiramente as características gerais do ícone, tais como a cor predominante e só depois considera os seus traços distintivos. Devido às características desses dois processos, ícones devem ter silhuetas simples e poucas cores. A maior relevância do ícone não está, entretanto, associado aos processos de memória e de reconhecimento, mas sim no processo de significação. O ícone tem o potencial de estabelecer uma rica rede de associações que levam ao sentido do aplicativo. O ícone do Find My iPhone lembra um radar que, assim como diversos outras tecnologias militares, agora estão presentes no cotidiano de civis. Uma tecnologia militar conecta-se bem com os casos de uso do aplicativo: roubo e vigilância parental. Não por acaso, a Apple tem um segundo aplicativo com a mesma função de localização do aparelho, porém, o Find My Friends exige autorização do amigo para compartilhar a localização. Com o Find My iPhone, os pais podem saber onde os filhos estão a qualquer momento através da interface web do iCloud sem autorização dos filhos. Esse processo de significação é muito bem explicado pela Engenharia Semiótica, uma teoria de Interação Humano Computador criada pela pesquisadora Clarisse de Souza da PUC-Rio. Essa teoria é baseada em duas premissas: O computador é uma máquina capaz de processar signos e a interface com o usuário é um processo de comunicação baseado em signos. O conceito principal da Engenharia Semiótica é a metacomunicação, ou seja, a comunicação do designer explicando como o usuário pode se comunicar com o computador. A aplicação seria uma mensagem que o designer enviaria para o usuário expressando que soluções existem para suas necessidades. O usuário interpretaria os signos contidos nessa mensagem e realizaria suas atividades. A metacomunicação é unidirecional, pois uma vez que o aplicativo é codificado, o designer não pode mais mudar a sua mensagem. Um dos maiores insights da Engenharia Semiótica é a distinção entre dois tipos de metacomunicação: operacional e estratégica. Na metacomunicação operacional, a interface expressa como usar a aplicação. Este tipo de metacomunicação já recebeu muita atenção de outras teorias de IHC. O diferencial da Engenharia Semiótica é a ênfase na metacomunicação estratégica, que expressa por quê o usuário deve utilizar a aplicação. No exemplo do tour de entrada do aplicativo AirBnB a descrição se refere às características da experiência do usuário e não aos elementos da interface. Embora a Engenharia Semiótica não coloque nesses termos, eu compreendo que ela propõe que o designer atue como um tradutor entre duas linguagems: a linguagem de programação e a linguagem de interação. Enquanto a linguagem de programação serve para dar instruções para o computador, a linguagem de interação serve para dar instruções para o usuário. Devido à informalidade, a linguagem de interação é definida por todos os "falantes", está em constante evolução e ninguém sabe exatamente todas as possibilidades desta linguagem. Em contraste, a linguagem de programação é definida por um grupo pequeno de pessoas e se torna fixa, devido à necessidade de formalidade. A linguagem de programação expressa conceitos computacionais enquanto a linguagem de interação expressa diversos tipos de conceitos. A unidade básica da linguagem de interação é o padrão de interação (pattern). Como exemplo, temos o padrão "Puxe para atualizar", primeiro utilizado pelo aplicativo do Twitter que, ao mesmo tempo em que criava um novo padrão, quebrava o padrão de clicar no ícone home para atualizar o feed, uma vez que este que não era percebido pelos usuários. O padrão de "Puxe para atualizar" logo se espalhou por outros aplicativos e se tornou parte da linguagem da interação falada nos aplicativos móveis. Ícones são interpretados como parte de uma linguagem de interação, porém, eles não são meras palavras. Ícones são frases. É possível através de um método chamado análise da estrutura frasal decompor um ícone em suas partes constitutivas. O sujeito normalmente refere-se ao usuário, o verbo é a ação possível, o advérbio é um qualificativo da ação e o predicado é o objeto principal do ícone, qualificado por adjetivos. No caso do ícone Firefox Crystal vemos que o designer Everaldo Coelho qualificou a raposa do Firefox como um animal mágico que pode navegar a web tão rápido quanto o fogo. Assim como na linguagem falada, nem todas as frases são ditas por completo, pois há informações não-ditas e implícitas. No caso dos ícones padrão da iOS Toolbar e Navigation Bar, as frases possuem verbos sem predicados, pois estes se referem ao que está carregado na View atual. Por outro lado, os ícones padrão da iOS Tab Bar possuem o mesmo verbo implícito (ver) com diversos predicados. Os ícones não demonstram o que é possível fazer com os objetos, apenas sugerem o tipo de conteúdo. Já os ícones do Home Screen do iOS não seguem um padrão. Alguns possuem verbo e predicado (Mapas), enquanto outros possuem apenas um substantivo (Mail). Porém, todos possuem muitos adjetivos para qualificar a experiência proporcionada por cada aplicativo. Os qualificativos são marca registrada dos ícones da Apple. Quando se compõe uma série de ícones para um mesmo aplicativo, vale à pena definir um padrão consistente para as frases. Assim a linguagem de ícones contribui para o microbranding da marca. A linguagem de ícones da Spotify possui espessuras finas, curvas com mesma ângulação e preenchimento vazio. A consistência na linguagem de ícones não deve, entretanto, prejudicar a distinção entre as frases. Uma vez que ícones nem sempre são vistos com atenção, a silhueta da figura deve ser diferente mesmo que a figura seja parecida, de modo a facilitar o reconhecimento diante de formas similares. Este exemplo foi publicado por @MegDraws no Twitter. Até agora estamos discutindo as possibilidades que a forma oferece para a informação. Porém, a "mágica" dos ícones acontecem nos níveis de estrutura e de função, quando contribui para a interação e experiência. Há uma certa equivalência entre esses três níveis de possibilidades aos três níveis de análise da linguagem: sintática, semântica e pragmática. Iremos agora analisar ícones nos níveis semânticos e pragmáticos. A Engenharia Semiótica é baseada no conceito de signo de Charles Sanders Peirce, o filósofo que fundou a escola americana de semiótica. O conceito de signo é baseado numa tríade entre três elementos: o representamen (também chamado de representante), o objeto que ele representa e o interpretante (também conhecido como significado). Neste exemplo, o ícone de pasta representa dados no disco rígido, mas a interpretação deste para um usuário específico é o álbum de fotos, pois é nesta pasta que a pessoa guarda as fotos. Segundo Peirce, um signo nunca emerge isolado. Cada signo é significado em relação a outros signos e dá origem a novos signos num processo conhecido como semiose ilimitada. Neste exemplo, o signo de álbum de fotos lembra a pessoa do álbum impresso, ela sente vontade de imprimir algumas fotos e imagina que pode dar de presente para alguém aquele álbum. Na Engenharia Semiótica, a semiose não é ilimitada. Ela pode ser interrompida por um signo que não faz sentido, fenômeno conhecido como breakdown. Neste momento, o usuário fica perdido ou frustrado e desiste do que estava fazendo. Certa vez tentei imprimir um álbum de fotos que havia preparado no Fotos do Mac e fiquei surpreso negativamente ao descobrir que não havia como encomendá-lo impresso pela ausência do serviço no Brasil. O aplicativo poderia ter me dito isso antes de maneira mais clara. A Engenharia Semiótica identificou diferentes expressões comuns do usuário quando ocorre a interrupção da semiose (De Souza et al, 1999). Algumas dessas expressões podem indicar um problema sério de usabilidade (fundo vermelho), como por exemplo, quando o usuário faz algo errado e não percebe. Elas também podem indicar um crescimento da competência do usuário e a dispensa de ajuda (fundo verde). Vejamos dois exemplos de interrupções na semiose causadas por uma mensagem com ruídos ou desvios de interpretação. O Macintosh original não tinha botão de ejetar para o disquete. Os designers criaram uma associação de arrastar e soltar o ícone do disquete até o ícone da lixeira para ejetar o disco. Depois de muitas reclamações de usuários que não encontravam a função (Onde estou?), o ícone da lixeira passou a mudar para um ícone de ejetar sempre que um disco era arrastado. Mesmo com o representamen correto, muitos usuários ainda ficam com medo de apagar os dados do disquete, CD, DVD ou pendrive até hoje e preferem fazê-lo pelo botão de ejetar do finder (Obrigado, mas não). Na minha visão, a semiose é, na maior parte do tempo, interrompida pela falta de interesse ou de atenção. A pessoa simplesmente não quer aquilo que o signo está representando. O que mais interessa aos usuários não é como o ícone foi desenhado (sintática), nem o que ele representa computacionalmente (semântica), mas o que é possível fazer com ele (pragmática). Essa característica da Interação Humano Computador está sendo gradualmente compreendida através de teorias como a Engenharia Semiótica. Emojis são um exemplo popular de ícones que não representam conceitos computacionais. Ele não representa um espaço ou uma funcionalidade do computador, mas sim uma emoção ou intenção de comunicação do usuário. Ícones representam cada vez mais conceitos não-computacionais. Isso torna ícones cada vez mais sujeitos às contradições da sociedade, em particular, entre representação e realidade. Na última versão do iOS (11), a Apple incluiu a silhueta que parece de uma mulher no ícone da lista de contatos. Anteriormente, o ícone continha apenas uma figura com feições bastante masculinas. A questão contraditória que levou à Apple a incluir a silhueta é: porque mulheres não deveriam ser representadas se elas figuram na lista de contatos? Apesar da mudança, o déficit de representação da mulher ainda continua. Embora o signo seja uma estrutura de simples compreensão, a análise do signo permite ver sutilezas que não estão claras à primeira vista. Peirce propôs três tricotomias para analisar signos. A primeira tricotomia diz respeito ao representamen e ele mesmo. O qualisigno é uma relação de representação em que a qualidade do representamen fala por si. Neste exemplo de qualisigno, o ícone representa a qualidade de ser ícone, a "iconicidade". O sinsigno é uma relação de particularidade. O signo representa algo único, particular, tal como os trejeitos da expressão facial de uma pessoa. O legisigno é tal como uma Lei, algo inevitável. A representação do botão de desligar inequivocamente irá desligar o aparelho. A segunda tricotomia diz respeito à relação entre representamen e objeto. Quando o representamen é similar ao objeto, a relação é chamada tecnicamente de ícone. Note que no resto dessa apresentação eu não utilizei essa compreensão mais restrita de ícone. Prefiro utilizar o nome ícone também para índices e símbolos, que não são tipos de imagens mas tipos de relações. A relação de índice é uma causalidade, ou seja, o objeto causa uma modificação na representação ou vice-e-versa. No exemplo do calendário, a data atual modifica a forma do ícone. Já a relação de símbolo é completamente arbitrária e se justifica apenas pela convenção. O desenho + não tem nenhuma relação além da arbitrariedade com a operação matemática da soma, por exemplo. A terceira tricotomia serve para analisar as relações entre representamen e interpretante. Se o ícone representar uma possibilidade não muito clara, ele pode ser chamado de rema, tal como o ícone do microfone da Siri. O usuário não sabe se ela vai entender o que ele irá falar. No momento em que o usuário fala, aparece um outro ícone, um ícone dinâmico cuja forma se altera de acordo com o volume das ondas sonoras. Esse ícone é um fato. A Siri está lhe ouvindo, mas ainda não há certeza de que ela lhe entende. Você só consegue perceber isso nas respostas que a Siri dá, que não seria um ícone, mas seria uma relação de argumento. O argumento expressa uma relação de certeza entre o representamen e o interpretante. Embora as tricotomias sirvam à classificação de relações, elas não foram criadas meramente para classificar signos desse ou daquele tipo. As tricotomias servem para perceber as variações no processo de representação. Scott McCloud conseguiu representar isso magistralmente no triângulo que mostra o continuum entre realidade, significado e plano da figura. Os extremos desse triângulo corresponderiam ao ícone na esquerda (figura muito similar à realidade), ao qualisigno no topo (representamen representando a representação) e ao símbolo na direita (rosto simplificado). O signo pode transitar entre as categorias dependendo da situação em que ele emerge. Um estudo superficial sobre a Semiótica pode levar o designer a acreditar que ele pode garantir um interpretante a partir da manipulação do representamen. Isso, segundo a Semiótica não é possível, pois o objeto do signo tem caráter dinâmico. Ora o signo representa uma coisa, ora outra. Por esse motivo não há uma tricotomia sobre a relação entre representamen e objeto. O que pode ser feito é considerar os padrões de interação existentes, as particularidades do contexto e as possibilidades expressivas. No design de ícones, existem três práticas que consideram as relações das tricotomias peirceanas. A primeira prática é a definição de parâmetros de representação antes de conceber o signo. A primeira coisa que Susan Kare ao ser contratada pela Apple em 1982 para desenhar ícones foi comprar um caderno de rascunhos quadriculado. Desenhando nesse caderno, ela restringiu os representamens ao que seria possível com a tecnologia do pixel da interface gráfica. A segunda prática é a geração de alternativas para encontrar representamens potenciais do objeto. Tom Bigelajzen desenhou algumas alternativas para os ícones do player multimídia VLC antes de escolher a final. Isso ajudou-o a considerar qual representamen era mais adequado ao objeto (a funcionalidade de configuração do aplicativo). Para verificar a relação entre representamen e interpretante, é indicada a prática de testes com usuários. No exemplo acima, eu criei um sistema chamado Icon Sorting que mostrava um ícone a cada 13 segundos e perguntava ao usuário qual o rótulo mais apropriado. A quantidade de opções e o tempo curto forçava uma associação rápida e corriqueira, mais parecida com o contexto de uso. Os ícones que não tiveram associações foram descartados. Existem outras maneiras de testar ícones com usuários, por exemplo, através de entrevistas e diálogos presenciais. Apesar de tudo o que disse até agora, a melhor maneira de projetar um novo ícone, muitas vezes é não fazê-lo. Se existe um ícone que atingiu o status de símbolo para aquele objeto, é melhor utilizá-lo do que criar um novo. Existem diversas bibliotecas com milhares de ícones gratuitos para utilização. Na maior parte dos casos, é mais fácil adaptar um desses ícones do que criar um do zero. O desafio do design de ícones não é o desenho, mas sim a designação de sentido, que não é uma tarefa exata. Não é um processo exato porque mesmo os símbolos mais convencionais podem perder o sentido ao longo do tempo. Um exemplo contemporâneo é o ícone de salvar que, antigamente, referia-se à mídia de armazenamento principal (disquete de 3 e 1/2 polegadas). Hoje em dia, existem pessoas que nunca viram um disquete desse tipo mas que conseguem reconhecer o ícone de salvar em diferentes contextos. Porém, existem muitos aplicativos que já não estão mais utilizando este ícone para representar salvar ou porque não existem mais essa funcionalidade (os dados são salvos automaticamente em intervalos de tempo) ou porque existem dois tipos de salvar (salvar na nuvem e salvar no dispositivo). Qualquer signo estará sempre sujeito à contradição entre representação e realidade. O design de ícones reproduz e transforma essa contradição o tempo todo. Compreendê-la é mais interessante do que negá-la. Made with Keynote Extractor.Comente este post

Recapitulando la versión anterior, los piratas hicieron un update de la no tan positiva situación del voto electrónico en el país. Pero para no dejar de lado a los clásicos personajes, nos presentaron a Douglas Engelbart, el tipo que inventó el mouse.  Ingeniero e inventor, impulsó el vínculo entre las capacidades intuitivas de la mente humana y las capacidades de procesamiento de las computadoras. The Mother of All Demos, uno de sus grandes hitos. Para cerrar, le dijeron adiós y hasta siempre a uno de los mejores trackers privados para descargar torrents.

In this week's episode, our hosts talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow including what they got right, what they got very wrong, and what we can learn. Also listen to hear "Grandpa Joel" tell stories about the Xerox Alto.

In this week's episode, our hosts talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow including what they got right, what they got very wrong, and what we can learn. Also listen to hear "Grandpa Joel" tell stories about the Xerox Alto.