HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ TooCreative

Displays with wrong aspect ratio for me. Which makes Steve Jobs look pretty fat.

On YouTube, it has the correct aspect ratio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek

How do we find the car of the uploader?

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1187/

Some perspective on the presentation:

At 13:20 or so, Jobs says "Of course you need a compiler, because a scripting language would be too slow for the server if it is used by a lot of users". Little did he know ... PHP was out for about a year when this presentation was given. Still lives today and powers most of the web.

⬐ nihonium

Direct link to the video has better quality and right aspect ratio.

Mp4 https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/6f1b/49417183-9944-40c9-ab1c-5b2d51aa...

Even Higher quality wmv https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/6f1b/49417183-9944-40c9-ab1c-5b2d51aa...

⬐ cududa

Nothing against your comment, just ... everyone on HN found this nit pick the second most upvoted comment on all of this??

⬐ hevi_jos

PHP was a C front end at first...

⬐ ksherlock

Facebook (HipHop for PHP) transpiled PHP to C++ but that 15 years into its life.

⬐ javagram

Edited: you might be thinking of C++ ?

I don’t think php ever compiled to C, based on a quick scan of the Wikipedia page. I thought it compiled to perl at one point but that doesn’t seem to be true either.

⬐ wirrbel

Iirc it was kind of like a templating language first. Imagine writing a cgi-bin c application and becoming tired of writing out HTML with printf statements.

⬐ solarkraft

It never compiled to C, but it was first intended to only provide bindings to libraries that were written in C.

⬐ bibinou

change the video quality to High and you get the correct aspect ratio.

⬐ HeckFeck

> Which makes Steve Jobs look pretty fat.

Typical Microsoft, retouching the video in their relentless campaign against their rivals. /s

⬐ cma

But Facebook compiles PHP into C++ or something right (I think now they have a newer approach than c++)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

⬐ lclarkmichalek

It's a JIT compiler nowadays: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/

⬐ saagarjha

HHVM now mainly only targets Hack these days.

⬐ rgoulter

The top-of-my-head story is that PHP5 was quite slow, Facebook's HHVM was PHP-compatible and fast. PHP7 was competitively fast with Hack.

In terms of "performance needed for many users", Facebook doesn't use PHP (a "scripted language") for everything. etc.

⬐ xmodem

WebObjects was very ahead of its time, but unfortunately crippled by its high price tag

⬐ cmrdporcupine

In 1996, pre-NeXT aquisition, I attended a 3 day WO seminar where they did a good job selling us on the product.

But then the cost was revealed and my employer had no interest.

⬐ iamgopal

Almost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.

⬐ coldtea

On the other hand, a lot of Apple products have no as-good rival -- at any price -- at least for a year or so after their introduction.

Consider the iPhone and the then Android phones (which appeared later anyway).

Consider the iPad and the vastly worst first competing tablets (back in 2010 or so), which in addition cost $100-$200 more than the iPad.

Consider Apple Watch today and what's available from the competition (at the same category, which includes e.g. the Samsung watches and so, I know there are e.g. Garmin watches that last 2 weeks, but they have different target group and functionality).

Consider the AirPods as well.

(And, again, for all of those, I'm talking at launch and for the first 1-2 years. For some of those we have decent competition now).

⬐ Austin_Conlon

The high prices crippled the cube and cylindrical shaped ones.

⬐ lostgame

The cylindrical shaped ones were just crippled, de facto, according to Apple's own admission.

⬐ TheOtherHobbes

I always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.

⬐ rytis

I thought "charge more" is a good thing? /s

⬐ blihp

Apple products would be considered inexpensive compared to what NeXT charged. IIRC, a WebObjects license at the time was $50,000. There were good reasons for this, but when you hear 'NeXT was expensive' you really shouldn't be thinking Apple-level expensive... they were at another level.

⬐ TheOtherHobbes

I always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.

⬐ blihp

Exactly. So they had orders of magnitude fewer customers with orders of magnitude higher prices than Apple today. But by the time WebObjects became a thing NeXT was out of the workstation business so the price was purely for the software.

The good news is that in the talk, Steve mentioned that the Enterprise WebObjects (probably the one you needed: EOF was for WebObjects what Cocoa was for OS X) license was $25k so it had started to drop. Even back then free was tough to compete with...

⬐ rbanffy

> Even back then free was tough to compete with...

At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there.

While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.

⬐ kartickv

Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.

Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted.

Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?

⬐ dmitriid

> Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.

That's 2019 thinking. In 1990s almost no one would think that, especially in the world of commercial software.

⬐ flomo

NeXT workstations and OS were not successful, and at this point had largely been shelved. WebObjects was the only thing which they had which was profitable. Most customers were developing/deploying on NT, which (I assume) is why Jobs is at the Microsoft conference.

⬐ rbanffy

> NeXT workstations and OS were not successful

My MacBook would like to have a word with you. ;-)

⬐ flomo

Ya, but the snark at the time was that Jobs was such a great salesman he sold a dead OS to those dumb suckers at Apple for $400M. (Of course they were really buying Jobs & team.) Still took about 6-8 years for that OS to get good.

⬐ rbanffy

Apple failed spectacularly, multiple times, to develop a successor to MacOS classic. Time was running out and they needed something that worked. They could have picked either Be and BeOS, shaped MkLinux into something presentable, or NeXT and they chose to bring Jobs back in. It didn't hurt bringing him back in reignited faith in the company.

NeXTSTEP was only dead to the market - it was still a pretty good OS, specially when compared to MacOS 9 and Windows. NeXT failed against Sun and SGI, not against the PC market. They never even tried that.

⬐ rbanffy

Not really.

NeXT boxes could not compete in the visualization space against SGI and they lagged behind Sun, Digital and HP in price/performance, even after ditching the MO disk for conventional ones. It also didn't help much they had a weird Unix OS that didn't have X.

They were well rounded machines and their development tools were excellent, but that's it. As much as I would have loved to have one, I could never justify the tradeoffs between it and, say, a Sun pizza box.

⬐ jasoneckert

That statement also sums up NeXT in a nutshell.

⬐ physicsguy

'Not really sure why anyone would wanna do that, but that's what you can do!'

Web technology in a nutshell...

⬐ alexis_fr

Interesting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week” (3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud.

Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.

⬐ solarkraft

> or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud

Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all good things.

Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors', because they want to show it as in a completely different class.

⬐ Austin_Conlon

This describes part of why I thought Steve Jobs interviews at the D conference were so interesting. Nowadays interviews with Apple executives are them just sticking to a PR script and pretending competitors don’t exist, except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.

⬐ rbanffy

> except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.

He must be a decent stand-up comedian.

⬐ drclau

As I understand it, “I don’t know why anyone would want to do that” comment was referring to showing a plane animation flying from origin to destination, while “we like IE very much ... but I’m using Netscape for this demo” was a quip and sarcasm. He was great at connecting with the audience.

Another example was when he switched screens and the car website appeared instead of the flights website, the audience laughed and he said something like “we recommend them driving instead of taking a plane”.

⬐ reimertz

Very inspirational to see Jobs being so sure about what is the future of the web. Dynamic Servers.. Server-side rendering.. Almost like Windows, but in the browser....

At the same time, I feel sorry for him and his alikes; it most have been tough to constantly work upstream, trying to inspire people that just don't get it.

⬐ None

None

⬐ jka

The segment from 18m10s onwards -- a demo of making a flight reservation via an application built for OAG -- is pretty wonderful in a tech-nostalgic kind of way. Simpler times!

⬐ pyreal

I was already using the beta of Microsoft Active Server Pages when this presentation was given. ASP 1.0 was released in December 1996 and changed my web development career.

⬐ tbyehl

Buried in this video[1] are a couple demo sites built on Internet Database Connector (IDC/IDX). IDC launched with IIS 1.0 in NT 3.51 SP3, late '95 or early '96. Microsoft was iterating incredibly fast -- the famous "Internet Memo" was mid-1995.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keyno...

⬐ pyreal

Thanks for this link! I was trying to remember the predecessor to ASP while watching the Jobs video. I hoped that one of the others might have contained an ASP demo, but never realized they would be still demoing IDC. I recall the pace of change being incredibly fast, as you said.

I was experimenting with IDC for a client project at the time but quickly switched to ASP as soon as the beta became available.

⬐ weinzierl

At the beginning Jobs introduces a few websites: NeXT, Microsoft, Intel. Then, at 1:59 he mentions a fourth one but I can't understand what he says and there are no subtitles. Could anyone understand what website he mentioned?

EDIT: I think it is Toy Story. I thought this was much later but apparently it fits the time frame. Unfortunately Wayback Machine doesn't have: 302 redirecting to Disney:-(

⬐ dboreham

I remember not understanding that talk.

⬐ lr

Still my all-time favorite web framework. To date, I still find so many other frameworks lacking the vision that brought about WO.

⬐ trixie_

Looks like it's still kicking

https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder

⬐ Austin_Conlon

He takes questions from developers at 25:00.

⬐ watersb

I might have been at this one.

Object remoting via NeXT Smalltalk (Objective C) messages seemed so much easier than CORBA or DCOM. Or Sun RPC. HP was a big supporter of the NeXT approach.

It was a complicated time.

⬐ someonehere

Strange to see a Jobs keynote and you can see audience members getting up and leaving, “like who the eff is this guy?” A couple years later that mentality gets flipped on its head.

⬐ ralfd

There are other meteoric rises. Facebook is only 15 years old. I wonder if it must feel surreal to Zuck.

Still, Steve Jobs has such a unique comeback story of being in 1996 head of two interesting but commercially mostly failing companies, one of which is shortly later being bought by an Apple skirting on going out of business and riddled by intense technical debt. And only a decade later he presents the iPhone and had Pixars stunning success.

⬐ blazespin

It's one thing to talk about it, it's another to build.

⬐ imglorp

When you could buy a car under $10,000.

⬐ coldtea

Do you know how much some enterprise software / specialized SDKs charged then and even today?

Those are not uncommon prices...

You can get into the million territory easily...

⬐ gtirloni

I have no idea. Could you share some rough numbers?

⬐ pizzapill

SAP - Price for the base package of a couple million. Price of customization can bankrupt international corporations.

⬐ enjoy-your-stay

>Price of customization can bankrupt international corporations.

Doesn't stop them trying though!

⬐ bluedino

Did WebObjects live on?

I wonder if Apple could have positioned Mac OS X server to run that sort of thing

⬐ grecy

I was a WebOjects dev from 2007-2009, it was really neat to work with, and although I'd learned about "frameworks" in my Software Engineering degree, it never fully appreciated just how much of the work a framework does for you. So, so much different to just a "library" like everything else I've used before or since.

Apple still use WO internally for a lot of things (apple store, iTunes store), but I think it's slowly dying outside the company. The place I used to develop for slowly moved away from it, interestingly mostly because apple killed the XServe and so it got harder and harder to deploy.

⬐ yoda_sl

WebObjects starting at version 5 was 100% java so it could run on any system running a Java VM, including Mac OS X. When Apple was selling Xserve then many Apple on Une services like iTunes, .Mac (ancestor of iCloud), Apple Online Store were running on WebObjects and Xserve thus on OS X server.

⬐ Austin_Conlon

I've seen it in the URL when using App Store Connect, I'm curious as to what other services Apple uses WebObjects for.

⬐ saagarjha

I think the iTunes Store and its associated machinery (including App Store Connect) uses WebObjects.

⬐ frou_dh

That reminds me of "eBayISAPI.dll" still being in eBay URLs, but in that case I think it's fake and no longer actually hooked into some crusty old Microsoft stack.

⬐ dmux

I have no experience with it, but Apache Tapestry[0] is supposed to have some commonalities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry

⬐ i_feel_great

The Smalltalk web framework "Seaside" is inspired heavily by WebObjects

⬐ protomyth

They dropped the price but converted it to Java for version 5. Java just isn't suited for anything based on Cocoa. They stopped development so it didn't transition into the JavaScript driven world.

⬐ tootie

I was a dev when WebObjects was new and absolutely no one ever used it for anything serious. CGI was already the default standard for web servers by 1996 and by 2000 there was a raft of commerical products from Microsoft and Java-based systems that were adopted much more widely.

Instead of Stack Overflow, we had Matt's Script Archive

https://www.scriptarchive.com/

⬐ setpatchaddress

Dell’s online store would like to have a word.

⬐ andrekandre

not to mention the infrastructure behind itunes and the apple online store

(though i have met a few haters of wo here and there, i could never get a good reason why)

⬐ projektfu

He mentions in the questions that WebObjects used CGI to connect to the web server. I’m sure it was used and I believe looking back at it it could have accelerated development of a system I was working on. One of the problems of the time was that it was hard to evaluate software. You had to go through a sales guy who would lie to you until you bought it. Then the engineers would discuss the limitations.

Its price tag probably prevented the average startup from using it. It’s hard to use expensive software before you have funding.

⬐ scotth

Bring back this JavaScript logo! https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum

⬐ theboywho

I find it amusing to think that today's equivalent would have been kind of like if Mark Zuckerberg was introducing GraphQL.

⬐ Austin_Conlon

Zuckerberg seems similarly deflated in public appearances as Jobs was at the time.

⬐ hossbeast

Deflated?

⬐ rbanffy

To be fair, AOC deflated him very thoroughly in their last encounter.

⬐ xeromal

I'd say a closer example would be Elon Musk. He definitely is

* the face of the company * drives the products of his companies with a unified vision * works his ass off * is an asshole to people under him * a visionary and a bit eccentric

Jobs has Musk beat on charisma though by a long shot. Musk is kind of Woz and Jobs combined.

⬐ omarhaneef

Without going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO didn’t see the web, or mobile, or VoIP and other technologies rising.

But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one — it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will be.

Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how things will turn out.

⬐ delinka

My sibling comments seem to all want to attribute this foresight to Jobs alone. Jobs had an organization of designers and engineers informing him. Not only informing, but collaborating. He’d express a vision, others would help shape and hone based on existing tech, or based on how they could build new tech, and eventually Jobs would present the vision and solution publicly.

And Jobs would take credit. And the process probably didn’t feel collaborative to the other employees. My point is that Jobs didn’t come up with these things all on his own. Other employees were heavily involved.

⬐ holoduke

That's with virtually every thing in the world. It's never a true single man show. The great thing about jobs and similar people is that they can effectively let people work together with all having a common shared belief.

⬐ Austin_Conlon

Jobs on several occasions ended keynotes by mentioning the various teams and leaders involved in the announced products. I do see though the perception of it being a one man show, as he spent so much of the time presenting.

⬐ trixie_

No one thinks Jobs or Musk comes up with all the ideas, or 'takes credit' for others work.

They are the figureheads of their respective companies. And just as the engineer builds the product, their job is to sell it. You'd be lucky to work for a company with people at the top as persuasive as Jobs or Musk.

⬐ andrekandre

i’m not so sure... to people in industry that’s probably true, but to the average person/consumer, i would say that’s probably a different story...

⬐ Hoasi

> but to the average person/consumer, i would say that’s probably a different story...

Not really, people are not stupid. They can see through that.

⬐ davidy123

"Great artists steal." Jobs identified an overall vision that was something like "to sell great technology." This later became refined into something that was a little "different" as Apple latched onto the "better alternative" image when confronted with clone PCs.

Jobs was always on the lookout for selling points, the "one more thing." But the impact of objects as a selling point through NeXT and WebObjects on Apple's consumer-focused tech is only skin deep, because creating a comprehensive system would have taken much longer, but it was enough for Jobs to impress people, and provide an essence of an advantage. This was clear in at least early versions of OSX (I haven't used OSX for years), where drag and drop between identifiable objects worked… sometimes. The remaining functionality would have been much harder to achieve, and would have meant something really significant was being built, rather than what became a current generational marketing push. The idea of an object oriented system isn't talked about much anymore, and Apple really focuses on Raskins' ideas for interface, which aren't really compatible since it focuses on one object at a time, rather than a system of objects.

⬐ Aloha

Jobs used a very Walt Disney like approach, he was always plussing, and looking for a weenie in the products he worked on.

⬐ azinman2

As CS people who love uniformity and abstraction, this idea of objects everywhere is very appealing. But concretely, what actually are you restricted from doing today? I question the tangible executions of this into a variety of everyday examples versus one or two talking points.

⬐ davidy123

Being able to easily use the data from one application in another. Being able to learn one set of digital tools and apply them to nearly any task (copy and paste being an example). I don't think you have to be a basement dweller to see benefits from these, and there are others.

⬐ azinman2

Ad hominem aside, can we dig in to this? What application data are you want it to put into something else and you currently can’t? All major office suites already let you embed between their apps, so what non-office suite task are you trying to accomplish? And once you’ve done it, how do you figure you’re supposed to interact with it? Does the native application UI now need to morph to this unrelated object?

We’ve had object technologies before in mainstream environments (OpenDoc, COM), and yet they’re effectively dead today. They were very complex, and the main pathways can be explicitly supported with better UX when the target apps are written with what’s supported in mind.

⬐ fraggle222

Is this foresight a function of the CEO themselves or more of being in that position (ceo of a technology company). In other words, being in that role you have time and resources to think about "what is next?" also this is somewhat expected from the board and investors.

How much of their insight comes from others (eg. senior staff, acquisition targets, etc.) and how much from their own noggin so to speak?

Or a better way to ask this might be, how would one go about replicating this insight if one is not a CEO of a tech company? What resources would I need to pull in, who should I be talking with?

⬐ tcbawo

Speaking from limited experience, executives are surrounded by people giving them distilled insight and knowledge. They sit at the top of the meritocracy, although not everyone in that position has earned their place through that meritocracy.

⬐ Existenceblinks

Sure, these executives have power to drive and make it happens. Especially they are the leads of tech industry, .. and not doubt you could find an exception among executives of big tech companies.

⬐ hodgesrm

CEOs can get the market very wrong. Boeing developed the 787 to meet a vision of point-to-point long-range flight using smaller aircraft that could fly out of medium-sized airports with high load factors. Airbus bet on hub-and-spoke and developed the A380, which turned out to be a substantial misreading of the future.

⬐ tyingq

I was impressed with this video as well. It's years before soap, rest, JSON, xmlhttprequest, etc. He's describing the end state very well.

⬐ klhugo

What about self driving vehicles? Many "big time CEOs" saw it comming.

They not always "see" it right. It is tough to forecast future in tech.

⬐ gtirloni

What do you attribute that to? Pure genius, more access to information, better associates, etc?

⬐ omarhaneef

My personal view is that it’s not hard to see where things are going, and anyone reasonably smart and informed will have a good sense of where things are generally headed.

The hard part of delivering the right trade off between usability, reliability, timeliness, cost with the right team and ecosystem.

I mean everyone knew that rich web over mobile would work but did that look like blackberry, iPhone, Android, windows phone etc

⬐ dsiegel2275

Survivorship bias?

⬐ Austin_Conlon

Formative experiences hanging around the fringe - the Aspen Institute, PARC, Homebrew Computer Club, etc.

⬐ hunter2_

Isn't it also a bit self-fulfilling? You imagine what's next, and you steer your company in that direction in order to be ready for it. Doing so (and speaking about it, etc.) contributes heavily to it even happening. If you were wrong, and your company disappears as a result, that contributes to us not analyzing it later.

⬐ Insanity

Ha yeah that was what I was thinking. Probably some survivorship bias in play here.

⬐ Roritharr

I find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous quotes where basically details were misjudged.

I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different.

This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.

⬐ enjoy-your-stay

>when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going

I believe that's largely because they spend a lot of time listening to their customers, understanding their needs and sifting through the trends in their businesses.

What's harder though, is inventing the future. Apple I believe did it in some ways with the original Mac, iPhone and iPad, and Tesla are now doing it with their cars.

⬐ omarhaneef

Yes, I agree with this comment in it’s entirety, and I did imply — but didn’t mean to - that only top executives have this foresight.

⬐ mrmonkeyman

How is this remotely true?

Lots of C's were very, very wrong about the future.

⬐ copperx

I'm curious about where the puck is going in accounting software. Can you expound on that?

⬐ theferalrobot

As an aside and for my own curiosity, where do you think accounting software is going in the future? (It isn't my industry but I hear occasional mentions of it more frequently than I would expect)

⬐ Roritharr

Lot's of vertical integration & automation, with the depth depending on business size.

There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting.

I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring...

Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road.

I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic.

I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.