Look, my point is, this misty-eyed nostalgia for some golden past that never was is tedious and unproductive.
I programmed a graphical WISYWIG bit-mapped font editor with real-time updating of a text sample in three different font sizes on an eight-bit one megahertz CPU - in BASIC - on a machine that didn't even have a GUI. Don't talk to me about the "good old days".
The arrival of a rock-solid Unix core and NeXT's incredibly flexible and fast rapid application development tools in the Mac ecosystem - along with access to machines that are cheaper than they have ever been - has lead to an explosion of creativity utterly unmatched by anything from previous decades. One-person and garage code shops are turning out apps of elegance, beauty and refinement - and usability; and larger shops are treating the Mac as the natural place to develop new and interesting things - for any platform - because of the richness and accessibility of the toolset. Young hackers are growing up with access to tools that were the preserve of obscure academic projects and closed-shops like PARC - improved versions of those tools even - and taking that as the natural state of the world. As they should. And interfacing their code to the real world through cheap and astoundingly powerful off-board hardware like the Arduino.
And yet while this explosion happens all around us, we sit back and pine for the Apple of the 90s, who frankly couldn't find their own backside with both hands, a map and compass and a pack of bloodhounds. Calling the Apple of today "cold and robotic" by comparison verges on delusional.
I programmed a graphical WISYWIG bit-mapped font editor with real-time updating of a text sample in three different font sizes on an eight-bit one megahertz CPU - in BASIC - on a machine that didn't even have a GUI. Don't talk to me about the "good old days".
The arrival of a rock-solid Unix core and NeXT's incredibly flexible and fast rapid application development tools in the Mac ecosystem - along with access to machines that are cheaper than they have ever been - has lead to an explosion of creativity utterly unmatched by anything from previous decades. One-person and garage code shops are turning out apps of elegance, beauty and refinement - and usability; and larger shops are treating the Mac as the natural place to develop new and interesting things - for any platform - because of the richness and accessibility of the toolset. Young hackers are growing up with access to tools that were the preserve of obscure academic projects and closed-shops like PARC - improved versions of those tools even - and taking that as the natural state of the world. As they should. And interfacing their code to the real world through cheap and astoundingly powerful off-board hardware like the Arduino.
And yet while this explosion happens all around us, we sit back and pine for the Apple of the 90s, who frankly couldn't find their own backside with both hands, a map and compass and a pack of bloodhounds. Calling the Apple of today "cold and robotic" by comparison verges on delusional.