The Acorn A4 laptop was, I think, the first Arm laptop. Acorn of course died fairly quickly but it would be interesting to consider how history might have been different if it had gained some traction given the early Arm CPUs we’re both powerful compared to x86 and had low power consumption.
I wonder if anyone here used one of these machines?
My first portable was The Luggable (that 20-pound, lead/acid-battery monster), in the late 1980s. I also had a Duo, for a couple of years; complete with its dock.
I've probably had just about every one of them, over my career. I think my favorite design was the "Blackbird" model. It would be ridiculous, these days, but back then, it was pretty awesome.
My first childhood computer was an IBM P70 luggable. I loved that thing. It had such great feel — so many clicky parts — that really appealed to me as a little kid.
The keyboard, which snapped into the case, also had these little legs on the back that swiveled so you could set it at an angle. The 3.5" floppy drive tilted out, and it had a great IBM-blue button to press to eject. Naturally the keyboard was clicky as all get-out. Beautiful orange plasma display. In hindsight, you'd think it would make MS Paint boring, but I loved it just the same.
One story. At maybe 4 or 5 years old, I thought to myself: I wonder if I can make this blue floppy eject button pop out without putting a disk in the drive. So I jammed a plastic ruler around inside the drive feeling for some kind of latch to press. I was not able to get the button to come out, but I sure as hell broke the drive. Whatever software was on the machine before jamming that thing around is the software that stayed on that machine for the rest of its days.
One of the jobs that Steven Sinofsky had was to go to trade shows and copy best-of-breed software for Microsoft. He excelled at that and rose through the Microsoft ranks.
A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering.
Just look at how they still fail at edge cases compared to Zoom or how clunky they are compared to Slack. Yet they dominate those categories.
A really interesting example is Dropbox. Steve Jobs famously made them an offer which they refused, and told them what they had was a feature, not a product.
Since then a lot of the major tech companies have rolled out file sync products, arguably not because they particularly want to be in that business, but because they need to be. File sync is just a natural thing we need to be able to do and lots of systems we use need to be able to do it.
Dropbox seem to have carved out a sustainable business as the non-aligned independent that integrates with everyone. Long may that continue.
But IT admins don't buy things because they're independent. The cost of using Microsoft 365 with Onedrive is $0 since it's included in all retail packages, while doing the same for Dropbox is $12.50/user/month (the same per-use price as the M365 plan that includes Office applications). Unless IT is part of a tech-driven company where leadership knows the benefit of investing extra money into IT Ops, the budget doesn't allow for redundant solutions like this.
That’s not really their strategy anymore, it’s not “bundle a bunch of mediocre stuff” but more “Bundle it with Exchange and Outlook”, which is an excellent product. People will buy Exchange, and then the Teams button just magically pops up and they don’t see a good enough reason to go buy Slack unless their employees complain too much.
Calendaring in Outlook is worlds better than anything else I've used, there's a ton of niceties (pick a time, type a name and it automatically tells you that person is unavailable. same with rooms.). Exchange's sync is very good, which is not something I can say for traditional IMAP.
I have my problems with them (like that Outlook is by far the most unstable part of Office, and can't keep the local cache clean for more than a year), but the features that work are way better than anything else on the market. I use Gmail for personal mail (because it comes with my unlimited Google Drive), and I can't do half of the rules and things I can do it Outlook.
> A big part of Microsofts success is to copy competitors (often badly) and be good enough for IT managers to buy worse-of-breed products in a “best-of-suite” offering.
This gets put out a lot but for Microsoft Office, this wasn't the case. By the time Office came out, Microsoft had pretty close to best of breed. By the mid-1990's, Word on its own was at least as good as, if not better than, WordPerfect. Lotus AmiPro was in 3rd place. Also, by the mid-1990's Excel was at the top in terms of spreadsheets.
I think the thing that made them able to succeed was the experience with Excel and Word for Mac. By writing these, they learned a lot of lessons on how best to allow software to take advantage of a GUI. Then when Windows took off, they could apply these lessons that competitors who had mainly focused on their DOS based user interfaces did not learn.
The ability to one-shop the whole office experience helped. So you could deal with microsoft for the OS and word.....etc or Microsoft for os and there for your WP and lots of other companies making support a multi number TZ experience compared to a one-stop shop like Microsoft.
This is also around the era of NT4 becoming mature and oh, did they push around that. I recall getting a crazy deal in which was after NT4 server but they had a bundle that was cheaper and you got the whole Backoffice bundle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BackOffice_Server )
and of course, helped promote their ecosystem even further.
So many alternative offerings just get pushed out, be it price or the cost of marketing to get new sales being a bridge too far. Many carried on in some form for while with their hard-core loyal users from old but even that didn't sustain them.
I recall also IBM buying one of these word alternatives and trying to create their own bundle offering, but alas that and equally the PC market slipped thru their fingers. In part from their half-cocked push on OS/2, which alas never really got the public traction it could of got and often wonder what could of been upon that.
> I think the thing that made them able to succeed was the experience with Excel and Word for Mac. By writing these, they learned a lot of lessons on how best to allow software to take advantage of a GUI. Then when Windows took off, they could apply these lessons that competitors who had mainly focused on their DOS based user interfaces did not learn.
YES the whole GUI aspect really did help Microsoft push their offerings as they worked, but then they did have inside help as they knew what API's would work (and quirks) and how to use them ahead of others. Equally if they wanted something not available, they had the clout to get it added. This along with GUI's add one heck of overhead upon your application development and was a few gotcha's. I do recall having issues using some OCX(iirc) feature that just would bug badly and retorted to logging a ticket with Microsoft for them to come back and say, we have looked into it and yes it is broken, we will fix it in the new version. Which meant upgrading everything and kinda killed that whole project in the end as was a fair few of those.
Whilst it didn't do heavy development with Windows back then, my experiences sure tainted me and I'm sure those deeper in that trench will have some even uglier battle stories. Maybe why finding out undocumented API's back then was more a thing as many instances of you can't do that but there is an undocumented API that will do that and Microsoft product X,y.Z....all use it to add that feature.
Was interesting times and yet, was enough to put me of doing development upon Windows even to this day as just got burned too many times. SO yes, I can see how things may of played out for those wonderful DOS applications transitioning towards GUI land with Windows.
Mine had a PowerBook 100. It was underpowered even at the time and that passive matrix screen was awful, but damn it was sexy. So sleek, even compared to the clunky PC laptops from the end of the 1990s. A fantastic piece of engineering.
It absolutely blows my mind that people try to use Twitter for long-form writing.
Honestly, it blows my mind that people use Twitter for anything at all, other than outrage and anxiety disorders. But if you do want to use an awful platform for long-form writing, then that's why we have Medium.
They probably feel like you when preparing these too. The reason it excels is that a few of the individual tweets go viral and it drives the complete thread.
Twitter could provide a long-form writing platform where you write the whole thing and then some tweets you want to package with it. I suspect they feel that this is a form of experimentation where any of the sets of sentences could go viral, but the author may be unlikely to select the correct ones most of the time.
It's probably seems less commitment for the reader as well. Instead of a block of text upfront, a few paragraphs with a punchline and a thread a tap away if you are really interested.
Certainly an interesting experiment, which can be improved on for sure.
I don't get it either, I miss when everyone had their own blog and we used RSS. Aside from the obvious decentralized and readability advantages, I miss that each had a different design, personality, style.
But I've long given up, since all the smart people chose Twitter to vent their minds.
It's the only social media I've caved in to.
It's absurd how much more readable that is than the twitter thread itself. If you had told me it was a blog post I 100% would have believed you up until I hit the bottom and saw it was on threadreader.
As a 7 year old I loved watching the Apple commercials that came on the Apple Multimedia Starter Kit CD-ROM. I still think this is the greatest commercial ever made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1hSU_qz5Es
One thing that is absent from today’s technoculture but was pervasive in the 1990s is the fact that the use of any feature that might have required an intermediate/advanced level of technical knowledge seemed subversive. Also, the feeling that big institutions seemed obtuse and unaware of advancements in technology. You want to what on an airplane? What’s a network?
Now, it’s normalized and might be perceived mildly annoying at worst (ie asking someone to AirDrop a photo for better quality versus them messaging a quality-reduced photo to you).
The Sinclair Z88 that came out five years after the Kyocera/Model 100/NEC/Olivetti which sold millions of units worldwide, while the Z88 was a regional curiosity?
By the time Sinclair got on board, almost every company had a portable machine. Even IBM.
I didn't see that in this post at all. If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick.
You do have to somehow acknowledge and explain the dominance that Apple portables have in the popular imagination though, and that's what this does.
> that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick.
I can't remember any laptop doing the same trick at the time. Perhaps some Vaio models could?
The trick with the envelope was the long-needed nail in the coffin of netbooks: it was a fully-functional laptop with none of the compromises that netbooks at the time had.
"The Manila component of the name originates from Manila hemp, locally known as abacá, the main material for Manila folders, alongside the Manila envelope and Manila paper."
> If anything, Apple was way behind at the start on portables, and it even mentions that the famous "yellow envelope" moment was pure marketing ad there were already Sony laptops that could do the same trick.
That wasn’t the start at all, Apple had been making laptops for 20 years at that time. Apple and Sony had been leapfrogging each other ever since the very first PowerBook (built by Sony). The titanium PowerBooks and iBooks (and to a lesser extent the Wall Street and Bronze G3s) were great devices in different ways, certainly not worse than their Vaio competitors.
What Sony had and Apple had not was a broad range of tons of devices, each one with its own special gimmick. And a lot of terrible machines in the dark years between ~1991–1998.
It might be a symptom of people aging out if the industry or what jobs they may have had. Cloistered in a university somebody may never have seen the groundbreaking Toshibas, or the Zenith supersport. Its been interesting to me to watch an industry giant like Toshiba abandon the laptop market while Apple took all the mindshare. Zenith was probably doomed as their main businesses were decimated by white box suppliers but toshiba had few peers 25 or 30 years ago.
I did used to favour toshibas but the last two were hard to distinguish from everything else.
Some 20+ years ago my dad had a Toshiba Portégé (no idea what the model number was, but it had a P3-500) that didn’t weigh more
than a current MacBook Air, yet was a competent laptop. They were truly ahead of their time in some ways.
I wonder what happened. Innovation slowed down? Poor product market fit / not price competitive? Failed at securing corporate mindshare like Dell/HP/IBM?
I'm not sure. HP have shown that a premium laptop like the Spectre definitely has a market, which is where Toshiba probably needed to be. They seemed to decide at some point that they wanted to cover the entire market, including budget offerings like the Satellite right up to the fancy touchscreen, crazy folding half-tablet Ultrabook.
The last Satellite I bought all the hinges broke and the screen flaps about (still works though). My wife's old Ultrabook has a cool design idea (screen slides over the keyboard and folds upwards) but all the hinge gubbins are exposed so it looks half-finished when it's open. It has also decided to poop itself when Microsoft send out updates on a semi-regular basis and require booting from a rescue USB. Both of them are ancient though.
Their market used to be "I'm doing business but I'm not a developer" types who wanted something reliable and a little stylish and paid a premium for it, so I suspect what happened is too many budget Satellites and not enough interesting thinking like the Ultrabooks.
The article is by Steven Sinofsky who was at Microsoft at the time, who absolutely knows what he's taking about, and extensively documents the state of Windows portables right alongside the Mac. How is that "taking away context"?
Apple does what most companies won’t: focus on something and place heavy bets on it.
I’ve long argued this with those who claim the current smartphone form factor was inevitable. Sure, companies were experimenting with touchscreen smartphones, but none of the major players like Motorola would ever have dared make just one phone and market the heck out of it.
If someone like Nokia or Motorola had created the iPhone, it would have been just one of dozens of models, languishing in the corner of carrier retail stores because no one knew what to do with it.
Similarly, Apple gets credit for a lot of things not because they invented it (e.g., USB) but because they embraced it, popularized it, and doubled down on it.
It also had a different form factor, built around the graffiti scribbling thing, and completely reliant on a stylus and resistive screens, which were ok for the time (I loved mine), but were obsoleted overnight by the iPhone.
There was also the LG Chocolate (pretty much the only phone with a capacitive screen released before the iPhone), which is a demonstration that “capacitive touchscreen” does not imply “iPhone form factor”.
I wonder if anyone here used one of these machines?
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/22807/Acorn-A4-Lapto...