Re: [dev] The Apollo Display Manager [very long]

From: John Yates <john_AT_yates-sheets.org>
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:02:29 -0400

> I have no idea how I've never heard of this,

The adage is that the victors get to write history. Apollo was a
single company peddling a proprietary technology. At the time that it
started Unix was offered only to academic institutions. There was no
way to foresee that the consent decree constraining AT&T's activities
would be lifted and that Unix would snowball into a vast community and
ecosystem.

Rich Gabriel had some insightful thoughts on why Unix was so
successful in his "Worse is Better" essays:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Apollo engineering was definitely an example of what Gabriel calls the
MIT or "The Right Thing" approach.

> It would be almost
> trivial to introduce a sane mouse interface to this idea, and then
> build all kinds of applications that lever the separation of streams.

I will be happy to try anything you come up with.

/john
Received on Sat Jun 25 2011 - 17:02:29 CEST

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