Truth

http://my.excite.com/tv/prog.jsp?id=MV007897960000&sid=17129&sn=Starz+Edge+%28Pacific%29&st=201609171850&cn=536

excite tv


Truth (2015)

536 Starz Edge (Pacific): Saturday, September 17 6:50 PM [ 6:50 PM Saturday 17 September 2016 Pacific Time USA ]

2015, R, ***, 02:01, Color, English, United States,

Controversy surrounds CBS anchor Dan Rather (Robert Redford) and ``60 Minutes'' producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) after the network broadcasts a report about President George W. Bush and his military service.

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood, Stacy Keach, John Benjamin Hickey, Dermot Mulroney, Dennis Quaid, Rachael Blake, David Lyons Director(s): James Vanderbilt Producer(s): Bradley J. Fischer, William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Brett Ratner, Doug Mankoff, Andrew Spaulding Executive Producer(s): Mikkel Bondesen, James Packer, Neil Tabatznik, Steven Silver, Antonia Barnard










http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm

Philosophy Blog


A Short History of the GUI and the Microsoft vs Apple Debate

Originally Published Jan 2007, Last edit November 2013

Douglas Engelbart, an American academic and engineer working at the Stanford Research Institute, dreamt up the idea of a mouse driven graphical user interface back in the 1960s.

1966 Engelbart's Research Machine with Hypertext GUI, Keyboard, Function Key Pad, Mouse

In the early 1970s researchers working for Xerox in Palo Alto California added Engelbart's mouse to their experimental "Alto" workstation which broke away from the prevailing mainframe paradigm becoming the both the first serious modern "personal computer" and the first proper computer to feature a mouse. However, the mouse wasn't integrated into the operating system in a profound way, it was more of an accessory for people to experiment with. Although the Alto used a lot of expensive cutting edge hardware, and although it wasn't a commercial product, about two thousand units were manufactured for researchers, and many innovative programs were written for it including the first WYSIWYG desktop publishing programs. Note: word processing, desktop publishing and spreadsheets, which benefited from graphic user interfaces and didn't need mainframe databases only floppy drive storage, were the commercial "killer apps" that drove the early PC era.

In 1981 Xerox released a commercial workstation based on the Alto and called the "Star 8010 Document Processor". However it failed both because the mouse and GUI were quite primitive, and because it cost a hefty US$17,000 (about $40,000 in today’s money).

1981 also saw the release of the IBM PC. Although the market for personal computers had been flourishing for about five years, it was highly fragmented with dozens of manufactures competing in both in the home and business markets. The first IBM PC was too expensive for the home market, but it proved a huge hit with business. "You can't get fired for buying an IBM" said many, but the PC quickly developed a more important attraction - open standards. Failing to realise the importance of the operating system, IBM purchased one from Microsoft. As a result other manufacturers were then able to copy the IBM hardware design and ship their 'Clones' with copies of MSDOS purchased directly from Microsoft. Note: clone manufactures took the same off the shelf hardware components IBM used in their PC, and brought them together with a reverse engineered clone of the IBM BIOS, but without IBM's fateful decision to rely on Microsoft's DOS they would have been helpless because they couldn't have reverse engineered the operating system.

As a result, beginning in June 1982 with the release of the first IBM compatible PC, and even without IBM's participation or approval, the IBM PC became an open standard with virtually unstoppable economies of scale. By 1990 IBM Compatible PCs captured an 80% market share, by 2000 97%.

Although this article is about Microsoft and Apple and the evolution of the GUI, perhaps it is worth spending a few paragraphs talking about the old Mainframe vs PC hardware debate that raged during the late 1970s and effectively ended with the 1982 emergence of the IBM PC Compatible standard. It wasn't just a dry computer science issue, people often talked about the debate from the sort of systemic philosophical perspective we associate with political oratory, rather like the debate between elitist top down Catholicism and grounded heart felt Puritanism, or the debate between the Post War State Interventionist "Post Keynesian Consensus" and Laissez-Faire Thatcherism (or Reganism). The post war economic model evolved out of the total mobilization and management of manpower and resources which all the major powers embraced in order to win the war. For example, in the aftermath of the war the British government maintained rationing of food and directed economic enterprises to provide whatever infrastructure projects and consumer goods it judged appropriate. Laissez-Faire Thatcherism evolved in response to the failure of the Post Keynesian Consensus during the tumultuous 1970s.

Now one of the problems with the old mainframe paradigm was that it had come to be monopolised by IBM which fought against the tides of change like King Cnut because it believed maintaining backwards compatibility was essential to sustaining its monopoly. Think, for example, about the 1970s socialists who killed off the Post War economic model. Imagine yourself running a state owned car manufacturer such as British Leyland, to be good instead of bad you have to serve the community, turn away from self-indulgence, and do a professional job. But the trade unionists who ran the world back in the 1970s were blind to everything except the welfare of their workers, and as a result they killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and thus they forced, so to speak, the gods to destroy them. For example, British trade unionists didn't want to embrace new technology or international competition in power generation because they wanted to keep inefficient deep pit British Coal mines running simply for the sake of the employees, but that parochialism, that inability to look past vested interests and comprehend the greater good, created higher prices poisoning the whole UK economy. Now take a deep breath and imagine yourself as a great statesman who looks far into the future, do you see that if that inefficiency hadn't been addressed it would have ultimately condemned the British people to the sort of slavery their Victorian ancestors once condemned much of the world too by becoming so much more evolved that them? So, speaking in the style of the Ancient poets, we could say that because the Brits were wise and faithful, the gods rewarded them by sending down a destroyer to cure the hubris of the socialists with nemesis, and that destroyer was Margaret Thatcher. How did Thatcher destroy the unions? Beginning in 1982 with the privatization of the nuclear company Amersham International plc, she shifted the balance of power from the workers to bosses, destroying the trade unions and changing the zeitgeist of the country, rapidly transforming the UK from a basket case into one of the most successful counties in Europe, although like a boat that can't keep get to its destination without tacks, the action she took created new problems which are beginning to overwhelm us today.

The point is that in the same sort of way that "big government" is now associated in minds of the ordinary opinionated Western masses with dinosaur technology and ghastly customer services and insolent employees, so mankind looks back on the old IBM mainframe era with contempt, accusing them of holding the world back by running the computer industry like an old fogies members club instead of a cutting edge adventure, and changing eye watering prices for the few instead of engaging with the many, and elevating their own interests over their passion for scientific advancement. But the truth is that just as "central planning" is the key to winning great wars, so mainframes broke the German codes, so these opinions seem as riddled with holes as the cheese the poets once said the moon is made from, and we should not tar and feather everything mainframe just because IBM failed anymore than we should tar and feather everything utopian just because the socialists failed. Indeed, there were some very exciting cutting edge developments talking place in computer academia such as the P.L.A.T.O. mainframe network which pioneered many exciting ideas such as online learning and forums and email and chat which didn't really emerge again until the internet took off in the mid 1990s. Yet although mainframe computer networks seemed to make more sense because they avoided duplicating expensive resources and kept things simple and safe for users and joined everyone together, they couldn't easily reach out and touch the masses at home in the way cheap personal computers such as the 1976 Apple I and 1977 Commodore Pet did.

1976 Apple I and 1977 Apple II. Two of the first personal computers that broke the mainframe paradigm like the legend of Prometheus who stole the intellectual fire from the palace of the gods and gave it to mankind. Visicalc the first spreadsheet was invented on the Apple II. Steve Wozniak, designer of these computers, was a geeky young engineer who designed them because he dreamt of owning his own computer but could not afford a mainframe, and he famously used as few chips as possible to minimize cost so that, for example, the Apple II had the world's first affordable floppy disc drive.

So to understand the philosophy involved in the transition from the mainframe to the PC we need to stop thinking about accomplishing some great communal task such as breaking enemy codes, and we need to contemplate other parts of the art of war, such as the creation of excellent troops by running training programs and separating the wheat from the chaff. And when we look at the history in that way, we notice immediately that whereas mainframes grew up around lab coat wearing men in the rarefied elite world of academia, defence and commerce, personal computers invaded the home and brought lots of new users and a much broader set of applications such as video games, creating a much noisier environment. Such innovation sounds wonderful, but it surely threatens to dash lesser men on the rocks like the proverbial songs of the sirens. For example, as Bill Gates has pointed out this expansion of application is not necessarily the same thing as world changing innovation, capitalism can be great at addressing lots of banal mundane problems such as "male baldness", but terrible at solving big communal problems which don't enrich individuals or require cooperation, such as Malaria and Climate Change. For example, as Steve Jobs has pointed out, instead of keeping watch over the community, capitalism can toast the world by filling our lives with porn (thinking teleologically about personality types, perhaps that's why lovers of capitalism, such as the Puritans, are so sensitive to moral purity when they're healthy).

In Plato's famous Symposium dialogue Alcibiades drunkenly described the words of the great Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates as rather like hallow statues which open up to wise men capable of looking behind the surface revealing golden statues of the gods, but Socrates himself sternly advised us to begin our philosophical odyssey by "knowing nothing", and of course there is nothing both more insufferable and dangerous than a bad philosopher pontificating about history, but we could take a risk and point out that one of the famous relationships philosophers like to think about is that between the architect and builder, and although both are needed to create a building, we can say perhaps the first is a natural King Catholic style with an eye on the big communal picture, and the second a manly General with his ear to the ground Puritan style, and when you put builders in charge of the world instead of architects they will cut costs and deliver more homes and give ordinary people what they want, but their lack of vision can create a very short term shallow and gridlocked world - most of all an ugly world - in need of a whole new paradigm.

So perhaps we can summarise by saying that the end of the mainframe paradigm was celebrated by the masses not only because it destroyed the unworthy incumbent monopolist IBM, but also because it was accompanied by an explosion of functionality which changed the world so that ordinary kids were brought up playing games and smart kids were brought up building computers and writing code. But it's also a classic example of a bottom up not top down revolution, instead of academics building the sci-fi like networked mainframe PLATO system out to humanity, the revolution pulled everything down and started again from people's garages, and the IBM monopoly was simply replaced with the Microsoft monopoly, and some of the stuff the PC era brought with it such as games and flaky personal operating systems is of questionable value, and in some important ways PCs arguably set back the development of modern internet like technology by fifteen years, and PCs have probably created a much messier uglier and more dangerous internet that the elite academics would have. And we should add to our summary by pointing out that the 1982 paradigm change from mainframes to PCs occurred because there was a kind of political unification that by setting one standard allowed everyone to compete doing their own thing, and Microsoft's operating system was at the heart of the political unification and acted a sort of single currency gold standard making it all possible.

Although IBM PCs running MSDOS dominated the market, Apple will be forever remembered as the innovative company behind the first mass market GUI based computer.

Steve Jobs, co owner of Apple Computers, visited Xerox in 1979 and saw a demonstration of an experimental mouse based GUI running on the Alto. He instantly realised that graphical interfaces controlled by a mouse are superior to text based interfaces controlled by keys, and he rushed back to Apple saying he had seen the future and they needed to get working on it right away. The engineers at Xerox were excited by their interface work, but they hadn't really understood the potential of a mouse controlled GUI. When Steve Jobs saw the newly released Star 8010 in 1981 he instantly knew Xerox had dropped the ball. The computer's mouse couldn't move diagonally, it didn't have overlapping windows, nor even dialogue boxes, and its operating system still revolved around keyboard commands. Apple were working on something far more revolutionary, and it took them many years and many millions of dollars to perfect the technology. In a sense the Xerox engineers had just stumbled across a very roughly drawn picture of the future, and Steve Jobs was the genius visionary who screamed eureka the instant he saw it, and then dedicated himself and his company to making it a fully functional and polished reality. In 1983 Apple finally released their first GUI based computer, unfortunately the "Lisa" was a very expensive machine targeted at business and academia which proved to be a commercial failure. However, a year later Apple launched their now famous "Macintosh" computer for consumers which started out with relatively modest sales but eventually became a great success.

Although Apple remained a niche player in the personal computer market, it should be remembered that the IBM PC was a sort of meteor that hit the earth and wiped almost all other competing life, in fact Apple was essentially the single survivor of this dramatic evolutionary event.

Before GUIs, users relied on complicated key combinations and typed commands to control computers. Steve Jobs focused on bringing computers to the masses by making them friendly, fun and easy to use - for example by making the desktop resemble a physical desk with a trash can and file folders (skeuomorphism) - and he succeeded. If we think again about the Mainframe vs PC debate, we said mainframes seemed at one time a "more efficent and powerful solution", also "easier to use and more stable", and "better connected together". The IBM PC compatibles competed against the mainframes in the first efficiency category, now Apple competes against the IBM PC in the second stability and ease of use category, and, of course, just as the stars move though the heavens in beautiful orbits, it seems that the battleground today is increasingly moving toward the third better connected together point.

In 1985, before the success of the Macintosh was clear, Apple's board of directors forced 30 year old Steve Jobs to resign. The Lisa had failed, Apple was loosing ground in word-processing, there had been disagreements over costs and the hyperactive Jobs had become very hard to work with. In 1997 Apple brought Jobs back when it purchased NeXT.

The development of the GUI made the Apple Mac popular for Graphical Desktop Publishing, but the IBM PC clone was still able to maintain market dominance. Meanwhile Microsoft worked on a GUI of it's own, and in 1985 it released an add-on to MSDOS called 'Windows 1.0'. However, this first version of Windows came with no useful compatible applications and its general functionality was limited by legal challenges from Apple (eg no overlapping windows). After defeating the law suites (Bill Gates defended them with the claim “hey you copied from Xerox”) it was able to release the much improved Windows 2.0 in 1987. That same year, two important programs written to work with Windows 2.0 were released: Microsoft Excel and Desktop Publisher Aldus PageMaker (the latter had previously only been available on the Apple Mac). Some computer historians date the release of PageMaker, the first appearance of a significant and non-Microsoft application for Windows, as the beginning of the success of Windows.

It is interesting to compare the GUIs at this stage.

Windows could run applications side by side and had minimization and maximization buttons. Although the $10k Apple Lisa supported multiple applications, up until Operating System 7 in 1991 the Macintosh could only run one application at a time (like the early iPhone - no multitasking).

Apple applications shared a common menu bar in a fixed location at the top of the screen - a design which remains today. Windows, by contrast, demanded each window maintain its own interface. The Apple approach probably made sense at the time, especially on a machine that can only run one process at a time. However, as the world has progressed to big screens running multiple applications in side by side windows, the Apple approach has stopped making sense because the menu bar is often nowhere near the rest of the application. Today, the Microsoft approach is the standard used by non Apple GUIs such as Linux etc.

Apple used the common menu bar at the top of the window to launch applications, but Microsoft instead chose a 'Program Manger' application that contained icon shortcuts to programs and other folders. The Microsoft approach allowed for the hierarchical organisation of large numbers of applications / shortcuts (which was not possible with the simple Apple Menu), but it also contributed to clutter and complexity as the user opened folder after folder in search of his target. In 1995 Microsoft completely replaced the Program Manger technique with the 'Start Menu'.

Apple adopted a friendly icon based approach to browsing the hard drive but Windows employed a vertical tree based application called File Manager. The vertical tree approach is much more effective, but novice computer users often struggle to understand it. This difference is one of many that reflects a divergence of design philosophy in those early days - while Steve Jobs of Apple concentrated on making his system friendly and aesthetic, Bill Gates and the brilliant geeky programmers living on caffeine at Microsoft concentrated on power and technicalities.

To see the difference in aesthetic design compare two early text editor applications from Apple and Microsoft.










http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm

Philosophy Blog


A Short History of the GUI and the Microsoft vs Apple Debate

Originally Published Jan 2007, Last edit November 2013


By contrast, in 1991 Word Perfect released Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS and Word Perfect 5.1 for Windows. Word Perfect was the biggest application of it's day, but its GUI version was both late to market and outclassed by Word. The screen shot below shows the famous but complicated 'Reveal Codes' feature which was rendered essentially obsolete by WYSIWYG editing.










http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-11-11/business/9811110299_1_microsoft-partner-steven-holley-intel

Chicago Tribune


Intel Exec Stands By Testimony

November 11, 1998 By Andrew Zajac, Tribune Staff Writer.

WASHINGTON — Intel Corp. executive Steven McGeady, under cross-examination Tuesday in the Microsoft antitrust trial, acknowledged that Intel blundered when it developed multimedia technology for a soon-to-be-replaced version of Microsoft's Windows operating system. But he refused to yield on his contention that the technology was shelved because of Microsoft's threats.


His notes of a November 1995 meeting quote a Microsoft official as saying the company planned to "kill HTML by extending it."



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 7:58 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Saturday 17 September 2016