Interesting indeed. The bit about Solaris -> Solar is nice/funny. I guess its an update to some system or kernel config file.

Or for super hacker points, edit appropriate binary using adb :)

Wow, moving every 2-5 years? I suppose it works with no kids, or spouse ..

I have both and it's still doable, as long as your spouse is as into it as you are.

Mine isn't going to stay put for more than a few years either. We enable each other's moving fetish.

Umm .. pretty standard & generally lame line of questioning at many companies/countries. Sounds like you were offended or surprised by it?

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.

At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.

Yes, and the collaboration with Sun heavily influenced how Java ended up looking.

Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.

Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.

I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.

WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.

Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.

Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.

But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.

Successful in some domains.

The daily Rails projects on HN is long gone, people eventually moved on into Clojure, than Elixir, Gleam, nowadays I lost track where to.

Some folks that missed out history lessons are now trying CORBA/J2EE with WebAssembly, WIT, and Kubernetes.

Yeah, I chose Rails just an example, could be PHP, could be Elixir, could be this dumbass bun shit, whatever is cool man and get you that VC.

I cannot recall any 'Show HNs' based on J2EE, not that it doesn't work.

Usually enterprise apps don't do Show HNs.

I concede you like to talk to yourself.

Three decades ago, they would relentlessly snailmail spam us with these weekly industry tabloids like 'ComputerWorld' and 'PCWeek'. These were always fun to read at lunch, even if they were all obvious advertisements, but certainly better info than vaguely remembering something from your stoner phase and then sticking your junk out.

Agree. The only recent UI/safety advancents have been a good rear & side camera; and blind spot detection & warning system. The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.

Until reliable FSD becomes widespread, we ought to stop with these ‘incremental’ UI changes for the sake of it. Like the ridiculous ’take a coffee break’ indicator which is also incorrect mostly

>recent UI/safety advancements have been a good rear & side camera

With the reports of spyware tech possibly coming to California cars “in 2027” (prob not!), I saw someone complain about the rear camera adding costs. But those families impacted by backover accidents fought for this cheap technology for a reason.

>The rest are for folks who should not be driving a vehicle at all.

I may be able to be convinced that there are so many drivers on the road who need to get off that it’s worth investing in technologies for people who should not be driving. (I’m just thinking of a private local system that has a hunch whether you are entirely absorbed in your phone or not, and if & how much I would like the public to pay for it so they don’t hurt me)

That is an unfair insinuation - ‘that he sounds proud of it’. There are many reasons one stays quiet - like you are sole provider for a family, its beem going on for a while that you ignore/doubt its seriousness etc.

The consequences for speaking out can be very, very real, and utterly catastrophic. A good friend tried to blow the whistle on something the Cameron government was doing in the U.K., involving the judiciary, and got steamrolled for his efforts. There isn’t a whisper of the topic itself in the public domain, but his “crimes” were so bad that Cameron himself did a press conference to condemn him. His wife couldn’t take it, as these were people who’d spent their lives as loyal subjects of the system, suddenly cast out and crushed underfoot, killed herself. His kids fled the country.

So - sure - it’s the “right thing to do” to speak out, but when dealing with government you have to do it with the foreknowledge that this may have mortal (or worse) consequences for you and your family.

Profoundly formative experience for me, witnessing it all.

That's just the way the "Unlike Snowden" part read to me. Had you read further down the thread, you'd see I had already stipulated the family part before you made your comment.

Your statement of ‘hardly anyone considered facebook part of the web’ is incorrect. Facebook became popular a bit after the Web had become quite mainstream. The idea of signing up for online services was not foreign to most of these folks. Now, AOL/Compuserve and such were more considered as non web.

YES, THIS (capitalized on purpose). Folks, please use reasonably correct writing syntax. You CAN do better .. At least think of the AIs consuming your writings.

I ReSpEcTfUlLy DiSaGrEe FrIeNd -- PeOpLe LoVe SlOp. =3

Ok, so better to be poor and backward, eh ?

Hard to say. There are so many options that aren't just those two.

perhaps.