Well, TimBL was a committed NeXT user when he wrote the first WWW
applications, and he and Cailleau (sp.) have often lamented publicly that
Mosaic created people's expectations of the web (most especially its lack
of support for authoring). So a systems that Jobs was hawking was at least
part of TimBL's idea of what a good WWW UI might be like.
They also knew about Nelson, and Engelbart, and at least some of the other
academic systems...
I don't think Jobs deserves creative (as opposed to business and
managerial) credit for any of the systems he's been in charge of. He does
know a good thing when he sees it, and he has no tolerance for the Ugly.
I'm an Apple user myself (as well as a Unix user), and I don't want to get
into that battle here. I don't understand why people have to try to make
someone else's work tradeoffs for them. I don't proseletize against
X-windows, however loathely most X application interfaces may be (Xterm is
the best X application for most stuff) -- but I also get tired of being
mocked for preferring what is, for me, a superior tool. I guess I do
proselytize against MS_windows, but only when someone else brings it up.
Which is usually the instant that I mention that I use a Mac.
Maybe we could flush the platform wars and discuss something worthwhile,
like whether we should all break our eggs at the big end or the little end.
It's a question with a long and impressively intellectual history.
For myself, I like my eggs big-endian, just like my computer architectures.
Or maybe we could wonder why octal persists in programming tools more than
2 decades since the death of the 6 bit byte and the 12 bit word.
Or we could just get on with our lives.
-- David
_________________________________________
David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu \ david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science \ Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ \ Dynamic Diagrams
--------------------------------------------\ http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/
MAPA: mapping for the WWW \__________________________