a trip down memory lane

[David Cake]

At 6:23 AM -0400 28/3/07, Charles Dyer wrote:
>>>No 9 - Taligent
>
>IBM's fault.

	Everyone involved fault. But particularly IBM.
	Awful.
	A train wreck example of how to get object oriented so wrong 
knowledgable people will run screaming.

>>>No 1 - Apple Newton

	The Newton didn't really flop, though. It didn't really take 
off - but it went to three generations of hardware, spawned third 
party retail stores, etc. It just went mediocrely. Not the same thing 
as a true flop at all.

At 5:13 PM +0100 28/3/07, Matt Johnston wrote:
>I'd be tempted to add:
>
>	PowerTalk
>	CoolTalk
>	Dylan
>	HotSauce
>	OpenDoc

	I played with every single one of these, I think. I probably 
had them all installed on the one machine at one point. God, Apple in 
the 90s was run in a spastic and confused fashion (with some awfully 
clever people paid to produce cool ideas for the management to 
squander).
	I'd definitely put PowerTalk/AOCE on the list. Don't think I 
ever saw a real field deployment.
	There were plenty of other wacky technologies that surfaced, 
had obviously had a lot of development put into them, disappeared. 
MAE for unix, that let you run a little Mac environment on unix years 
before Classic, for example.
	Dylan never really got the chance to be a flop - the language 
was just another language (albeit a quite nice one) without a full 
proper language specific toolchain, and the rather nifty Apple Dylan 
development environment never got as far as being released. I 
remember the t-shirts the team had made, that said 'Apple Dylan - the 
power to cancel your very best!' or something like that. I still have 
all my Dylan seed stuff.

	In general, the list was a mediocre attempt at a good idea. 
Confused 'mildly successful but wildly overhyped product' with true 
flop in the case of the Newton, missed out some obvious things like 
the Apple III and mess that was the giant Rhapsody strategy product 
U-turn (with its orphaned or unreleased products along the way).

	Cheers
		David