Notes from January 2004 Meeting


Morning Session

Jef Raskin -

Mac Founders Push for New Ideas
From: Wired News - 01/06/2004
By: Daniel Terdiman

Some of the creators and designers of the original Macintosh PC, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, are disappointed that today's computers are not significantly more advanced than the early Macs, and blame this lack of innovation on a resistance to radical ideas, at least at Apple. Former Apple programmer Jef Raskin, considered by many to be the "father of the Macintosh," argues that graphical user interfaces need to change rapidly, and complains that Apple staff suffer from a paucity of interface knowledge and understanding. His current project is a new computing environment known as The Humane Interface, which is supposed to operate at a far higher level of efficiency than Windows or the Mac OS. Meanwhile, onetime original Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld believes that Apple's rate of innovation far exceeds that of the mainstream industry, though at the same time he is puzzled at the inertia exhibited by the PC industry in the 20 years since the original Mac's debut. "Personal computers are still way too frustrating and hard to use," he admits. Another member of the original Mac development team, Bill Atkinson, is more enthusiastic about the Mac's progress since 1984, noting that its ability to help ordinary users carry out sophisticated tasks remains one of its most appealing features. He also points out that the transition of once-expensive, customized capabilities such as video-editing tools into standard Mac features is proof of the continued evolution of the PC.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,61799,00.html

Visit Jef Raskin's official website:
http://humane.sourceforge.net/home/index.html

Jef's email address
jef@jefraskin.com

Windows, Linux, and Mac versions of THE soon available


Afternoon Session

Fbrowse is an object-oriented browser and simulator writte in F#.


Contributions by Kevin Appert

How To Write Unmaintainable Code

Museum of American Heritage

Sculpture on California Avenue in Palo Alto
Body of Urban Myth
Our Lady of the Washing Machine
Wascomat Laundry Equipment

Contributions by John Cassady

Here are some links on the item I mentioned at the meeting: feasibility of now doing a true forthBIOS and using it for clustering.

  • LinuxBIOS Home Page
  • LinuxBIOS at Four - LinuxBIOS is more than a way to boot your Linux box in a few seconds.
  • About LinuxBIOS - Eric Biederman shows how performance and increased adoption of LinuxBIOS is attracting attention from embedded and cluster developers.
  • openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering which turns a network of ordinary computers into a supercomputer.