People who weren't alive at the time may not appreciate how different the commercial app ecosystem was: how many more options, how much less concentrated.
Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29. It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source.
It wasn't just word processors. Here is a different cover: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-05-17. It boasts tests of 43 different consumer-level database products. And magazine covers like these two weren't extraordinary.
If you compare word processors to note taking apps of today which I think are very equivalent to the same use you'll find more than 55 tools.
Word processors belong to an era where the computer replaced the typewriter and it's not needed any more these days. You can find commercial, free or open source note taking apps that are local or cloud based and offer a huge variety of features.
Those annual PC Magazine Best Printer of 19XX that weighed the same as a tome - but they really tested in depth - now we just go to the local PC store and buy a crappy $99 inkjet on special from HP/Epson or Canon.
I still use microEmacs, which floated around the intertoobs in the 1980s. Of course, I've modified it substantially over the years, most recently adding color syntax highlighting and Unicode.
>The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it ... there's no point in adding an extension language.
Missed a "if you're a major programming language creator and profficient with parsers and compilers since the 80s" between these two parts of the sentence...
But why use a μEmacs when you can use actual Emacs, with its comprehensive scriptability? μEmacsen made sense on older platforms like CP/M and MS-DOG, but they're pointless today.
Quick hypothesis on PIMs/editors/etc, from someone who worked on a PIM in the late 1980s and who misses outliners and others- the biggest "unimagined" change is from personal information management to hive-mind information management (via search engines).
It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites. The second order effect is a change in demand for personal information authoring/management/etc.
A small number of tools, like Scrivener, that may have been competitive in the 1980s, have a market today. The idea of an isolated, focused, non-networked writing environment, surviving like the crocodile.
I don't have a hypothesis for the lack of innovation in the spreadsheet space. The incentives are certainly there. Literally billions/trillions of dollars of assets are subjected to all kinds of spreadsheet risk. Yet that workflow persists, and small and large businesses that attempt to tackle it rise and fall by the wayside.
People build things with Excel because they already have it installed on their office computers. They don't have to file an expense report to pay for a license. They don't have to wrangle IT, beg their manager, or fight with the security team for permission to get it installed.
It doesn't hurt that a wide variety of white-collar workers are already familiar with Excel and stand to gain a great deal of leverage across their job with every small investment in learning about its features, but the incumbent advantage of Excel being universally available, without question or complaint, cannot be overstated.
The problem with any of the old 'killer applications' like spreadsheets is that the network effect now dominates the productivity market.[1] So you'd spend most of your energy on trying to maintain compatibility and feature parity with an application that users are very resistant to moving away from. It's a pretty bad risk/reward unless you have a use case with a 10x (or more) value proposition.
[1] Back when businesses were mainly concerned with internal document sharing it wasn't as much of an issue. But as that expanded to marking up documents with outside lawyers, accountants etc that changed quickly. When the Internet happened for the masses in the late 90's it was game over for most of the competition.
This is a great insight, but there's a third angle too: a lot of these 80s tools assumed you'd invest in them, and not just in cash: you'd give them a lot of time and attention and learning and hence reap expert-user rewards. The world simply isn't like that now, except in niches.
And if you're niche, you can't establish a new file format in a networked world, so you end up having to be interoperable, with markdown in text or xls for spreadsheets. And if you're interoperable, you end up shrinking your market even further: people your users are sharing with don't need to use you.
You really can't build much of a moat on "powerful UX that boils down to a sharable file format". The only way to make space for yourself then is to become a platform in your own right (see emacs/vscode etc).
And what prevents spreadsheets becoming a platform? The install base of Excel, for a kickoff, but also the enormous limitations of csv on the other hand.
In short, the conditions that allowed all those 1980s applications to flourish – bespoke file formats, invested users, no truly dominant players, less networked sharing - have all gone. And so have the apps.
For me it is a lot about changing expectations. I used to use ecco pro for my notetaking. I loved it, it was very powerful and focused and it let me capture my ideas very effectively. Today I use onenote, which as an outliner sort of sucks.
Why did I move from ecco pro to onenote? Because I want something that automatically syncs to all my devices, easily searches across a decade of notes and lets me get things done from my phone. Onenote’s low quality outline authoring experience is trumped by its networking features.
This for me is the key: we expect tools to live on the network. All those apps of old, they were based around files, their business models were based around buying files, and they targeted one form factor and often only one OS. We need tools based around networks, not files, that target every form factor and every OS, but doing that costs a lot of money to rent servers and build frontends, and that means we get locked in saas products. Tons of saas products, all solving the same set of problems on the network but doing it through a web interface because it allows them to write once and run everywhere.
What would really help is a free substrate for networked open source products. If you could deploy something cloud-native without having to pay for servers, you’d see more community and native apps and less web saas in the productivity tools space.
> This for me is the key: we expect tools to live on the network. All those apps of old, they were based around files
I agree and it's why I'm a fan of apps that sync data via something like Dropbox or Google Drive. The application can still be file based and the developer doesn't have to run servers. There are the obvious limitations, but for personal use it works pretty well.
The desktop app scene is so different today with more and more apps moving to SaaS. In the 90s, they were so many interesting and well-made desktop apps that were full of interesting ideas. Lotus Improv was certainly one of them. ( A 1990 video demonstration can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsYsZmhnXR4 )
Lotus Word Pro also took a refreshingly different UI approach to MS Word. Long before Microsoft introduced the Office 'ribbon', Lotus Word Pro essentially had the same idea with their floated tabbed property box. The low resolution of screens at the time meant the design of the property box was a bit cramped. But it was still much better designed and organised than the Office 'ribbon' that would come later. See the Lotus Word Pro example below:
WordPro was awesome. It came on my mom's ThinkPad back in the mid-90s (along with an optional partition of OS/2 that I immediately removed to make more room for Windows, and then restored, and then removed, each a half-dozen times), and I initially hated it because it wasn't WordPerfect, but I soon grew to really appreciate how carefully thought out their entire approach was. In my opinion, WordPro (and the other modern apps in that suite, notably not including 1-2-3) were just a great example of how really doing something right for the GUI was fundamentally different from doing it right for the CLI.
Somewhere, in my office, is still a CD with Lotus 96 on it, but I've had no real desire to reinstall it in a VM.
It's weird to see the term "App" in relation to anything before iOS era. Back then such software used to be mostly called applications or just programs. [1]
Whenever this comes up, I always ask, even though I can anticipate the answer:
has anyone cloned Lotus Improv, either literally or ideologically? The closest thing I've used recently that was close was probably Airtable, but that's more an iterative improvement on FileMaker/Access, with a web focus, than really a competitor to Improv. There also used to be a Java desktop app, but it wasn't targeted for casual desktop use, and I've long since forgotten its name.
as far as I know Quantrix Modeler https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/ started as a clone and has continued on with the same idea, though by now I assume it's accreted enough bells and whistles to be just barely recognizable.
Improv was protected by patents, which was a complicating factor. That said, there were a bunch of implementations (already mentioned), and the capability was added to Excel and other spreadsheets.
I’m working on https://inflex.io/ which can achieve the data / logic separation of Improv, by putting functions in cells. But Improv isn’t an inspiration. Inflex is certainly closer to it than Airtable though.
These apps have been "lost" for one single reason: they weren't FLOSS. There's plenty of software written in the 1980s that has been maintained since and is used today on modern platforms, because its code was made available under a suitable license. Proprietary software is a dead end, and proprietary online services only more so.
Nah, that's missing the point. While FLOSS products have a survivability advantage it's not like we see a high level of usage of diverse FLOSS productivity apps across the user universe. The authors are more talking about why we don't see more varieties of software in the same category regularly emerging and seeing adoption.
Other commenters have it right I think- network effects drive up the cost of not being on the dominant software. I also think that the security and privacy aspect plays a huge part too- it's one thing to install software sold by a retailer you trust in a non-networked computer, it's another to do so directly from a random website on an always on networked computer.
I'm actually missing working OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). I used to like it in MS Works in the 90ies: I could insert an area from a Works spreadsheet into a Works document and have it auto-update (you could choose if it should link the data or copy it.)
I wonder if Ozzie considers Groove to be one of the products he expended energy on and failed. From my perspective it seemed to actually be succeeding as a deeply network-aware thick client for collaborative knowledge work when Microsoft acquired it and killed it off. Or if not outright killed it, then managed it to death by strapping it to the SharePoint boat anchor. I wouldn't count that as a failure per-se. It didn't succeed, but wasn't really given the chance to do so, which seemed to be what Microsoft wanted to get out of the transaction.
Undeniably the product failed commercially. By the time we decided to sell the company, the product was doing ~20M+ of revenue but on a low growth rate, after having gone through ~140M of capital with (not unreasonable) investor expectations of unicorn-like returns.
That said, I absolutely loved Groove the product and Groove the team. It was a dapp with a wonderfully-usable interface, built on a pure P2P blockchain-like infrastructure that achieved distributed consensus for generalized transactions.
It had an extremely loyal following in the NGO and GOV space. They "got it" as to the unique benefits of a secure end-to-end encrypted system for small team collaboration.
But the enterprise and consumers chose centralization as the winning architecture, and the rest is history.
> Also there should be networked spreadsheets. And since it's 40 years later, there should be products we never imagined in the 80s. They aren't there.
That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying slightly improved versions of newsgroups (facebook), IRC (slack/discord), BBS (google)... I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades. One could say video, but live TV existed before. Scaling up is incremental. Right here, HN is barely different than newsgroups. If change had been non-incremental , we d be dismissing HN as something that only crazy people do (the equivalent of riding a horse to work)
>Now, we don't have choice. [...] I have to use their editors
Only for the submission. You can write externally. There used to be "It's All Text" before Firefox's extensions got gutted, which automated that copying. I wonder where that lies on their list of "apps" to edit with.
Isn't Notion pretty close to what's being described here? Sort of weird combination of networked spreadsheet, relational database, writing + notetaking app?
There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too. Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.
Notion is definitely the closest but it lacks some of the magic (maybe it will get there).
Lotus Agenda for example would take your notes and automatically categorize them based on the categories you created in the earlier not taking process, allowing you to filter your notes by different "views" with no input on your end (after the initial category creation). For example you could mention a contact in a Task or Note and then that note would appear under the view for that contact automatically. Etc.
Notion wanted to be this I think. But it knows really few for a spreadsheet, it isn't enough flexible for a database, it is not really set up for writing (because of the blocks, at least for me...) and it is slow for note taking. Also they still do not have offline working and you cannot back up properly.
I think that today's developer tools, such as GitHub, represent the main difference to application developers. The secondary factor is ship cadence and deployment infrastructure. Lotus Symphony was one of my favourites at the time. It was so advanced with its own language "script" when it appeared. It supported add ins, an early predecessor to APIs, and had its own database. But dev tools such as Macro, Quick C, Quick Basic, MFC, Bench, NextStep, and Hypercard. There were many great Unix tools such as Emacs and RCS along with languages such as Smalltalk, LISP, Pascal, and C. And not to be forgotten Symbolics - the beginning of AI hardware. It was a great time to develop software. Anything was possible and everything seemed impossible. There was only some Internet (ARPANET) if you worked at the university like I did, or some advanced research lab, and to launch a product you went to trade shows and advertised in Dr Dobbs Journal. In the 80s we wrote wonderful software, and while as @rozzie says, most of it is gone forever, the innovations live on IMHO.
I think the main reason of their abandonment is Internet.
It just changed everything, people stopped create desktop apps and started to create web apps. However, web as a platform was really weak for complex apps, so only now we see how companies re-discover lost apps from 80s and re-create them in the web (Notion, Coda, Airtable, Fibery)
I see what the author is saying, but I also think the "low code" stuff is catching up. I've seen things people build in O365, Quickbase, Airtable, Knack, and so on that have the same level of functionality I remember seeing in Notes/Domino.
Based on the title, I thought this was going to be about finding, archiving and curating those lost apps. Instead, it's just a complaint about how "it was better in the old days."
What gets me about this line of thought is that the technology didn't disappear. Anyone who wants to recreate "the lost apps of the 80s" just needs to grab a text editor and start coding.
Everyone has the power to create any app they like. Stop pointing the finger at other people asking why they don't do the work for you.
[+] [-] jbullock35|5 years ago|reply
Here is a PC Magazine cover from 1988: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-02-29. It boasts a review of 55 different word processors. All of them would have been commercial; none of it was free, let alone open-source.
It wasn't just word processors. Here is a different cover: https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-05-17. It boasts tests of 43 different consumer-level database products. And magazine covers like these two weren't extraordinary.
[+] [-] JamesAdir|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|4 years ago|reply
It was a time of evolutionary explosion. And while I don't miss a lot of the aspects of it, it is certainly nostalgic in a lot of ways
(though I'm not the type to play with 80s hardware - emulators are more practical)
Oh and about the "none of it was free" well ;)
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vidanay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
D version:
https://github.com/DigitalMars/med
C version:
https://github.com/DigitalMars/me
The "extension language" is it's so easy to just add some code and recompile it, there's no point in adding an extension language.
I like microEmacs a lot because I can use it remotely over a tty interface.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
Missed a "if you're a major programming language creator and profficient with parsers and compilers since the 80s" between these two parts of the sentence...
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites. The second order effect is a change in demand for personal information authoring/management/etc.
A small number of tools, like Scrivener, that may have been competitive in the 1980s, have a market today. The idea of an isolated, focused, non-networked writing environment, surviving like the crocodile.
I don't have a hypothesis for the lack of innovation in the spreadsheet space. The incentives are certainly there. Literally billions/trillions of dollars of assets are subjected to all kinds of spreadsheet risk. Yet that workflow persists, and small and large businesses that attempt to tackle it rise and fall by the wayside.
[+] [-] RodgerTheGreat|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't hurt that a wide variety of white-collar workers are already familiar with Excel and stand to gain a great deal of leverage across their job with every small investment in learning about its features, but the incumbent advantage of Excel being universally available, without question or complaint, cannot be overstated.
[+] [-] blihp|5 years ago|reply
[1] Back when businesses were mainly concerned with internal document sharing it wasn't as much of an issue. But as that expanded to marking up documents with outside lawyers, accountants etc that changed quickly. When the Internet happened for the masses in the late 90's it was game over for most of the competition.
[+] [-] bonaldi|4 years ago|reply
And if you're niche, you can't establish a new file format in a networked world, so you end up having to be interoperable, with markdown in text or xls for spreadsheets. And if you're interoperable, you end up shrinking your market even further: people your users are sharing with don't need to use you.
You really can't build much of a moat on "powerful UX that boils down to a sharable file format". The only way to make space for yourself then is to become a platform in your own right (see emacs/vscode etc).
And what prevents spreadsheets becoming a platform? The install base of Excel, for a kickoff, but also the enormous limitations of csv on the other hand.
In short, the conditions that allowed all those 1980s applications to flourish – bespoke file formats, invested users, no truly dominant players, less networked sharing - have all gone. And so have the apps.
[+] [-] Joeri|4 years ago|reply
Why did I move from ecco pro to onenote? Because I want something that automatically syncs to all my devices, easily searches across a decade of notes and lets me get things done from my phone. Onenote’s low quality outline authoring experience is trumped by its networking features.
This for me is the key: we expect tools to live on the network. All those apps of old, they were based around files, their business models were based around buying files, and they targeted one form factor and often only one OS. We need tools based around networks, not files, that target every form factor and every OS, but doing that costs a lot of money to rent servers and build frontends, and that means we get locked in saas products. Tons of saas products, all solving the same set of problems on the network but doing it through a web interface because it allows them to write once and run everywhere.
What would really help is a free substrate for networked open source products. If you could deploy something cloud-native without having to pay for servers, you’d see more community and native apps and less web saas in the productivity tools space.
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
I agree and it's why I'm a fan of apps that sync data via something like Dropbox or Google Drive. The application can still be file based and the developer doesn't have to run servers. There are the obvious limitations, but for personal use it works pretty well.
[+] [-] open-source-ux|5 years ago|reply
Lotus Word Pro also took a refreshingly different UI approach to MS Word. Long before Microsoft introduced the Office 'ribbon', Lotus Word Pro essentially had the same idea with their floated tabbed property box. The low resolution of screens at the time meant the design of the property box was a bit cramped. But it was still much better designed and organised than the Office 'ribbon' that would come later. See the Lotus Word Pro example below:
https://youtu.be/svijgsb2iLs?t=463
[+] [-] gecko|5 years ago|reply
Somewhere, in my office, is still a CD with Lotus 96 on it, but I've had no real desire to reinstall it in a VM.
[+] [-] mard|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=app%2Ccomputer...
[+] [-] randomifcpfan|5 years ago|reply
I could quote at length but basically for most people there are now better ways of doing work than using word processors and spreadsheets.
[+] [-] gecko|5 years ago|reply
has anyone cloned Lotus Improv, either literally or ideologically? The closest thing I've used recently that was close was probably Airtable, but that's more an iterative improvement on FileMaker/Access, with a web focus, than really a competitor to Improv. There also used to be a Java desktop app, but it wasn't targeted for casual desktop use, and I've long since forgotten its name.
[+] [-] guessbest|5 years ago|reply
https://flexisheet-orphans.blogspot.com/2006/10/circa-2002-l...
Sourcecode : https://github.com/gnustep/gap/tree/master/user-apps/FlexiSh...
Review of alternatives: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=546563
[+] [-] Avshalom|5 years ago|reply
as far as I know Quantrix Modeler https://quantrix.com/products/quantrix-modeler/ started as a clone and has continued on with the same idea, though by now I assume it's accreted enough bells and whistles to be just barely recognizable.
ETA: also it's 2.5 grand a seat so...
[+] [-] mpweiher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisdone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topkai22|4 years ago|reply
Other commenters have it right I think- network effects drive up the cost of not being on the dominant software. I also think that the security and privacy aspect plays a huge part too- it's one thing to install software sold by a retailer you trust in a non-networked computer, it's another to do so directly from a random website on an always on networked computer.
[+] [-] robenkleene|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reitanqild|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|5 years ago|reply
I had a heavy macro-based workflow worked out, but could not really replicate the whole thing in other editors.
[+] [-] webmaven|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rozzie|5 years ago|reply
That said, I absolutely loved Groove the product and Groove the team. It was a dapp with a wonderfully-usable interface, built on a pure P2P blockchain-like infrastructure that achieved distributed consensus for generalized transactions.
It had an extremely loyal following in the NGO and GOV space. They "got it" as to the unique benefits of a secure end-to-end encrypted system for small team collaboration.
But the enterprise and consumers chose centralization as the winning architecture, and the rest is history.
[+] [-] gerikson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
That's linear thinking. Computer science peaked in the 80s-90s. There arent bold new ideas to add, just incremental progress. Today it's all about polishing and making things more addictive in order to make the highest profit. Rounded corner screens for displaying slightly improved versions of newsgroups (facebook), IRC (slack/discord), BBS (google)... I can't think of a new mode of communication invented in the last decades. One could say video, but live TV existed before. Scaling up is incremental. Right here, HN is barely different than newsgroups. If change had been non-incremental , we d be dismissing HN as something that only crazy people do (the equivalent of riding a horse to work)
[+] [-] sakesun|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readflaggedcomm|5 years ago|reply
Only for the submission. You can write externally. There used to be "It's All Text" before Firefox's extensions got gutted, which automated that copying. I wonder where that lies on their list of "apps" to edit with.
[+] [-] currymj|5 years ago|reply
There's been an explosion of competitors and imitators, too. Some, like Roam, definitely have a utopian 1980s hypertext ethos.
[+] [-] efficax|4 years ago|reply
Lotus Agenda for example would take your notes and automatically categorize them based on the categories you created in the earlier not taking process, allowing you to filter your notes by different "views" with no input on your end (after the initial category creation). For example you could mention a contact in a Task or Note and then that note would appear under the view for that contact automatically. Etc.
All this in 640k.
[+] [-] tibu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tacurran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tablet|4 years ago|reply
It just changed everything, people stopped create desktop apps and started to create web apps. However, web as a platform was really weak for complex apps, so only now we see how companies re-discover lost apps from 80s and re-create them in the web (Notion, Coda, Airtable, Fibery)
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asymptosis|5 years ago|reply
What gets me about this line of thought is that the technology didn't disappear. Anyone who wants to recreate "the lost apps of the 80s" just needs to grab a text editor and start coding.
Everyone has the power to create any app they like. Stop pointing the finger at other people asking why they don't do the work for you.