Well, clippy didn't last long (although I miss the cat a bit), but the clippy jokes seem to have lasted forever.

I'm struggling to see how to add songs to a playlist for my iPod - ok its old (2007 ipod nano), but I love it, so I guess I'll struggle on.

Saying that, lots of people complained about iTunes, especially that it tried do do too much.

Now it does less, and should be more focused on music but I find myself being constantly frustrated with it too.

Which then raises the question, how does - if at all - Ubuntu make money for Canonical?

It doesn't. The Ubuntu desktop was a hobby project for a tech-oriented individual with deep pockets. In 2017 the Ubuntu desktop project was virtually eliminated as a loss-maker in the run up to going public. Now, Ubuntu is just enabling technology for (profitable) cloud services and (hopefully in the future profitable) IoT and ships with a slightly customized version Red Hat's Gnome Shell desktop.

Business support and private cloud offerings (as in: pay Canonical to come set up a private cloud for you on machines you own).

Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses.

> Mindshare is important here, because otherwise, something like RedHat would likely be the default choice for businesses.

I mean, with regards to Linux Enterprise stuff... it is. SuSE is the boss when it comes to SAP, but otherwise everything lives on some flavor of Red Hat or derivative; CentOS is everywhere.

In the Enterprise we only roll with stuff that is officially supported. Hiring freezes, layoffs, and general work ebb-and-flow means we will need to rope in help at some point, and while I may be a wiz at some CLI functions I'm not up on what each patch is doing to the environment. Having a support contract to lean on is a huge advantage.

Canonical was (is?) effectively trying to do this on the .deb side of the house (as opposed to the .rpm side), though I don't know how successful they were/are. I looked at interviewing w/ Canonical, but the Glassdoor reviews painted a picture of an org that was having deep growing pains and internal struggles.

Right, just like HP would be the default choice for desktops, Lenovo the default choice for laptops, and Cisco the default choice for networking hardware.

One format that doesn't seem to get much attention nowadays is RTF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format), but there's no reason it shouldn't be readable for years to come.

The thing also booted up faster than you could blink.

Of course that might have changed if they added more system services, but from POST screen to a usable desktop was easily under 15 seconds.

>Epically focused leadership. Just to support that, I remember hearing a story told by Larry Elison (they were apparently neighbours for a while), where he would pop over to see Steve, and would be subjected to the 100th viewing of Toy Story where Jobs was obsessively pointing out every new tiny improvement they'd made in the story or graphics.

Epically focused indeed.

On a slightly related note, I have to say I love the whole folklore website. It adds a really human face to the fascinating developments in IT at that time, and a lot of that I think comes from Andy Hertzfeld who tells a story really well.

It's hard to be nice and fluffy in a market where there's a lot of competition, but there's degrees. When you deliberately attempt to sabotage other people's software that has to run on your OS, but competes with an MS Product (e.g. Lotus vs Excel) then it's stepping over a line.

Thanks goodness for Linux and the web (and later mobile computing which MS failed to dominate) to pull us away from the brink of an MS monoculture.

I had a Mac Performa from the OS 7 days, and Inside Macintosh from the same time - but with the C API from what I remember, and used Metrowerks CodeWarrior as the development IDE. It was a great introduction to GUI programming, and CodeWarrior was a great IDE too.

I noticed this from the first pascal code example:

TEIdle(textH); {call TextEdit to make vertical bar blink}

.. oh how spoiled we are today :-)

WinHlp32.exe "All Windows help information is available online. The Windows Help Viewer is no longer supported in Windows 10"

Wow, that's the end of an era. I suppose that also means all WIN32 API documentation is no longer available offline.

In fairness, I believe that's the old WinHelp format of Windows 3.1 vintage, rather than HTML help files with .chm extension.

Undermining their ad campaign claiming that Chromebooks are bad because they don't work offline.