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The Future Back in 1992

This was noted over on Presentation Zen where I first started watching it. It's amazing to think this was Jobs presenting back in 1992, the year after FoxPro 2.0/DOS came out onto the market and the same year FoxPro 2.x/Windows was all the buzz.

I recalled seeing a Next machine back in 1991 and immediately wanted one - I even got excited about learning Unix. This intro to NextStep might show you why but really - watch the video instead.

Highlights:
Where is Improv today? That was ONE awesome spreadseet and Excel's naming features never could really compete with it the same way.
NextMail with its drag and drop support.
The DigitalLibrary - where you can pull up articles that you wanted to save (back in 1992) and even had its own search criteria.

The Drag/Drop and Object linking is still something that we currently don't have or users still struggle with. (dragging and dropping from between multiple OSs with live linking) - jeez, I remember doing demos of OLE Linking and embedding in Windows - when? 1997? (anyone remind me)

But the Cool part is custom app development (around the 23 minute mark). Creating a GUI search tool for backend databases (with their DatabaseKit). For those thinking "what's the big deal?" - this was one of the first demos where I can recall the words "you don't have to write any code" - kind of like the mantra Microsoft was talking about this year with Rock the Launch and one I myself have repeated in training classes with Builders and Wizards.

"And you can switch to new databases using 'Adapters' without writing any custom code".

Great nostalgia video but even more- it's amazing what features we use every day today that were just being explained back then.


p.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

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