Good article on OpenDoc

[beachycove]

http://gregmaletic.wordpress.com/2006/11/12/opendoc/

 

[Temetka]

Neat, thanks.

 

[bigD]

That is interesting. Strange though, "It’s hard to remember now, but back in 1996 memory (as in RAM) was a big issue. The average Mac had about 2 megabytes of memory. OpenDoc wouldn’t run on a machine with less than 4 megs, and realistically, 8 megs was probably what you wanted."

RAM was definitely expensive and a bigger issue than it is today, but 2MB Macs were from the late 80s, not the mid 90s.

 

[Temetka]

True.

In '96 I had 24MB of RAM in my 5300 which was a high school grad gift from my grandparents in '95. My dad paid for the RAM card. I don't recall what he paid, but he made some mention of his backside being in pain.

The 5300 was my very first Mac and my very first laptop.

Some numbnutz stole it from me when I was in the Navy.

Since I didn't have the cash for another mac, I bought a used Satellite Pro 405CDS or similar.

Thanks to a forum member, I have a 5300 again! I love it.

Now to install OpenDoc on it!

 

[Cory5412]

I wouldn't be surprised if they meant that a lot of older Macs were still in service -- 1/2/4 meg Macs and the like. I wouldn't be surprised if today's "average" Mac (although to be fair I bet they sell Macs way faster today than they did twelve years ago) has about 512mb of ram in it.

The article was pretty good, mainly because it presents a cool thought I hadn't seen about Apple before, that they were going out of their way not to step on the toes of their developers, which hurt them more than anything else.

 

[II2II]

I remember being excited about these architectures back in the day. It was quite exciting to think about the ability to pick and choose what you wanted to use, so that I could use a real dictionary with definitions in my word processor, or use a real graphics program to create the artwork. The demos that really got me giddy were the ones that showed the level of integration. Imagine the user interface of CorelDRAW blending into the user interface of Word as though they were the same program. It was an unbelievable level of integration.

It would be easy to say that it never happened, because of monoliths like Office, but I think it did happen. After all, OpenDoc's competitor (OLE) is still at the core of Office. A similar model called SOM was also available in OS/2. The thing is, I don't think that many consumers were interested in extending their applications. And I think there are three good reasons for that:

• It is easier to buy a monolithic package like Microsoft Office because it simplifies the decision process. Imagine that you need three components, and each component is available from three vendors. You have 27 potential combinations to choose from. If you buy a suite, you have just three to choose from.
  
• It is cheaper to buy a monolithic package. Or at least it looks cheaper. Office may be expensive, but you get a shitload of stuff with it. If you go out to buy all of that stuff individually, it would almost certainly be more expensive. Of course, Microsoft doesn't mind selling more for less because it ensures that everyone is buying everything from them. Heck, it ensures that everyone is buying everything period. (I know that I wouldn't buy a database application, I probably wouldn't buy a presentations program, and I only may buy a spreadsheet -- if I only needed a word processor.)
  
• Compatability is horrendous between vendors. Think about it. Why does everyone use Word? In some cases it's because it's all they know, but a lot of informed buyers stick to Word because it works with everyone else's documents. The same goes for every other Office component.

At the end of the day, I don't think that OpenDoc would have been successful in any circumstances. It would not be successful because you didn't need an industry-wide component level software management system. You only need that sort of thing within the context of a particular application suite.

 

[Bunsen]

Though if it was adopted across the board within Apple/Claris, that could have worked.

 

[beachycove]

Actually, it was the Claris connection that led me to find the piece via Google, as I have been looking into the implementation of Publish and Subscribe in Claris software. OpenDoc is in some ways an extension of that concept: you don't need an outliner in MacWrite Pro because you have one in Claris Impact, which you can subscribe to in MacWrite; by a similar line of reasoning, you don't need a monolithic office suite because instead of having the capacity to do 500 things with your machine, you only need it to do 40 things, which multiple software packages working conjointly on a well-defined platform can provide more elegantly, and perhaps more powerfully, than only one. Mix and match would thus be better than one-size-fits-all.

The trouble with using the modular approach of Publish and Subscribe or program interoperability on the level of Claris stand-alone titles like MacWrite or Impact or Draw, etc., was that it would have cost a fortune in the 90s to have all the pieces in place so as to do what you needed via Publish and Subscribe. These days, you can buy the titles for a song; those days, you'd have needed to drop a grand or more to acquire the suite. Presumably OpenDoc was intended to address that problem, by opening up possibilities to niche companies, and the provision of office software to vastly greater competition, including Shareware outfits, which would be writing small software packages to do small things. Brilliant in concept - and no wonder the high-ups at Claris didn't like it.

I find these lost technologies in vintage software rather interesting, and their failure rather sad. In fact, the software is as interesting or more than the old hardware tends to be. After all, once you have your IIci or whatever up and running, what then? Well, then you have to give it some softwre to run.

As OpenDoc more or less died a death (though I still "use" it 24/7 courtesy of an ASIP 6.2 server that I run - up to v. 6.2 it relied on OpenDoc for certain administrative functions), I plan to explore what Publish and Subscribe can do for me in Claris software over the summer. I still like the old Claris titles better than anything out today.

 

[Charlieman]

I remember being excited about these architectures back in the day. It was quite exciting to think about the ability to pick and choose what you wanted to use, so that I could use a real dictionary with definitions in my word processor, or use a real graphics program to create the artwork. The demos that really got me giddy were the ones that showed the level of integration. Imagine the user interface of CorelDRAW blending into the user interface of Word as though they were the same program. It was an unbelievable level of integration.

The level of inter-application integration that you describe is possible with Microsoft Office and other Windows applications. A low end implementation that does not require specialist IT skills is mail merge: the data is in an Excel spreadsheet (the world's widest used flat file database!) and the mail merge engine is Word.

The downside is that OLE was a Microsoft technology, thus suffering from multiple implementations (OLE, COM, ActiveX) and confusing APIs. OpenDoc had parents (Apple, Novell) who abandoned the baby; OLE had a single dysfunctional parent.

The thing is, I don't think that many consumers were interested in extending their applications.

OpenDoc was never designed as a consumer technology, although Apple made a good attempt at a friendly interface. The big partners intended OpenDoc for use in corporate environments where multiple platforms were in use. For Apple, pre-press publishing would have been another big market. In the end, OpenDoc became irrelevant owing to the Windows 95/Office steam roller and the slow decline of Apple and Novell in big companies.

 

[LCGuy]

Very interesting article.

For the record, back in 1996, our LCIII had 4MB of RAM, though I remember in December 1996, Dad paid somewhere around AU$120 for a 16MB 72 pin SIMM to be put in it.

 

[Quadraman]

You would have to go back to 1990 and the Mac Classic and IIsi to find a machine that shipped with less than 2mb. By 1996, the PCI Powermacs and their derivatives were displacing earlier machines and none of them shipped with so little RAM. The Quadras all shipped with either 4 or 8 megs as standard and Apple sold a lot of them, so to say that Macs were still averaging only 2mb has to be an error. Even in 1996 those older machines with 2mb or less were probably no longer fighting on the front lines and had been relegated to lesser tasks where RAM sizes weren't so important. You probably still had a lot of Quadras and Nubus Powermacs chugging along awaiting their inevitable replacements to arrive, but they probably all would have at least the 8mb RAM recommended by the author of the article for running OpenDoc by then anyway. System releases for 1996 included 7.5.3 and 7.5.5, which were still usable by machines as old as the Mac Plus but those older machines would have required a memory expansion beyond the standard 1mb so a lot of those older compacts and Mac II's probably received a memory boost at some point during the System 7 years in an attempt to stay current making the 2mb figure quoted even less likely. The number of Macs still struggling along under heavy workloads with less than 2mb was probably insignificant by then and Apple could have cut them off from running the latest and greatest apps without much fear.

 

[Charlieman]

The section in which I work has been responsible for specifying purchase recommendations for sixteen years. In 1993, I recall that the minimum RAM recommendation was 4MB (Mac or PC), even for people buying lousy LCIIs. When Quadras arrived, the recommendation was 8MB. For first generation PowerMacs, the advice was 16MB (but you could just about live with 8MB).

2MB is insufficient to run System 7, so the likelihood of many such limited Macs being used in any work environment is slim. As Quadraman wrote, most Macs in active service in 1996 were well up to running OpenDoc.

 

[paws]

most Macs in active service in 1996 were well up to running OpenDoc.

I think 16MB would have been common at that time (think it's what I had). That's not a whole lot for System 7 and OpenDoc, is it?