Hammering Thumbs
Blake Ross talks about how the old Netscape Browser was one big WTF. His post led me to one of the old Netscape devs (everyone knows jwz) claiming that, “to a database person, every nail looks like a thumb.”
It’s lovely, because it’s in the same post claiming that you would be crazy to use anything other than BSD ‘mbox’ files to store e-mail. In hindsight, that seems like crazy thing to call crazy.
Anyway, it’s a common theme on this blog. Data is the only thing that matters. Modern machines don’t even run Basic anymore, paradoxically the code jocks like jwz enabled the revolution where it’s all about hypermedia now. Sorry, code guys.
So my friend Mark just pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for “Pick Operating System“. (Interesting, helicopter parts were being tracked in m200 by the time I became a Pick god). Pick was like the WWW before the WWW was invented. Well, it was like a bunch of walled-off WWW’s with a cool data access model and a cool identifier model. So maybe it wasn’t a WWW at all. But jwz should have put Pick in his pipe and smoked it, then maybe he wouldn’t have opened his cakehole with all that nasty personal defamation of McCusker. McCusker “gets” Pick, I am sure.
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Update: My brother adds his memories of Pick, along with source code for a Pick to C++ gateway. I wonder if WGB.MET is reading?