I see a lot of folks here asking about what happened to the original Yahoo Pipes.
We had the same question, so we went and talked with a lot of the original team and wrote up the story[0]. We also made a fun mini-site that contains a lot of easter eggs (e.g. if you click on the "Memory Pipes" folder on the desktop, you'll see a bunch of candid photos of the original team circa 2007)
(Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.)
This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers.
Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work.
For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2].
We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know!
[1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic
I wrote a long form history of Visual Basic[0] awhile back that covers the origin of the product and how it ended up being married to BASIC at Microsoft.
tl;dr: VB started out as a project called "Tripod" (later "Ruby"), written by Alan Cooper (of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" fame) and a small team of developers. It was originally a Windows shell construction set, but Alan sold it to Microsoft where it languished on the shelf for awhile.
Bill Gates eventually decided that he wanted to marry the visual UI building aspect with BASIC and handed the project off to Scott Ferguson and the Business Languages Group, who were maintaining Microsoft's QuickBASIC IDE, the BASIC compiler, and developing a new language engine (dubbed Embedded Basic) for inclusion in a relational database product codenamed Omega (which would go on to become Microsoft Access).
I actually wrote a long article on this [1]—and had a chance to interview some of the team that built the original version of VB that was sold to Microsoft. (Alan Cooper and Michael Geary; Michael actually frequents HN pretty regularly!)
My opinion is that it was a confluence of a few factors:
- Microsoft was very worried about the threat of Java/Sun, and rotated hard into .NET and the common language runtime as a response.
- The most vocal, but minority of VB users wanted more advanced functionality and a more powerful/expressive language (as is often the case). Couple with the shift to .NET, Microsoft listened to them: VB got a full rewrite into an object-oriented language and the IDE moved further away from the VB6 visual building paradigm. That left the silent majority high and dry.
- The web emerged. Working with the Win32 API was suddenly less relevant, and younger devs adopted PHP en masse, rather than adopting VB. (And existing VB6 devs upset about the change also migrated over when they could build for the web instead of Windows) Unforced error on Microsoft's part, since IE had 96% browser marketshare in 2001.
One of the developers here. Sketch.systems is about 5 years old and we haven't actively worked on since its release––but it's still used fairly regularly by folks and does the job it set out to do! If anything ever seems broken, reach out (our Twitter accounts are in the website footer) and we'll definitely take a look.
Hey Stephen, I wrote the original article. Had no idea that MS actually tried to port the Ruby forms engine to the CLR—what a fun twist. Did it end up being too difficult technically, or were there other factors that killed it?
Thanks, Michael! Finding your comments on HN about the design details of the original "Ruby" version of VB and VBX was part of my inspiration for writing this article in the first place. Your recollection of "firing an event" is my favorite kind of classic Silicon Valley story.
We had the same question, so we went and talked with a lot of the original team and wrote up the story[0]. We also made a fun mini-site that contains a lot of easter eggs (e.g. if you click on the "Memory Pipes" folder on the desktop, you'll see a bunch of candid photos of the original team circa 2007)
[0] https://retool.com/pipes