Frontier To Radio

A Stroll Down Memory Lane With Dave Winer

When I first met Dave, he was just finishing up Frontier, the original forerunner of Radio (well, at least simplistically; see below) and had hired me through my agent to handle the task of documenting that amazing piece of software in a very short time. We met in the living room of Dave's home in Palo Alto. The first thing he ever said to me was jarring: "You're one of the smartest guys I know about in this business. How come you don't have a best-seller yet?"

As the next weeks flew by, with me working 18-20 hours a day, seven days a week to document what turned out to be a deeper and deeper product the more I got to know about it, I was really struck by the power of Frontier. There was no attempt to disguise it as a simple, easy-to-use outliner. This was a serious power user's tool and Dave made no bones about it. It was easily the most pwoerful scripting tool on the planet at the time. It may still be in many ways.

So Andy's right. If it's from UserLand, it's going to be more powerful. Radio's like that. It's a platform. No borders. Do what you will with it. But I detect a difference between Radio and the original Frontier, at least for my purposes.

Earlier, I said that Frontier was the original forerunner of Radio. But on one level, that's over-simplifying. Dave's been Mr. Outline for practically his whole software career. He invented PC-based outlining and then took it to new heights with one of the finest pieces of software ever developed: MORE. That product still runs on modern Macintoshes, by the way, and I suspect it still has fanatical users running it every day. So in some ways, Frontier was a segue, an evolution, rather than a new product, though it drilled down into the system to a depth MORE wouldn't have attempted.

Frontier wasn't easy to get into. As a marketer might say, the "out of box experience" was pretty daunting. It was aimed at propeller-heads and if you weren't one, you were likely to experience what I came to think of as "Science Kit Shock." You know, the feeling you got in junior high when someone gave you a science kit and you opened it and saw all those wires and tubes and tools and gizmos and whatzits and an instruction manual that looked like it had been written in a language nobody had invented yet.

Radio, on the other hand, has a tremendously comfortable out-of-box experience. Anyone can get a Web log up and running in 15 minutes or less with Radio. But it goes deep and it goes wide and if you want to spend the time and energy to get really comfortable with it, its limitations are all but non-existent. That's what I call split-level power. And it's a beautiful sight to behold. Damned few software packages achieve this goal.

Last update: 11/13/02; 2:12:45 PM.