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Looking Back At NeXT
jregel writes: "Ars Technica has a link to an old Newsweek article that was written when Steve Jobs was about to unveil the NeXT computer. It's an interesting read, with some amusing pictures of industry characters including Scott McNealy and Bill Gates. Although most of us have probably never had the opportunity to play with a NeXT computer or use Nextstep, both the hardware and software were revolutionary and represent one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry." Then again, how much of this is parallel to the MacOS X stuff? Maybe the photographs will convince people once and for all that I don't look like Steve Jobs.
Ester Dysan in the article mentions that Gates would end up producing NeXT software because "he's a smart businessman." While that non sequitor placed him in a warm light of misplaced optimism, the suspected 'dark side' of his alterior motives, opposing the operating system he could not own, was dead on the money.
My earliest memory of discovering "the Real Gates" came from the late eighties when watching Computer Chronicals on PBS. Before actually seeing Bill, I'd heard rumors that he must be some great software engineer, and that he used to "hold contests for programming business apps, so he could outpace them all with QuickBASIC." But the reality of his mindset was seen on the East versus West "Computer Bowl" around 1988. The three questions I saw him answer were very revealing:
(1) "SPOOL" describes a queueing operation, such as sending a document to a printer device. What does the acronym SPOOL stand for?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line.(Granted, it's understandable that such trivia could easily be missed, even though I knew it.)
(2) MIDI is the standard for Musical Instruments Digital Interface... but How Many pins are in a MIDI plug?
Gates: No clue.
Answer: Five. (THIS is the man who claims he will bring us multimedia on the PCs? Has he ever LOOKED at multimedia instruments or technology?)
(3) Who is the top earning CEO in the Computer Industry?
Gates: "JOHN SCULLEY OF APPLE!" (Correct!)
I think he may have even quoted the salary Sculley was making! It didn't take him a blink of an eye to issue that answer. It also took him only two more years to get that answer changed to "Bill Gates." From that point on, it was clear to me where Bill Gates "inventive" mind really is.
The NeXT failed for a lot of different reasons. Mostly economic.
While the NeXT was revolutionary, its cost per performance was iffy. The magnesium cases were way cool, but they cost a lot. As did the rest of the NeXT hardware. As other posters have said, the other workstations of the era (Sun 1+?, Apollo 3k&4k, Cybers, etc.) were as fast, or faster, and cost less. NeXTStep had the software down, but it was aimed at educational institutions. Which is all well, and good, but its hard to maintain a company on edu discount sold machines. The return from the discount is years off, and it doesn't sell enough units toi remain afloat long.
There are other issues; the NeXT used display postscript, instead of X, as the GUI. there were X servers for NeXTStep, but they were slower than a native server would have been, and the other native apps being 'like'; but not always the same as other platform equivelents hurt the platform.
It was also the era where, for whatever reason, Sun was king. it was the default platform to develop for, and a lot of 'cross compatable' software was really SunOS only (much like a lot of platform compatable software now only natively compiles on Linux, but thats neither here nor there).
NeXT was also slow to innovate. In its lifetime, there were only a handful of different models made, they were slow on the release cycle and were behind the pace - other manifactures would come out with their bigger and better machines first.
Another kicker is that while the NeXT was a cool as beans desktop machine, as a remote system it was nothing out of the ordinary. it was almost a standard unix shell, which lost to Apollo as Domain/OS was very spiffy in ways that unix can only dream about now, and to Sun on the cost and compatablity issue.
Eventually, NeXT stopped producing their own hardware, and went just to working on the OS. Hardware is expensive and has low margins, comparatibvely, but, at least IMO, no company can support themselves based on an OS alone. Be, for example, is viable now, but they lost a lot of momentum when they gave up the BeBoxes (and I'm not convinced they will last, either). The OS petered around for a few years, and NeXT made semi-regular releases for a while, but a lot of what they had that was unique, besides the GUI look-and-feel, was done elsewhere, nearly as good, for free OSes(or effectively free, if its the OS the machine shipped with).
So, there are a number of reasons NeXT failed. A poor long term business plan, a loss of momentum after the hardware branch was dropped, slow to meet new technologies. Probably other reasons, as well.
Ah! It's about time the Slashdot community recongnized NeXT. So many Linux and *BSD users are oblivious to NeXTSTEP (and later OpenStep, Rhapsody and Mac OS X). The GUI, Objective-C, the programming framework, and Unix and Mach. They're a dream to use!
The GUI: Pure gold, man. In many ways, the NeXT GUI is far more elegant and functional than even the Mac OS GUI- CDE and other WMs and environments for X11 come nowhere even close.
Objective-C: A much better object oriented C than C++. More like a cross between C and Smalltalk than some tacky add on to C. Elegant, simple, and a minimal syntax change to regular C. Dynamic like Smalltalk, but retaining the run-time speed of C. Objective-C's dynamic nature allowed for great products like ActiveDeveloper and Joy Developer which allows Obj-C users to develop apps interactively like Smalltalk or Python, whereas C++ is about as static as it gets.
Programming Framework: Killer API. A rich class library of support classes like the mutable array (what?! you're still rolling your own?) and dictionary (or hash-table) as well as the AppKit, the means of creating GUI apps. Also, distributed objects were a no brainer with the Foundation framework which was a part of NeXTSTEP. It's a good thing to see this framework brought to the masses in the form of GNUstep.
Not to mention the IDE... InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder are two tools which the world just recently cought up with. All of these ideas you see in most modern IDEs were invented for NeXTSTEP.
Unix and Mach: What can I say? Geeks dig it. Mach allows for some funky IPC action, and if you wanted, you could always drop into tcsh if that's where you feel more at home. The truly great part? You didn't have to know how to use a shell to get work done. If you didn't know Unix, you could still have all of the power of Unix exploited by this wonderful OS.
I still use my cube when I can, for lighter-weight computing, something I choose over my Power Mac G4 or a PC running Linux whenever I can.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Reading this article was like a freaky time warp!
* The story itself deals with Jobs unveiling a revolionary CUBE computer, with innovative styling.
* The other main story on the cover says "How Bush is winning."
* The article itself is amlost identical to an article a couple of years ago whre Time chronicled Jobs' Apple turnaround, culimating with his famous Keynote. Many of the opinions of what Jobs was doing now vs. '88 are the same "Jobs is back", "He's learned from his mistakes", "He's matured".
* Bill Gates disparaging a *nix distro as non-revolutionary.
* Bill Gates saying he wouldn't write software for NeXT because the market was too small.
Reading this article was weird, but the one thing that struck me was how nasty Bill was.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
I never owned a NeXT, but the University I went to bought into it big time, so I did spend a bit of time playing with them.
The software was revolutionary. In many ways we are still catching up. Definitly in having a user friendly Unix we are still catching up. As little as I liked Objective C's performance, it did make things easy. Nice, nice, nice software. Good choice of bundled apps for an academic market too.
The hardware was not stunning at all.
If you sat it next to it's Sun's boxes of the era it was dog slow (if you ran SunTools at least -- if you ran X the display on the NeXT xould catch up). Both had equivolent resultion. The NeXT has 4bit (8bit?) grey. The Sun had either 1-bit deep mono, or 8bit color (which could do 8bit grey) depending on which graphics option you got. The NeXT had a 68030 (68040? 68020? mmmm, maybe the 68030) at something like 20Mhz. Sun had recently come out with the SPARC 1+ the follow on to the first desktop SPARC, 25Mhz I think. But much much much faster. Doing a whole lot more per cycle then the Moto part. The SPARC didn't feel a little faster it felt a lot faster.
The few hardware features the NeXT had and nobody else did were not particurlay well recieved. The "floptical" was a bit fragile, and most people only had the one and no HD so it wasn't removable media, it was just a slow hard drive. The DSP never got used for anything intresting, the promised high speed modem was extreamly late, and I not sure it ever worked. About the only inovatave hardware feature I remember on the NeXT was the cubes looked way cooler then even the new SPARC pizza boxes.
But the software, oh man was that software ahead of it's time...