NeXT Lives -- In Apple

mikey writes: "vnunnet.com has an interesting article about Steve Jobs; his love for cubes, a bit of a history behind NeXT, why it failed, also why it was so way ahead of its time, also some Bill Gates stuff. All in all, a great piece, and to give Slashdot readers some insight into what was NeXT, and how now it has basically taken over Apple."

Comments

Re:Absolutely true...

[LMariachi]

Apple stole idea from Xerox, and put their own twist on it. MS did the same from Apple.

I'm amazed that this still comes up in every Apple thread. Get it straight: Apple licensed technologies from Xerox. As in "paid for."

NeXT - Almost a Miracle, Destroyed By Java

[Nightspore]

I've been a NeXT developer for over ten years. I've seen it /all/ -- the (for the time) mind-blowing hardware, the bad business decisions, the wrong turns and the beautiful, beautiful devleopment environment and OO frameworks. What a ride!

While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.

In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.

All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.

In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.

Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.

Nightspore

Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be?

[gig]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that Be wanted $180 million or so, and Apple balked at that (they're worth less than half that today, after their IPO). Steve Jobs wanted $400 million for NeXT, but Gil Amelio thought that NeXT was worth it because they had a full-featured, mature, OS, third-party applications, customers, and leading people like Steve Jobs and Avi Tevanian. Be's OS was a beta that couldn't print, no multiuser, and had poor networking. Be had no incoming revenue at the time, and no customers.

Why do Be fans keep bringing this up? It's embarrassing to Be.

another important NeXT user

[mat.h]

So the Web was invented on a NeXT machine. That was new to me. What I missed in the article was another very significant NeXT user: id software. Doom was developed on NeXTs, and before Quake 2, all level design was apparently done on NeXTs: just have a look at the huge pile of Objective C that is QuakeEd. Carmack switched over to NT for Quake 2 development because you can't plug an OpenGL accelerator into a NeXT station. And IIRC, he wasn't too happy about it.

Re:Something for Be to think about...

[hyacinthus]

It's really too bad that Apple under Amelio decided to go with NeXT and not BeOS. I know that few may agree with what I'm about to say, but I feel that Apple's acquisition of, and eventual absorption into, NeXT, may prove to be a crucial disaster in Apple's career.

During my short stay at Caltech (another crucial disaster, but never mind that), I saw a number of NeXT boxes. They were very pretty...and not much else. An acquaintance of mine joked that the NeXT boxes in the undergraduate computer lab could have been replaced with those cardboard computer props that furniture stores use, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. I also remember my astonishment at the hard drive space NeXTStep demanded, over 200 MB, I remember--this at a time when my personal computer had an 80 MB hard drive and I barely felt the need for more.

NeXT failed, deservedly; but now Jobs is back, fighting old battles, playing all the same old tricks. Release dates have been pushed back so many times as to become meaningless--remember, back in 1997, when Jobs had regained power, that Rhapsody was supposed to be the future? Functionality has taken second place in importance to Jobs's pedestrian notions of how computers ought to be pretty, e.g. his quixotic attempt to revive the cube. And system requirements have bloated monstrously. If Apple had gone with Be, they would have had an OS with a spare, functional interface, which booted in ten seconds and required not even 100 MB of hard drive space.

I do agree that Be's best chance was acquisition by Apple. That would have rendered irrelevant most of the problems which made BeOS such a poor competitor in the desktop OS market. Its paucity of drivers wouldn't have mattered, because it would have been running on proprietary hardware. It would have had an established audience with a small, but significant, share of the market.

It's too bad. Be and BeOS are still around, but the company seems intent on making one dumb mistake after another. Their ludicrous attempts to position themselves as players in nonexistent niche markets didn't convince anybody--BeOS wasn't a "Media OS" (whatever that is), and nobody outside of a few trade shows cares about "internet appliances". And just visit www.be.com these days--they barely admit that BeOS is one of their products.

hyacinthus.

Re:Are you sure?

[mallie_mcg]

And please, no one pull out the stupid integer performance tests and try and tell me 500Mhz PPC = 1Ghz x86!

If you do not want integer tests, how about a number crunching solution, that is perhaps equally optimised on both sides of the fence. How about Distributed.net client?

Some g4 rsults:
Power PC_7400_G4 433 3,903,000
Power PC_7400_G4 450 3,794,467
Power PC_7400_G4 500 4,383,581
Power PC_7400_G4 733 6,529,242


Some intel PIII results:
Intel Pentium III 1000 2,818,393
Intel Pentium III 850 2,379,094
Intel Pentium III 733 2,034,363
Intel Pentium III 500 1,383,202

Some TBird (AMD K7) reults:
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1200 4,283,940
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1000 3,549,885
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 850 3,021,021
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 450 1,589,342


I am not trolling, but i am trying to point out that for properly optimised code, you can get decent real world scientific FAST crunching from the G4 processors, even though they operate at 1/2 the clock.


How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.

Re:Too positive.

[iso]

I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..

i don't understand why people pass off the Photoshop benchmark as useless. i think it's a lot more useful than an integer or floating point benchmark.

i don't understand the way people around here (and people in general) buy computers. do you buy your cars based entirely on horsepower? or do you buy one on which meets your needs best? most of the time a computer user lets their processor sit idle (say while surfing the web). if so, then why is speed speed speed paramount? of course speed is important, but "speed" in computers is not black and white, faster and slower. consider my situation:

i own a Mac. most of the time my computer sits there while i traverse files, surf the web, telnet to linux boxes (or drop to the terminal in MacOS X), read email, and write word processing documents. the rest of the time i spend using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Image Ready and GoLive.

so which processor fits me best? the one that can crunch Integers the fastest (Intel/AMD), or the one that's opitmized to beat the shit out of Intel/AMD in Adobe applications? even though the vast majority of the time my CPU sits idle, the few times i really need that speed is when i'm using something like Photoshop.

so quit passing off the Photoshop benchmark as a useless statistic.

the G4 is a great chip, mostly because of the Altivec engine. i'm going to start watching DVDs on my computer more often: oh look! the Apple DVD player is going to be Altivec enhanced! that means i'll get a great, clear picture from my software DVD decoder. the "Photoshop" benchmark represets an "optimized for Altivec" benchmark, and this benchmarks is far more important to me than a simple integer benchmark.

if you don't think you need a G4, that's fine. but don't pass of this benchmark as useless for everybody just because it doesn't fit your needs.

- j

It's called the e Villa

[Xenex]

No Sony? You say you work for a company that makes chips for IA's and you haven't heard of the e Villa?!

Be's press release - Be Announces Development of BeIA Client Software for Sony's New e Villa Network Entertainment Center

Sony's press release - SONY SIMPLIFIES -- AND MAXIMIZES -- THE INTERNET WITH NEW e Villa(TM) NETWORK ENTERTAINMENT CENTER

CNET - Sony trots out Web-browsing eVilla with Be OS

BeNews - Sony's eVilla "Network Entertainment Center" Uses BeIA

It's just Sony's entry into the IA market, and it used BeIA. But then, Sony are just a little company after all.... :P

Re:I've said this same things many times

[jon_adair]

...NeXTcube currently sitting right next to me, running a screensaver, acting as a print server...

When the NeXT came out, I was at Georgia Tech. Several guys in what was essentially the campus IT group got cubes, went to NeXT class, etc. Within a few months, most of them were relegated to being NFS and print servers for the Sun 3 boxes on their desks. I never saw anyone on campus make better use of the cubes.

I think what killed NeXT, in our case, was a combination of the Sun 3 and the Mac II. The Sun3 did everything we needed as an academic Unix workstation (though the NeXT eventually had an X server). The Mac II was the "consumer" machine for all the students that needed to write their term papers and resumes and forget to save them on floppy. The PC? What PC? We did have some IBM PS/2's that ran WordPerfect in DOS.

As neat as the NeXT was, everything was just too expensive. I think that for the price of one cube, we could have gotten at least two Mac II's or maybe even a Mac II and a Sun 3. Even the $50 price for a "floptical" disk was too much for beer-swilling students who usually just swiped a beat-up boot floppy from one of our diskless Mac SE's to save their only copy of their thesis.

I used to have this NeXT poster which stated "In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." The seven:

• R/W Optical Disk
• The power of Unix (with a GUI)
• VLSI chips
• Postscript (display and printing)
• Digital sound
• Multimedia e-mail
• Object-oriented / visual development

So, how many of these were right? We may not have magneto-optical drives, but most of us have cd-burners. Even if you run NT or 2000, you have a very Unix-like OS (much more Unix-like than the MacOS, DOS, or Windows of 1990). VLSI chips was a gimme. Postscript may be the only loser on the list. Who doesn't have digital sound and look at what MP3s have done (the NeXT was the first place I saw pirated digital media files of CD tracks, btw). Multimedia e-mail may not be a huge hit for everyone, but it was a precursor to the web. The NeXT development environment in 1990 still beats a lot of current ones.

So what are the other 3 or 4 breakthroughs?

I'm going insane here...

[TheInternet]

Apples and NeXT boxes are extremely proprietary, difficult to service and poorly scalable.

I'm going to lose my mind. Will you please visit this page at Apple and tell me how Apple's G4 tower is not the easiest machine to service on the planet? Other than the chipset, what component in this box is proprietary? The PCI slots? The AGP slot? The PC133 DIMM slots that accept up to 1.5GB of RAM? The USB ports? The NVIDIA card? Perhaps it's the gigabit ethernet controller?

- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu

Apple couldnt come to terms with Be?

[FWMiller]

Theres a statement in the article about the Apple chairman at the time not being able to come to terms with Be on using BeOS to replace the aging, cooperative multitasking system with a true preemptive multitasking design. I would really like to hear some details on the negotiations that took place between Be and Apple at that time. If you ask me, Be passing on Apple as a customer or an aquirer is right up there with CP/M or whatever it was passing when IBM came looking for an OS for the new PC...

Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understood it, Be got greedy. They wanted $400M for the ~50 person company - Apple was balking at that price for a company that wasn't worth near that price on paper. But Be thought Apple had its back against the wall and there weren't any other options, so they'd pay anything. Ooops!

Granted, Be would've given Apple a new OS based on some really cool technology. But it was unrefined. Development tools were still very new at that time.

There were a couple other options on the table as well. Including continuing development on Copland and talking to Microsoft about using the Windows NT kernel.

Then a few days before the decision day, Hancock thought to call NeXT. Steve brought his crew and wow'd the brass at Apple. Then a bit later, Apple bought NeXT for roughly the same price that Be wanted.

However, NeXT was a far more refined OS than Be and more "user-friendly" conscious. Not to mention getting more engineering talent and a larger userbase in the merger.

Definitely it was a tough call for Apple and time will tell if it was the right one. So far, i'd say it looks very promising.

Tom

Something for Be to think about...

[Gen-GNU]

Reading this article, I kept thinking the people behind BeOS should sit up and take notice.

Be is a visually appealing OS (IMHO, of course), and is easy to create simple apps with. Many of the aspects of it's OS design are great, as well.

Unfortunately, it came about in a time when there was already a standard (Microsoft). People who didn't want to use that standard, for whatever reason, still had Macs. To make matters worse, Linux was really starting to get a buzz, and drawing exactly the type of people BeOS would want.

And there were problems...It is closed source, so FSF types didn't want it. And old Amiga users didn't care about it after it went solely to the x86 platform. (It was originally supposed to be the new Amiga, or an OS styled after Amiga, or whatever.)

So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.

Re:It also lives in GNU/Linux...

[gig]

Windows 95 was also a rip-off of the NeXT interface, as well as the Mac interface. Windows has gotten more NeXT-ish as time goes on.

When I saw recently that Mac OS X now has a cool customizable toolbar API that works just like the toolbars in IE 5 for Macintosh, I thought Apple had ripped of Microsoft, but then a NeXT user informed me that these toolbars were in NeXTSTEP as well. Big surprise, I guess.

Steve Jobs and Perot

[Alien54]

This short passage brings up an interesting reflection of what might have been, could have been:

One person who watched the documentary was Texan H. Ross Perot, multi-millionaire founder of EDS and future US presidential candidate. Perot liked what he saw in NeXT, called Jobs and told him that if he ever needed money he should call him. So Jobs offered Perot a 16 per cent stake in the company for $20m. Over a handshake, Perot agreed.

This was an amazing stroke of luck for NeXT, but a financial gaffe of gargantuan proportions for Perot. His money dwarfed the money Jobs had put in ($7m) and valued the company at a bloated $126m. The effect on NeXT was like pouring gasoline on a fire, as they say in Texas.

"One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was to give those young people all that money," Perot would later say. But he also regretted his failure to buy Microsoft in 1979, when he had the opportunity. That failure would partly explain his leap of faith in NeXT.

The most startling element is the Idea of Perot buying Microsoft. Although it is not likely that things would have worked out the same if Gates were not there. Gates as a mere footnote to history is fascinating.

The other element in the whole article is how much Mac OSX is similar to the main vision of NeXT, just from a software viewpoint alone. Never mind the hardware angle.

Talk about being ahead of the times.

Re:Steve Jobs: first GPL violator?

[lostguy]

In case you wanted to read what RMS had to say about that (among other things).

I was looking to see if Andy Tai's statement was true (it was stated so tersely I took it to be an unwarranted attack. ;>)

good, but not quite second to none

[q000921]

There was no problem with the software that came with the system. The operating system and the development environment were second to none.

The NeXT software was an excellent and practical engineering achievement: it married Smalltalk-like object-oriented technology with the C language and a UNIX kernel. By industry standards (i.e., compared to Windows, MacOS, and UNIX) it also had good tools and a good development environment.

But it wasn't second to none. The NeXT machine, like the Macintosh that preceded it, mostly just took selected aspects from Smalltalk and similar systems and brought the to the masses on a more mainstream platform. But the originals actually arguably had better development tools and a better runtime.

The NeXT machine was a smartly packaged, excellent practical compromise. Jobs deserves a lot of credit for good taste and practicality. But it wasn't breakthrough or even particularly novel technology given the systems that preceded it by nearly a decade. And, of course, reasonable as it was technically, it was still considered too radical and too expensive by industry.

The real missed opportunity of the 1980's was probably Smalltalk. Sun had actually apparently considered bundling Smalltalk-80 with every Sun workstation sold, but the deal fell through. The world of computing would be a very different place if the graduate students of the 1980's and early 1990's had grown up with that software on their Sun workstations.

Re:good, but not quite second to none

[q000921]

It was a breakthrough in one important area: it made Unix easy to use. More specifically, it was a Unix system easy enough for one's grandmother could use

If you say that they were the first machines to bring a Xerox/Macintosh style UI to a commercial, UNIX-based platform, I think that would a bit more accurate. But even then, Smalltalk provided that kind of UI on UNIX platforms years before NeXT.

But there are many other styles of easy-to-use UIs. Your ATM probably runs on UNIX--is it difficult to use or administer? Many uses of UNIX in banking, offices, and other applications have similar, highly specialized and very easy-to-use UIs. And I have seen many non-computer folks become productive with the UNIX command line with no problems; it's not rocket science and only takes a few hours.

Linux today is better, but [...] there's still too much resorting to the shell and the editing of configuration files.

If you use something like Webmin, you get an easy-to-use, browser-based administration system for Linux. I don't think even NeXT has come close to that kind of simplicity.

Still, I don't want to diminish the significance of the NeXT machine. It was an excellent engineering achievement and its legacy lives on both in Java and in MacOS X.

It also lives in GNU/Linux...

[The_Messenger]

While CDE is the standard commercial UNIX desktop, some of the most popular GNU/Linux window managers are inspired by or clones of the slick NeXTstep interface. The most popular is undoubtedly GNUStep is a fairly complete clone which is also the "official" GNOME WM. (Bugger off, E-freaks! ;) AfterStep, which shares core team members with GNUStep, is an older WM inspired by NeXTstep that also allows infinite customization. And be sure to pick up a copy of Aterm, a terminal emulator with NeXTstep-style scrollbars and really awesome transparency setups.

AfterStep actually used to be CmdrTaco's fave window manager, before he sold out to the Enlightenment camp. Fun fact: Taco is the author of the dockable CD applet "ascd", which looks really cool but dumps core more often than Shaft smacks hoes. :)

Apple may be trying some NeXTstepish things with OS X, but IMHO they should instead bring back the NeXT tradition of awesome, sleek black hardware. It is my hope, even though I don't use Macs, that the iMac's successor embodies this aesthetic philosophy... but I'm not holding my breath; despite the fact that Jobs wants to appear rebellious and artsy, he will never again sell a machine whose external appearance might frighten their now-core userbase of little kids and grandmas.

All generalizations are false.

Oh my!

[Mike the Mac Geek]

Something Neutral towards Apple? On SLASHDOT?

(Quickly checks CNN.com)
No, Hell hasn't frozen over yet. Hrm. Must be Katz's day off

Slashdot. Where bashing anything but Linux is not just a job, it's a way of life!

CORRECT Google cached address

[Therlin]

That URL didn't work for me but this one did http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.vnunet.co m/Features/1112630

They've shipped source code for years!

[tm2b]

(More like a choice by Apple to cut off Be from their specs.)


I'm really, really tired of reading this nonsense. Apple has been shipping source code first for Linux, and then for Darwin, kernels that use Apple hardware! How much more information do you need, ferchrisakes?

Be, Inc. made a decision to stop pursuing Mac hardware, and the excuse that Apple stopped spending resources to help Be is a really flimsy excuse to hide behind.

news from teh future

[VAXGeek]

check out the date on the article: Friday 19 January 19101

can you say y2k+1 problem? i can
hahaha
actually, i can't.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless

I've said this same things many times

[Dixie_Flatline]

As someone with a NeXTcube currently sitting right next to me, running a screensaver, acting as a print server, and telling me the time, I'm excited about OSX because in it, I see NeXTStep ressurected. It's the only thing that Apple has ever done that's gotten me excited. With the coming of their new G4s (which, make no mistake, kick the living crap out of most any Intel processor out there) and their sleek laptops, I think that Apple has a fighting chance. Don't believe the FUD, Apple is doing okay. It's been a hard quarter for everybody. Don't think that this single quarter of loss is going to sink them.

In fact, I'm one of those people that will jump ship from Linux to use OSX. It's got the right underlying guts (BSD 4.4), it's got a pretty interface, it's got a bad-ass programming environment. A macintosh can be a real programming platform, instead of the toy that MacOS has made it for so many years.

--
The /bin/truth is out there.

The interesting viewpoint department?

[brianvan]

What about the "They-blew-it" dept?

I live with a Mac sympathizer, so I know what it's like to have that viewpoint that Apple keeps coming out with cool things even though they sell like ice cubes in Alaska. I do have a certain amount of sentimental feeling that wishes Apple to stay alive, as well as an eye for aestetics that really likes the computer models that came out in the past few years... but at the same time, I'd be pretty ignorant to say that a company should stay alive if I personally wouldn't buy anything they sold even though I could USE it.

Then again, the main point of this message wasn't to bash Apple... it was to make fun of timothy for coming up with a lame dept. :)

Contrarian Bullshit

[Ars-Fartsica]

You might think you've made yourself look quite insightful with your contrary hooey, but the internet appliance market is still nascent, and is potentially empty. The more people try to obsolete the PC, the more it becomes the center of the electronic home. Face it, a generalized computing device with lots of hardware, loadable software, and a complex OS is going to be part of computing in the home and business for at least the next twenty years.

Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed. Worth a paltry $70 million dollars, Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock. They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business. Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook, I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be? Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company. If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.

zila!?

[mirko]

> "Poorly scalable ?"
Any NeXT would come with a free app : Zila, allowing its applications to be multithreaded across a local network.
So, no.
I tried and this.... Damn! *R*O*C*K*S* :-)
I could do a billing system in a week with a bunch of old NeXTstation.
--

Floppy drives?

[Rombuu]

So, what is it that Jobs has against the poor floppy drive? I mean, look at the NeXT box, the iMac... Did he once lose some important file he saved on a floppy and take some oath to remove the from the face of the earth or something???

Re:Are you sure?

[Solstice]

Of course they will make money on the Titanium - in fact, they will probabily make a killing on it. The PowerBook has always been a high-margin item, and I doubt that they would sacrifice this. Whoever wrote this article forgot a few things:

• The G4 Processor has a much smaller die size than the x86 competitors. It can be manufactured more cheaply - especially now that they have been getting good yields at lower speeds.

  
  

• Apple owns a sizeable portion of Korea's Samsung electronics, which is the company that manufactures those larger screens. Therefore they are in a much better position to get a sweet deal on those screens than many other manufacturers.

  
  

• The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. Sure, the material itself is cheaper, but think about this: most laptops today have a plastic outer skin molded over a magnesium or aluminum skeleton. This process requires two sets of machines, and two toolings to do - both very expensive. By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton. Furthermore, assembly is made much easier, since the parts simply "bolt-on" to the case, rather than being bolted first to the skeleton, and then to the plastic case.

  
  

There are many other ingenious ways that they've been able to save money on the product, but I don't have time to list them now. Obviously, the person who wrote the article had not even considered the obvious.

The 500MHz PPC is a fast chip. Keep in mind that many of the x86 processors were "artifically" increased to 1GHz. They do that by lengthening the processor's pipelines. This increases the clock speed, but at the same time the processor is doing less work for every clock. The G4s in these laptops are the same ones in the desktops. The chips that AMD and Intel are producing are actually hobbled. Transmeta's chips haven't been well accepted in the marketplace yet, as they haven't been able to live up to the hype. I'd say that Apple has a pretty decent machine here and I think that they'll sell alot of them. There's been a pent up demand for a G4 laptop for quite some time now.

Re:Years?

[iso]

I cannot claim to be proficient enough in Apple code to know what is needed for Be to legally get BeOS running on the G* platform, but I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information. The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.

BULLSHIT. i am sick and tired of hearing this drawn out crap about Apple "refusing to give Be the specs" for the G3s.

let me explain something to you: there's no magical book at Apple that's labelled "specs for the G3 for operating system writers." sure there are specs for their parts, and all the information is available, but it would take some serious man-hours to compile it all to make it available to a 3rd party.

Be came along and basically said to Apple "please, go out of your way to use your engineering resources to compile all the specs to your machines neatly so that we can support it." Apple said, "why should we spend our engineering resources to help you?" Be then left the PPC platform (something they were planning on doing anyhow) and blamed Apple for the whole incident.

let's face it, Gasee isn't a big fan of Jobs. and it isn't Apple's job to bend over backwards an support Be. the whole "lawsuit" line and "reverse engineering" was a bullshit line by Be to try to slam Apple on the way out of PPC. after the clones were killed, they actually had to WORK to support the G3 platforms, and they didn't want to do it. period, end of story.

i was a HUGE fan of Be, and even had an original BeBox. i was also a fan of NeXT, and used a NeXT Cube at my school for years. i followed this whole thing very closely, and even lived in Menlo Park (where Be's HQ is located) while this whole Apple-vs-Be war was going on. i don't claim to have all the answers, but i do know that the line Be employees were feeding people was mostly bullshit, done out of spite. Apple was not in the wrong on this one.

meanwhile Be moved over to x86 and instead of being a great operating system on a great chip in a small market, became swamped in the sea of x86. they're not going to make it anywhere. i now work for a company that supplies a fair number of chips to the embedded (including IA) market, and let me tell you, NOBODY is talking about BeIA. the big IA OS: Linux. Be dug their own grave, and none of it was Apple's fault.

- j

Steve Jobs: first GPL violator?

[Andy Tai]

The article did not mention but NeXT/Steve Jobs has the honor of being the first significant GPL violator. Jobs took gcc as the system compiler for NextStep. NeXT added Objective C support but tried to keep it proprietary. After a stand-off with the FSF/RMS NeXT donated the Objective C compiler to GNU.

Today gcc is still the system compiler of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs depends on the work of Richard Stallman for his OS.

Re:Apple 1984 ad

[sachsmachine]

You can find it here...

Re:Errr, I think you have it backwards!

[iso]

Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)

wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).

the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.

i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.

- j