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History Of The NeXT Platform
ToothBrush writes "OSNews published an article about the BSD/Mach-based NeXT Platform, discussing its history and its capabilities back then. The article has lots of screenshots and it is generally a good introduction --of the once innovative platform-- for younger readers who are unaware of the inheritance that lead to Mac OS X."
Isn't that where the original Doom game was developed and tested?
Is that also the platform the source code was for when they GPL'd it?
More than enough BS
Somehow I can't imagine doom on anything except a PC! But Tim Berners-Lee did write a particularly useless piece of software in order to justify the money he'd spent on a NeXT Cube.
Sadly, there was no sound, but it ran very well, and you could netplay with others on the LAN. I was introduced to these machines in 1993 (about two years before they were phased out in favor of PCs, sadly) and they were truly awesome...
The article states NeXT created Objective-C. They didn't. Brad Cox did. NeXT did however add a couple of things and implement Objective-C in gcc (and get in a fight with the FSF) but they didn't create the language.
Why exactly does the Mathematica Preference panel include a switch for "Automatically Italicize Mathematica?
I have heard that there is still an internal competition going on at Apple between the old school OS 8/9 developers and the Next guys they brought in. Basically the 9 devs want to incorporate more features from 9 back into X, while the Next people want to further separate them.
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I used to work for the Mathematics dept at the University of Minnesota. We had a lab up on the 3rd floor that had 2 SGI Irix machines and 4 mono NeXT workstations in it. We were going to decomission these machines and replace them with some P133's running linux. 2 of the NeXT machines were removed first, and then quickly replaced as about half of the professors bitched to no end about us taking away their NeXT boxes. We put them back. As far as I know, they are probably still there.
I used to sneak up there to play Doom because those were the only machines we had that had it installed.
I kind of want to get an old Cube and stick the guts of a G4 or G5 in it. Now that would be cool.
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Feh. I have a Next Cube system that works, plenty of software, etc. and yet I can't find a single serious buyer.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I know of a few local people who will sell me a NeXT cube with monitor for about a hundred bucks. That seems to be the going price for them these days.
Did you ever get Doom to run with audio? I never got this to work on my Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).
33 MHz of 68040 firepower, baby! DMA, a great DSP. *sigh*. Its power supply finally died in 2002 - it was running as a secondary DNS server until the last.
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In case anyone didn't know Window Maker is the free implementation of GNUstep. From the website "In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface." It's actually quite a nice lightweight window manger and runs great on older hardware (for which GNOME & KDE are much too bloated) and has a pretty good developement community.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
it was the freindliest unix at the time.
One reason the black hardware was so expensive was that it was all top of the line. THey had the first mega pixel displays for ordinary users (woo hoo, but then they were mind blowing). The screen was done in display postscript using a custom chip to make it possible. this gave all objects smooth reziability. at the time the competition for Windows was all bit map graphics so things were pretty jagged when you changed their sizes. Mathematica came with it. so did the collected works of shakespeare (which I actually used for a science project on entropy in text). it also came with renderMan, one of the early CG movie quality shaders.
It also came with a neat little program called Zilla which is the forerunner of todays grid computing. if you ran zilla then any time your computer was idle it donated its cycles to a master zilla project server. I've read several really interesting things were solved by zilla. apparently parts of the four color map theorem proof were done. as were some of the first hollywood cg effects.
the mail program was I thik the first to make mimetypes a standard hence you could send voice e-mails even way back then (its still hard!).
they were early adopters. Postscript printers were required (impact printers still ruled the market back then) and the very first black Nexts were based off of optical disks instead of hard disks. that was a terrible move in hindsight. and they quickly moved to large hard disks. but at the time they thought they would have to be distributing large software and large databases hence having the largest possible removable media had an appeal.
the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market.
marrying it to apple was thus a good fit. apple had the developer base. they had the OS.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Quote:
"That machine was selling for $10,000 US back in 1991 in the configuration I received (33 Mhz, larger hdd, 32 MB of RAM, color 17" monitor, sound unit). We purchased it for only $330 USD"
Its interesting to see how much a machine like that depreciates in value. Its sorta like that Camero you bought in 1991 for 10 grand, and now its all rusted and dented and you sell it to some punk kid at the destruction derby for 300 bucks... think about it.
In linux libertas
This guy is selling WordPerfect for the NextStep. The bidding's already up to $20, with several days to go yet. That's more than you'd pay for a recent version of WordPerfect Office!
If you meet anyone that has worked at NeXT and ask them if they had custom software they developed, in-house solely, that still is ahead of most commercial software and they said no, they'd be lying to you.
We had some of the most kickass stuff. I got at least 3 times as much productivity daily than I do now.
Here is hoping OS X version 11 or whatever they call takes off where Keith Ohlfs and company wanted Openstep 4 to go and was never released.
I WANT SOUPS (ask about SOUPS) and perhaps someone like Peter Grafanino (sp? sorry Peter it's been a while) just exactly what is was going to be.
Quartz eXtreme rules btw! Thanks a lot and that goes for Andrew Barnes and the rest of the Quartz team!
Wordperfect (at least the 1.01 version, 1.0 was buggy as hell) is a treat to use. I couldn't live without it at the time.
This was WYSIWYG (and with display postscript and a postscript printer, it really was WYSIWYG) and was a very big deal at the time.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
" the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market."
;)
... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today ;)
OK, I am guilty of having some favorite / sentimental applications, but WriteNow was available on the NeXT, in fact I think the copyright even mentions NeXT. I think it was versions 3 and 4 that I used -- but I was using the Mac version. I only know that it was NeXT related because people have told me this
Too bad WriteNow went to the software afterlife
Reasons for my sentiment: Word crashed frequently, was slow to start -- WriteNow started up near-instantly, never crashed. Very nice UI, simple but not simplistic, did the things I needed to write papers in high school and part of college. Much cheaper than Word, too. Faster spell-checker. Less bloat.
OpenOffice is one of my favorite pieces of software (and projects), but I'd still like to see a quick, nimble thing like WriteNow for most writing tasks.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Yeah, I've used WordPerfect. But it's had an upgrade or two since this version came out!
Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).
That is not true. It is the fastest unit NeXT ever *sold*. They had prototypes running with dual 68k and single PPC cpus.
Also there were Nitro and Pyro boards that could accellerate stock NeXTs.
This was the first gui I used on Linux way back and until I benched my Linux desktop in favor of OS X last year, it was the one I still used.
And even with Gnome improvements and the like, it's what I *still* use if I have to work on a Linux box. Something about the simplicity. I think nowadays that's a lost art. Apple's probably the closest to it, but I remember NeXTStep being really powerful, but really simple.
The Mac WordPerfect of the same era (3.0 from WP Corp., then versions 3.1 and 3.5 from Novell) was also excellent. Probably the best word processor I've ever used, on any platform. Now that I use OS X all the time, I do appreciate enough OS X-only features that I don't drop back into Classic very often just to use itt -- but damn I wish Corel hadn't stopped development on the Mac version. Not having a native version of WP is the only way in which OS X is still Not There Yet for me.
... well, just about every M$ product. Please, someone bring back the idea of a word processor that just works!
What bugs the hell out of me is that all the current werps being developed, on any platform, all seem to be devoted to aping M$ Word. Word sucks, which means that any attempt to imitate it will also suck. It didn't beat WP because it was better; it beat WP because of the massive Microsoft PR machine, like
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Several years ago I bought an 040 Mono cube for $400. Everything was there. Cube, Monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, a working (!) MO drive, hard drive, and believe it or not the rare (for cubes), but very useful NeXT Floppy. I love the machine, and while I don't do much with it anymore it still holds a place of distinction on my desk.
What do you use it for?
Before mine died, I occasionally used it for web browsing. There was a good version of Omniweb for OpenStep, but it was SLOOW on the Black hardware. Lynx worked great, of course.
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I still remember when Steve Jobs came to Boston to hype the new NeXT Cube. Awesome demo. Amazing machine at the time if a little pricey. But you couldn't buy it. Had to be in school or a developer.
Ok, I'm a developer.
Steve is in the hall after the event answering questions. Someone asks, "how can I become a registered developer?" Steve's response, "well we don't need any _garage_ developers." Nice.
Never bought a NeXT after that. I suspected they weren't going to be popular.
NeXT Step is a shining example of what vision, Open Source UNIX, and Objective C can achieve :-)
Is there any lesson we can learn?
Stick Men
Its a pity the article doesn't go into EOF (Enterprise Object Framework) and WebObjects. Two of the real crowning-achievements of the folks at NeXT. EOF was the first usable Object-Relational mapper and, in my opionion, still the only usable one. While WebObjects combined with EOF was the pre-cursor to the whole n-tier application-server thing.
I have a second sig, I call it sig#2.
I'm married and rather silly, but I'd be interested in buying it. How much?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
When Improv got shut down, a group called Lighthouse Design built a functional workalike called Quantrix. They also made several other excellent apps such as Diagram!, the precursor to OmniGraffle. Lighthouse was bought out by Sun for their expertise in object-oriented design, but Lighthouse threw their licensing keys into the public arena when they stopped shipping. Sadly, Sun owns the rights to the code, and has no interest in releasing it - I say sadly, because I suspect it would be relatively easy for someone to resurrect the apps on OS X.
Improv and Quantrix spoiled me for life - to this day, I can't stomach working in Excel. This is particularly ironic since I'm required to use Excel in several courses I teach.
I still have my NeXTDimension Cube boxed up in the garage, I don't have room to set it up but can't bear the thought of selling it off either. I guess when I die, my grandchildren will dig it out and fire it up to see what computing was like "way back when". Won't they be surprised to see that Excel still hasn't caught up to what Quantrix could do back in the 90's.
Adobe Framemaker, Visio, and Max/MSP were all created on the NeXT. When Adobe bought Framemaker, they claim they "lost" the NeXT source code. The NeXT cube had a thrid party DSP board with 5 DSP chips that allowed Max/MSP to happen (the board was like $18k). I heard Visio used to be cool before it became a PC app.
I own a NeXT dimension cube. Its as fast as a G3 class mac but its only 25 MHz. The motherboard was designed with a revolutionary architecture.
For anyone who might have fished it out, the root password was "heretic."
HP/UX never actually *ran* NEXTSTEP, there was a native NEXTSTEP on Mach built for some PA-RISC hardware. I ran this for a short while on a 712/80 and it really screamed (relative to a 33Mhz 040).
-johnny