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."

Comments

That silly web thing.

[fm6]

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.

Re:That silly web thing.

[AtrN]

The authoring tools for Doom were done on the NeXT. Also, the original Berners-Lee web browser was pretty lame, even for that time, given the graphical abilities of the platform and toolkit.

Re:That silly web thing.

[Jeremy Erwin]

Lame Graphics? That's not the point. Tim Berners-Lee valued his Next because the libraries were so easy to use.

I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already.

WorldWideWeb.app commentary

Re:That silly web thing.

[laird]

I used the original web browser on the NeXT. It wasn't terribly useful, but it was clearly the start of something huge.

Things it did:
- Showed text pages with text links and a little bit of formatting (bold and italics, headers).
- Clicking on a linked word/phrase opened a new window showing the definition (or whatever). So you ended up with zillions of little windows (unless you held down some modifier key).

Things it didn't do:
- Graphics.
- Form fields.
- Dynamically generated pages (no CGI's).
- Complex layout (no tables, etc.).

But because it was easy to author documents, and to implement HTML, it rapidly exploded. Form fields and CGI's allowed you to use the web as a front-end to real applications.

Objective-C

[AtrN]

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.

Re:Objective-C

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not the sole error from the article. For instance:

"After the demise of NEXTSTEP, the company renamed the OS -- updated with the new APIs -- and called it OpenStep (as opposed to all-capitals OPENSTEP framework). Three versions saw the light of day, 4.0 to 4.2."

Nope. It is just the opposite. OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep the APIs.

And anyone can guess that the author did not really worked with NeXTstep:

"One weird quirk of the system, though, is the fact that while the mouse has 2 buttons, I only found a single application that actually uses the second button and does something with it..."

Use Preference.app to set second mouse button to pop up the app menu. That is what that second mouse button is for.

Re:Mathematica?

[norwoodites]

Because that is the first front-end for Mathematica® and they also in the current versions (at least 3.0 and 4.2) automatically italicize Mathematica®.

Re:Let the bidding begin

[SN74S181]

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.

Re:WindowMaker

[klui]

No. Window Maker is not a free implementation of OPENSTEP. GNUstep is the free implementation of OPENSTEP. Window Maker only looks like NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP but it is in no way coded using GNUstep classes.

one good word processor

[timothy]

" 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."

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 ... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today ;)

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

Re:WindowMaker

[Jeremy Erwin]

In fact, WindowMaker is coded in C, using the WINGS--WINGS Is Not GNUStep widget library. WindowMaker is designed to cooperate with the GNUstep environment, though.

Though NextStep was designed to "look good" it was also designed to be easy to program. If you only install WindowMaker, you would be missing out on the AppKit-- Next's programming framework. (At least on my Mac, it's easy to use. I've never used the OpenStep/NextStep implementations.)

Fastest NeXT unit ever made

[capmilk]

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.

Re:Fastest NeXT unit ever made

[shawkin]

The fastest released NeXT platform was the HP 735-125. Of the unreleased systems, the fastest was NeXT port to the DEC Alpha that would support multiprocessing. It might have scaled up to 8 CPUs. The NeXT RISC Workstation used two Motorola 88000 CPUs. One was devoted to the display.

NeXT Time was a video compression system that worked quite well, particularly for the time. NeXT also had a JPEG video compression card for non-linear editing, based on the C-Cube. This was designed to be a plug in daughter card for their Dimension color video display card. There was a single chip version and, rumored, a two chip version. They may have gotten the two chip version to work shortly before hardware got Steved.

Re:I had one

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that WordPerfect ran on Next too. (recall entering a contest where WP was giving away 1 of each kind of machines they ran on - Sun, Mac, PC, Next, etc)

Re:I had one

[Lysol]

All true. Altho I never had a cube, I remember reading about Zilla in some computing mag. Back then I was totally blown away by NeXT.

But, I think it was their high price and Jobs' attitude that ultimately killed the company. Plus, they were in debt to Hitachi by like, $400mil or something.

A good audio book to get about Jobs, which talks quite a bit about NeXT is called The Second Coming of Steve Jobs via audible.com. Talks about how he tried to get NeXT into various companies and how he would try to woo execs on features - features they wouldn't really need or understand - while they just saw a high price tag vs. pc's. Interesting stuff.

But, yah, apps are a big problem too. If you look at NeXT back then and Apple today, some of the same attitude still plays out. All the little 'cool' features like built in PDF to the OS (most people in the pc world probably don't give a shit about this), the animation on the fast user switching, booting off external fw drives, etc... It's almost like it's all just too far ahead and whatever M$ makes, the dumb herd will accept.

Re:Fond memories working at NeXT

[jweatherley]

could you PLEASE give me some examples while i hunt these developers down? anything at all, really, i just need a quick fix!

Will this do?

Here's some thoughts on NeXT for developers

Sample quote - John Carmack:

"We developed lots of products under dos (mostly borland c++), and never want to again. We went through five major iterations of our tools under DOS, and they are all junk below our first iteration of NS tools. You can't really just point at specific things and claim superiority. It is the complete package hat has the appeal. NS is the best tool I have found for MY development work."

Re:I had one

[Elwood P Dowd]

All the little 'cool' features like built in PDF to the OS (most people in the pc world probably don't give a shit about this)

Bad example. That feature makes all the PC users at my office go a warm wet one. It's the only thing that ever turned their heads for a brief second to even notice macs.

more detail

[piobair]

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.

Re:Spreadsheets to die for

[cbv]

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.

Some of the GNUstep team are talking to SUN about that, apparently with some success ...