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.

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: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®.

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: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."