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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
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...
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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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.
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!
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.
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
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.