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

Doom!

[trompete]

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?

Interesting article

[coolmacdude]

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.

math

[austad]

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.

I had one

[goombah99]

I had a early pc version of Nextstep. rand on a 486Dx, 1 gig disk.

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.

Fond memories working at NeXT

[tyrione]

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!

Re:I once played that version of Doom...

[rworne]

I rescued some equipment from a horrible fate from my university computer store. The University was phasing them out in favor of going over to Windows NT.

Now they are getting more and more into OS X. Funny how that worked out.

As for the NeXT machines, my Cube and Turbocolor served me well from 1995 to 1998, and I did pretty much all of my CS work on it.

By 1998, it was quite long in the tooth, and I reluctantly switched over to NT, and thankfully later to Windows 2000.

OS X came out (10.1) and I summarily dumped my PC and switched over to a PowerMac. I haven't looked back since.