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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."
my mom told me that i was going to start feeling much better now that we changed doctors im not so sure and i still think shes trying to kill me my dad is definately trying to kill me because i mess with my sister and she probably would kill me if she could my sister hates me and i dont mind because i hate her too she doesnt have to take meds because she doesnt have problems but she does have messed up boyfriends i know because ive met most of them and i think one of them was in juvi or maybe even the hospital my parents put me in anyway they are messed up at least as much as me so i grunt at them and if they grunt back i like them and if they just hit me or something then i spit in their drink if i can so this one boyfriend would grunt at me before i grunted and i like him from the get go and my sister broke up with him last week and i still talk to him on the phone and on aim he has a dog with one leg and i like to touch the stub on the dog where he leg would be because it feels weird. my head hurts.
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.
The article doesn't mention it, but as far as I'm aware the AmigaOS was the base of much of NeXTs OS. The small tightly written exec kernel and much of the speed on the 68ks (which AmigaOS was written for) is part of that efficiency.
There's even an Amiga boing ball demo as part of the 2nd screen of screenshots.
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.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I have a color Next Station. Monitor, mouse, keyboard, speaker/microphone box, working in new condition. I wonder how much this thing is worth if I were to sell it.
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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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.
My video compression blog
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
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!
" 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
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.
Dear Apple:
I bought an Apple computer because of its native support for teledildonics. I bought a USB FUFME and MacOS immediately recognized it and installed drivers instantly! As a gay Catholic priest who often can't be at the altar all the time, you can understand how the ability to have sex with children whilst on the airplane with my Powerbook and wireless internet service is a lifesaver.
I just have a single question, will Apple be releasing a firewire version of the FUFME anytime soon?
With much gayness,
Father Michael "Arminass" Sims
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.
My video compression blog
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.
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.
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