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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
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.
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.
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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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®.
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.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
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.
I first used NeXT on 486 in 1995 at a print shop, it was running a big ( room sized) Oce printer/scanner. It was really slick.
Then when Mac OS X Server 1.0 came out we bought that and used it to replace an AppleShare IP 6.5 install.
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!
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.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
" 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.
anybody else have fond NeXT memories?
Only recent ones! I picked up a reasonably priced NeXT slab on Ebay - it's in mint condition with colour monitor, original software and manuals. The quality of the GUI and API's is amazing, especially when you consider that the thing's only got a Motorola 68030 in it. My Macinstosh LC II (running MacOS 6) has a responsive and pleasant GUI, but using the Programmers Workbench is nowhere near as fun as developing with the NeXT stuff.
Despite my love of NetBSD, I'm giving serious consideration to buying an Apple laptop and running MacOS X on it.
Chris
I'm married and rather silly, but I'd be interested in buying it. How much?
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
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.