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.

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.

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.

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.

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: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."

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