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NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
*no comment* writes "the folks over at OSviews have a nicely done article that explains the evolution of NeXTSTEP into Mac OS X. 'With the beginning of 1996, Apple realized that with the next generation PC's running Windows NT to be released within the decade, they would need a new, modern operating system to run on their machines. ... Amongst Apple's other options were to license Solaris from Sun, NT from Microsoft, or to purchase a small net services company called NeXT. Apple chose the latter.'" OSNews had another nice Mac-oriented look at NeXTSTEP last year; the Wikipedia entry is also worth looking through.
Someone didn't do their homework!
For awhile I was in search of the x86 version of Apple's Rhapsody DR2. Finally after speaking to a guy who created a page of screenshots, I found a beta software trading forum and grabbed an ISO of it. This guy also has screenshots of OpenStep too.. He's been running this site for years and its given me quite a nice look into the past. Its interesting never the less :)
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
And of course, the choice of NeXTStep had nothing to do with Next also being owned by Steve Jobs!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Imagine how things would be today in the computing world if Apple had licensed NT... I'm very thankful they chose NeXT, especially seeing as how much their decision has influenced home computing technology and especially Apple themselves. We wouldn't have Mac OS X today if it wasn't for that decision. Who knows if Mac OS would even exist still?
Amongst Apple's other options were to license (-- --) NT from Microsoft
Ouch. The thought alone makes me vomit...
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
While I am a huge fan of MacOS X, I wonder what would have happened if they bought Be and used their cash to evolve it instead of ressurecting NeXT?
.02
It's true that Apple currently employs several key Be developers, but I think the Mac platform would eb even further ahead if they went with Be.
Just my
or to purchase a small net services company called NeXT ... that happened to be founded by Apple founder Steve Jobs.
I can't be the only one who thought it was a mistake for Apple to forgoe purchasing Be and instead go with NeXT, but it doesn't appear to have worked out too bad for Apple now.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
Well, a couple of weeks ago, I tried to install Rhapsody DR2 on an x86 box and also using an emulator. Unfortunately, I couldn't get started since the CD isn't bootable and the filesystem isn't ISO9660.
Does anyone know where I can get floppy images?
Thanks in advance.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They fail to mention that NeXT was the company set up by Steve Jobs after he left apple, with the mission to produce a next-generation Mac-like workstation with an OS called NeXTstep, based on mach, BSD and display Postscript
With the beginning of 1996, Apple realized that with the next generation PC's running Windows NT to be released within the decade, they would need a new, modern operating system to run on their machines.
Apple needed a solution to the classic OS's problems regardless of what 'next generation PC's' would be doing, right? Did apple really look to the PC world for cues?
Amongst Apple's other options were to license Solaris from Sun, NT from Microsoft, or to purchase a small net services company called NeXT. Apple chose the latter
Did apple *choose* Next, or did Steve Jobs simply decree it? Were apple engineers involved in this 'choice'?
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I remember a collegue that got one of those. They were soo cool.
And in retrospect, I wonder if the Mac that was a clear plastic cube was based off of that?
Steve Jobs was running NeXT when the NeXT cube came out and he was in charge of apple when the plastic cube Mac came out?
Coincidence? Probably not.
Tin foil hats on!
Umm... wait a minute. It isn't really a conspiracy.
Tin foil hats off.
Where was I? Oh yeah. The NeXT cube. Sexy.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
The blurb is not quite complete. Apple decided it did not have time to develop a next-generation operating system. Copland was pretty much dead in the water.
At the time, also available was the BeOS. A lot of Mac die-hards at the time, myself included, thought that Apple purchasing Be and using that would make the most sense.
From my memory, I seem to remember that Be wanted more money than Apple was willing to spend. It could have also had something to do with the fact that the head of Be, Jean Louis Gassée, was a former Apple man and there was probably some politics there. In addition, NeXT had Steve Jobs and all the personality that went along with that.
I would be interested in reading some of the discussions that went along with passing up Be in favor of NeXT.
It would be interesting reading to see what might have developed out of a Macintosh + Be combination (as opposed to the Macintosh + NeXT we have now).
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Yeah, umm... Someone might want to take that one off the article.
How hard would it be for Apple to choose a product from one of Steve Job's old companies?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
and found this which looked to be fairly indepth about the history of the Mac OS, including some information on what was taken from what and went into what.
That was a nice idea, they should release Macs in shapes. Spheres, pyramids, or even woman-shaped pcs, for the more unfortunate of us!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
BeOS was a nonstarter.
The printing was horrid.
The development environment was awful, contrasted to the robust tools available on NeXTSTEP at the time.
NeXT had real mult-user capability. BeOS was only brought in as a bargaining chip and to entice Jobs to come onboard. BeOS at the time was really impressive on a Mac, especially if you couldn't stomach MacOS... but I ran BeOS @work and NeXTSTEP @home, the choice was readily apparent to people who actually used both systems.
--- I do not moderate.
I first used NeXTStep in about 1989, when NeXT was still a hardware company.
NeXT made a big splash in the trade magazines by using standard UNIX industry hardware like the 680x0 processor, standard RAM, SCSI drives, etc. They did some neat stuff like having a 600M rewritable optical disk, unheard of capacity at the time. Unfortunately, no one else followed suit.
The big thing was the apps, though. Everything was done in Postscript, and there were several desktop publishing applications. As a math student at the time, Mathematica made my jaw drop. I figured out how to use it under ASCII mode via dialup, and checked all my homework that way.
The programming environment was interesting, though I never really delved into it. Underneath (or beside) the pretty GUI there was a 4.3BSD system with a Mach kernel. I was mostly interested in this compiler they had for it, gcc. They wanted you to copy it! And hunting around the ftp sites I found this new scripting language, perl, that was really great.
Too bad stuff like that will never catch on.
sigs, as if you care.
Maybe I just saw that in a style guide or something. My, this is some good crow.
Bottom line: Going NeXT saved Apple by getting Steve Jobs back and getting OS X based on Unix BSD. Steve Jobs might be a crazy man, a meglomaniac, whatever, but he has vision and taste and the drive to force others to follow his vision. The interregnum of Sculley et al was consumed with internal fighting and a zillion product teams smashing each other.
Also, the move to NeXT helped Apple acquire OS rock-solid stability and the Alpha Geek population, as O'Reilly puts it. So now, even though market share is sitting around 5%, OS X is still guaranteed lots of cool stuff.
And finally Tiger is going to start pulling in some of those BeOS metadata ideas...
Off topic but muahahah - look at the history of the NeXTstep article on Wikipedia - someone messed it up and replaced NeXTstep with Hitler and stuff like that - now its locked :-)
Peter.
Someone decided to screw with the Wikipedia page. Nice work ass.
Use this link to go to the real NeXT info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
WASTE - The Secure P2P
...was that JLG kept jacking up the price. He saw that Apple was running out of time and options, and thought that Be was the only viable option for Apple at that point. I think that his attitude left Gil Amelio and the rest of the Apple board cold.
Of course, Apple spent far more to acquire NeXT, but they got Steve Jobs along with it, which was easily worth as much as the operating system.
Can you imagine JLG as Apple CEO, trying to push fruity-colored iMacs? It just wouldn't have happened...
Now that Cocoa is finally getting its just dues how long before we see replacements to these Gorillas? They didn't want to invest in Cocoa programming then, but now six years later will they have taken the time to find the talent to do it now? Hard to tell but these are my predictions.
If they don't they'll be left behind. Adobe sees it by Apple entering into the market with better products.
Macromedia sees it but lets see if they really see it.
Quark seems to be the most cautious and I'm guessing they'll hedge their bets and have invested in such talent already.
Microsoft? Never. They'll figure that Office will always guarantee them supremacy in the platform. Then again I'm sure they'll be quite pissed if Apple releases a compatible Office suite worthy of knocking off Office. Afterall, XML is the measure of compatibility on all future Office suites.
The last section is obviously just conjecture but conjecture with history.I remember lusting after one of these, but, as with many things Apple, it was pricey. Several years back I worked for a company which had some great vision and was going to go 100% NeXT. Sadly, leadership changes and whatnot make it like many companies out there, a Frankenstein IT; a little of this, a little of that, and trying to keep it all going happily if the power goes out or someone kicks a network connector out of the wall.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is for 99% Magnesium, alloys may take a higher temp to reach point of auto-ignition
t m
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/m0088.h
Fire:
Autoignition temperature: 473C (883F)
When heated in air to a temperature near its melting point, magnesium may ignite and burn. Dangerous in the form of dust or flakes, and when exposed to flame or by violent chemical reaction with oxidizing agents. Magnesium may react with moisture or acids to evolve hydrogen gas, which is a highly dangerous fire or explosion hazard.
Autoignition temperature is for Magnesium turnings or ribbon.
Explosion:
Fine dust dispersed in air in sufficient concentrations, and in the presence of an ignition source is a potential dust explosion hazard. Minimum explosible concentration 0.030 grams/liter. Water used on molten magnesium will produce hydrogen gas and may cause an explosion.
Fire Extinguishing Media:
Use metal extinguishing powders such as G-1® graphite powder, Met-L-X® powder, powdered talc, dry graphite, powdered sodium chloride, soda ash, or dry sand. Warning! Do not use foam, chlorinated products such as Halon®, carbon dioxide, or water to extinguish magnesium fires, because dangerous reactions will occur. Use of water on molten magnesium will produce hydrogen gas and may cause an explosion.
Special Information:
In the event of a fire, wear full protective clothing and NIOSH-approved self-contained breathing apparatus with full facepiece operated in the pressure demand or other positive pressure mode. Fire fighters should protect their eyes and skin from flying particles. In order to prevent eye injury, do not look directly at magnesium fires.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
For the x86 freaks, your only hope for an Apple menu on a bare metal x86
w _I n_DR2.html
They're making headway - mine runs.
http://www.rhapsody-project.tk/
A VERY cool resource.
http://www.shawcomputing.net/
Stone
http://www.stone.com/dev/StonesThrow21/Whats_Ne
~hylas
I can't let this topic go without a mention...
http://www.gnustep.org
Please take a look!
Thanks, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I'll stick this back here. What do people think about a Darwin kernel, and Smalltalk framework, coupled with some of the lates graphics technology?
Like? Dislike?
I am probably one of the few people who prefered NeXTStep to Mac OS X. Some of the (IMHO) reasons:
-the user interface was better
-file management was better
-Digital Webster
-no bar fixed across the top of the screen
Excited by old articles in Byte magazine, I bought a used NeXT Mono-Station from Sam Goldberger, who ran a company called Spherical Solutions. It ran great and I loved it. But when I wanted to buy a copy of Openstep 4 for my PC, NeXT wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $900.00 for it. I think that had a lot to do with NeXT's inability to compete in the PC market.
Today, I run a PowerMac G4 with Mac OS X 1.3.6.
You forgot the almost purchase of BeOS, just before Jobs returned.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Back in my more hard-core Mac days I remember their OS roadmap was:
System 7, code named Blue
Taligent (Joint IBM project, never did anything) - Pink.
And there was Red, what the hell was Red? This was supposed to be the real far-out stuff.
I don't think it was Copland, that seemed more of a stopgap from the implosion of Taligent.
I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm reasonably sure it will.
The only reason I can think of is that the disk partition type is slightly different..
You can't read your Rhapsody partitions on a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP box..
You mean like this? Or perhaps maybe more like this?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
For info about the evolution of NextStep to OS X, the Mac OS X history article is also worth reading.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You actually are strictly correct but Merriam Webster typically adapts its definitions to fit more modern interpretations. Further and farther are a great example. Traditionally further is additional time while farther is additional distance but MW has given them both the identical definition.
'With the beginning of 1996, Apple realized that with the next generation PC's running Windows NT to be released within the decade, they would need a new, modern operating system ...
They should have realized this back in the late 80's. 1996 was far too late. Apple was already relegated to a niche market by then.
I have to sell my old working NeXT Cube, since i am downsizing and moving.
One of the early Cubes, upgraded to a 25MHz 68040 (Turbo NeXTstation). 64MB RAM, 2GB SCSI HD, 17" greyscale megapizel monitor.
Pick up or deliver in Boulder, Colorado.
mail rousseau67 at gmail dot com for more info.
NEXTSTEP changed my life. I hope it changes yours.
The CEO of Apple then was Gil Amelio. The decision was made by him not by Jobs. Jobs sure persuaded Amelio to buy NeXT, but he was not a part of Apple at that time. Jobs was brought to Apple as a part of the deal.
A little off topic, but related nonetheless. Does anyone have any links to pictures and perhaps even step by steps of a complete teardown of one of these? I've seen the TurboStations .... they are very similar to a same year model Sun Pizza box. Layout and all of my SparcStation 5 is very close (not cookie cutter mind you, but still you can see that the inspiration was there)
These cubes are so huge ... 12" by 12" ... compared to a similar Pizza box. In fact it looks like you could have two Mainboards in a Cube? How many drives did this thing hold? What's the internal chassis look like? I'm curious to know, but don't have a lot money (shipping a computer that size/weight is enormous) to spend to just strip the thing with no intention of ever actually using it. (I have 6 various Sparc machines, none Ultra, that just sit around already)
Thanks in advance for any info.
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
*stabs*
I dunno, my guess is the initial manufacturing zigs and zags of Mr. Jobs held back initial shipments, but I recall seeing them (probably in a BYTE article) and that was the advertised price at the time. The university may have gotten educational pricing. I was intrigued but didn't have the dough to cough up, having already spent my retirement funds on an Amiga.
:-)
And then I went on to do lot of OS/2 work, so you can make an appropriate evaluation of my platform judgement.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
At least be a little bit selective of who mods.
It was designed and prototyped shortly before they stopped making hardware (in 1993), so it never shipped.
The head designer was Jon Rubenstein, who left NeXT at that point. He (and, I think, others from the hardware group) went on designing dual-processor PPC systems. First they had a company called FirePower. That was bought by Motorola, I think.
When Apple bought NeXT, Rubenstein came on board to run hardware. Because he'd kept working on dual-processor systems after leaving NeXT, his SMP-fu wasn't stale.
So, basically, on the hardware side, NeXT vs. Be was a wash.
NT's underlying kernel and architecture is considered one of the most advanced and stable out there. If you hate the crap on top of it, fine. But VMS and its descendent NT are arguably better kernels than Linux has turned out to be (so far).
But I guess whatever it takes to get you karma on Slashdot.
Its amazingly fast, crisp, clean. I run two OPENSTEP Athlon machines and a NeXTstation TurboColor mainly for printing PostScript. NeXT printers run the paper straight through rather than around rollers making it possible to print on heavy paper, cardboard and even plastic sheets.
I do a lot of graphics work using WetPaint and Virtuoso. For some reason I'm always able to get a lot more work done each day on OPENSTEP than on a Windows machine which unforuntaly I still need to run for certain tasks.
Windows XP is a sloppy, bloated cluttered POS OS, can't even hold a candle to an 11 year old OS from NeXT!
If the Copland project (aka the real Mac OS 8) hadn't floundered like a beached whale, it wouldn't have left Apple in the desperate position of needing to buy a new OS foundation.
That means, they wouldn't have had to buy either Be or NeXT, which would have meant no Mr Steve Jobs. Even the non-fanboy audience here wouldn't question that it was his vision guiding Apple into an undisputed innovator in the "OS-with-power-AND-style" and "digital lifestyle" arenas (despite having negligible marketshare) that has truly saved Apple from extinction (for the moment).
If Copland HAD worked out, Apple might have kicked around for a few years as a viable alternative to Windows 95/98/NT for loyal Apple supporters, but ultimately the onset of very cheap PC hardware and a genuinely superior NT-based OS would have pummeled them into powder.
(BTW, hold the flames: I'm saying NT was superior to the nuKernel of Copland, not to modern Mac OS X, which I'm sure hands NT's ass to it on a plate when it comes to things like multitasking.)So... as I see it, Copland's failure saved Apple!
I think the biggest reason why Apple's Copland project failed was that it was essentially re-inventing the wheel of the type of memory management UNIX and Windows NT did.
(By the way, people forget that Dave Cutler--who spearheaded the Windows NT project back in the late 1980's and early 1990's--essentially used a lot of the stuff he did at DEC in writing Windows NT.)
But MacOS X was different: it essentially put the Macintosh interface on top of the BSD Unix kernel--probably a lot of stuff borrowed from NeXTSTEP. As such, MacOS X (for the most part) has the memory stability and multitasking/multithreading functionality of BSD Unix.
We considered a lot of other OSes. We looked at NT, but it looked like it would never be practical to port to a big-endian processor.
I was reading with great interest 'till I got here. Just to make sure I hadn't gone mad, I grabbed my NT4 cd from the bookshelf. I hadn't. I scanned the CD for this comment.
So, either you're putting us on, had an excusable brain-fart, or we're talking Apples and Oranges. Pick a card any card.
Assuming you're just getting old like the rest of us, perhaps you can shed some light as to whether the mkLinux's Mach microkernel was considered either a proof-of-concept or an enabling technology when it came to porting OpenStep to Macintosh.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Instead of paying too much for Be, the tactic them seem to have used is hire good people from Be and have them work on parts of OSX. Thus you get things like the former BeOS file system designer creating Spotlight.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyway, noticed on the box that came with my machine that OS X is partially FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD based...
So how does this related to NextStep?
I did always wonder if the next NeXT would be a NeAT, following the path of IBM's PC XT and AT...
(Nearly bought a pizza box x86 unit in 1993-ish as a student... sigh...But I guess my iBook G4 counts as a successor, eh?)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
No flames from me. I love the Mac, run OSX here at home, but I use NT 4.0 at work on an old Deskpro, with 300 MBs of memory [Vs. a Gig of RAM at home], and my job requires maybe 8 big apps all working together and it goes off without a hitch. Since April I haven't seen even a hint of our office Network getting shaky, never mind crashing. Nobody can tell me that multitasking is Apple's 'turf'. Watch what happens when you click yer Safari Bookmarks menu the first time after launch,(i use firefox) or ask the Finder to do 2 things at once... heheh, yeah, I can run Final Cut loaded with plugs, but it's the 'little things' that drive a person half bananas....
>But MacOS X was different: it essentially put the Macintosh interface on top of the BSD Unix kernel--probably a lot of stuff borrowed from NeXTSTEP. As such, MacOS X (for the most part) has the memory stability and multitasking/multithreading functionality of BSD Unix.
Max OS-X is essentially OPENSTEP 5.0. NeXTstep and OPENSTEP are multi-platform BSD-based UNIX like operating systems using the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon by principle
designer and engineer, Avie Tevanian.
From what I've read they are both different operating systems.. so are they by different companies are both done by NeXT? If so what did OpenStep run on? What where the goals of the diff OS's?
-Josh
Could someone post a mirror? I didn't have a chance to read it before they took the article down.
Thanks.
Wait a second here... I was AT Microsoft the day of the NT 3.51 release party at the end of May in 1995. The whole point of the 3.51 release was to ship for PPC (it wasn't ready in time for 3.5).
Now sure, maybe PPCs ran NT little-endian and MacOS big-endian, but that doesn't matter -- they'd just be running the old Mac stuff under emulation, and apps can't simply be recompiled to work on the new OS anyway. As long as you would have to rewrite every app and driver from the ground up, why would it matter what endianness they were using?
I think NT would have been a good code base to use because it would have allowed them to run MacOS as an OS subsystem ("personality") instead of Win32. Actually, there would not need be any Windows-ness about it. But if you wanted to run Windows apps on your Mac, perhaps you could install it. If they wanted to be POSIX compliant, they could ship the POSIX subsystem. And who wouldn't want to be able to select from all of the available drivers for Windows?
aQazaQa
Don't forget: Mac Plus, color classic Mac, NeXT, iMac, G4 cube.
I believe there were all Job's children, and they were all envisioned originally by Jobs as self-contained fanless one-stop appliances.
Of course, then the realities of running such things with a hard-drive made fans necessary, as well as the hotter cpus.
PowerPC can be switched to little-endian mode, so an operating system running on PPC may decide to be little-endian instead of big-endian.
BeOS was also serously considered as a base for the new Mac system. I would like that choice.
---if anyone still needs a gmail invite, message me, i have few to spare.
open -a "Spin Control.app" --
I worked on Copland. The failure of Copland was not really a failure of technology but a failure of management. There were a number of management failures that brought the project down.
In the winter of 1995 we got a mandate that the first Copland beta would be made available for the May 1996 World Wide Developers' Conference.
That winter two of the major tasks that were being handled were to bring in the new file system and the new I/O system, replacing the original Copland, hastily built, prototype systems. For the purposes of that build, Copland could be split into 4 major pieces: file system, I/O subsystem, kernel and higher level functionality.
We produced set of glue code such that either file system or I/O subsystem could be used together, allowing the new I/O subsystem to be tested without alterations to the rest of the system and the new file system to be tested with the old I/O subsystem.
In January of 1996, as we were approaching the end of that build cycle, the kernel team decided that they really, really, needed to change a bunch of API's that would break just about everything. At this point, a strong management decision would have been "WAIT - those changes can go into the next build, AFTER the I/O subsystem and file system have been tested". Instead, the kernel changes were allowed to proceed. At this point everything in the system was broken. Upgrading the old I/O subsystem to work with the new kernel API's was a huge amount of work so the ability to test the new file system against the old I/O subsystem was lost. Now, the entire system had to be tested together with every component in flux. Needless to say, the integration process for this build took forever and was probably the first death blow for the project.
As WWDC approached, we expected that pressure would be brought from management to make the deadline. Instead, as the time for all-nighters with free pizza came up in about March management looked at the schedule and decided that it could not be met. Having told everyone previously if this deadline was missed the company would be in deep doo-doo, management credibility went out the window. The number of late nighters (already not enough for a project so far behind schedule) dropped precipitously. This was the second death blow to the project.
Over the summer of 1996 we were very close to having the developer release ready. A senior engineer and tech lead had been on sabbatical and doing some serious thinking and came back with a paper that cast serious doubts on the approach that Copland was taking to emulating the Mac OS System 7 environment.
Classic Mac OS is more of a library than an operating system in that all of the operating system's data structures are in the same address as applications. Copland's approach to Classic Mac OS compatibility was to emulate EVERYTHING, including internal data structures that applications might use. For example, in Classic Mac OS there is a linked list (can't remember the name of the damned thing right now) of data structures for all of the open files. Applications would walk this list to find out who else had files open. In the Copland emulation environment the Copland file system would generate events for the emulation layer so that the emulation layer could keep this list current!
This approach was causing serious problems. The mandate from marketing was that 99% of applications had to run, warts and all and this was proving to be strictly impossible. The emphasis on providing an emulation layer had bushwhacked the "new api" such that there really wasn't much available to write apps that took advantage of the multi-tasking and memory protection that the OS provided. The paper written seriously critiqued this approach.
Unfortunately as this paper made its way up the management chain to people who did not really understand what it was talking about, the entire project began to be regarded as failed.
Copland had a number of technical failings, one of its
If you can read french, there is a site full of screenshots :
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/.
Do you think apple would be interested at all in a port of ReactOS to PPC? I have been trying to make contact inside of apple for quite a while with no luck.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I think the biggest reason why Apple's Copland project failed was that it was essentially re-inventing the wheel of the type of memory management UNIX and Windows NT did.
Actually they were trying to invent the steel-belted radial. The Copland swap system, for instance was a strange beast, using 256 swap files (for some reason) and performed better than unix or NT swap systems.
Don't forget, we got alpha seeds of Copland - you can run it today if you have the right hardware. They just hadn't finished backwards compatibility (yes, that old song again) when it was "too late" and they went shopping for something else.
We're better off today for it, I'm sure, but it's disingenuous to represent that they didn't get memory management working.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There weren't many expansion cards produced by third parties.
/ Lindem ann90a/
There was a board called the Ariel Quintprocessor, which had 5 27MHz 56001 DSP chips, each with its own pair of serial ports.
Together with the 56001 DSP on the Cube's motherboard, that'd give you a box with six DSPs.
Ariel had another board, the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation, which had two i860 CPUs and a 56001 DSP.
http://mediatheque.ircam.fr/articles/textes
image of the board at: http://www.synrise.de/images/ircam-ispw-m860.jpg
"You're opaque to facts, mpaque."
I'm not sure what mpaque's specific role was, but it's safe to say he had a significant role in the development of Quartz at Apple.
He was similarly involved with Display Postscript at NeXT, among other things.
As I said, I'm not sure about the specifics. But he's an insider NeXT/Apple graphics guru. 12th level, at least. He's probably got Power Word: Composite committed to memory.
Correction - Cutler worked on VMS at DEC.
I understand Windows NT was named that because the initials WNT are the next-letter increment to VMS.
the likely scenario, without the sale to Apple, would have meant a shutdown and a pennies-on-the-dollar fire sale of NeXT assets at some point in the late 90s or early 2000s.
Compared to that, a $400 million sale is pretty good, even if investment to date was over $400 million.
Break-even is better than a significant loss, no?
i applaud anyone who would like to bring the user interface of NeXTstep back to the x86 platform on modern hardware. but i'm wondering if there's an alternate route.
........... kris
i've been spending considerable time of late conceptualizing building a new distro based solely on GNUstep and its associated apps. in my opinion, there is a critical mass of GNUstep-powered apps that run on Linux to create a user experience that rivals that of NeXTstep. it's low-hanging fruit that IMHO no one is reaching out to grab. i would like to grab it.
you might not understand the sheer power NeXTstep affords its users to appreciate why I would want to build something like this--i encourage you to find an old NeXTstep box and see for yourself why I would be excited about NeXTstep years after its demise.
i'm sure some believe KDE/GNOME already provide ease-of-use for end users, but having had the power of NeXTstep under my fingers for years, and having been a Linux user since 1995, I'm not sold. I'm currently working with a small Linux distro vendor to explore the possibility of building such an environment. We're trying to figure out if it would have any commercial promise. So far, well, it looks promising, but we might do it anyway for the sheer fun of having NeXTstep back on top of Linux. (Scratching an itch, in other words.) Although I believe KDE and GNOME have come a long way, IMHO they still lack the sheer ease-of-use that NeXTstep provided back in the day. I think the time might be right for an alternative to KDE/GNOME that is based on the NeXTstep experience.
I'm interested in readers' thoughts on this matter. Email me if this sounds interesting.
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
The end result was that Mac OS X was not shipped until 2001, nearly 3 years behind what was promised.
You're leaving out some rather crucial parts of the story, here. In Spring of 1999, Apple shipped Mac OS X Server 1.0. In many respects, this is what was promised: Nextstep/Rhapsody on PowerPC hardware. It's a far cry from what we have in Mac OS X today, but that's because the requirements changed.
First, the original Next acquisition strategy was to require everyone to rewrite their apps in NextStep APIs (predecessor to Cocoa). Companies like Adobe didn't like this prospect, so Apple went back and started working on Carbon, which was a significant undertaking. In addition, Quartz was created to replace Display PostScript. And that's really just scratching the surface.
Nonetheless, Apple went from having about 10% of the desktop market when I started in 1995 to less than 4% today
Windows 95 combined with Apple management issues certainly had a significant impact. But to be fair, not all of this is due to Apple losing customers. Today, market share includes $168 PCs from Walmart, but this is a much different type of experience offered to a much different type of customer than what we typically think of as computer users.
So, if Copland had succeeded would Apple have been sunk? I don't think so. The fact that OS X has a Unix underpinning has had very little effect on the number of applications available for it. OS X's windowing system is most emphatically NOT X Windows so a port of any interesting application from Unix or Windows is major work.
This is misleading in several senses. Not only does come with a X11 server but a lot of significant Unix software (Apache, MySQL, etc) is faceless. In terms of consumer desktop application, what the Unix side brings is basic infrastructure for a multi-user system.
But one of the most significant advantages that Next brought to the table was the development environment. Not only for third party developers but Apple itself. The speed at which one can write high quality applications is a huge asset.
Objective-C has become the language of choice for Mac applications which again makes your applications totally non-portable.
The language is essentially irrelevant. The difference is in the frameworks. Unless you're using cross-platform toolkits, the language issue is a moot point. And cross-platform apps generally don't serve the platform or users as much as the developer.
Your best bet is to write the core engine in something like C, and write the higher level UI stuff in whatever the platform prefers.
Had Apple had strong enough managemnt to rein in engineering and force the product to ship it would have been successful and a strong contender to Windows NT on the desktop.
We clearly have different opinions on this, but I have a rather hard time seeing your parallel universe comparing favorably to one with Jobs, Cocoa, iMac, iPod/iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, etc. That's just my gut feeling.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I remember when NT 4 came out, one of the big deals about it was that it ran on many different platforms. It ran on Mips, PowerPC, Alpha, and x86. That was one of the things that Microsoft touted about it. I think Mips and Power PC NT machines were made for about 6 months, no one bought them. Anyways the point is, back then, when NT ran on PowerPC the thought of Apple switching to NT wasn't as outlandish.
"brxref
For the love of God, I have no idea of what you're talking about. The Finder handles multiple tasks perfectly well, I just tested it. Regarding the Safari bookmarks "problem", I guess you mean that it takes a long time to open, but that hasn't been my experience.
Three years ago I was the main administrator of an NT 4.0 server that ran a critical database for the company I used to work for. It only crashed once, badly, and it was due to a hardware failure. But one of the policies was NEVER to run more than one critical app (a database, webserver, mail server) on an NT or 2000 server, and the servers were basically never touched in fear of them crashing. That was extremely stressing, frankly speaking. Given my (admittedly limited) experience with MacOS X and other Unix-like systems, I would never again run something critical on an NT-based box. And if forced to, I would probably go for a Win 2003 server, NOT for NT.
"Its interesting never the less"
it should be:
"It's interesting nevertheless"
which still would sound better as:
"It's interesting nonetheless"
Words like nonetheless, nevertheless, thereof, abovementioned, heretofore, et cetera, are single words. "Its" means "of it" (a dog eats its bone). "It's" means "it is" or "it has" (it's been raining; it's interesting).
I usually don't correct people on Slashdot, but when four out of five words in your sentence are incorrect, that is just too much even for me--and I am not even a native English speaker, mind you.
Mac OS X has less code in common with NEXTSTEP than commonly assumed; it also lacked large swaths of current functionality, and much of what it had was rewritten. The XNU kernel, including networking, is a fresh implementation of the same architecture. Printing was redone to work with the new driver and display models, then scrapped and replaced with CUPS just two years ago. Developers balked when told that the only way to get their apps running natively on Rhapsody would be to rewrite them in Java or some crazy moon language, so Apple had to go write Carbon.
Unlike the grandparent, I'm not convinced that 'Plan Be' would have worked out better than what we have now, but reusable lines of code and time to market weren't the NeXT advantages Apple thought they would be.
Oh, that's right. I forgot about that, probably since I never had more than about 50MB to store.
I bought one of those disks. I eventually sold it to Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg.
sigs, as if you care.
Well isn't that grammar nazi-ish of you.
No, as a matter of fact it is not a "grammar nazi-ish"--it is an orthographic pedantry at worst, or just a good old-fashioned purism at best, but it has nothing to do with national socialism whatsoever.
I'm thinking of it right now, and would hate to see you on a bad day. This rant (although clever) isn't exactly overflowing with righteousness. I guess living in the deep south (Mississippi) makes me the worst of them all. Uneducated, backwards, no A/C, bare foot, lynch happy son o' bitch, huh?
Oh wait, let me look around a little in my department...yep just as I thought, some of the hottest women on the planet. Damn, am I one happy backwards son o' bitch now.
Damn, now how do I get my unedumacated self off this high tech machinery before my boss catches me?
Three years? Possibly. Five years? Not considering what Be accomplished in that same period without Apple's resources.
Carbon was necessary because developers weren't willing to completely rewrite their programs in a different language or forever run in a penalty box. BeAPI wasn't as close to Mac Toolbox as is Carbon, but it was closer than OpenStep/Yellow Box/Cocoa, and it used C++. (For the record, I mostly like Cocoa and ObjC, but I don't like it when my migration path is a total rewrite.) Even had developers still demanded an updated Toolbox in addition to BeAPI, my understanding is that it would have been easier to implement on BeOS.
Nitpick: OpenStep was a specification, OPENSTEP was an OS that implemented it. (IME, calling the OS NEXTSTEP is usually the least confusing option.) The Mach and BSD updates may not have been absolutely necessary, but neither were they exactly frivolous; keeping the old versions would have required more work at other levels of the OS and made it more difficult to change some undesirable design elements.
The Mach and BSD layers were updated before Apple unveiled Rhapsody; Carbon came after.