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.

Comments

Screenshots

[LiNKz]

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 :)

NeXT background

[close_wait]

purchase a small net services company called NeXT

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

The choice.

[juuri]

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.

Rhapsody DR2 x86 Developers

[not_hylas( )]

For the x86 freaks, your only hope for an Apple menu on a bare metal x86
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_New _I n_DR2.html

Of course, never forget about GNUstep!!

[borgheron]

I can't let this topic go without a mention...

http://www.gnustep.org

Please take a look!

Thanks, GJC

Re:This Article is riddled with inaccuracies.

[MrLint]

Id like to add a few things based on my experiences in the user chat rooms (IRC) at the time, specifically on the "Idiot wars" (which im not sure i would have chosen as a term but hey:)

Of the many things we groused about as we saw os x develop were many of those UI things. We wanted our volumes on the desktop along with our trash (which we didnt officially get).

Many people wanted labels (of which I couldnt care less).

There was also a lot of back and forth by people who mostly didnt know anything regarding open transport, that is streams from OT (macos 7 - 9) and of course BSD sockets from NeXT. Of course in the end no one noticed any change at all and that part has long since been forgotten.

There was, and still remains some bitterness over the appearance manager getting "Steved". This one is a mixed bag. Id like to change some colors, however when you look at some the visual disasters created by ppl who would be better off doing soap carving, I dont know if i can fault Steve totally.

In the end the users didnt want to have to learn too much new stuff. The finder had to behave like everyone expected. And more importantly X-Windows style cursor focusing is just a no go. (Ive used it on Solaris, and it takes a certain mindset to deal with that meta-abstraction in a visual mode) and frankly it would be too bard for some people. As a note there was and may still be a hidden pref in the terminal.plist to turn this on for terminal, however it causes behavior inconsistencies when terminal autofocuses when you are in a "normal" app.

And thus it was from the peanut gallery.

Re:Net services company???

[NightLamp]

WebObjects is still alive and kicking, at my company we use it for all manner of things. It has become a real workhorse and continues to evolve capability-wise and mature in terms of stability. As a J2EE certified platform (last time I checked), the thing that I find most overlooked about the package is its built-in GUI a la Dreamweaver, it is, however, much more effective at visualizing/previewing dynamic pages with active data than the Macromedia product. If you are developing database-tied web sites with Java you owe it to yourself to check out Apple WebObjects. (It is not strictly tied to the Apple platform BTW) Of all the J2EE APIs I have used it is by far the most friendly, due to a code-quality pedigree inherited from NeXT and extensively re-factored ObjectiveC MVC structures. thanks Steve, et. al. (the built-in multi-schema load-balancer is a nice finishing touch ;) /* Can you tell your JVM controller to re-start (and pass off extant sessions to other instances) your application instances to account for what could (at any time) be(come) a buggy JVM by clicking on a check-box on an HTML config page? A non-elegant but eminently practical solution for inexplicable java memory leaks is built in to this package. I call Nice. Check it out. */ TTFN.

Re:Did Copland failing actually help Apple succeed

[putaro]

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