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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.
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
It means that I, for one, would not be using a Mac right now. The UNIX-ness is important to me.
I think they should have bought both, though -- maybe they would have come out with Spotlight sooner.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
BeOS was UNIX-ish. It was working towards POSIX compliance IIRC and has a Bash shell and Unix-like file permissions system set up. It had the ability to become multi-user if it was developed further.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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...
...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...
Emphasis on the "ish". It was not yet capable of multiple, simultaneous users. I think Apple did the right thing by going with a mature kernel. It meant that there was a metric shit-ton of work that they did not have to do.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Well, Hank, I was the guy who wrote the report at Apple that recommended we buy NeXT. It was a simple choice, really, between Be and NeXTStep. NeXT had a much more complete offering, with actual commercial developers who had written really good stuff for it. Even better, it had had a number of releases, and had a mature system for handling version upgrades. Be, as many people will recall, tended to need an application recompile for every new version, and there way no obvious simple way to solve the problem. NeXT had a mature and battle tested kernel, and a real BSD layer, neither of which could really be said of Be at the time.
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. We looked at Solaris, and it was a serious contender. There was no decent UI layer, though, by the standards we used to judge such things. Remember that things like KDE and GNOME were quite young and immature at the time.
Getting back Steve was a plus for the company, but wasn't a part of our deliberations as technical folks. NeXT Looked like the best technical choice, really. Linux was simply too young in 1996 to be a serious cnsideration, even though Apple had an internal mkLinux project.
Who knows what it might have been today, given a new shot at choosing. But back then, there was nothing that stood up to NeXT given the constraints of Apple's business.
Failed? It's hard to see Apple as a "failed" company with successes like the iMac, the iPod, iTMS and recent financial figures. I confess I haven't checked stock price and financial statements, but I understand anecdotaly that Apple is doing quite well, "niche" or not.
Don't make someone bust out the old argument of market share and comparisons to companies like Lexus, etc. etc. You're just not a "success" unless you become some sort of a monopoly, is that it?
I'd better go enjoy my G5 since Apple has so miserably failed and is, true to predictions since about 1990, about to close its doors.
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.
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.
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!
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
No, I'm not kidding, nor was it a brain-fart. The problem with BS detectors in the presence of too little information is that they sometimes lead you astray in a big way.
There's a lot more to getting an OS ported than just porting the kernel and a few system apps. Just because you can recompile for a platform doesn't make it commercially viable. The work to try to reorganize code so that it could run at competitive speeds on PowerPC looked pretty terrible to us. NT was terribly tied to PC architectures. It ran on other instruction sets, but they never ever caught on in a big way, remember? Ever imagine there might be a reason?
The work to try to integrate it with existing PowerPC Mac applications looked even worse. The issues with simple things like screen sharing, and keeping multiple screens going, and so on, looked prety grim to us. The graphics models of the two platforms are quite different. And there's that horrible tendency in NT to run a graphics subsystem at the core of their kernel, which looked like a real bear to keep running on Mac hardware in anything like a stable fashion.
And for all of this work, we would have gotten maybe a few dozen Windows developers to recompile and support it on our new platform, if we were lucky. We were looking at huge porting effort, and ongoing maintenance problems, for very little upside indeed.
While BeOS was very advanced in some areas at the time Apple was looking at buying it it was sorely lacking in others. Areas like localisation, language services and typography. Despite this it was still an attractive proposition, but Jean-Louise and co. killed it by being too greedy. Believing that they were Apple's only real option to get out of its mess they asked for more money than they were worth.
As it happened Apple chose to buy NeXT instead and paid even more for them. I believe that Be were offering themselves for $300M and that NeXT was bought for $400M.
At the end of it all I think that Apple totally made the right choice. Steve returned the focus needed for Apple to succeed again. OpenStep provided a very solid foundation for Mac OS X, arguably a better one than BeOS, then Apple managed to acquire a number of key people from Be who have helped add some of the show case BeOS technologies into Mac OS X. In essence it got both.
If you look at where we are now with the current builds of 10.4 with CoreImage, CoreData and Spotlight it's difficult to imagine that things could have worked out better if Apple had gone with Be. Certainly the dev tools inherited and evolved from NeXT have enabled Apple to develop the OS at a faster rate than the competition and they've managed with with less resources.
Don't blame me - this