Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3.0
node 3 writes "Following the current trend of posting video from product demos long past, openstep.se has posted a 55MB video from 1992 of Steve Jobs demoing NeXTSTEP 3.0. They already have 4 mirrors hosting the file, but hopefully someone will set up a torrent (I would, but I don't have a place to post it). If you find the demo compelling and want to try out NeXTSTEP for yourself, you can always go here or here to get started."
what's with all these old apple ads?
feeling lonely? grab a balled up pillow for company
Wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to contribute to GNUstep?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Is someone keeping a list of these or something? It sure would be nice if someone could just put together one big bittorrent archive.
I mean, it would be sad if after these things being rescued from the ravages of time and analog media, they were lost to the ravages of time and the broken Slashdot search function the instant that the blogosphere's attention span moves on...
what's with all these old apple ads?
If they only posted old Microsoft ads, it would basically be mass murder of geeks who died from internal hemorrhaging as a result of uncontrollable laughter.
Anyone that saw the recently posted video of Ballmer touting Windows 1.0 knows what I'm talking about.
The coolest voice ever.
Or the files are lost due to the wonderful DMCA, as the DRM rights kick in and all unapproved files are magically deleted off your pc.. or just refuse to play beacuse they *might* be infringing on something, somewhere..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Anyway, think about it people. This video was made in 1992!!! It is amazing how advanced NeXT was at that time. I mean, that machine is what?...a 68030? 040? 33MHz? Amazing! A lot of the technologies that we take for granted in MacOS X were already around at the time, as well as some other things (such as OpenDoc) which were not introduced in other systems for years and have yet to be re-implemented.
Truly an impressive OS.
Oh, and it is great to hear Steve Jobs say "BOOOM!" during his demos. ;)
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Use this coral cache link instead.
And here's a coral cache link to the video itself.
And now watch yourself getting modded down for having committed the sin of blasphemy against the name of Our Lord Steve...
Anyway, this is pretty cool stuff. You can definitely see the broad strokes of OS X in most every part of this demo. Interface builder still ruled.
A few years ago, I was this close to buying a NeXT box at a University surplus store but it wasn't in booting condition and I didn't have time to determine what was wrong with it. WOuld have been fun to play with though.
GNUStep hadn't even gone public yet at the point this demo was made. There wasn't even something for Apple to contribute to in 1993.
So since this is 1993, the correct thing to say here would be "wouldn't it make more sense for Apple to contribute to GNU/HURD"?
It combines the majesty of WindowMaker with the visual flair of Motif!
So, 4 mirrors for the video, but none for the site?
I haven't tried it in a long time now (not since enlightenment (the windowmanager) but afterstep looks like a better version of NeXTSTEP - than, well NeXTSTEP itself.
http://www.afterstep.org/
I could well be wrong on this though.
Torrent link here: http://nedron.net:6969/torrents/1984macintro.mov.t orrent
...when will Steve Jobs posing videos start appearing?
I didn't know Jobs auditioned for Jerry Maguire!
I knew that OS X inherits from NeXT, but I was surprised by the similarities. This also makes me believe that OS X is more mature than I had previously thought.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
What the hell are you smoking?
1) It's FreeBSD - not FreedBSD.
2) FreeBSD uses FFS, not ext2
3) FreeBSD is licensed under the BSDL, not the GPL.
4) WTF does this have to do with the article?
MOD PARENT DOWN!
There's pissing contests all over. OSS is just another one.
I agree it shows you what could be done in the old days.
It was due to the fact that programmers understood the hardware's limitations and made do with what they had. Regardless of whos.. Be it a Mac, an apple IIGS, atari ST.. whatever...
Today, its 'just throw some more cycles at it, the user can just upgrade'. All the wonderfuly fast hardware and gobs of memory have made all the system guys lazy..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For thoses who want to see how programming is done in GNUstep, there's this short flash demo here
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the OpenStep API (like Cocoa), and it provides development tools as well. The demo steve do is doable in GNUstep as well..
(Yes, it's flash... a mpeg version will probably be available next week... in the meantime, it's a good idea to check either swift tools or swfdec , if you don't want or can't use the Macromedia Flash player..)
Found on MacSlash:
_ de mo_30mins.mp4.torrent
S 30 _demo_30mins.avi.torrent
http://nedron.net:6969/torrents/steve_jobs_NS30
"...transcoded the proprietary DivX version into an MPEG-4 file with a standard container."
http://haikunews.org:6969/torrents/steve_jobs_N
What's wrong with .se (Sweden)? The sexually explicit image you're probably thinking of was originally hosted on a site with a .cx (Christmas Island) suffix.
dont forget to remove spaces , not linked up because slashdot mangles ed2k links
5 34 694|663591D9427E979CDDDD8A9E9ADDA9D9|/
ed2k://|file|steve_jobs_NS30_demo_30mins.avi|58
I'm hosting a mirror of the video, and I have unlimited bandwidth from my host.
l .mov
http://www.collegechixors.com/jobs_NS30_demo_smal
"Today, its 'just throw some more cycles at it, the user can just upgrade'. All the wonderfuly fast hardware and gobs of memory have made all the system guys lazy.."
VB hasn't helped.
but think about it. Back in the 80s and early-mid 90s, a lot of things on computers were VERY hardware limited and developers had to program efficiently to get things to run with some semblence (sp?) of speed. IANADeveloper, but it seems to me that that kind of efficiency has for the most part disappeared (and this is not a knock on developers...you guys are doing amazing things!).
I guess I just imagine about what it would be like if the same kind of efficiency that was used to make things run quickly on an 040 was used to make things run on a G4 or G5 today and it blows my mind.
Of course, there is a lot that I don't understand about developing and the hardware has also advanced so much that programming for efficiency due to hardware limitations like developers had to back in the day probably doesn't apply as much any more.
thoughts?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
You must be new here. YHBT. HTH, HAND.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://stanley.melin.org.nyud.net:8090/jobs/jobs_N S30_demo_large.mov
Anyone have a list of MM:SS bookmarks in the video for where Steve Jobs says "boom"?
This is what a good slashdotting will do to
You browke them!!
NeXTstep is far more than just the Dock. Some of the advantages which it affords:
;)
- Display PostScript --- true WYSIWYG, and the ability to do rich on-screen stuff like display (auto-updating) dimension lines in a drawing program by just typing up some PostScript code.
- Services --- these allow any app to take advantage of any other app which provides a Service. There're Services for sorting text, convert TeX source to in-place graphical equations, printing envelopes &c.
- Customizable UI --- tear off menus allows one to decide which command is most easily available and where it's available at.
- Dynamic run-time binding means that installing a filter service affords said capabilities to any other app, w/o recompiling.
William
(who misses NeXT's vertical menu, Display PostScript, Webster.app, pop-up main menu, concise shortcut descriptors and lots of other things on his PowerMac G4 at work in Mac OS X, and appreciates them greatly on his NeXT Cube at home
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
news for NERDS
Why the fsck do PeeCee people think we Apple fans worship Steve Jobs like a living deity? Of course, he's a guy who did a lot of interesting things, but he is definitely no god.
Because there is only one true God, and His name is THE WOZ.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Why? What's wrong with Swedish websites?
Agreed. Used one for several years. NextStep is the system that showed that Unix could have a pretty face, and ease of use.*
*Yes there are other systems out there that had a pretty face (subjective), and ease of use (subjective). But they're even less memorable than NextStep.
If you find the demo compelling and want to try out NeXTSTEP for yourself, you can always go here or here to get started
If you want a more end user solution, you might want to go here.
Why do people moan about other people being happy for the success of a man with vision and leadership. Some of us who have worked with his products for over two decades (gees I am old..) have gained alot of respect for him. He has really made a differnce by thinking different. Jobs is the Che Guevarra of the computer industry except Steve didn't get killed. If you don't him, don't click the links.
I don't troll around on Gate's items...
I am happy Jobs is sucessful and I apreciate and understand his vision, I have for probably longer than you have been using a computer.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Although of course - as is abundantly clear, NeXTStep was the basis for OS X after Apple decided against Johnlouis Gasse's BeOS.
LOL!!!
WOZ RAWKS!! But I guess they both did alot for the industry!!
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
You know, this does more or less what Exchange does, and ask any business if they could live w/o Outlook/Exchange (or Lotus, whatever) these days and the answer's no. I guess with the price tag (wasn't a Next workstation something like $20 grand?) nobody cared, but he did say he was going to port to 486. I can't help but wonder if a 486 could do this kind of stuff (a dx 100 could, but I think the dx33s where current when this was being done). All I can say is, what the heck happened? I've read a bit of the history (I hear those MO drives they Next Stations ran off of were kinda buggy), but this is big enough stuff that they should have been able to get through a few lean years and sell the technology....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So change your OS X Dock to vertical. Enjoy display PDF. Get a 2 button mouse, and use the right button... Or am I missing something(s).
lazy whiner!
My experience of NeXTstep more or less consists of this video, but I think he's refering to the menus which, in Mac OS X as well as earlier Mac OSs, are along the top of the screen. In NS, they seem to be in a floating pallet, with one menu item on top of the next.
You can see that Jobs is behind a monochrome NeXT MegaPixel Display and the screen grabs are from a color screen.
"This is a live demonstration"..."this EPS file is really coming off of a Mac which is why it takes a second. The Mac's a little slow to give it up."
"Why the fsck do PeeCee people think we Apple fans worship Steve Jobs like a living deity?"
Because they worship Bill Gates as a god and they assume that "we" have one too.
They also assume that Linus is, and will always be, the Linux god.
yeaaaa 50kb/sec
"Jobs is the Che Guevarra of the computer industry except Steve didn't get killed."
well, that and he didn't kill thousands of people.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Brilliant concepts, perhaps, but management that was anything but brilliant. "Kits" (proprietary software--collections of ObjC objects and classes--one was encouraged to build dependencies upon) were obsoleted quite quickly, frustrating developers. The underlying OS was a rapidly decaying proprietary variant of 4.2BSD. I vaguely recall the details on how to build shared libraries were kept secret. This might have helped developers write programs that could work better on machines that had less than the full 64MB RAM (on a NeXT Cube). 64MB might not seem like a lot of RAM today, but back then RAM was considerably more expensive.
Many of the apps that came out for the OS were profoundly overrated and overpriced. There were some unquestionable gems here and there (some gems were even available with source code so one could learn from them, like the sorting demonstration application which allowed you to sort groups of bars of varied heights using different sorting algorithms), but I think many people looking back on what NeXT had to offer are wearing rose-colored glasses and are likely to have never owned NeXT hardware.
My experience with my NeXT Cube (ownership starting with NS 2.1, user experience starting before that, perhaps with v2.0) helped lead me to appreciate the free software movement. I didn't have my software freedom then and now I do, using commodity hardware I can afford to enhance and replace if need be.
Digital Citizen
"And of course, a NeXT Cube and even a NeXT station were extremely expensive... too bad, they were 15 years ahead of their time (yeah, OSX is not as clean as NeXTSTEP, partly because of the need to integrate all theses existing apps..)"
Commercially yes. Now Google for CLIM and CLOS. From the same place all other interface ideas came from.
Mod -1 redundant
Did your comment mention the meanings of both TLDs and link to an article explaining the significance of something disgustingly "open", or did you rely on knowledge of an inside joke? A more informative post deserves the +1 even if is one minute late.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I got a chance to play with a friend's NeXTStep 3.0 box tonight, and fiddling around in the OS, I was quite amazed with how similar it is to modern day OS X, despite being over a decade old. A few things that were damn near identical that come to mind:
- the color picker (except for the fact that it was a grayscale monitor)
- Interface Builder
- Terminal.app is dead-on, except in his NeXT it took me a couple of tries to get an actual prompt to come up
- Drag and drop everywhere
- The beachball when an app is loading
And when I saw Jobs demo the WordPerfect, I thought, "So what's the big deal about Pages again?"
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
or rather OWULD compete ifd it ran on x86.
Your going to need some strong, immediate, and obvious reasons to get a CTO to buy all new boxes with 'new' OS and interface.
Or a CTO that wants the company to take a long term apraoch to savings..haha I crack my self up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How the hell do they get the fonts to look that good?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Morror: http://www.goweee.com/jobs_NS30_demo_small.mov
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
The mono monitor was ribbed, or flanged. I have two in the room with me. The monitor in the video is not. It also looks too big to be the mono monitor, which only came in 17".
Also, the mono monitor had fat rubber rollers at the front of the base. It actually looked a lot like the old Apple IIc greenscreen monitor, which was designed by the same company (frogdesign). The monitor in the picture lacks the rollers.
(There was a differently-designed mono monitor towards the very end of the black hardware era (introduced in October of 1992). I don't recall if it had the fins, but it surely wasn't that big.)
Really, why would Steve Jobs be sitting in front of a low-end slab when he could sit in front of the most tricked-out color box they had available? That would involve their top-end monitor, the Hitachi 21".
And it's not like Jobs is bad at doing demos...
Jonathan Hendry
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
why the fuck do you macholes use the phrase, "PeeCee" when describing the exact same machine they use?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
"Kits" (proprietary software--collections of ObjC objects and classes--one was encouraged to build dependencies upon) were obsoleted quite quickly, frustrating developers.
Yes, I can certainly see why developers would be upset that NeXT gave them frameworks to build upon, which let them build their highly profitable trading systems very, very quickly. No, what they really wanted was a primitive system which required them to start from scratch.
Unfortunately for your thesis, those "kits" were what NeXT customers really wanted, and what kept the company going so long.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I don't know why people complain about not having space to put .torrents when there's alternatives. With ed2k, you don't NEED a web site.
5 A9 C66335A1480D0CBBBAA919F547FDF|/s _NS30_demo_small.mov|12098767|9D4 A2217AE6586C036F3078CF0019AF5|/
Here are links for the interested: (ed2k links get messed up on Slashdot, so just copy and paste them. Also remove the space that gets added)
ed2k://|file|jobs_NS30_demo_large.mov|35758627|
ed2k://|file|job
There is no downloadable release yet, but it will be a *serious* contender to GNOME and maybe even OSX.
"I would but I don't have a place to post it"...
www.my5minutes.com
I've made torrents available at:
http://nedron.net:6969/
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I was in an Apple store, having my first look at macosx - it reminded me too much of nextstep for me to want one. (The job I had at the time made me really hate anything NeXT-related.)
;-)
That said, I have a number of shrink-wrapped NeXTStep 3.3 box sets knocking around, if you lot are all so interested in nextstep I may just go finish the flog-them-on-ebay procedure.
Or Mortor, for that matter.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Wow, hopefully Linux will be this good one day!
-bbh
IIRC, Knowledge Navigator was John Sculley's baby, from after Jobs was ousted.
I think Jobs would sooner give Michael Dell a blumpkin than do anything related to Knowledge Navigator.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Small (160x120) 11M
Tracker info at:
Nedron's HE Torrent Tracker
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
Why don't people post freecache.org links to these large files?
...but I agree with your general assertion. I think that while KDE is fine, and Gnome has its merits, the Open Source community is making a strategic blunder by not capitalizing on the OpenStep API specs. Many, many man-hours and lots of money went into developing a system of great beauty.
:-)
Still, you have to remember that it's not The Open Source Community(tm)'s job to think strategically. Every programmer is entitled to scratch his/her own itch. Because of this, many blind alleys terminate in piles of dead projects. However, the ethos of "explore every facet of every problem domain" has also produced some wonderful and unique software.
Still, if world domination with FOSS was your prime objective, you could do a lot worse than BSD/GNUStep. Somebody else has already proven the technological model.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
BSD 4.3. Get your facts straight.
The menus on the NeXT were a vertical stack of tiles, by default at the top left of the screen.
Sub-menus could be torn off and positioned wherever you wanted.
You could also obtain a full, temporary duplicate top-level menu by right-clicking. The duplicate would appear where you clicked, and disappear when you were done.
I imagine that could work a lot better on a multi-headed system than having to throw the cursor back and forth across thousands of pixels of real-estate. Fitts' law or no.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
I find it facinating that a lot of the stuff I consider compelling in OS X existed in NeXTSTEP 14 years ago, and it reminds of how disappointed I was with the direction the Linux Desktop took in the mid to late 90s (and today) when the vast majority of support went behind the Win9x-esque KDE and Gnome desktops.
The designs, ideas, and concepts were all there in the 90s waiting to implemented. And, as hardware improved, there could have been an advanced desktop built on top of Linux that would have been a very compelling alternative to Win9x, if not the leading edge of desktop innovation.
Instead, we got a start menu, a task bar, and a dump truck full of skins.
At least nowadays the Gnome people have set their sights much higher, which is great to see.
I loved WindowMaker and wished it was so much more than a lowly window manager. Ironically, I suppose, it took Apple to make that happen for me. At least these days I can afford to buy a Mac.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Actually, Fitts law says that right where your mouse already is is the easist thing to access. So Fitts law actually encourages this kind of behaviour
And I LOVE my Mac!
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Of course not, we just build the hardware they run on.
Don't feel so smug, liberals, you are not the intellectual giants you imagine yourselves to be. It takes no more genius to believe in socialist economics than it does to believe in Santa Claus, and for the same reason.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
It's honestly amazing. I'm serious. Can anyone remember Windows 3.11? That's what was state of the art when this came out.
Over 10 years later, tasks like e-mailing, starting a program, and even browsing a network look very similar to what he's demoing, and I'm talking about MS Windows (PC) use. I'd still like an easy-to-use inter-application dictionary. I'm sure the editors of slashdot could use one too.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I just find it absolutley amazing how fast those jpegs fly around. My 233 Intel couldn't do that, and it was made five years after this machine was demoed O.o
I found this somewhere a while back somewhere and saved it to show in computer classes I teach.
i ng12.html
http://homepage.mac.com/clong/PhotoAlbum/FileShar
You 6 digiter peasant.
/.?
You dont know that Apple is as revered as Linux on
The quota for Apple stories per week has been increased again and after 327 stories on why owning an Ipod is on par to discovering a cure for cancer, I guess now were gonna do all the Apple ads of the past 2 decades.
By december 2005, every third Slashdot story will be Apple related.
Long live close proprietary software.
The video is somewhere near the bottom of this page.
It's pretty cool.
Apple commercials
Wow. 5 MByte/sec downloading to my HE VPS. Thanks!
Unfortunately for your thesis, those "kits" were what NeXT customers really wanted, and what kept the company going so long.
As somebody who used NextStep from 0.9, I'd agree that NeXT had some cool stuff, and that's what kept them afloat. But I'd agree more with the previous poster: their ultra-proprietary, we're-smarter-than-you, sealed-box attitude was part of what killed them.
I remember one cool University of Michigan software project that required a pseudotty for each remote user, but the kernel NeXT shipped was limited to something like 16 or 32. NeXT wouldn't let you build your own kernels and refused to build a custom kernel for the project, suggesting that the developers buy new NextCubes to accommodate the extra users. End result: the project had to be rebuilt in another language and used Sun hardware, and some local NeXT evangelists swore never to touch them again.
Yes, I can certainly see why developers would be upset that NeXT gave them frameworks to build upon, which let them build their highly profitable trading systems very, very quickly. No, what they really wanted was a primitive system which required them to start from scratch.
Well, actually, what the builders of trading systems wanted, at least the ones I worked with, was kits with source code that they could view and change. It was hugely frustrating to be bitten by some annoying bug or limitation, with the only recourse being to call up your sales rep, give him an earful, and hope, generally in vain, for a fix some months later. This was especially fun when the bug or limitation caused problems for traders, some of whom would express their displeasure by five or ten minutes of screaming verbal abuse.
And really, the focus on high-dollar customers like financial traders was also part of what killed them. In the mid-90s I could have written and sold a ton of great solutions built on NeXT technology, but only financial traders could afford to license the NeXT OS or runtime.
I loved the NeXT technology, but NeXT's high-handed, arrogant behavior eventually drove me and a lot of other early adopters away cursing the day that Steve Jobs was born.
The same reason people say M$ and WinBlows ....
Sadly, I'm not quite sure what that reason is.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
I remember one cool University of Michigan software project that required a pseudotty for each remote user
Forgive me, but I seriously doubt that was a drop in the bucket compared to the other competitive challenges NeXT had in the 90s.
And really, the focus on high-dollar customers like financial traders was also part of what killed them. In the mid-90s I could have written and sold a ton of great solutions built on NeXT technology, but only financial traders could afford to license the NeXT OS or runtime.
Um, sure. By 1995, I don't think pricing would have helped much, if at all. NeXT was already facing Win95 and Java.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
This leads me to believe he's on a Cube with a Dimension board. He would have the vram space to toss those windows around on the NeXT hardware with ease, plus have direct video I/O - perfect for capturing a demo in high quality.
Check out the specs on that bad boy:
You could have as much (or more) video memory than system memory. Compare that to 16MB DOS systems with 512K - 2MB svga displays at the time.
I've used it on a Color NeXT Station and on a modern P3 with 32MB Matrox video, and there's a major difference. The demo looks somewhere in the middle.
Nope, I have never used a NeXT machine; but, on my old Mac, I used a Nextstep theme on Kaleidoscope. I loved that look - black and grey, very sober and frugal. It was somewhat refreshing to use that sometimes. Like getting in a totally silent room, getting isolated from all the noise outside... until it gets so damn boring, you can't stand the silence anymore! :P
Oh wait, here's a NeXT Shapeshifter theme. Guess I'll try it.
- http://swizcore.com/SS/macOSX.php
Circumcision is child abuse.
How can you call him successful? He only makes $1 a year!
I'll tell you what's wrong with sweden!
"This mail application is so easy to use that executives can use it without reading manuals--which is kind of a test we have around here..."
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Since no one else seems to have said it, I will. What is most striking about this rather old video is how much is just like the Mac OS X of today: postscript display, system services, rtf for mail, network interoperability, the dock, interface builder, even something that looks very much like Pages. Pretty remarkable that 12 or so years later, it's still just coming together, and other OSs are still catching up.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Best moment of the demo:
Jobs showing off Soft-PC, the DOS emulator for NeXT. As he struggles to open a file in Lotus he reveals an emulated 1-2-3 window "running along side your good applications."
Priceless.
You can tell someone has no valid argument whatsoever when instead of providing counter-arguments, they offer nothing but ad hominem attacks.
Go back to your little hole in the ground, troll.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
This is sort of sad to watch, because it makes me realize that most of the neat new developments in OS X are really just progressive reimplementation of a vision and feature set that was already complete very long ago.
This is sad, first of all, because it illustrates just how much Windows's domination has stalled everything in the interim. It's like we've been stuck in a time warp, with nothing changing except processor speeds, for 10 years. Now, since the DOJ suit, things seem to be unfreezing a little and progress can start up again--maybe. But how much further along would be be if the industry had actually had meaningul competition all these years, and if the NeXT vision had not failed so completely to make a dent in Microsoft's two monopolies?
The other sad thing is that Jobs is still basically just trying to get that vision reinstated. Even playing sappy music while showing family snapshots--everything is the same from demos then and now, only now it's part of iLife. But what if he doesn't have any more big visions beyond what he did at NeXT? We've been living so much in the dark ages that everything old looks new and exciting, but at some point we'll have everything NeXT had again--and then what? Is that the end of the evolutionary path we're on? (In terms of real computer development, not consumer electronics.)
Seeing him mention Lotus Improv led me to the Wikipedia entry on it, which led me to a (pretty awful) OS X version of Quantrix, which led me to understand that when Cells comes out, that is probably exactly what it will be like, with premade templates for commonly-used home functions like blood-pressure management and weight control, and an emphasis on beautiful charting and graphing, so Apple can deny that it is trying to mess with Excel. And again, we'll be back to something wonderful that we should have had a long time ago. I mean, reading PC Magazine and having them celebrate Pages as a new way of thinking about word processing . . . it really is just a reimplementation of another ancient NeXT program, Pages by Pages.
So anyway, the whole What Might Have Been feeling is just so strong for me when I see this stuff. You can see why Jobs ended up feeling bitter.
An interesting demonstration. However I noticed throughout the demo. A lot of "C"-isms showing up in the process of defining "look" and "behaviour".
IMHO I think that a development environment can either hide (or better render no need for) a lot of that, and shorten the demonstration by half.
Tiger looks to have a mature searching API built into the OS years before Windows (now that WinFS has been pushed out past Longhorn).
.Net style development since they heavily support Java throughout the system.
Interestingly Apple has a strong counterpart to the
It's amazing to me that a company the size of Apple can have an answer for pretty much every feature going into Windows. I guess that's what you bet by focusing on the creative high-leve bits of an OS instead of spending a lot of effort on writing internals... I wonder how many people Microsoft has to devote to doing what Apple gets for free with the BSD and GNU components they use?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you pause the video at 2:29, you see a pie chart that indicates that their app base "exploded" to 147 apps in 1991. Not even Steve could make that sound good :(
Webster will be reborn again as Dictionary.app on Tiger.
NextStep in 1989 was an endless series of brilliant concepts and ideas that are just now coming into mainstream operating systems.
.NET.
Yes, they were brilliant concepts, but they weren't invented by NeXT. Objective-C, for example, came from Stepstone and was an attempt to bring at least some Smalltalk concepts to a C dominated world. In the transition from Smalltalk to Objective-C, a lot of important functionality actually got lost.
The organizations who developed those brilliant concepts were places like Xerox, AT&T, IBM, MIT, CMU, Stanford, SRI, etc. NeXT was a well-engineered attempt to bring those technologies into the mainstream, mostly by scaling them down and leaving out a lot of stuff. That's something Jobs is good at: picking good technologies and putting them into his company's products.
As someone else mentioned, the foundations of OS X are a lot more mature than people realize. Cocoa is truly a fantastic way to develop apps.
The NeXTStep foundations of OS X are a reasonable compromise for the late 1980's, when you have to use stripped down OO languages like Objective-C because nothing else will fit well and because C compatibility is a must. But hardware these days ships with hundreds of megabytes of memory and GHz processors. We don't have to leave out important features like safety, garbage collection, full reflection, and dynamic code generation. Furthermore, other window systems offer the same graphics primitives now as OS X (translucency, anti-aliasing, etc.).
In different words, among commercially available systems, NeXTStep was a great system compared to SunOS. It's not such a great system anymore compared to Java, Mono, or
I'm not sure what's supposed to be so impressive about the GNUstep GUI builder. Compare it with Eclipse or any other modern IDE. Not only do they give you full visual design of your GUI app, they also provide tons of other functionality, including refactoring, version control, etc. And because they compile into languages with garbage collection, runtime safety, and other features, big projects are a lot easier to create and debug as well than in GNUstep.
And, for historical interest, you might want to compare it with some of the Smalltalk IDEs from the 1980's and 1990's, where a lot of the functionality and ideas of modern IDEs were originally developed.
Can happen. Doesn't specifically mean it -will-, but the technology exists, and the stupidity exists for most people to accept it. And orphan work has -long- since been an issue, even before the Internet.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The 'monochrome' NeXT's had 2-bit graphics, not 4-bit. 2-bit results on four shades of grey, including black, white, and two inbetween.
Longhorn sounds like they're ripping off a ton of OS X technology, like a new display technology, hardware-accelerated window drawing, and so on.
.NET code just to fit in.
In order to "rip off" OS X technology, that technology would have to belong to OS X. But the people who created OS X did not invent the display model they are using, they did not invent hardware accelerated drawing, etc. Apple and NeXT, like Microsoft, took existing ideas from lots of other products and research labs and put them in their product.
Adobe, Macromedia, id Software, and so on aren't going to rewrite their apps in unmanaged C++
No, but that doesn't matter: if you need to develop a new application, you can do it with a managed API, which will save you time and effort. If Adobe finds it simpler to struggle with creating and debugging unmanaged applications, that's their thing.
Note, incidentally, that Objective-C is "unmanaged" in the C#/CLR sense: you have to add code manually to do storage management, and you have to worry about the possibility bad pointers in Objective-C code.
GNUStep's Objective-C programming language is just plain sweet and by adding a native Python bridge and it would be even sweeter. I hope that the developers of PyObjC can get their code trees to work on GNUStep solidly so that coders can bring PyObjC based apps to win32 and *nix environments.
Currently, PyObjC is kind of limited to OSX.
JsD
It's honestly amazing. I'm serious. Can anyone remember Windows 3.11? That's what was state of the art when this came out.
No, it was not the state of the art. The state of the art was defined by systems like the Xerox office workstations, Smalltalk, and the work done at several other companies and research labs.
NeXT, like Windows and Macintosh, was an attempt to bring some of those ideas to market. NeXT incorporated more of the technology, but they also weren't as successful, which shows you again that packing more technology into a product often is not a good idea if you want to win in the market.
...
Yep.
[Sigh.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep:
Rhapsody
Rhapsody was a reworked OPENSTEP for the Mac, and formed the start of the process that resulted in Mac OS X. It is OPENSTEP with the "Classic" interface and could be regarded as OPENSTEP 5. Two versions of Rhapsody were released to developers. The first, Developer Preview 1, ran only on Intel hardware. The second revision, DP2, was the first version to include support for limited set of Mac hardware.
Mac OS X
Since Apple has merged with NeXT, OPENSTEP has became the basis for their new operating system, Mac OS X. Mac OS X's new programming environment is essentially OpenStep (with certain additions such as XML property lists and URL classes for Internet connections) with Mac OS X ports of the development libraries and tools -- this became Cocoa. Mac OS X is essentially OPENSTEP 5 or 6. As Mac OS X, OPENSTEP managed to become the most used Unix in the world.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137716&c id=11517670
Smalltalk wasn't the only one.
And just where do you think Cocoa came from? Cocoa is an evolved OpenStep, complete with NIBs, NSObject, and so on. Hint--the "NS" in those object names stands for NeXTStep...
Very insightful - I thought exactly the same thing as I watched it: Why the hell aren't we way ahead of this stuff already?
Don't know what you people are smoking who modded me down; everyone knows OS X is based on OpenStep. It's not exactly a secret. Try programming in Cocoa sometime; it's extremely similar even down to the naming scheme.
"It would be an understatement to say that OS X is derived from NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same. One can think of it as OpenStep 5 or 6, say. This is not a bad thing at all - rather than create an operating system from scratch, Apple tried to do the smart thing, and used what they already had to a great extent. However, the similarities should not mislead you: Mac OS X is evolved enough that what you can do with it is far above and beyond NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP."
--from A Brief History of OS X
He has really made a differnce by thinking different. Jobs is the Che Guevarra of the computer industry except Steve didn't get killed. If you don't him, don't click the links.
The thing that is annoying about the Jobs cult is that he is getting credit for a lot of things neither he nor his companies actually invented. The guy has flair and a knack for packaging and selling technology, but the actual technology and vision comes from elsewhere.
And, flashy as his products are, there are usually better choices. For example, NeXT was targeting rapid, custom software development (banking apps, travel agencies, etc.), but there were plenty of tools like that for UNIX and Windows workstations around that didn't require you to throw away everything and start on a new platform. The situation is not unlike today with Mac vs. everything else.
Gotta love Steve's demos; otomatically, boom, and now Blamo!
"Blamo, I'm home"
Bitter and dumb.
What a pathetic person.
Well, actually, what the builders of trading systems wanted, at least the ones I worked with, was kits with source code that they could view and change. It was hugely frustrating to be bitten by some annoying bug or limitation, with the only recourse being to call up your sales rep, give him an earful, and hope, generally in vain, for a fix some months later. This was especially fun when the bug or limitation caused problems for traders, some of whom would express their displeasure by five or ten minutes of screaming verbal abuse.
That's what subclassing is all about. And if you can't (for some reason) fix it with subclassing, you can replace methods wholesale at runtime. This is not C++, where the black box can't really be touched - it is objective-c, where you can replace methods or even classes at runtime.
Of course, if you didn't like something, you could always write it yourself.
And really, the focus on high-dollar customers like financial traders was also part of what killed them.
I have to grin when read that statement. If you think NeXT is dead, you haven't looked at Apple recently.
If you want the vertical menus beneath the mouse, try Deja Menu, here http://homepage.mac.com/khsu/DejaMenu/DejaMenu.htm l If you hold down a modifier key and click, a the menu bar pops up, NeXT-style, beneath the cursor. I guess with a programmable mouse, you could simply use a button.
Hope that helps
Nick
::applause::
Not only that, but some rapidly accessed menu items become almost gestural in their access (and easily learned, which is the big complaint against most gesture-based systems).
``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso for me is
- right-click
- down a bit
- right through two menus
- release
Sometimes I catch myself trying to do it at work in FreeHand.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What's with all the "his vision" crap? What's wrong with a bunch of software engineers and interface designers getting together and coming up with cool new ideas? The only real "vision" with respect to software design is allowing great ideas to be tested and keeping good projects from getting infected with politics.
You think Apple consists of Steve Jobs and a marketing department?
One man's vision is all well and good, but a group's constantly evolving vision has a lot more potential.
Forgive me, but I seriously doubt that was a drop in the bucket compared to the other competitive challenges NeXT had in the 90s.
You miss my point. That was an example of their its-my-bat-and-ball arrogance, not a major problem in itself. When they launched, they had a huge number of geeks drooling or preaching, and a lot of the rest at least interested. But by dribs and drabs, they alienated a lot of the people who could have made a difference.
Um, sure. By 1995, I don't think pricing would have helped much, if at all. NeXT was already facing Win95 and Java.
With OpenStep running under NT, Solaris, and on the Alpha boxes, they had the best cross-platform OO development toolkit around. And unlike Java, it was a mature environment that pretty much worked. With WebObjects and EOF they had a fantastic web development toolkit, years ahead of anybody else. But the insisted on ridiculous license costs and entirely blew their lead.
On both of these, pricing would have made a big difference. I'm sure of that because it would have made a different to my clients, and the companies my NeRD friends worked for. NeXT's high prices entirely cut out anybody who wasn't working for a Fortune 500 company or a financial trading company. And a lot of the interesting GUI work and almost all of the interesting web work in those days was outside the bureaucratic confines of the "enterprise" market.
That's what subclassing is all about. And if you can't (for some reason) fix it with subclassing, you can replace methods wholesale at runtime. This is not C++, where the black box can't really be touched - it is objective-c, where you can replace methods or even classes at runtime.
Gosh, thanks, I've been doing OO programming in four or five different languages for more than a decade; I don't know how I missed this subclassing thing until now.
Seriously, I agree that in some cases it was possible to eventually hack around some bugs or issues. But only some bugs are easily amenable to that, and even those are only overridable once you figure out exactly where the bug is. And that only applies to the parts where you're dealing with Objective C development; if it was an issue in their closed custom apps or their custom OS or, in the beginning, their custom hardware, you were yet more screwed. Which, on regular occasions, I was.
My point is that with a more open attitude from NeXT, hopefully including source access and a willingness to occasionally listen to their customers, it would have been much easier to do development and systems administration with their gear.
I have to grin when read that statement. If you think NeXT is dead, you haven't looked at Apple recently.
It seems you weren't a NeXT developer or NeXT owner. After the merger between Apple and NeXT in early 1997, they promised a release of the new merged OS in early 1998. It was actually the end of Q1 2001 before they got it out the door. In the meantime, NeXT and users developers were pretty much screwed.
I agree that some the technology lives on, but what NeXT was, including a cross-processor OS and a cross-platform development environment with Windows and Unix support, died with the Apple merger. What emerged was the the standard Apple we'll-tell-you-what-you-like routine. That seems to work for some people and I'm glad they like it, but it's a small fraction of the potential that NeXT had.
Correcting false advertising and marketing claims (and the carefully constructed Jobs mystique is part of that) has nothing to do with bitterness, it simply has to do with truth and accuracy.
There would be no need to be "bitter" anyway: NeXT is gone and Cocoa isn't exactly a big success either.
Link Here
- Wasnt OpenStep first priced at $10,000; very few takers.
- Then a few years later, marked down to $100; very few takers.
What was the marketplace telling us?Since then I've upgraded to a 2GB drive and 128MB of RAM. It is running on a 33MHz 68040. The interface is glass smooth. Here's the pics:
1 2 3 4 5 6
I took Apple up on its (no longer valid) offer to get full copies of NeXTSTEP v3.3 or OpenStep v4.2 (I applied twice and got one of each!) with a valid black hardware serial #. I used the HP PA-RISC install CD to install NeXTSTEP on an HP 9000 (60MHz PA-RISC) I grabbed at a local flea market for $20. Check those pics:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
The video on the HP is rather interesting. While NeXTSTEP uses 16-bit color, it's divided into 12-bits for color (4096 colors onscreen and in palette) and 4-bit (16 level) transparency. Even still, it looks gorgeous. But the HP uses video compression/decompression hardware to encode true color in the 12-bits of color, and it's decoded on the way out the door. The result is truecolor images on the screen with what seems like minor JPEG artifacting. It's this most novel video setup that will cause me to hold onto that HP for thet long haul.
See more machines of mine at my List page and my vintage computing blog, ByteCellar.com.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
yea, my mistake, if I could mod you up I would
Well, actually, what the builders of trading systems wanted, at least the ones I worked with, was kits with source code that they could view and change. It was hugely frustrating to be bitten by some annoying bug or limitation, with the only recourse being to call up your sales rep, give him an earful, and hope, generally in vain, for a fix some months later. This was especially fun when the bug or limitation caused problems for traders, some of whom would express their displeasure by five or ten minutes of screaming verbal abuse.
Absolutely. I remember at Swiss Bank we had a problem with NXTable where during the busiest part of the day the whole machine would lock up because it was spending all its time redrawing parts of the NXTable to reflect share price changes. We couldn't wait months for a bug fix so I had to reverse-engineer the underlying private class responsible and discovered that it was redrawing many rows instead of just the one that had changed. I fixed it by doing some hack involving (I think) poseAs with a subclass of the private class posing as the real class and overriding the bad method. (Compare that with Java today where you get the source to all the classes).
There was lots of stuff like that going on. Basically Swiss Bank had bought into a lot of marketing hype about development under NeXTStep being "ten times faster" than any other environment. Which may have been true for the sort of noddy demos Steve Jobs used to love, but certainly wasn't for large real world projects.
And don't even get me started on the Disney WorldView debacle!
Doesn't Steve know you shouldn't open attachments?
Whatsa matter, poor little bonchy? Did the mods fail to fall for your pathetic little attempt at karma whoring? Awwww, too bad.
From your own blurb:
:)
In many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same. One can think of it as OpenStep 5 or 6, say.
Which doesn't mean that it's the same--only that your can think of it as being the same in many respects. Note that this is not equivalence. Also:
However, the similarities should not mislead you: Mac OS X is evolved enough that what you can do with it is far above and beyond NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP.
Which again says that OSX != NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. It's called reading and comprehension. You really need to work on it, you know.
Either that, or you were trolling/karma whoring, in which I say, get back to work--you're not doing it well enough.
That's the Gospel!
I actually made t-for myself and friends using pictures of The Woz.
A true genius.
Also, the crowd is way too liberal for me.
Rush Limbaugh is a die-hard Macintosh fan. Doesn't that kind of average it out?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
amen brother!
What's with computer company CEOs and Ferraris? In this Steve Ballmer Winodws 1.0 video http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=ballmerwi ndows.wmv
he cuts a Ferrari into Lotus 123.
This Steve Jobs video is depressing because it makes it clear that there's been zero innovation in operating systems in the past 12 years, at least in terms of UI.
although, the death of the display postscript engine due to it being too complicated for interested parties to maintain is a loss.
Fetching w/ btdownloadcurses gives a file error. Could you check the seed?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Absolutely. I remember at Swiss Bank we had a problem with NXTable [great, detailed description of killer bug deleted]. Compare that with Java today where you get the source to all the classes.
There was lots of stuff like that going on. Basically Swiss Bank had bought into a lot of marketing hype about development under NeXTStep being "ten times faster" than any other environment. Which may have been true for the sort of noddy demos Steve Jobs used to love, but certainly wasn't for large real world projects. And don't even get me started on the Disney WorldView debacle!
And the thing that just killed me was that they had the potential to be great for large-scale projects, too. So much potential! And so much of it wasted.
I'm glad the Mac devotees finally got a decent OS and, in the bargain, some sweet development tools. But for those of us who can't bet our projects or companies on a single niche vendor with ultra-proprietary instincts and a history of jerking the rug out from under customers, it was a sad outcome.
the file is broken
Go grab those torrents.
You say:
... and nobody was buying for intel.
/. article on 2000 superbowl commercials).
Gosh, thanks, I've been doing OO programming in four or five different languages for more than a decade; I don't know how I missed this subclassing thing until now.
But you don't mention replacing parts or entire classes wholesale - which is very important, especially WRT not shipping source. The biggest complaint for C++ libraries not having source is that if part of it doesn't work [the way you want], you need source to change it. In Obj-C that just isn't so.
You also say
Seriously, I agree that in some cases it was possible to eventually hack around some bugs or issues. But only some bugs are easily amenable to that, and even those are only overridable once you figure out exactly where the bug is. And that only applies to the parts where you're dealing with Objective C development; if it was an issue in their closed custom apps or their custom OS or, in the beginning, their custom hardware, you were yet more screwed. Which, on regular occasions, I was.
But also say
I agree that some the technology lives on, but what NeXT was, including a cross-processor OS and a cross-platform development environment with Windows and Unix support
So why not run it on Solaris or Windows? Maybe you did, and that certainly got you around NeXT's "closed OS problems". (hah)
It seems you weren't a NeXT developer or NeXT owner.
NeXT owner since about '90. NeXT employee since about '95. Apple employee from the merger until 2001?
After the merger between Apple and NeXT in early 1997, they promised a release of the new merged OS in early 1998. It was actually the end of Q1 2001 before they got it out the door. In the meantime, NeXT and users developers were pretty much screwed.
The article from uakom isn't very good. "Next"? "First, Next is a major supplier of object-oriented development tools for the Solaris environment"? Well, that had been the hope.
The info from wikipedia is much better: "Apple released Mac OS X Server 1.0, in January 1999."
I agree that some the technology lives on, but what NeXT was, including a cross-processor OS and a cross-platform development environment with Windows and Unix support, died with the Apple merger.
As for x-platform and x-processor support, the existing users and developers being screwwed - yup, they pretty much were. But I'm pretty sure the writing on the wall was "You're Screwed" one way or another. The Solaris deal was going going
What emerged was the the standard Apple we'll-tell-you-what-you-like routine. That seems to work for some people and I'm glad they like it, but it's a small fraction of the potential that NeXT had.
Potential is a wonderful thing. End users and sales are wonderful, too. You have to balance the two of them. Apple has brought what I like to call "OpenStep 6.0" to more users than NeXT ever could.
As for the we'll-tell-you-what-you-like routine - I don't get it. Apple doesn't announce much of anything before it ships, and the flow of dollars seems to speak a lot louder than advertising (see also the
If you take a look at O'Reilley's History of Programming Languages chart you'll see that Objective-C was just one of many parents to Java.
Java was not inspired by any one language, but rather the desire to see some of the nicer features of a variety of languages brought together.
It must have been a good idea because Microsoft liked it so much, they changed the capitalization of the libraries and ported it wholesale (well, parts - slowly they are getting close to where Java was a few years ago) and now they are basing the future of Windows on it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, it looks like that my way of explaining and your way of listening don't match so well. I'll take one more pass at conveying my point. After this, you're on your own. Note that I'm just trying to tell you what my view is. You're welcome to agree or not as you please.
But you don't mention replacing parts or entire classes wholesale - which is very important, especially WRT not shipping source.
I'm not denying that there are solutions to some problems. I'm saying that limiting customers to those partial, inferior solutions was a substantial contributor to the eventual rejection of NeXT technologies in places I did work for. And it's not just me; read the post from a developer at SwissBank, one of NeXT's most prominent customers, that says basically the same thing.
So why not run it on Solaris or Windows? Maybe you did, and that certainly got you around NeXT's "closed OS problems". (hah)
"Hah"? Look, if you're going to be a prick about this, I've got better things to do.
As you know, the ports to other platforms came much later in NeXT's lifecycle. That was not an option for years. And for people who had already made substantial investments in NeXT's hardware or, later, OS, saying, "Hey, why don't you just undergo a major, expensive platform change so that we don't have to be bothered showing you the source and accepting free patches that fix our bugs," is exactly the kind of dismissive contempt for customer concerns that drove a lot of early adopters away.
As for x-platform and x-processor support, the existing users and developers being screwwed - yup, they pretty much were. But I'm pretty sure the writing on the wall was "You're Screwed" one way or another.
Oh, please. Looking at my notes from the private Enterprise Alliance Partners session at WWDC 1997, where they told all the serious NeXT software vendors and in-house development shops what to expect post-merger, they said things that were very, very different than the line you're giving now.
In particular, they promised that Rhapsody would continue to ship for Intel hardware at the same time as the PPC shipments and that you'd still be able to ship your apps for Windows NT, too. They promised what would become OS X Server for early 1998 and the consumer OS X for mid 1998. None of this was even close to the truth. Whether they were fools or liars, I'm not sure, but either way people who trusted them paid a heavy price for it.
Potential is a wonderful thing. End users and sales are wonderful, too. You have to balance the two of them. Apple has brought what I like to call "OpenStep 6.0" to more users than NeXT ever could.
Yes, but the point of the originator of this thread, which I agree with, is that their arrogant refusal to listen to customers or play well with other vendors was a big part of what lost them end users and sales. Screwing the remaining NeXT faithful at the end was just an extreme example of what I see as a consistent theme. You apparently don't see it, but as somebody who worked there for years, I wouldn't really expect you to.
The world was ready for both an open, Unix-based OS and object-oriented development, as the rise of Linux and Java prove. NeXT had technology that was years ahead of either one at the time. IMHO, Jobs's notorious arrogance and insistence on complete control led NeXT to miss that wave entirely.
Webster.app had a funny thing it would do if you looked up 'gullible'.
I hope it makes a reappearance.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
"The world was ready for both an open, Unix-based OS and object-oriented development, as the rise of Linux and Java prove. NeXT had technology that was years ahead of either one at the time"
You're missing the point that Linux is free, and Java is also given away free. Sun had sufficient revenue from their hardware business that they could afford to fund Java and give it away. Linux, in theory, doesn't depend on paid labor (though in reality it does).
I'm not sure NeXT ever had the kind of revenue stream for them to survive a low-cost strategy. And it's by no means clear that there ever existed a large enough market to support them on a lower-cost strategy.
Be tried an approach closer to what you suggest, even giving their OS away at one point, if I recall correctly.
They failed.
It's easy enough to wave one's hands, ten years later, and say how it should have been done. But only if you willfully ignore unpleasant market realities.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
You're missing the point that Linux is free, and Java is also given away free. Sun had sufficient revenue from their hardware business that they could afford to fund Java and give it away. Linux, in theory, doesn't depend on paid labor (though in reality it does).
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I didn't say that they should have tried to be Java or Linux. I'm saying they missed the opportunity to take advantage of factors that made Java and Linux successful.
Moreover, they could have done worse things than trying to be Java or Linux. Although both of those are free, both created ecosystems in which people are making plenty of money. Linus never cared to capitalize on that and Sun tried only halfheartedly, but I don't think that's sufficient to prove that the strategy can't work.
I'm not sure NeXT ever had the kind of revenue stream for them to survive a low-cost strategy. And it's by no means clear that there ever existed a large enough market to support them on a lower-cost strategy.
I don't think it was an either/or choice. There are plenty of examples of products with both low- and high-end offerings. Some of those low-end offerings are even free (e.g., Eclipse, Fedora). Why? Because low-end offerings are how you get mindshare, and that's where a lot of your eventual customers come from. Tiny acorns, etc. NeXT never got that.
It's easy enough to wave one's hands, ten years later, and say how it should have been done. But only if you willfully ignore unpleasant market realities.
Thanks, but I'm mainly talking about what they did and were told at the time; the mention of Java and Linux was just to counter somebody else's implication that they were pretty much doomed no matter what they did.
I saw them drive away a lot of customers, both potential and actual, by their insistence on a sealed-box, ultra-proprietary approach, their focus on the very high end of the market, and their unwillingness to really listen to their customers. I personally, like many others, wasted many hours pleading for more openness so that I could, gratis, fix their bugs and improve their products. I also, like many others, regularly told them of specific business opportunities they were missing through their choices. They rarely listened, and then only grudgingly.
My impression was that although I dealt with many nice, great people at NeXT, the company as a whole generally acted in an arrogant fashion. I don't blame the lower-level people for this; I think it came from the top. And from the stories I hear and read about Jobs, that seems to fit.
You may have your own analysis of what NeXT did that led them to disaster, but that's mine.
Remember to check for spaces in the URLs.
e mo _mpeg4.mov
e mo _large.mov
_ la rge.mov
_ la rge.mov
e mo _large.mov
l oa d.php?id=43
l ar ge.mov
l ar ge.mov.torrent
e mo _small.mov
_ sm all.mov
_ sm all.mov
e mo _small.mov
m al l.mov
l oa d.php?id=42
s ma ll.mov
s ma ll.mov.torrent
r ge .mov
a ll .mov
s _N S30_demo_large.mov
s _N S30_demo_small.mov
MPEG4
http://homepage.mac.com/joacimmelin/jobs_NS30_d
Large
http://homepage.mac.com/joacimmelin/jobs_NS30_d
http://www.fourzerofour.net/jobs/jobs_NS30_demo
http://media.jjb.cc/files/videos/jobs_NS30_demo
http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/.Public/jobs_NS30_d
http://www.revolutionhosting.net/downloads/down
http://www.thatweasel.tv/mirror/jobs_NS30_demo_
http://nedron.net:6969/torrents/jobs_NS30_demo_
Small
http://homepage.mac.com/joacimmelin/jobs_NS30_d
http://www.fourzerofour.net/jobs/jobs_NS30_demo
http://media.jjb.cc/files/videos/jobs_NS30_demo
http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/.Public/jobs_NS30_d
http://collegechixors.com/jobs/jobs_NS30_demo_s
http://www.revolutionhosting.net/downloads/down
http://www.thatweasel.tv/mirror/jobs_NS30_demo_
http://nedron.net:6969/torrents/jobs_NS30_demo_
Taiwan
ftp://ftp.cs.pu.edu.tw/others/jobs_NS30_demo_la
ftp://ftp.cs.pu.edu.tw/others/jobs_NS30_demo_sm
Sweden
http://dezent.mindrelease.net/openstep/jobs/job
http://dezent.mindrelease.net/openstep/jobs/job
~hylas
I know some tech stuff and follow tech news but somehow I did not know this...
http://www.mp2kmag.com
One of the biggest components of Slashdot hype about so many projects is "It's got skins, so the user can customize all the decorations however they like!", and there was a lot less of that on early software, where the graphics capabilities were more limited and the slowness of doing that really hurt. If anti-aliasing fonts is too slow, don't do it. If letting the user pick the color table values for window system features doesn't take much work, fine, let them do it, but don't add infinite amounts of it. Focus on functionality, not decorations.
My wife ran a tax-consulting business during much of the 80s and early 90s. At one point, she was running her business on a dog-slow 386sx laptop with Windows and Turbotax, and had to drag up some old files for a customer that were in a text-based spreadsheet that she'd used on her DOS 8086-clone laptop a few years before. Man, it was fast! It hadn't been fast on the old 8MHz machine, but now she had 16 MHz with more than twice the MIPS and lots of RAM (probably 4MB?), and was running the machine in DOS mode instead of Windows mode, and it just ripped along.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Frugal bastard too eh!
"If this was a macintosh or PC, moving around these full-colour images would take until next week for the windows to repaint"
It would seem that nothing has changed.
For an example of a major shrink wrap app, consider Matlab. Don't think all of it is written in Java, but major parts of it are.
And a lot of what is in OS X / NeXT was in SmallTalk as developed by Xerox PARC. It really seems like Steve was profoundly influenced by Smalltalk, but he couldn't implement all of the ideas in the first Mac.
I don't mean Steve's vision is the same as SmallTalk... it was just inspired by SmallTalk. But he seems to have been pursuing the same basic vision for computers since the first Mac.
The early Mac was headed towards NeXT and OS X, but then Apples fired Steve and we entered the dark ages where the vision couldn't take hold.
But now, Steve has more than enough resources with Apple, along with humility and wisdom enough to temper his rashness. I think we're in for a very fun decade as we watch his vision finally be made manifest.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
When Anders Hejlsberg crossed over to the Dark Side, .NET didn't use that approach -- they use the code-generation approach instead of the object-property serialization approach.
Don't know if there is a way to hack the .dfm files to change and app with source -- I believe the .dfm's stick around during compile and their info is folded into the .exe file so you don't distribute the .dfm's with the binary app.
Depending on when this video was made, perhaps it was a pre-production "Nitro" NeXTStation Color, one running at 40Mhz. Word about them got out around October 1992.
"How many Nitros exist?
Personal e-mail from someone who for now shall remain nameless "there was more than 5". He had one, the release control guys had at least one for builds, there was one around that was used by the NRW group and later for porting cross builds, Steve Jobs had one in his NeXT for a long time, and there were various versions around in hardware. He also says he thinks a few were given to important customers as part of trials."
Anyway, despite the impressive hardware specs of the i860, what Jobs is doing doesn't appear to be remarkably fast, compared to more typical NeXT hardware. It could have been a stock 33Mhz Color Turbo.
The performance you see in that video certainly didn't require super-high-end hardware or special co-processors.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Notice the black "pizza-box" that the monitor is resting on top of? Signs that the system used is a NeXTstation. If a NeXTdimension were used, the monitor probably would be resting on the desk by itself.