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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."
that's the link for the 1984 ad. rtf news page. ;)
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..)
Sorry, wrong links.
small
large
Courtesy of Macslash.
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
NextStep in 1989 was an endless series of brilliant concepts and ideas that are just now coming into mainstream operating systems. Truly ahead of its time. 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. Even simple things like menu item enable/disable becomes automatic due to the way messaging works (i.e., if no methods are found to handle the Print message, then Print gets grayed out automatically).
Microsoft is going the way of declarative interface programming with languages like XAML, which I disagree with. I take issue with not knowing about the interface objects until run-time which can cause all sorts of issues, particularly display issues. NextStep/Cocoa, on the other hand, actually stores the object graph into a "freeze-dried" file in Interface Builder (the famous NIB files), serializing all the objects and bringing them up in a flash when the application runs.
It's truly a neat technology to play with. Too bad most of the major apps on OS X are sticking with the Carbon route to avoid rewriting their codebases. Cocoa gives you so many things for free, you even get automatic spellcheck available for any input fields if you want it.
Although of course - as is abundantly clear, NeXTStep was the basis for OS X after Apple decided against Johnlouis Gasse's BeOS.
list not needed with given the existence of the archive.org
wayback machine. try on for size:
http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html
All I can say is, what the heck happened
Well, basically, NeXT overcharged their hardware, then their software. For example, you probably never heard of WebObjects, even if it was (still is actually) one of the best technology to create a dynamic website... and it's no wonder considering they used to sell it at insanely huge prices. Now you can have it via Apple for 500$ ...
this is big enough stuff that they should have been able to get through a few lean years and sell the technology....
Well, they did :-) -- to Apple ...
Actually, the problem they had, is that nearly nobody in the industry was used to OOP. Now it's easier to understand the brilliance of NeXTSTEP's concepts, but it was probably more difficult to convaince people at the time ? (check the real media video on openstep.se/next/videos , they take half the video to explain the interest of OOP before introducing IB..)
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..)
" NeXT, for example, had nothing like Quartz. Quartz is largely informed by the word Bill Atkinson did on QuickDraw in the early 1980s."
Um, no. NeXT had Display Postscript. Quartz is much closer to that than to QuickDraw.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
From a 1992 Usenet post of the Winter 1992 price listThese prices are in the ballpark of comparable machines from Sun and Apple.
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?
It was ported to Intel in the 486 era, but it didn't really become practical to run until the Pentium 2. Ran pretty well on my AMD K6-350, if I recall correctly. Supposed to scream on Athlons.
In addition to Intel, it was ported, and sold, to run on Sun Sparc workstations and HP PA-RISC workstations.
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....
It wasn't the stations that had the Optical drive, it was the cube. That was the machine that got really expensive, when loaded up with a NeXTDimension color graphics card, big hard disks, and lots of RAM. The Optical was dropped before very long, and the Cube just shipped with a floppy drive. I think the Turbo Cube (33 MHz) couldn't even connect to the optical drive.
What happend to NeXT is (roughly) this:
First, customers realized they didn't so much want the hardware, they wanted the operating system. So NeXT dropped hardware and started doing their OS for other peoples' hardware.
Second, customers realized it wasn't so much the operating system they wanted, it was the development tools. So NeXT came up with a way to run the development tools on NT. And they had their WebObjects product, which let people use NeXT development tools to do web apps. So they de-emphasized the OS.
Then Apple bought them. The dev tools for NT were de-emphasized, except as a way to do WebObjects development. The OS was refreshed and updated, a process which continues.
Jonathan Hendry
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
A NeXT cube can drive multiple displays, a 4bit grayscale display built onto the motherboard, and one or more NeXTDimension cards which will do 24bit color (up to 32bit internal w/ alpha driving 24bit to the monitor). So doing a color demo w/ a monochrome monitor nearby isn't far fetched at all. Steve typically used a cube w/ NeXTDimension since it was the "hottest" machine NeXT made.
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
I've made torrents available at:
http://nedron.net:6969/
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
TJ isn't a conservative, he's a libertarian.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is here today. GnuStep is a great environment based on OpenStep standard. Too bad that Linux communities got sucked into Genome/KDE to pay enough attention to it. Maybe the popularity of Mac OS X can help GnuStep to gain some attention.
WindowMaker is just a window manager that has the look and feel of NeXtStep. It is NOT the APIs or Frameworks. Just like a theme on GTK is not Aqua.
Still, what kind of moron bases their decision of which computer platform to purchase on the perceived political opinions of most other users of that platform, rather than e.g. it's technical capabilities, usability, design strengths etc.
How can a computer be "right" or "left" anyway? Does the G4's assembly language have instructions for creating socialist socio-economic systems? Give me a break --- what a load of crap.