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."
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..)
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.