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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."
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."
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
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.
That video was an INTERNAL microsoft joke. They have them from time to time, not an actual advert. Ballmer did it for the entertainment of MS employees, not for customers.
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 ----
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
OS X IS NeXT!
The technology behind OS X is going on almost two decades. :)
.NET? Adobe, Macromedia, id Software, and so on aren't going to rewrite their apps in unmanaged C++ .NET code just to fit in. At least on OS X, Apple offered the Carbon APIs to allow old apps to compile with few changes and suddenly take advantage of the new environment.
The only thing immature about OS X coming out of the gate was the Aqua interface, which they finally patched up around 10.2.
On an unrelated note, on Panther, and with Tiger upcoming, the interface is so polished that everything else feels six years behind. I can't help wondering what Apple will offer to compete with Microsoft in the update after Tiger, which might be coming out the year Longhorn ships if Longhorn doesn't delay again. 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. And what new apps will take advantage of
Honestly, though, it would be nice of more of the major OS X apps took advantage of Cocoa instead of hanging onto Carbon for dear life. Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs like a dog, and Photoshop CS is little better.
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/
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
Something like this ? or that ?
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!
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.
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.
this really isn't my fight, but - the part he disagrees with is the part where someone thinks this could actually happen.
Also, the crowd is way too liberal for me.
You mean the crowd that includes Rush Limbaugh and Tom Clancy?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Quartz uses a PDF imaging model. Display Postscript uses a Postscript imaging model. PDF's imaging model is not terribly different from Postscript's imaging model.
Quickdraw's imaging model is like neither.
Quartz is architected quite differently from Quickdraw, and is rather more complex, because it has more to do.
Quartz does alpha compositing. Quickdraw does not.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
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
::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.