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."

Comments

where'd the torrent go?

[interactive_civilian]

I caught this link yesterday on the Mac.Ach. on the ArsTechnica forums, and they had a .torrent link on the page itself (though that was for an older version of the video which was missing the last 10 minutes), but it seems to have disappeared. Either that or they haven't made a torrent for the new file...

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. ;)

Old Hardware

[nurb432]

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..

Good point!

[interactive_civilian]

nurb432 said:

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...

I agree. There are many times when I think about some of the things that I do on computers today, and sometimes it seems like they aren't much faster than years ago...of course, now with the power and the multi-tasking I can do many more things at the same time...

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?

Re:Good point!

[Have Blue]

Don't forget that optimization and writing the code in the first place are tradeoffs. Sure, it was possible to perform miracles on very limited hardware if you focused entirely on one single piece of critical code over a long time- but that was time you could have spent adding new features, removing bugs elsewhere in the code, and so on.

Also, optimizing compilers have very nearly caught up with human assembly programmers, at least when using modern chips with complex architectures and very aggressive internal scheduling (depending on platform, of course).

Finally, there is a place where very high levels of optimization and hand-coding are still used: console games.

Re:Good point!

[tyrione]

So speaking of 1992 when the hardware began being phased out and having worked at NeXT I can tell you DPS screamed on future hardware and in-house we fixed a few high penalty flaws in coding that never got released but later the design was rolled into Quartz.

Re:Almost looked like a demo of OS X

[bonch]

The technology behind OS X is going on almost two decades. :)

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 .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.

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.

So little has changed

[System.out.println()]

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?"

Re:GNUstep demo

[roard]

Is it possible to push the user interface experience of GNUStep out of the dark, muddled, inorganic mess that it is now and into something more appealing, something, dare I say, more feminine?

Something like this ? or that ?

I 'Heart' WindowMaker

[astrosmash]

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.

Re:Flawed management helped keep NeXT out of sight

[dubl-u]

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.

Re:Almost looked like a demo of OS X

[SteeldrivingJon]

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.