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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."
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
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.
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.
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 ----
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
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
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.
buah ha ha ha... yeah sure.. afterstep, all the look and none of the function.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
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.
Although of course - as is abundantly clear, NeXTStep was the basis for OS X after Apple decided against Johnlouis Gasse's BeOS.
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/
You can see that Jobs is behind a monochrome NeXT MegaPixel Display and the screen grabs are from a color screen.
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
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
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.
Wow, hopefully Linux will be this good one day!
-bbh
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!
And I LOVE my Mac!
-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.
Considering what "conservatives" are doing to the US economy right now, the previous "liberal" administration seems like a dynamo of economic sense. "Conservatives" in the US haven't done right by the economy for decades now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
How can you call him successful? He only makes $1 a year!
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."
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.
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.