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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."
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...
Ehhh.....maybe not.
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.
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
What is your point? Mac OS X _is_ the next NeXT operating system, even GNUstep realizes this and aims to keep up with Apple's development of Cocoa (former OpenStep). Anyhow, I don't see how this relates to the article about a ~14 yr old product demo.
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 ----
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.
Wouldn't it make more sense to read past the headline and see that this is from 1992? It's not as if Apple is showing a demo of the upcoming NeXTstep *today*.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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.
"Rip-off"??? OPENSTEP is an open standard, different implementations were encouraged. How is implementing a standard by a consortium's invitation "ripping-off" someone?
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..)
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
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
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
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.
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!
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
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.
Its interesting that anyone who is worried about the national debt is considered a "liberal" now.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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.