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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...
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.
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!
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.
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