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Unix Operating Systems Software

Looking Back At NeXT 229

Posted by emmett from the insanely-black dept.
jregel writes: "Ars Technica has a link to an old Newsweek article that was written when Steve Jobs was about to unveil the NeXT computer. It's an interesting read, with some amusing pictures of industry characters including Scott McNealy and Bill Gates. Although most of us have probably never had the opportunity to play with a NeXT computer or use Nextstep, both the hardware and software were revolutionary and represent one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry." Then again, how much of this is parallel to the MacOS X stuff? Maybe the photographs will convince people once and for all that I don't look like Steve Jobs.
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Looking Back At NeXT More

Looking Back At NeXT

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  • Oh, I don't know. Pixar's done just fine. Granted they're not a computer company, but they make and sell a pretty good product (though most of the credit for the 'making' part should go to John Lasseter).

    Also, look at the turnaround Apple has made since he came back on. While I'm sure Bill doesn't exactly lose sleep over whether Mac OS is going to displace Windows, Apple is turning a profit ad that's better than they were doing not so long ago.

    I think marketing is both Steve's greatest strength and his biggest weakness. When he succeeds, he succeeds big (example: the iMac). When he fails, he fails big (example: failing to open the Mac architecture early on). And then, of course, there's the wild card -- the Jobsian Reality Distortion Field.
    --
  • You do look like Steve, but don't wear black turtle neck shirts and you'll be fine
  • I still have a cube sitting here, It gets infrequent use, but I wouldn't part with it.

    As to your post, there was a product called NEXTSTEP/FIP back around 1993 which ran intel, I know that a release existed for atleast version.

    This likley means there is also an OPENSTEP/FIP as for obtaining a copy you might want to try: www.blackholeinc.com [blackholeinc.com] they still have next hardware and may be able to give you a lead on the software.

    Of course I think that an educational copy is still in the order of $400, a real pitty if you ask me.

    On another note, I know that NEXTSTEP/FIP 3.2 is approaching the end of reasonable use for things like its video driver. (i.e.: Finding a video card it supports can be a challenge.
  • We had a room full of NeXT machines in one of our Electrical Engineering labs at University of Rochester back in 1990-91. They were head and shoulders better than the Sun workstations for our purposes. It had a nice Motorola integer DSP built right into it. You could do some pretty cool real time DSP if you were willing to code in assembler. Even the accessories were superb, it came with a 400 dpi laser printer that absolutely everyone in the department printed to for their graphics. You could definately tell the difference when printing out 3D time vs frequency plots as I was doing for my Masters work. Blew away 300 dpi and MacLaser.

    Frankly.. If I had known about IRC and had a client for it on the NeXT, I would have surely flunked out of school :)
  • NeXT boxes were actually cheaper than equivalent Macs -- it's just that they were much higher-end than your average office/educational/home user's machine. There was an article in Macworld many, many years ago, right after the first color NeXTcubes and stations came out, that benchmarked and cost-compared them to high-end Quadras, and they smoked 'em on both fronts. Remember, this was in Macworld, in an issue with Jobs' replacement CEO at Apple on the cover.

    The original Mac was also spendy as hell, and eventually took off only because of hefty student discounts and the rise of DTP and multimedia. NeXT failed because they never really had a niche -- their systems weren't quite as easy to use as a Mac, due to their UNIX heritage, but weren't quite as powerful as a Sun or SGI; they had great multimedia support in hardware, but initially shipped with a low-bitdepth greyscale monitor; etc., etc.

    Personally, I think that the NeXT systems would have done much better if they had come out a little later...like 1997, when Apple was licensing for clones. The hardware could have been updated for PowerPC, and they would have been kick-ass workstations and lightweight servers. Development on NeXTStep is as easy as development on Windows, without the lobotomizing effects of excessive exposure to Microsoft tools.

    I suppose we're getting pretty close with OS-X. The development environment is incredibly NeXT-like, with a few modern updates (like kick-ass Java support). G4 hardware is considerably cheaper than the old NeXT gear, and they've certainly improved in a number of areas of usability. Then there's the one ingredient that NeXT never had: the laptop. I'll sign whatever I have to for a G4 PowerBook with OS-X...drool...

  • In fact I own three.

    I love my slabs (NeXTstations) and used them daily for several years. In fact I used one as my personal web & mail server right up until NeXT's Y2K patch fsck'ed up my sendmail config and I didn't have the patience to patch humpty dumpty back together again.

    I am also a longtime (12 years) SunOS/Solaris admin, *BSD admin, and MacOS admin. I've been playing with Linux for about 6 years now too. Yeah, I've even had to swallow the blue pill and fsck around with NT here and there too. All this has given me an appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of various OS'es and GUIs. I won't waste your time here by reciting a treatise on them all. I'm an admin not a programmer so I won't comment on the dev tools in NeXT either.

    I *will* however comment on the hardware. NeXT's 'puck' mouse [goolsbee.org] is a joy to use. Still the best mouse devised (and yes, I've used the new Apple 'buttonless' mouse) in fact since my mouse is ADB I still use it on all my Macs (via a switchbox) at work. Plus the keyboard has the CONTROL key in the RIGHT place, between the tab and shift keys and that useless CAPS LOCK is relegated to a far corner of the keyboard... this is the *proper* key placement for a unix (or any OS really) keyboard.

    The black magnesium case is sexy as hell to this day... almost 13 years later. I have my slabs in my office [goolsbee.org] and they never fail to produce gasps and lust from visitors.

    I will concur with another comment here that the NeXT's insides are as gorgeous as their outsides. A very spare, clean design, much like Sun's early Sparc slabs. I hate opening up the case of crappy Intel boxes... they are so cheap, random, and busy by comparison. Apple's designs are just as good if not better. Anyone who flames Apple hardware has never opened up a Mac.

    I look forward to the future of Apple/NeXT with a mixture of anticipation and fear. Anticipation for the final redemption of their great hardware designs and the realization of NeXTstep's amazing architecture. Fear with how the Mac community will endure the move from the MacOS to this brave new world, as they are dragged kicking and screaming forward by an Apple who has an amazing ability to drop balls and screw things up relationshipwise.

    --chuck goolsbee
  • NeXT came out while I was in college, and my Alma Mater bought into it. Thus began my love-affair :)

    I spent three summers full-time, and three academic years part-time programming edu apps on the NeXT at Rose-Hulman. I also learned C at the same time. Here are some random thoughts on the computer.

    It's ironic that in the Newsweek article Bill Gates poo-poo's the computer, saying it's no big deal (everyone's got a graphical interface, everyone's got a mouse). I believe MS was transitioning from Win 2.0 to Win 3.0 (or maybe 3.1). The windows interface was an abomination, obviously designed by people who knew nothing about human design issues. The NeXT crushed it in terms of ease of use. Still, Gates was right -- the NeXT was the computer equivalent of a 45rpm record.

    Programming the NeXT was, in many ways, a wonderful experience. The Interface Builder allowed you to create your basic interface 'live', and in some cases, have some basic functionality, before writing a line of code. Perhaps windows and Mac can do this too, but I haven't found a gui programming environment to match the features of the 10 yr old NeXT's.

    A big buzz-phrase in recent years is "object reuse." Been there, done that. By my third year of programming, I understood the system pretty well, and developed a couple standard interface tools that could be implemented from the Interface Builder, and configured with minimal programming additional coding. These were used by my fellow developers to provide a more consistent user interface across our applications. This was not terribly difficult to do with the NeXT.

    I still miss its file manager. I really liked the multi-paned hierarchical browser. It was what Windows Explorer is supposed to be.

    Why did NeXT fail? Because Jobs ran it. I believe that Steve Jobs is a computer visionary. I think he understands what people want, what's cool, and what we be great to work with. I also think that he's got a technical savvy. However, I think he let's his desire for "cool" block his sense of "realistic." The NeXT was awesome. It was truly years ahead of its time. It was also double the cost of an equivalent PC, and more expensive that Macs too. It had a magnesium case (hello? extra cost?), and other such things. Nice, but not helpful in trying to break into a larger market.

    Currently, I am a PC guy. I can't get the software I need on a Mac, and I am put off by the consistent 30% price difference between a PC and it's equivalent Mac. But if the Mac OS X brings in the best parts of NeXT, appropriately improved over the past several years, along with the best of Mac, it may be time to switch computers.
  • I'm thinking of getting a non-working cube on the cheap to reuse the case. Anyone know which mobo size it accepts?
  • I'm starting a collection of "dead operating system" CDs as wall-decoration. I need a Nextstep CD, and if anyone has one that they're just planning on tossing, I'll take it off your hands.

    I went hunting on EBay, but some crazy people were paying $50 and up for used Nextstep CDs, which I couldn't justify for my particular purposes.
  • I have actually played with Aqua (not used it), but in my experience it was a little obnoxious, but then again I didn't like Platinum when that first came around... now I'm a genuine Platinum addict.
  • Sigh. You sound just like the people in the article, focussing on the hardware too much, and not thinking about why it was put together. NextStep was built with a very solid interface, at a time when only one other OS provided one, MacOS, and when all the unixen were stabbing in the dark with X.

    It had a solid kernel. It had very intelligent application layout, and some APIs that still outclass many of what we're dealing with the in the open source movement today. The biggest problem with NeXT was that they focussed too much on having insanely great hardware (and insanely expensive), and didn't mention their insanely great software enough.

    And it seems, Mac is going to repeat history with OS X, tying it to the G3s and G4s, while leaving the other PowerPCs in the dark, even the third-party accelerator boards aren't going to be supported.. At least they'll be leaving Darwin in their wake before they go under.
  • Maybe its true that they were not trying to compete against home computers...They might have really been interested in the workstation market, but if I am not mistaken, they were based on Motorola 68040 processors were they not? If this is true, they may have thought of themselves as workstation producers, but with the power of home comptuers. NeXT, from what I recall, could have made a go of it, but like Apple at times, they could not produce enough of them due to chip shortages. Motorola was producing chips for Apple, who could not get their hands on enough of them, so there was very little left for NeXT.

    NeXTStep did, however, have an intel incarnation, which I actually did get to use. Very nice Interface, very clean and slick and quite easy to use. I had it running on a stock Pentium (166 at the time a very fast home computer) which basically means it was more powerful than the actual next machines.

  • Emmett, you are Steve Jobs. Just remove the glasses and wipe off your tan concealing geek makeup. You can't fool the AngryLoneNut.
  • Exactly. :) At first, I didn't like Aqua either, thought it looked annoying. I didn't like (and still don't) using Aqua themes for Mac OS 8+ and GTK+/Enlightenment/Sawmill. They're annoying. But having used both DP3 and DP4 a fair amount, I find it fine to use, and not distracting.
  • I kinda wish I could go back and compare now but I don't have access to the computers at the university where I used it anymore.

    I remember liking it, and the stuff I didn't like about it was typically similar to the stuff I don't like in X-windows now. It'd be interesting to go back and give it a whirl.

    As for the price problem, I want to pose the following question to those who might know a bit more about NeXT than myself. I vaguely remember on the systems I used, that the hardware the OS was running on were Gateway 2000 boxes. Can the NeXT operating system run on x86 hardware? If so, was it the OS that was pricey or the actual NeXT hardware? (I'm thinking the latter) Also, if it does run on x86, does anyone know where I can get it for free or minimal cost, or is it totally dead?

  • I'm not sure if you can fit a full ATX in there, but certainly a microATX or 2/3 baby AT should fit just fine. In any case, you'll have to install your own power supply. As far as expansion bays, it has two full height 5-1/4 bays, which you can mount a floppy, hdd, zip and cdrom in with no problem (except for cutting holes in the front panel, and you'll need the "mounting rails" that let you put 3-1/2 inch disks in 5-1/4 slots. It wouldn't hurt to cut some cooling holes in the front, as the cube was designed to blow air out the optical slot (it actually flowed through the drive--there was a filter on the back of the drive).
  • The DSP never got used for anything intresting

    Uh, atleast my wife did a lot of hacking (all kinds of sound handling with C++, formerly they had used all Object C) with the NeXTs at the Department of Musicology (University of Helsinki) - great hardware for that purpose I was told.

    ______________

  • linux on alpha has always been 64bit. you're getting confused by intel's (piece of crap) ia64.

    No... I wouldn't make that mistake, particularly since:

    I don't lust after Intel vapor

    I hold no interest in VLWI processors

    They've been talking about putting out the ia64, Itanium, whatever for ages

    It may never come out

    If it does it will probably be some horrible thing which attempts to do all and be all and have numerous bugs and run slow

    ...no, I wouldn't make that mistake, not a chance.

    Vote [dragonswest.com] Naked 2000

  • Well, it was a cool computer. However, it had some failures that made it unattractive.
    • No disk drive -- at a time where most of the data exchange was still done on floppies.
    • To many gimmics and to little raw power for the price. Yes, the price was not to bad for the things build into it. But most people did not need e.g. CD quality sound as much as they needed cycles. SUN was a much better buy in this respect
    NeXTStep was excellent, but again, not what most people needed at the time. The multi-media age was still some time off, and most researchers were still writing text mode applications (hell, many are still doing it now).
  • Did anyone notice the picture of Ross Perot on this page: http://www.whichauction.net/fly/back_07.html ? In tiny type at the very bottom, it says that Ross Perot was a NeXT backer. Now I know for sure that the NeXT idea was a crazy one.
  • Understanding that OS X is essentially the 'next' Nextstep and I'm impressed by OS X features, I wonder what the probability is of Apple porting it to Intel? I guess slim, if I have a desire of actually purchasing an Apple (would be first since //e) to enjoy this fine looking OS. I guess thats what they want, more Mac purchases. But, if Apple would port it...
  • All the cool software tools that were on NeXT will be available on OS X when it comes out, for those of you who don't know. Objective C, Project Builder and the other RAD tools, etc. This was part of the deal when Apple bought it.

    OS X Beta this year, 1.0 early next year.

    It would be nice if this technology finally blossoms in the market. I don't think a dual-processor G4 will be as much of a hardware impediment as the NeXT's 25MHz 68030 was...
  • Okay, each person needs a home directory. The system has to manage between users. There are permissions to deal with, access limitations, the requirement that a lot of commands require root, etc. If the model was hugely simplified, (no ownership restrictions, only home-directory restrictions, all applications run at any level, etc) and it didn't add overhead to the system (no checking for access privliges on hardware) it might fly. But otherwise, it would probably be too much complexity for too little gain.

  • Gates pegged a decade ago... (Score:5)

    by twisty ( 179219 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:27AM (#868386) Homepage Journal
    While the article is dated, it's funny to see the percpetion of Bill Gates a decade past, both by those who "get him" and those who don't...

    Ester Dysan in the article mentions that Gates would end up producing NeXT software because "he's a smart businessman." While that non sequitor placed him in a warm light of misplaced optimism, the suspected 'dark side' of his alterior motives, opposing the operating system he could not own, was dead on the money.

    My earliest memory of discovering "the Real Gates" came from the late eighties when watching Computer Chronicals on PBS. Before actually seeing Bill, I'd heard rumors that he must be some great software engineer, and that he used to "hold contests for programming business apps, so he could outpace them all with QuickBASIC." But the reality of his mindset was seen on the East versus West "Computer Bowl" around 1988. The three questions I saw him answer were very revealing:

    (1) "SPOOL" describes a queueing operation, such as sending a document to a printer device. What does the acronym SPOOL stand for?
    Gates: No clue.
    Answer: Simultaneous Peripheral Operations On-Line.(Granted, it's understandable that such trivia could easily be missed, even though I knew it.)

    (2) MIDI is the standard for Musical Instruments Digital Interface... but How Many pins are in a MIDI plug?
    Gates: No clue.
    Answer: Five. (THIS is the man who claims he will bring us multimedia on the PCs? Has he ever LOOKED at multimedia instruments or technology?)

    (3) Who is the top earning CEO in the Computer Industry?
    Gates: "JOHN SCULLEY OF APPLE!" (Correct!)

    I think he may have even quoted the salary Sculley was making! It didn't take him a blink of an eye to issue that answer. It also took him only two more years to get that answer changed to "Bill Gates." From that point on, it was clear to me where Bill Gates "inventive" mind really is.

  • Objective-C wasn't really "revolutionary". When it came out, Smalltalk had already been around for many years, there were Lisp machines, and lots of excellent languages and environments. All the important GUI and graphics concepts of NeXTStep also had existed in other environment before.

    Objective-C was a pragmatic attempt to bring at least some of that functionality to a world already dominated by a systems programming language called "C". The biggest problem with Objective-C was (and continues to be) that it inherited the unsafe nature of C.

    I think it would have been good for the industry for Objective-C and NeXT to catch on. It would have put the industry on a different trajectory. If Objective-C had been used widely, by now, the language would probably have evolved to be significantly safer, with C-like functionality restricted to specific, unsafe modules where needed.

    But the NeXT system did evolve and has found widespread acceptance, not at NeXT/Apple but at Sun. The closest predecessor to Java is not C++ but it's Objective-C: Java has much of the dynamic binding, reflection, and library from Objective-C and the NeXT. That's not really surprising either, since many of the people working on Java for the last few years came from the Smalltalk/Self and from the Objective-C communities.

  • Read the article. There's the answer to you question. -> Short answer: Gates did not liked it (or else except it's own distorted creations).
    (Hey! I'm not trolling !)

  • Re:Inverse hostile takeover - complete (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Shhhhh....
    That's the next model....
    That's supposed to be a secret.
    Now some poor sap's gonna lose his job.
  • I programmed professionally under NeXTStep/OpenStep for eight years. While the development environment was nice, I've seen similar functionality in a few other environments now.

    What I have yet to see is a replication of the "Services" menu provided by the NeXTStep environment. Programmers would declare services provided by their application for particular types of selections (e.g. string, file, rtf text). All other NeXTStep apps have a Services menu item which is automatically populated by these services.

    For example, you're editing a document. Double-click a word to select, go to the Services menu and choose "Look up in Webster" -- which tells the Webster dictionary app to look up the word. The Terminal app provided a service building feature so that you could define a "wc" service.... select a bunch of text, click on the Services->Terminal->Word Count service and the results from wc appear.

    sigh
  • Fair enough that you get your dig at Unix, but take a look at the NeXT and Win95 GUI's side by side sometime. Microsoft's ability to be unoriginal is almost inspiring.
  • Due to a period of imense free time i decided to play with dhtml and do a virtual interface.. http://rice0067.dsl.visi.com/bill/next/index.html
  • When Apple bought NeXT in december 1996 (actually, when NeXT let itself being bought by Apple), I knew it was for OpenStep, and had a fait idea of what was to take place. Being a Mac developer, I knew I had to start learning the inside-outs of this OS, so I searched on the web, and found orb.com (dont botter looking it up, the site is gone now) from which I bought my NeXT machine (literally).

    It's what's refered to as a "color slab". The actual model name os a "Color Station". The 25Mghz one, not the Turbo Station.

    It came with NeXTSTEP 3.3 pre-installed on a 400Megs HD w/ 16Megs of RAM. This machine actually could rival my PowerMac 8600/200 the Mac OS of the time (I can't remember what version it was... 7.5.5 maybe).

    When Apple introduced NeXTSTEP to the Mac community, it actually simply released OpenStep 4.2 for Intel to developers. It turns out that the CDs were fat-binaries that would also work on my color slab. I downloaded the installer floppy image to boot my machine with, and was able to install OpenStep 4.2 on there--for free. The machine has been running superbly ever since.

    I eventually bought a N2000 NeXT Laser Printer. The best 400DPI I have ever seen. Never has that printer, actually controled by the NeXT itself for PostScript rastering, ever failed to print anything I threw at it, regardless of the complexity of the image. By having installed CAPer on it, I can use this printer on my network like any regular Mac networked printer.

    I have just bought a first-generation NeXT Cube (N1000A) for the coolness factor. I'm picking it up tomorow, and am eager to spin it up. It should look pretty dandy on my desk, next to my color slab, original Mac II (rev A), PowerMac 8600/200, iMac DV/SE, Mac SE+20" mobius display and my (yes) Apple //c.

    Now, I just need another hub ...

    If you want to learn a bit more on the machines NeXT produced, check out this link [channelu.com].
  • also take a look at www.nextmuseum.com and most questions can be answerd at : http://www.nextmusuem.com/archive/html/english/ --ah.. too much next stuff for the day!

  • I also attended a college - Allegheny College [alleg.edu] - that used NeXT for many years. In fact I worked at Technical and Network Services at college, and had to service these boxes for 2 years. Allegheny kept their next machines until 1998, and by that time they were getting pretty damn slow. But in the end, these machines were excellend on a college campus that was filled with not-too-bright computer users. Their UI had to have ranked high on the usability scale, and they had a easy to set up account system.

    Allegheny made a transition to a NT 4.0 Network During the Summer of 99, after a NT/OpenStep Dual boot network in the Summer of 98. Administration wanted an OS like they had at home, but the NT network has been nothing but a hassle to TNS. I must admit that the turbo color NeXT pizza boxes were a far better machine that the NT machines. NT is horrificly slower than the NeXT boxes were.

    While searching for a job after my graduation in May, I got an offer from a company in Chicago which wanted me to do OpenStep development, so there is still some action goin on in the NeXTStep/OpenStep scene.

  • Steve Jobs

    is a self-made billionaire
    started the first personal computer company
    rescued it 20 years later with all the tech and talent he had over at the NeXT
    owns and heads the first movie studio to release a full-length computer-animated movie (and if you think the business side of a movie studio doesn't matter, you don't know the movie business)
    has appeared on the cover of TIME magazine 3 or 4 times, including earlier this year.

    Yeah, I can see why there are a few posters here who can call Steve Jobs "unsuccessful".

    The only thing he's been involved with that could even pretend to be unsuccessful is NeXT, and that was only because it didn't meet its goals until years later (now) after being sold to another company. Most of the NeXT people are at Apple now, including the same CEO, and they're about to release a cube-shaped computer that runs Mac OS X. Financially, the sale to Apple kept it from being a money loser, didn't it? Where's the unsuccess? This guys one of the legends of Silicon Valley.

    Is it because he's a chick magnet that so many Slashdotters like to rag on him? I mean, this guy's been involved in creating a user friendly Unix for 15 years (the NeXT project started at Apple where it was called "Big Mac" and left with Steve in 1985). It's only this past year or two that the idea of a user friendly Unix crossed over from insane to sane, and here Apple is with Mac OS X.

    As far as giving all the credit for Apple to Woz, not to take anything away from the guy (he's a genius), but that's like saying the Rolling Stones are all Keith Richards and no Mick Jagger. I mean ... come ON.
  • Why did NeXT fail? Because Jobs ran it. [...] I think he let's his desire for "cool" block his sense of "realistic."

    I agree. Jobs has made some decisions that left me shaking my head.

    The NeXT should have had a floppy. Back in the 80's, most computer users made heavy use of floppy disks to distribute code or data. I remember thinking, "So much for the software market; who will want to release anything on a MO disk that costs $50?"

    The Lisa failed because it cost $10,000. Steve Jobs was there. So, how much was the first NeXT computer? That's right... $10,000. ($6,000 at a student discount, but you can't build a viable business on selling at student discount price.) Later boxes were more reasonable, but what was Jobs thinking with that first box?

    steveha

  • Man, your sig is a crime against humanity. You should fix it.
  • I'll look into this...thanks. All of the source I've seen is labeled with the LGPL, so it should be OK.
  • I've got one sitting in the basement of my parents' house. It's a cube, 16MB RAM, 300MB or so hard drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse.

    It doesn't boot anymore, and I don't have the software for it (got it free from my alma mater), but it's quite possible that someone out there knows what to fix to make it boot. May only need a new battery, I dunno.

    Over a year ago it was working fine, but it needed the OS reinstalled. I moved it from a friend's room over to my apartment in his pickup--when we left it worked, when we arrived, it stopped working. No idea why. Tried new SIMMs, different cables, different HD, different keyboard, everything. Maybe something jarred loose on the way over?

    Anyway, the upshot is, if anyone's interested, I'm more than willing to part with it, and my folks want it out of their basement. I know this isn't eBay, but if you're interested in owning some NeXT hardware (a cube even!!), let me know...you may just be able to make the thing work again, too.
  • I own several copies of NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP for Intel and have found them fun platforms to tinker with although I have never had a reson to use it seriously.

    When I first saw/ran Rhapsody Alpha 1 or whatever it was over 2 years ago, I was pretty startled to see that it WAS OpenSTEP. The installer worked and looked exactly the same and supported exactly the same hardware on the X86 side as the release of OpenSTEP 4.2.

    Sadly, this was the first of only two alpha releases of OS/X for Intel before the project was shifted entirely to the PPC. Very dissapointing. Perhaps it's still secretly lurking behind the scenes at apple with the System7/X86 port.

    Granted, probalby almost all of the NeXT code has all been replaced by apple's own Darwin (BSD), etc. but the point is that OS/X has taken a very very very strong influence from NeXT as far as producing a UN*X based system with a very good GUI, etc etc.

    ~GoRK

  • nope (Score:1)

    by wcb4 ( 75520 )
    Sorry .... have to disagree with you on this one ..... I think that title goes to THE Amiga.

  • I spent many, many years in the NeXTSTEP community (through all the spellings of the name :-).

    Lots of great technology came out of that world and the people who drank the kool aid.

    Almost everyone still thinks NeXTSTEP had a beautiful user interface. WebTV also has a great UI. The same designer created both.

    The CERN web server was originally created on NeXTSTEP.

    Netscape's IFC (pure Java UI) were created by folks who came from NeXT. The IFC classes later got incorporated into Swing, Sun's current (and arguably goofy) UI library for Java.

    I'm sure there are lots of other projects that had their origin at NeXT too. At the time, Steve Jobs was able to attract a lot of *very* smart people to his vision.

    Unfortunately, none of it turned out to be interesting enough to displace Windows.

  • Bill G. Has written lots of products for *NIX. As far as I can remember, COM is already available on UNIX, and various Micrsoft backend products have been ported to UNIX.
  • As I remember, they were pretty big for 3D and graphics.
  • So people, why did it fail and what lessons can we learn from it?

    I did actually get to use a Next box at the time, and I've still got fond memory's of it, but it goes to show that we need more than "cool tech" and a good UI to suceed.
  • Your statements do not correspond to my memory.

    In 1990, when I started at CMU, we had:

    * A room of Sun 3/35 systems running X (these were older machines even for the time, at least 2 or 3 years old. The first Unix system I ever logged onto was one of these.)

    * A shitload of Digital DECstation 3100 machines running X

    * Lots of other Unix boxes running X in various departments (I remember a couple of IBM RT's that were very slow but also ran X)

    * One room of NeXT cubes that never got any use. The only time I used them was when all of the cluster DECstations were in use and I needed a telnet prompt to play MUDs.

    I don't know what year X started becoming widespread, but it was certainly a couple of years at least before 1990, and at the time of NeXT's introduction in '88, was probably pretty widespread already.

    BTW, X development started in '85 as well. So even if NeXT development did start in '85 (which I doubt), then it wouldn't be before X, it would have started around the same time as X.
  • The real, overriding problem with the next platform wasn't its hardware -- it was the crappy release schedule. At the time it came out, I was at Reed College, one of the development and prototype centers. We had access to some of the very first NeXTs to come off the assembly line, at release level 0.7 or something. By 0.8 I started playing with it because they kicked the pants off of everything else we had for raw power (this was the fall of 1988 and winter of 1989), and I was learning about fluid dynamic simulation.

    The problem was: the graphical interface on the top was buggy as anything (at least in 0.8). I never used it. That caused trouble, because when someone sat down and logged in at the console the average time to live was only about three minutes before the kernel panicked. That didn't keep me from running my fluid dynamic simulations on 'em -- a single NeXT could almost keep pace with a dedicated VAX 11/785 running my fluid code.

    Along about April or so of 1989, we got our first Decstation 3100, which in turn kicked the pants off the NeXT boxen. Then it was all over but the shouting: they'd taken so long to get NeXTStep finished that their hardware had fallen a generation behind.

    IIRC, NeXT boxen weren't released commercially until fall 1989 or winter 1990 -- by which time, DEC was already announcing their 5000 series workstations and SUN had leapfrogged the NeXTs too.

    Foonly effect all the way -- they just hadda keep tweaking to get the perfect graphics system, and by the time they were done with perfection it was too late. If they'd only been able to go to full production in the fall of 1988 instead of 1989, we'd have seen NeXT boxen everywhere and they'd have had the market-share oomph to run with the big dogs. C'est la vie.

    Anyone remember Kaypro? Wildly successful luggable-computer company that died for related reasons...

  • I have a Next box (complete with original invoice). Maybe it was the price. $17k US with a printer and a modem and this was the low end machine. There is a significant coolness factor even today, but not at that price.
  • I think the coolest thing about my NeXTStation is how solid it is.. It just feels...well solid. Things fit tightly, thick metal shielding, etc.. For being relatively lightweight, I think if dropped it would damage whatever it hit more that the box itself..

    Now, on the flip side, the monitor weighs 50 lbs..

  • Re:Revolutionary software at least... (Score:3)

    by Mr Neutron ( 93455 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:35AM (#868418)
    But the software, oh man was that software ahead of it's time...

    Specifically: NeXT leveraged the run-time-binding in Objective-C to create InterfaceBuilder (IB). IB allowed the programmer to create a UI by dragging and dropping interface objects. Yes, a lot of tools do that, but IB was different in that it wasn't a code generator per se. IB created a "nib" file that basically "freeze dried" the UI objects and their relationships. You dragged and dropped your buttons and text fields and other widgets, then you dragged connections between them and clicked radio buttons to specify which methods the buttons would invoke. Very slick, very fast and you didn't have to tromp through a bunch of Obj-C source to make changes. (You could even hack the UIs of apps without needing the source!) A brilliant tool for constructing "mission critical custom apps," which NeXT finally determined was its true calling. I remember watching a video of the 1992 (I think) NeXTWORLD keynote where the Steve used IB to query a database and display the result (including a tiff, IIRC) without "writing any code..." Wow.

    So what killed NeXT? High prices, lack of standardization with the X community, and (ultimately) the Web. Even after they killed their hardware in 1992 and went x86, the developer version of the software cost $3K-$5K/seat. IB and its integrated editor-debugger-source-manager ProjectBuilder were great for building client-server apps, but the three-tier world marginalized them. WebObjects (their middle-tier software, now offered by Apple) is supposed to be pretty good but has a pretty limited following.

    I have my NeXTstation in the basement and have many fond memories of late-night hacking on it. The spirit lives on in GNUstep [gnustep.org]. The software lives on as Mac OS X Server [apple.com] but latest word [stepwise.com] has it that Obj-C has been deprecated in favor of Java, at least for WebObjects.

    Neutron

  • Re:After the article... (Score:5)

    by marphod ( 41394 ) <galens+slashdot@nOsPAm.marphod.net> on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:36AM (#868419)
    The NeXT failed for a lot of different reasons. Mostly economic.

    While the NeXT was revolutionary, its cost per performance was iffy. The magnesium cases were way cool, but they cost a lot. As did the rest of the NeXT hardware. As other posters have said, the other workstations of the era (Sun 1+?, Apollo 3k&4k, Cybers, etc.) were as fast, or faster, and cost less. NeXTStep had the software down, but it was aimed at educational institutions. Which is all well, and good, but its hard to maintain a company on edu discount sold machines. The return from the discount is years off, and it doesn't sell enough units toi remain afloat long.

    There are other issues; the NeXT used display postscript, instead of X, as the GUI. there were X servers for NeXTStep, but they were slower than a native server would have been, and the other native apps being 'like'; but not always the same as other platform equivelents hurt the platform.

    It was also the era where, for whatever reason, Sun was king. it was the default platform to develop for, and a lot of 'cross compatable' software was really SunOS only (much like a lot of platform compatable software now only natively compiles on Linux, but thats neither here nor there).

    NeXT was also slow to innovate. In its lifetime, there were only a handful of different models made, they were slow on the release cycle and were behind the pace - other manifactures would come out with their bigger and better machines first.

    Another kicker is that while the NeXT was a cool as beans desktop machine, as a remote system it was nothing out of the ordinary. it was almost a standard unix shell, which lost to Apollo as Domain/OS was very spiffy in ways that unix can only dream about now, and to Sun on the cost and compatablity issue.

    Eventually, NeXT stopped producing their own hardware, and went just to working on the OS. Hardware is expensive and has low margins, comparatibvely, but, at least IMO, no company can support themselves based on an OS alone. Be, for example, is viable now, but they lost a lot of momentum when they gave up the BeBoxes (and I'm not convinced they will last, either). The OS petered around for a few years, and NeXT made semi-regular releases for a while, but a lot of what they had that was unique, besides the GUI look-and-feel, was done elsewhere, nearly as good, for free OSes(or effectively free, if its the OS the machine shipped with).

    So, there are a number of reasons NeXT failed. A poor long term business plan, a loss of momentum after the hardware branch was dropped, slow to meet new technologies. Probably other reasons, as well.
  • 1. You don't have to wear a suit to be a suit.

    2. His companies always slightly under-perform where you think a company with the products, creativity and mindset that places like Apple should be. Think about the companies he's been involved in, compare them to comparatively no-brainer outfits that don't require that level of creativity (Yahoo, Amazon), go figure.

    I'm not saying this is all bad, I'm just answering the question of the previous poster as to why Jobs always seems to fail.
  • No, OpenStep for Solaris for will not work with Linux. It doesn't include a Display PostScript server, but relies on the DPS extensions of Sun's X Server. Also, OpenStep for Solaris only works with Solaris on SPARC hardware, not Intel, and iBCS does emulate SPARC processor. I doubt it'd work with Display GhostScript as a substitution, but those of you using Linux on a SPARC might want to try it. It's kind of neet to try, but is of limited usefulness. Even though you can run X and OpenStep apps side by side on OpenStep/Solaris, they don't integrate that well, and a lot of OpenStep apps are only distributed for OpenStep/Mach for black and white (m68k/intel) boxes.
  • It's probably more to do with NeXT (is that right?), Apple etc coming up with stuff too early sometimes. I mean Apple made a PC GUI that was too expensive, and still is a bit (at least I can't afford one yet). The Newton was too early, and I've never had much success with this Mac voice recognition stuff yet. NeXT was science fiction at the time.

    They always seem to foul up by trying to sell stuff that people don't realise they need yet.

    I don't know whether Jobs is a visionary, or whether he just sees things ^_^

    Quite a bit of stuff that Apple comes up with generally gets, er, copied by other companies. the last modem I bought for my PC was transparent blue, for some reason.

    What Jobs needs to do is get his timing right. He needs to launch stuff, not years ahead of their time, but a few days. Or weeks at the most.

    It's all a matter of timing.

  • $25?! Good lord! I payed $250 for my cube (mono and non-turbo) about a year ago... Like old Macs (as opposed to old PCs), they still can pull in a pretty fair price.
  • Well in it's defense, the BeOS GUI takes time to get used to. Initially, I was appalled by the yellow title bars, but hey, it grows on you. Still pissed off by the poor right-click support though. As for themes, they kick ass. The main thing is that themes don't change the UI, they change the look. I personally don't like the default NeXT theme (or at least the default Window Maker theme) because it is too dark for my taste. Theming allows you to change the colors, the shapes, "the look" but retains the parts that make a GUI efficiant and functional (menus, placement, hotkeys, right clicking, object orientation, etc.)
  • Well, that really isn't multi-user. That's multiple profiles. Windows 98 has the same concept, that there are different logins, they each have access to certain apps, and they each have their own preferences, etc. That really doesn't take much OS support. However, multi-user is much more complex. It means that applications now can be in either system or local scope, it means that multiple people and use the system at the same time, it means the system must manage multiple people, it makes administration harder, it makes software installation harder, etc. Profiles probably are a very important. I wouldn't say it's a "must" but they are very important. However, multi-user adds a lot of complexity that really isn't needed if you just want to be able to have individual logins and preferences.

  • Ramblings of a long-time NeXT owner (Score:4)

    by RebornData ( 25811 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @07:01AM (#868435)
    I bought a NeXT as a freshman in college in 1991. Prior to that, I had been a Apple fan, having learned structured programming in Applesoft BASIC (!) and later, Pascal on a Mac. I had contemplated buying a Mac when I got to school, and had picked out the model. I don't remember the specific number, but it was a mid-range box with a separate monitor and a 68030. The rig + software was going to run me $3500.

    I had been interested in the NeXT since I'd first heard about it during the company launch circa 1988, which (as you can see from this article) did gather quite a bit of popular attention. I never imagined I'd actually get to use one of these things, and was totally pumped when I found out that our school not only had a few, but that they were available for sale in the campus store.

    1990 was the year the second-generation NeXT machines were announced- an upgraded "Cube" and the new, ultra-slim "Slab", which made even a sparcstation look clunky. What astounded me was that the base-model slab sold for $3000, with a 20MHz 68040, Motorola DSP, hi-res 17" 2-bit monochrome monitor, 8MB RAM, and a 104MB hard drive. With the addition of an external 135MB drive, I was at the same price as the Mac I'd wanted for the next generation in performance, across the board. I didn't need to buy any software- it came with a Word processor, some games, and pretty much everything else I needed. It stomped on all of the PCs and Macs at the time in terms of processor speed, and looked damn cool sitting on my desk. It wasn't a tough decision.

    A number of people in this thread have said that the NeXT didn't have much that was special about it's hardware. I'd have to disagree- the inside of that machine was nearly as beautiful as the outside, with a motherboard that looked absolutely vacant compared to most others of the time. It had a stupidly small number of cables: a power cable to the CPU, and a single cable from the CPU to the monitor which carried power and everything else (sound familiar?). The keyboard plugged into the monitor, and the mouse plugged into the keyboard. These 2nd generation machines corrected most of the problems of the first gen- the 68040 was fast / competitive with other processors, and they dropped the optical drive for SCSI hard disks for primary storage.

    Of course, the software kicked ass. I used the machine very productively throughout college- as a computer science major, the fact that there was UNIX under the hood was a major benefit, since I was able to get gnuemacs, gcc/g++, LaTeX, and all of the other tools necessary to duplicate the development environment used on the Sun-based campus network. The DSP didn't add a lot of real value, but it sure was fun to prank around with the demo programs that used it, as well as the wide variety of sound utilities available on the 'net. The machine came with Lotus Improv, which was a total-rethink of the spreadsheet that, while missing major areas of functionality (undo, scripting in formulas), was totally symbolic (no absolute cell references) and could handle 7-dimensional sheets with ease.

    Indirectly, this machine got me my first job, and set me on a career path that I'm still following today. Because it was UNIX, I was one of the few students on campus that had root access to anything (Linux hadn't really hit yet, and the university computers were locked down), and I got the chance to poke around the machine and learn the basics of system administration. Which got me an on-campus job doing UNIX system administration as a sophomore, and, well, I've been hooked since.

    Today, the machine sits on my shelf, looking cool, but not doing anything. It still runs (mostly), but the last time I upgraded the OS, the minimum RAM requirements exceeded 8MB, and I just haven't had the need to justify the effort to track down the ancient SIMMs that would be needed to get it usably fast again. I do miss it- I still get pissed off at the relative clunkiness of nearly every other OS. The NeXT was a work of art in many respects, and it was very sad to see the company eventually fade to black.

    Which is why, for the first time in years, I'm excited about the Mac again. I really hope they get OS/X right, as Apple has the market power to make this cool tech successful in the mainstream. It would be really great to see a measure of grace and elegance restored to the OS world that I think was lost when NeXTStep went away.
  • You may be interested in the fact that there is an effort underway to port the MusicKit to GNUstep/Linux. My ultimate goal is to get DSP hardware acceleration and a superb realtime synthesis solution to run under GNUstep/Linux. Perhaps I can get SynthBuilder to work.

  • My ramblings on NeXT and NeXTStep (Score:4)

    by spitzak ( 4019 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @09:35AM (#868439) Homepage
    I programmed the NeXT for about 2 years, starting on the emulated version that ran on a Sun workstation, and then on an actual cube.

    Though NeXTStep certainly is interesting, I do not join in the uniform praise for it that everybody else seems to have. I am also worried that the problems with NeXTStep are being duplicated in BeOS, OS X, and (somwhat) in Gnome and KDE.

    Good points:

    The postscript interface to the display. It included Adobe's "DPS", but it should not be confused with DPS on X. The important difference is that all commands (such as to create a window) were in PostScript. It is difficult to describe how incredible an advantage it is to only have to think about a single "context" to get all your work done. X is a total hassle where you have to manage windows, gc's, OpenGL glxContexts, DPS contexts, and perhaps the new "Xpicture" objects. NeWS also had this, and in fact integrated it better: the window-creation commands described the window shape using PostScript paths and transformations.

    The PostScript printer really worked, far better than the mess that is on Linux now. You could, with incredible reliability, do popen("lpr") and send any postscript you wanted, and it would queue and print!

    Problems:

    The lack of a hard disk on the base model was a real problem. Basically the optical disk had to be used as a hard disk. Jobs thought people would own their copy of the system and stick them in disk-less machines on a campus to enable them, this is in fact insane if you think about the need to store location-specific configuration imformation like the name of the printer server! (The machine I used had a hard disk, in that case the optical was an excellent back-up device)

    NeXTStep wad very slow to start any applications. It had to completely build every single control panel that would ever be used when it started up. At the time I thought this intolerable, but I guess it has become standard on Windows and Mac.

    This meant terminal.app was slow to start. Very frustrating for Unix users who wanted to create and destroy these rapidly. For this reason the first software we worked on was a replacement for the terminal (the marketing name was Communicae), and our intention was to bypass as much of NeXTStep as possible. I also wanted to get rid of the menu (which is pretty useless for a terminal) and it appeared to be impossible to make a menu-less NeXTStep program.

    This ran into the most serious problem. Though enough information was provided so that we could create plain windows with PostScript, getting them to cooperate with the NeXTStep programs required tracing down (often with disassembly) a lot of undocumented stuff. The NeXT programs refused to click on top of my windows, and many many other problems.

    This was an absolute pain in the ass, and NeXT's attitude that we were nuts for avoiding their wonderful code did not help. There are very good reasons for using low-level programming, for instance to get maximum speed, to try new GUI ideas, and (most important nowadays) to write cross-platform code.

    I want to plead to the OS-X (and BeOS) designers to not repeat this mistake: please document how to bypass the toolkit!. If you don't, people are going to write incredible kludges to achieve it, and you will have a worse problem remaining compatable in the future. And if you suceed in making it impossible to bypass the toolkit, you will completely cut off any company that is interested in porting software from Windows or Unix but not willing to commit a lot of resources yet...

    I also think NeXTStep had some design problems, and am scared at how many of them are being copied today:

    Steve Job's hatred for the second mouse button resulted in insane design decisions. The NeXT had two buttons, and there was an option to treat them the same or different. Unbelivably, this modified the server (rather than just set something that NeXTStep read). A program using NeXTStep (or even bypassing it) could not tell the two buttons apart, unless the configuration setting was changed!

    "Layers" This is being copied by Gnome, and sort of copied by the "Dock" being used by Windows and OSX and Gnome. "Layers" are why the menus and toolbars are atop the programs and have to "hide" when the program is "inactive" (not to be confused with child/transient-for windows, which are atop a *specific* window). "Layers" are also why the dock is atop all the windows, making a large amount of screen space useless (all modern systems "solve" this problem by providing the auto-hide option).

    Let me plead again with the designers: let me click any window atop any other unrelated window! It is not that hard, in fact it simplifies the interface considerably!

    And don't give me the excuse "but that will make the dock (or menu) hard to get to". That problem applies to every window on your screen, and you should be working on improving window navigation, not arrogantly claiming that some windows are "important".

    Jobs and many other UI designers seem convinced that showing a '/' character in a filename is user-unfriendly, and go through all kinds of weird hoops to avoid it. The Mac and Windows use newlines (and you have to hold a damn mouse button down to see it), while NeXTStep (and OSX) have this column arrangement where you have to scroll horizontally to see where you are! Comon, guys, it really is not that bad to display a slash! In fact the average user sees them all the time on the net! And if you did, it would be much easier and clearer how to cut & paste or drag & drop a filename!

    I did not like Objective-C syntax for methods, it was totally different than the syntax for a function call. This made it impossible to switch an interface between C functions and methods, even with macros. People say it was like that to "look like SmallTalk" but that is bogus, as SmallTalk has *only* that syntax. The dual syntax was so the parser could be cheap, no other reason!

    Also the first versions were too dynamic: if you mistyped the name of a method you would not find out until you ran the program and it tried to call it! Extremely bad for code such as error handlers that may never be called. They tried to fix this and had lots of trouble with already-existing code that relied on it (because you could create methods at run-time!).

  • Who said it failed? (Score:4)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @07:08AM (#868442) Homepage
    NeXT certainly didn't fail. Oh, the NeXT Cube and the other hardware offerings were never hugely successful -- the lesson there isn't new, any largely closed, difficult to upgrade and expensive hardware has faltered and ultimately failed without a redesign. That's the other lesson Jobs should have learned at Apple (other than the one about retaining 51% ownership).

    But the NeXT company and software, now, that succeeded very well. Microsoft ripped off some of the NeXT GUI's elements for Win95. The GUI itself has been cloned for other Unices. Their NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and WebObjects software has been very successful.

    And finally, Jobs and NeXT very successfully convinced Apple to give them money to take over the company. (Sure, on paper Apple acquired NeXT -- but look whose management is now in charge at Apple.)

    Hardware comes and goes, but the NeXT design concepts live on.
  • That is redundant. For a product like the NeXT machine, failing by definition means no market penetration. Again saying that Intel's products are sucessful because they have deep market penetration (that sound strangely erotic...) is redundant. Something causes them to have deep market penetration and that is why they are succesful. For example, good marketing causes them to be sucessful.

    Also, Intel survives on technical merit. The competing product are more expensive, and until recently, Intel had the highest performance in the x86 arena.

  • As if... (Score:3)

    by cracauer ( 6353 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:57AM (#868451) Homepage
    Owning a NeXTStation in 1991, I cannot share this enthusiasm.

    The Unix below was quite rooten, performance-wise, from a porting standpoint and from correctness and freedom of gcc warning issues in include files.

    The great GUI and its builder were shipped without documentation until Simson Garfinckle finally wrote his book. You were supposed to use their 5-day training and fill the holes with an expensive support contract.

    Hardware interface was also notoriously bad:
    - Ethernet and SCSI really had sub-standard
    performance. SCSI couldn't use many of the
    available PC disks at the time.
    - No slots, obviously.
    - Only 8 RAM slots in the station (=32 MB).
    - Non-upgradable Video card, and that with
    display postscript and its tendency to do
    single-pixel updates.

    I originally bought it mostly because it came with some nice commercial software packages bundled, because it was faster than a SPARC at the same price and I liked (and still do) Objective-C. PC Unixes were crap at the time. But soon the rotten Unix was what killed it for me, I bought a SPARC 18 months later (both systems from my personal money), sold the NeXT and was happy (until Solaris-2.1 made me switch to free PC Unixes). In retrospective, it had been better to buy the slower SPARC in first place and most of the commercial software sucked anyway and you weren't supposed to update the stuff that came bundled (as if much NeXT software ever got into several releases...).

    Martin
  • I have a real fond rememberance of them. They were one of the first 'real' unix boxen I used at Texas A&M. I still remember the specs: 15 MIPS, 2 MegaFlops (wow, eh?:) The A&M NeXT user group was called TexNext. We started out with a couple, eventually wound up with 6 cubes in Herb (H.R.Bright Building, our comp sci area). A couple years later, they spread, due to the 'pizza boxes'. We had a restricted access lab with about 25-30 of them, and another 5 scattered around campus. I remember the 2.88 drives the pizza boxes utilized. Someone else mentioned that they read Windows and Mac. Yup. Very nice, very handy.

    The GUI was beautiful. Their version of the Explorer/Finder was excellent. The dock was great. it's amazing how much they packed into a 17" monitor. The programming tools were slick. At one of our demos, they built a fairly simple app in under 5 minutes, needing only one line of code. The rest (all the GUI) they dragged and dropped. Very nice, and I didn't play with it as much as I wanted.

    One of things I really liked was Zilla. Hook up 5 machines to a network, run Zilla, and use them for parallel processing! One of the guys in the original lab (5th floor) was using them on his thesis. He could either use the NeXTs and a real language, or COBOL and the Cray Y-MP we had (this was in 1990-1991, so that thing rocked!)

    Oh, and the grayscale. I have no idea why, but you didn't miss color at all. Everything made full use of the different shades of gray. Impressive.

    All in all, I remember that they were only remotely affordable if you bought them through universities. Ours had a drive and an optical, and several of us were going to split the cost of a disk for it. Considering the hardware it seemed fast. It was Unix, it was elegant, stylish, and very cool. I need to go see if I find a gui to replace what I currently use. And dammit, I hope most of what made it cool makes it to OS X. I can't wait to see it running on ultra-fast hardware!
  • Be is more similar to NeXT than you think...

    Simple, clean and powerfull. Unfortunately very few apps. were available. Just finding a GOOD accounting package was a hassel (Never did find a reliable one). The standard apps (Spreadsheet, Word proc., Graphics) were easy enough to find but god forbid if you needed some thing special (Accounting, Payroll, Productivity).

    Ditto for BeOS. Accounting apps are among the most frequent gripes of BeOS users for some reason. (Funny, a $40 HP calculator and a sheet of paper works fine for me :)

    I miss their mail app the most. With the colorizer plugin you could sort out spam in seconds.

    In BeOS all email is stored by attributes... which means you can write shell scripts that work on email fields, sort mail, etc. Very cool.

    Come to think of it, their drag and drop was amazing. Grab an image file and drop it into Tiffany (graphics app), and viola!! it opens. Cut any data format and past it into almost any app and it would handle it.

    Translators. Just drag a new translator in to the appropriate folder, and *wham* even the simple image viewer can open photoshop files, etc.

    Try grabbing a section of excel and pasting it in notepad... The results are just not the same....

    Just grabbed a section of spreadsheet and pasted it into a word processor doc in Gobe Productive. Worked fine for me.

  • Re:Revolutionary software at least... (Score:3)

    by chriseh ( 220654 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @05:04AM (#868454) Homepage
    A couple of corrections regarding your post: First generation NeXT machines were 68030 (I believe), the NeXT Cube, Turbo and NeXTstation (+-color) were 68040s at 25 or 33 Mhz. Like even the Macs at the time, NeXTs had an internal and external SCSI bus, so adding a faster/bigger external HD was easy. I don't know of anyone serious who had a NeXT station without a HD. Also, the statement 'The DSP never got used for anything intresting' is completey false. IRCAM (a federally funded research orginization in France) used the NeXT to create the ISPW (Ircam Signal Processing Workstation) and there are probably still some NeXT cubes being used today for live/interactive DSP (although most of the components of the ISPW have been ported over to the Mac in MAX/MSP - www.cycling74.com or in IRCAM's jMax). This probably made the NeXT machine one of the coolest DSP machines ever. I do agree that the NeXT is a very cool looking machine, and I don't plan on getting rid of mine at all. It is/was incredibly stable and its attractive design makes a great terminal/discussion piece for the living room.
  • Bill Gates: Since 1984, a contest has been held on usenet for the most unreable, creative, bizzar, but working C program. What is the name of this contest?

    Moderator: Contest held on usenet for the most bizzar C program, but one that works. Anybody want to give it a shot? Going Once, going twice. Got nothing to loose, give it a shot here somebody? (Ring) Alright, Jean-Louis Gassée...

    Jean-Louis: Windows.

    [Roar of Applause from audience]

    - Computer Bowl, 1993

  • Maybe, maybe not. Putting your nationalism aside, though, can you say that it's a dumb person who knows how to sell to those 'morons'?

    I don't see anyone else doing it, at least not at the same scale.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
  • I remember seeing a t-shirt at Berkeley with the black cube NeXT logo, except that it read "NeVr". The t-shirt came from Apple and was being worn by a student who had interned there. If your product is late enough (and hyped enough) for vaporware parody t-shirts to appear, you've got a problem.
  • The problem with NeXT was that by the time it came to market in 1988 (two years late), the rest of the workstation market had caught up. NeXT was only incemental compared to these products:
    1) The Mac made the first significant commercial jump to bitmap graphics. NeXT just had a larger screen.
    2) Sun, MicroVax, HP, and Apollo had defined the UNIX workstation market by then. In 1984 when NeXT began, this market was still unformed.

    Other problems included price/perfomance:
    3) $6,000 commercial, about $4,000 for students. Very high then and now.
    4) The CDROM was extermely slow. You had to wait forever on disk ops. And of course, Steve J. banned the waiting-clock icon as "bad design". So you could click several times and really screw yourself.

  • The first commercial XWindows came out in 1987 from DEC on the MicroVAX. Sun and SGI did not adopt until early 1990s, though there were academic ports. NeXT started UI in 1985.

  • Waxing something NeXT (Score:5)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @05:13AM (#868475) Homepage
    Ah! It's about time the Slashdot community recongnized NeXT. So many Linux and *BSD users are oblivious to NeXTSTEP (and later OpenStep, Rhapsody and Mac OS X). The GUI, Objective-C, the programming framework, and Unix and Mach. They're a dream to use!

    The GUI: Pure gold, man. In many ways, the NeXT GUI is far more elegant and functional than even the Mac OS GUI- CDE and other WMs and environments for X11 come nowhere even close.

    Objective-C: A much better object oriented C than C++. More like a cross between C and Smalltalk than some tacky add on to C. Elegant, simple, and a minimal syntax change to regular C. Dynamic like Smalltalk, but retaining the run-time speed of C. Objective-C's dynamic nature allowed for great products like ActiveDeveloper and Joy Developer which allows Obj-C users to develop apps interactively like Smalltalk or Python, whereas C++ is about as static as it gets.

    Programming Framework: Killer API. A rich class library of support classes like the mutable array (what?! you're still rolling your own?) and dictionary (or hash-table) as well as the AppKit, the means of creating GUI apps. Also, distributed objects were a no brainer with the Foundation framework which was a part of NeXTSTEP. It's a good thing to see this framework brought to the masses in the form of GNUstep [gnustep.org].

    Not to mention the IDE... InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder are two tools which the world just recently cought up with. All of these ideas you see in most modern IDEs were invented for NeXTSTEP.

    Unix and Mach: What can I say? Geeks dig it. Mach allows for some funky IPC action, and if you wanted, you could always drop into tcsh if that's where you feel more at home. The truly great part? You didn't have to know how to use a shell to get work done. If you didn't know Unix, you could still have all of the power of Unix exploited by this wonderful OS.

    I still use my cube when I can, for lighter-weight computing, something I choose over my Power Mac G4 or a PC running Linux whenever I can.
  • Yes, the hype of Java has won out in WebObjects. As of WebObjects 5 (not released yet), WO will be "100% Pure Java." In the past, Java relied on a Java Objective-C bridge to use WebObjects, which was written all in Objective-C. Apple decided to rewrite WebObjects in Java so they could have the marketing markee "100% Java." It's a shame, but at least they're keeping Objective-C around for Mac OS X programming.
  • The first NeXT cubes were pretty pricey, but later NeXTstations were pretty competitive (around the 3-4K range, much cheaper most other workstation class computers at the time).

    My personal feeling is that NeXT's target market was too narrow and upgradeability was limited. About the only place you could buy one was through a university bookstore. This kind of limits the availability (how many university students can afford to shell out 4k for a really cool workstation). And at most university bookstores (that i've been in anyway), computer purchases are limited to students and academic faculty, so joe computer user isn't going to be able to walk in and purchase one, no matter how cool he thinks it is.

    CPU wasn't upgradable (soldered to the MB in earlier versions), so the slabs (even the Turbostations) were quickly left behind when CPU speeds increased.

    As far as being too different, the GUI was light years head of Windows 3.x and even MacOS at the time. It was easier to learn, and based on a BSDish Mach kernel. It was definitely ahead of it's time, but reached too small an audience for it to ever achieve a piece of the market.

    i still love my NeXT slab. The NeXT will always be my all time favourite system.

    imabug
  • Take from this page [whichauction.net]

    Jobs invited Gates to contribute software to the NeXT machine, but Gates declined, saying there wasn't enough money in the narrow market Jobs was pursuing.

    Note: He didn't decline because he was too busy innovating.

    I'm not simply trying to bash gates, but think of how much he and microsoft could have learned by simply being involved in a project like this. Yea, NeXT would have probably still failed, and yes Gates would have lost some money, but it could have been a real investment in knowledge.

  • Reading this article was like a freaky time warp!

    * The story itself deals with Jobs unveiling a revolionary CUBE computer, with innovative styling.

    * The other main story on the cover says "How Bush is winning."

    * The article itself is amlost identical to an article a couple of years ago whre Time chronicled Jobs' Apple turnaround, culimating with his famous Keynote. Many of the opinions of what Jobs was doing now vs. '88 are the same "Jobs is back", "He's learned from his mistakes", "He's matured".

    * Bill Gates disparaging a *nix distro as non-revolutionary.

    * Bill Gates saying he wouldn't write software for NeXT because the market was too small.

    Reading this article was weird, but the one thing that struck me was how nasty Bill was.

    -ShieldWolf
  • Dyson said if the NeXT caught on, Gates would produce software for it, because he "is a good businessman."

    Since the NeXT never caught on, the prediction was never tested.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • It didn't have a floppy drive. It started overpriced. It was dependent on a programming language which was never adopted in large numbers. There was no specific job for which it was more effective than other available options, leaving it with no way to "cross the chasm", and it was incompatible with everything.

    However, it hasn't failed completely yet. NeXT's operating system is the ancestor of MacOS X much like Windows 3.0 and DOS are the ancestors of Windows 98.

    Steven E. Ehrbar
  • NeXT did not fail. It just took a while to succeed. Steve Jobs and Alex Tevian (sp?) took over Apple during the merger. The Mac Cube with Mac X OS are the successors to the NeXT Cube and NeXTStep, with some Apple compatibility.

    When you got Steve's millions, plus millions from Cannon and Ross Perot, you can take a while.
  • I know that he and his company are odious in almost all respects, but seeing his picture in this article made me realise something:
    Gates embodies quite a lot of 'geek qualities' - just look at the photo, coffee cup hanging from fingers, dorky glasses, looking decidedly... scruffy (even in a tie).
    It might all be part of a carefully sculpted public image, but I get the impression that he doesn't care what impression he gives.

    So, I think he's cool (while also being thoroughly dastardly, don't get me wrong...).

  • It was hardly evident at the time that X would be the dominant non-MS windowing system. Sun itself had SunTools/SunView followed by its own Display PostScript-like system, NeWS. The latter predates NeXT's use of DPS by a couple of years. It flopped; Sun ultimately abandoned it, after bleeding much effort and money.

    And I have to disagree on the hardware angle. NeXT should have dropped the proprietary hardware angle long before it did; as it stands Jobs' insistance on an all-proprietary platform bled the company to the brink of bankruptcy, sacrificing efforts on the OS at a time when Microsoft had yet to obtain its total lock on the OS market. NeXTStep could have been a Windows-killer if the company had put all its effort into improving and marketing it (and providing more assistance to developers).

    We'll never know. Jobs didn't see that the window of opportunity for an all-proprietary platform that Apple had entered was closed -- closed by the accelerating market in commodity PC's on the low end, and a multitude of established Unix workstation vendors on the high end.

    -Ed

  • Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell? (Score:3)

    by Zoop ( 59907 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @05:32AM (#868514)
    > Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job

    Like most posts about Apple on Slashdot, I can see how someone would think that 5 or 10 years ago (you know, before Linux and Windows 95), but read a bloody paper. Have you seen the way Apple runs now? Have you seen their financial statements? Have you seen their stock performance?

    When Jobs took over at Apple, I was suspicious that it was the end, but I was proved wrong. What bothers me about this post is that it has been widely reported with data to boot and this guy still isn't aware that not only is the company making money, but it's making a lot of money. Most of that money comes from out-Dell-ing Dell on how to run a computer manufacturing company. Has everything Jobs done been successful? Far from it. But geez, read a freakin' paper.

  • Another interesting character... (Score:3)

    by gilroy ( 155262 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @05:55AM (#868520) Homepage Journal
    From the Newsweek piece:
    To finance the rest of his venture, Jobs made some new friends. He persuaded Texas billionaire
    Ross Perot to invest $20 million in NeXT and sit on its board of directors, bringing respectability and expertise to the fledgling company.
    Isn't that interesting? Nowadays, I don't think anyone would bring on Perot to add "respectability"... :)
  • There were also add-ons cards for the NeXT, The NeXTdimension, a color card for NeXTcube and also the Ariel . a multi-DSP card aimed at sound-manipulation. The IRCAM (famous French music institute) hadd a complete Ariel-powered NeXT network. Wow... These were more-than professional add-ons for what was already a more-than professional machine. :-)
    --
  • Another interesting tidbit about the Ross Perot/NeXT relationship goes thusly:

    One of the reasons Perot bought into NeXT because NeXT was doing all of their manufacturing in house, or more importantly, in the USA. Perot, as many can remember, was against NAFTA and is a big advocate of keeping business in America. He got really excited about a computer company that was making it's boards and boxes in the US, not some country in Asia.

    What's even more interesting is that when NeXT was not making any money making hardware, Perot, Mr. USA himself, advised that NeXT move their manufacturing operation overseas, to cut on costs.

  • Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell? (Score:4)

    by DrWiggy ( 143807 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @03:56AM (#868534)
    I thought that it was people like Woz that came up with the really cool stuff, and Jobs was just the man in the suit who sells it to the masses...

    I think the problem with Jobs is that he has suffered from a syndrome that he shares with Richard Branson. Because the companies he works for and has helped build are relatively high-profile in terms of branding and advertising, there is a media perception that he must be successful. In fact, Branson's companies aren't making profit at all but people perceive Virgin to be a success, and similarly people thought Apple was a great success when in fact whilst he was there the first time, it's fiscals didn't look anywhere near as good as they should have done.

    Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job - because the media have told you he's wonderful and it's just that everybody else is out to get him, you believe that he is indeed wonderful.

    I know I'm going to get flamed to hell for this from the die-hard Mac fans out there, but sorry, I just don't think that spin makes up for substance and as yet I've seen little from the Jobs camp apart from spin and the ability to have smart techs around him a lot of the time that come up with cool stuff.

  • Revolutionary software at least... (Score:5)

    by stripes ( 3681 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @03:56AM (#868537) Homepage Journal
    both the hardware and software were revolutionary and represent one of the biggest missed opportunities in the industry

    I never owned a NeXT, but the University I went to bought into it big time, so I did spend a bit of time playing with them.

    The software was revolutionary. In many ways we are still catching up. Definitly in having a user friendly Unix we are still catching up. As little as I liked Objective C's performance, it did make things easy. Nice, nice, nice software. Good choice of bundled apps for an academic market too.

    The hardware was not stunning at all.

    If you sat it next to it's Sun's boxes of the era it was dog slow (if you ran SunTools at least -- if you ran X the display on the NeXT xould catch up). Both had equivolent resultion. The NeXT has 4bit (8bit?) grey. The Sun had either 1-bit deep mono, or 8bit color (which could do 8bit grey) depending on which graphics option you got. The NeXT had a 68030 (68040? 68020? mmmm, maybe the 68030) at something like 20Mhz. Sun had recently come out with the SPARC 1+ the follow on to the first desktop SPARC, 25Mhz I think. But much much much faster. Doing a whole lot more per cycle then the Moto part. The SPARC didn't feel a little faster it felt a lot faster.

    The few hardware features the NeXT had and nobody else did were not particurlay well recieved. The "floptical" was a bit fragile, and most people only had the one and no HD so it wasn't removable media, it was just a slow hard drive. The DSP never got used for anything intresting, the promised high speed modem was extreamly late, and I not sure it ever worked. About the only inovatave hardware feature I remember on the NeXT was the cubes looked way cooler then even the new SPARC pizza boxes.

    But the software, oh man was that software ahead of it's time...

  • NeXT failed because:
    * It cost too much
    * The drive was too slow in the first version
    * It was a little too different from the rest of the workstation market at the time for the target market (Universities and Colleges) to be comfortable with it
    * Sun had more effective marketing in the target market at the time

    In short, it failed primarily because it was ahead of its time, and secondarily because of the whims of a competitive market.

    ----
  • According to the NeXT newsgroups, they're still doing the y2k upgrades. The cool thing about it is that it's not just a patch CD... When I requested an OpenStep upgrade for my cube, I got: OpenStep 4.2/Mach for m68k and Intel, OpenStep 4.2 y2k Upgrade Patch CD, OpenStep Enterprise for Windows, and Enterprise Objects Framework. It was a pretty sweet deal, seeing how I actually run NeXTSTEP 3.3 on my cube, and I simply had to fill an email form with my cube's serial number and tell them I wanted OpenStep 4.2. :)
  • I wonder what the probability is of Apple porting it to Intel? I guess slim,

    The chance of that is the chance that Itanium and/or Sledgehammer turn out to kick Power4's butt. I would put that as a good deal less than 'slim'.

    Oh, you meant the current processor generation? Right up there with Satan ordering snowmobiles, dude. Not absolutely impossible if somebody like Compaq makes an offer Apple can't refuse, though.

    I guess thats what they want, more Mac purchases.

    Yes. Apple is a hardware company. Many people miss this fundamental reality. Including Apple management, occassionally.
  • I have worked with NeXTs extensively. I started way back in 1991. I read about them in Time magazine, and instantly fell in love - I didn't know what Object Oriented programming was (I had heard of it though) - but those screen shots looked amazing. That summer, I had a job working for my university's [usask.ca] computer services department, and got to hear about what was happening all over the campus, computer-wise. A NeXT was coming! I went and found out who the CompSci prof was who was going to be responsible for them. Turns out they were brought in to work on the development of a user interface for blind users - cool! I pestered the prof a whole bunch and ended up getting sent down to Redwood City, California for the NeXT Developer's Camp (I was a CompSci wiz so this wasn't a huge stretch: the University and I shared the cost of the trip and the registration), in exchange for which I was to help on the UI for blind users.

    So, my first real programming job was in an OO environment like none I have seen since. I am a highly paid Java consultant with now 9 years of solid development experience. I have never programmed professionally in any other paradigm but OO (not that I haven't experienced others: structural (C, Pascal), functional (Lisp, Miranda), other declarative (Prolog), etc. etc.). Objective-C is a cool OO language that has strong type checking, but also allows weak typing (remember id?). Dynamic runtime binding is the rule. Method invocations could be forwarded. Classes were true objects in their own right which meant that static methods could refer to self and access the _current_ class (kinda like this accesses the instance it occurs in, in Java).

    The Interface Builder tool, even in it's early iterations was incredibly slick. No friggin' unstable code generation - instead a really stable flexible system similar to Java's serialization, but more flexible because of the dynamic typing (don't tell me Java comes close). The UI for the interface builder was cool and putting together the GUI for a prototype app was often just a few moments of click and drag. It wasn't just painting: it was putting in the connections between the Controller and all the live gui widgets.

    Ahh... those were the days...

    WebObjects [apple.com] is a very similar environment for building web apps. It has an interface builder that is slightly different from the NeXTSTEP one, but also very flexible and powerful. And of course OSX will continue the legacy that is still unrivaled (AFAIK).

  • I thought that it was people like Woz that came up with the really cool stuff, and Jobs was just the man in the suit who sells it to the masses...

    I am not an Apple fanatic and have never even owned one of their products. I do have a Next machine that I got a year ago just for the novelty of it but don't really use it (except for the 'guess where the power button is' game). However, I have a great deal of respect for Woz AND Jobs. While Woz was the tech genius behind the creation of the Apple products (and arguably the PC industry as well), Jobs was just as much the marketing savant that opened the collective consciousness of the people to the possibilities of computing at home. I don't see the PC revolution happening with the speed it did without Jobs. He's a guy that thinks outside the box (I hate cliches) all the time.

    If Jobs were in the automotive industry, he'd have been the guy coming up with the Dodge Viper's look, but without performance you couldn't justify the Viper's price. That was the problem with Next. It absolutely reeked with cachet but that alone wasn't sufficient to drive sales at the price they were asking.

  • I'm surprised I've not heard anyone else mention this yet. The original NeXT cube came with no hard drive- only an optical drive, which could handle 256 and 512 MB disks. Then they started coming with the OD for data and apps and 100 MB harddrives for the OS. Then they gave up on that and went just with harddrives.

    My cube has a working OD. Loud little sucker, it is. And slow, hence the move to harddrives. Just another bit of NeXT history for all you ignorant kiddies out there. :)
  • Anyone remembers Zila ? a utility rthat came with the machine and that was aimed at auto-distributing threads across a network.
    When using this feature with PhotoShop, we actually had a good time... :-)
    This was quite an elegant machine.
    --
  • Dude, have you ever actually used Aqua? It looks awfully tacky in GTK+/Sawmill themes, but the look and feel of it is, in my experience, not a hinderance whatsoever. Nor is it annoying.

    Also, deleting Extras.rsrc (the file to which you refer) makes is schizofrenic, not just revert back to a Mac OS X Server-esque platinum. But, have no fear! An Apple rep at MacHack (I believe) during a Q&A session confirmed that there will be some fascility for themeing in Mac OS X.
  • ---
    I guess this explains the 95% Windows's/PC marketshare then?
    ---

    Probably. Remember, we're not talking about technical merit at all. We're talking about individuals - it's hard to say Jobs is a moron, given that iMacs are selling like crazy. Gates isn't a moron either, at least when it comes to business. Bankrupt morals and poor product quality? Sure, but we weren't talking about that were we?

    Anyhow, just so you know, Windows is the majority OS outside of the US as well. Kind of blows your 'Americans suck' theory out of the water (not to say that we don't suck overall, but I think it's an issue with the human race in general).

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • Yes, I have a NeXT. (Score:3)

    by DrQu+xum ( 218745 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:05AM (#868565) Homepage Journal
    I first used a NeXT my freshman year at tiny Westminster College (New Wilmington, PA) in 1996 and thought..."Man, why does this look a lot like a perverted cross between MacOS and Win95?" Then I realized that they were actually sitting on Mach. What a concept - a pleasing GUI with a break-out to a real command line & shell! And it could read/write from both MAC & DOS floppies! It had a MC68040, onboard sound, and a MC56000 DSP port, so it had the best bits of MAC hardware without actually running MacOS (oops, flamebait). And it had on-board SCSI, so I could connect my ZIP drive to it! I actually formatted two ZIP disks for under the NeXT filesystem, which I believe was actually 4.3BSD's UFS.
    I loved those machines.
    WC liquidated the NeXTs last year (our European friends are laughing at our college's initials, I guess. :) I bought a slab/monitor/keyboard/mouse/laser printer combo for US$25. It still runs NeXTStep 3.3 in my bedroom whenever I feel like breaking away from the evil OS.
    LONG LIVE NEXT!

  • Attn. Solaris Users (Score:3)

    by freebe ( 174010 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @04:05AM (#868567) Homepage
    If you want to see what NeXTStep (OpenStep) looked like, you can still download OpenStep for Solaris here [brahma.imag.fr]. It includes a DPS server; just make certain you startx with -- -dpi 72. It should even run in iBCS under Linux (Sparc), though I haven't tried it.
  • Nope. While OpenStep is still in use, and people still develop for it, it doesn't run (nor did it ever, with the exception of within Apple) on PPC hardware. It runs on Intel and NeXT hardware (m68k - but *not* Macs!). NeXTSTEP 3.3 ran on NeXT hardware, Intel, HP PA-RISC, and Sun SPARC.
  • Doesn't Omni have a couple of the frameworks on which OmniWeb is dependent available, open-source style? Perhaps if someone ported those first to GNUstep, OmniWeb would be willing to do a port (or allow someone, under NDA) of OmniWeb, which is a great browser. Or would that violate the license of GNUstep? I cannot recall if it's GPL or LGPL.
  • I'll justify it... It's the chubby cheeks :-)

    Sort of makes them (emmet & steve) look baby-faced (not that that's a bad thing, some chicks dig that) :-)

    A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."

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