'Steve Jobs In Exile' Remembers the Birth of the Web and 'Making Unix Taste Sweet' (arstechnica.com) 34
Ars Technica shares some anecdotes from Steve Jobs in Exile, a new book released last month:
[Author Geoffrey] Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs' "exile" era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT — notably, the NeXTSTEP OS — continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS. As Cain puts it, "NeXTSTEP was Steve's attempt to make Unix taste sweet...."
[W]hile many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath "and that he would dismiss [the web] as 'shit.'" (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation....)
Perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever. In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era — and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system — a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, "Why don't we just frickin' call Apple?" (NeXT was also struggling during this period.) And so someone did. As Cain writes:
Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man's voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett's call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple's airspace once again.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
[W]hile many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath "and that he would dismiss [the web] as 'shit.'" (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation....)
Perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever. In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era — and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system — a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, "Why don't we just frickin' call Apple?" (NeXT was also struggling during this period.) And so someone did. As Cain writes:
Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man's voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett's call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple's airspace once again.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
Erm no (Score:4, Insightful)
NeXTSTEP was Jobs attempt to sell $10k workstations to education.
And yes, money talks. Nothing to do with sales pitches or technical prowess of any kind. Let's not forget ObjC and the sheer amount of stress and madness it caused. BeBOX was waaay ahead of NeXTCUBE (in fact it was up there with alphas of the same era) and BeOS was waaay ahead of NeXTSTEP.
Re: Erm no (Score:3, Interesting)
Ugh why the ObjC hate. As someone who has had to use about a dozen languages for work and always thought C++ is a demented way to expand C to to OO (although I am fine with a subset if C++), I found ObjC a delight to use. Yes, the syntax may seem a bit silly/verbose and compiler people tend to dislike it, but many developers love it and I don't remember anyone in my ObjC teams being "stressed" about it. I am old school of course, so I am very comfortable with C and find it being a clean C superset an advant
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I liked ObjC enough that even when I didn't have to use it - for something outside Mac/iOs - I did, anyway.
Thanks for that! I'm glad someone else appreciates (appreciated?) ObjC for what it is/was. I never quite got C++, and struggled with Pascal with Objects / Delphi for some time. I came across ObjectiveC, and OO programming started to make sense. I went back to Delphi, and its OO take also began to make sense. And then I struggled with C++, so basically I use it as "C with Objects" and leave it at that. Still don't get C++ completely, and I'm fine with it. Basically all my programming is "retro" these days (D
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Ugh why the ObjC hate.
Objective C's syntax is objectively terrible; it mixes Smalltalk syntax with C syntax, confusing everyone [ashfurrow.com]. Its implicit heap usage makes it unusable for real-time programming (e.g. even Apple had to fall back to C to implement CoreAudio), and ARC is only a partial substitute for RAII.
Apple was right to switch over to Swift.
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Let's not forget ObjC and the sheer amount of stress and madness it caused.
Objective C is the logical way to add objects to C. C++ was an ad-hoc attempt that focused too much on inheritance and failed at encapsulation.
Re: Erm no (Score:3)
ObjAnything is an attempt at making code more "readable", nothing else. Stick to Lisp for everything else.
Re: Erm no (Score:5, Interesting)
LISP doesn't give any guidance at all on how to organize the code, but it is an extremely flexible language. The flexibility allows creative people to come up with new ideas and test them immediately. That is how Alan Kay came up with Smalltalk, which is a close cousin of Objective-C.
It's where Javascript came from (an excellent language for its original purpose: setting values). It's where the concept of the | in unix came from.
But LISP is not an easy language: the programmer needs to find the beauty. That is why it is not suitable for work: when money is involved, beauty goes out the window.
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OOP is a way to organize your code.
OOP is a way to organize your code while standing on the shoulders of giants.
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These days we mostly choose languages for library availability, not for features of the language.
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Objective C was what C++ would have looked like if it had a sane design instead of being 10 incompatible languages stapled together. The syntax was wonky, but it was an absolute delight of a language.
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NeXTSTEP was Jobs attempt to sell $10k workstations to education.
He wanted to sell them to business as well. But then Motorola started to choke while Intel and AMD were executing, and they had to port to PC. Then there was no justification for a big price tag.
BeBOX was waaay ahead of NeXTCUBE (in fact it was up there with alphas of the same era)
The BeBox was really a marketing stunt more than anything else. It was built around a Motorola PPC dev board. (sidebad: The "Geekport" a breakout box connector on the original hardware, and was included only because there were other needed ports on the same board that port is on.) With its dual PowerPC 603e processo
Re: Erm no (Score:4, Informative)
Comparing a 603 from 94 to a pentium pro is not nice. And you seem to be forgetting about the SMP which if I recall made BeBOX the only SMP workstation out there in 95. 21164A and SGI Octane came years later. There was amd OpenSMP but there were no motherboards, at least not untill 97/8.
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you seem to be forgetting about the SMP which if I recall made BeBOX the only SMP workstation out there in 95
Well, this is going to depend a whole lot on how you define workstation.
There have been multiprocessor PCs going back at least to 486s. SunOS 4 for x86 (which has been a thing for a lot of years) and SCO Unix would both run on a machine with 8x 486DX processors. That was pretty much intended as a server so far as I know, though.
A Sun SS10 (1992) has 2x SBus slots, each of which can be loaded with a 2x hyperSPARC module, available at up to 200 MHz. We had a SS10 and SS20 at Silicon Engineering called seismic
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I have and extensively used (mostly as an edit and trial compile tool more pleasant than Sun 3) a Cube (Businessland "fire sale") and a Slab (given to me after being abandoned in a customer lab). They were very smooth machines to use, at least as long as the monitors lasted. I bought a spare monitor from someone who was selling NeXT equipment reportedly surplused from somewhere in the intelligence community, probably bought because they were painted black.
"Executor" from Clifford Matthews/ARDI allowed Mac v
BeOS was actually pretty decent (Score:3)
Steve Jobs had too much ego to consider anything outside of the stuff he did (hence the panic over the web) but Apple learning from BeOS (and possibly Plan9 as well) would probably not have hurt.
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Yes. Essentially, Jobs was more of a problem than an asset.
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Yes. Essentially, Jobs was more of a problem than an asset.
Absent his RDF, yes, he would have been. But he was an effective marketing tool. He was also intelligent enough to see that the Newton was overwrought as a portable device and demand something simpler. The market was moving in that direction anyway, and he charged out in front of it successfully.
Re: BeOS was actually pretty decent (Score:2)
Methinks your sentence has two letters extra
He picked up his designer phone...in 1996 ??? (Score:2)
Re: He picked up his designer phone...in 1996 ??? (Score:2)
I assume the guy picking up the phone was a designer, he is picking up his designer phone in the same way batman picks up his batphone.
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I agree (Score:4, Interesting)
The real reason macOS often feels more coherent than other Unix derivatives lies in its NeXTSTEP heritage. While most Linux distributions and BSDs are fundamentally compositional (ie. assembling a kernel, userspace, init system, desktop environment, and numerous independent projects) macOS was built as a more deliberately designed system.
It shows up in several consistent mechanisms. Property lists (plists) serve as the primary format for preferences, application metadata, and service configuration across the platform. Launchd provides a unified, declarative approach to managing background processes. The long evolution of Cocoa and its successors established strong conventions for how applications should behave and integrate with the system. The result is lower cognitive load: fewer competing configuration styles and less need to learn the quirks of dozens of separate components.
This coherence comes from deliberate trade-offs. Apple has consistently prioritized opinionated design and predictability over maximum flexibility. Power users sometimes feel constrained by the guardrails, and the system has grown more locked down over time. Linux desktops have improved considerably with better tooling and declarative approaches, narrowing the gap in some areas.
Even so, the difference in day-to-day consistency remains noticeable for many who move between the platforms. The NeXT influence didn’t just deliver a kernel, it embedded a philosophy that an operating system should feel like a unified product rather than a collection of parts.
Linux could do this under, but under the leadership of one person. Unfortunately he's not interested from what I can see.
Re:I agree (Score:4, Interesting)
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To many that coherence you speak of it bad. Jobs went against everything that made consumer computers popular and went against the entire open culture of everything. Specifically configuration options. It was the Jobs way or the highway, the ability to configure things to function the way the owner wanted it to was ditched. You operated the way jobs wanted it to or it didn't allow it. Also the entire concept of suites of apps is anathema to open computing. Small dedicated apps that do one thing and do it we
Re: I agree (Score:2)
To many that coherence you speak of it bad. Jobs went against everything that made consumer computers popular and went against the entire open culture of everything. Specifically configuration options. It was the Jobs way or the highway, the ability to configure things to function the way the owner wanted it to was ditched. You operated the way jobs wanted it to or it didn't allow it. Also the entire concept of suites of apps is anathema to open computing. Small dedicated apps that do one thing and do it well was also ditched for integrated suites.
This screams bored kid that is trapped in the backseat of the family sedan. Like you had one family computer and your parents wouldn't let you build one or rip the panels off their car to see if it will go faster. I mean I get it.
Clearly having a finished well built product was more popular than "configuration options"
We've all grown out of this right? Somewhere in the past forty or so years we've all had the chance to buy, build, customize all of the above and conclude that a project car is cool and all b
Doom and Quake (Score:3)
The NeXT machines and the OS were used for both Doom and Quake, because the development env was so superior to everything else out there back then!
Be, Inc. v. Microsoft (Score:2)
Be will receive a payment from
Previous comments removed !! Why ??? (Score:2)
Is the whole book obsessed with alternate timeline (Score:2)
Is the entire book obsessed with overblown daydreams about alternate timelines? The summary makes it seem that every other sentence is going to be some pronouncement of "in any other timeline" or "in any other universe." Look, most of us nerds enjoy a good alternate timeline fictional universe, but could we maybe just report actual history as actual history, without trying to glaze alternate histories in the process? Save your fan-fiction historical universe for some other publication. Thanks.
Stop Kissing the Ass (Score:1)
Linux could learn from Next (Score:1)
1. no having to manage swap space
2. standard file format for storing preferences for user and system applications, except for very low level command line commands. That's why the unix directories exist still like
3. storage of file/dir owners and file/dir permissions
2 allows you to export and save settings for every application. This makes backup and restore easy.
3 allows the OS to repair itself in case file/dir owners and/or file/dir permissions do not match what is expected.