After his departure from Apple, Steve Jobs created NeXT Computer, a company which has had a large impact on the design of operating systems today. NeXT was the creator of the first commercially viable object oriented operating system, the first hybrid microkernel, and numerous other notable innovations. Read the whole story at Braeburn.
For those interested in kernel classifications, here is a nice starting link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_(computer_science)#Hybrid_kernels_.28aka_modified_microkernels.29
Actually, the wikipedians are still arguing over what the true definition should be. And as always with words, there’s no 1 true definition.
I found the article informative; learned a few things I didn’t already know.
However, it’s also very unclear about why it failed. It says ‘Well NeXT sold a lot!’ and then ‘so NeXT discontinued’.
Jobs wanted to kill Macintosh the moment he saw it. Jobs thought Lisa was the big ticket. Jobs leaves a long trail of overpriced boutique knick-knacks that are big on hype and way, way short on delivery. Jobs has never successfully run a pure computer company. NeXT only had a profitable quarter _once_ in its fourteen year run and even now Apple is successful because of the boutique element, not because of their computers.
The article itself shows how out of touch Jobs is – it claims NeXT prepared the Cube for general public, only it was priced at $6500 to _developers_ in 1988.
Actually, the original poster is correct about Lisa. Jobs only hijacked the Mac group once Lisa had failed.
For those of you wondering about the early days of Lisa/Macintosh/Apple, check out http://www.folklore.org
“Jobs wanted to kill Macintosh the moment he saw it. Jobs thought Lisa was the big ticket.”
Your history is backward. Its the other way around.
“now Apple is successful because of the boutique element, not because of their computers.”
And your a troll.
No, your post is BS.
IMHO, no personal opinion should ever be called BS.
Sorry, but am I the only one who thinks that computer in 1985-1994 give us a bigger thrill? After that it was all about PC. Before we had so much cool systems. I wish I had time michine and get back to 1990 to talk c=64 vs. Amstrad vs. Atari vs. Spectrum vs. WhatEver over the beer. We had different POV, yet, we all pushed our solutions to the next level. Thanks to $GOD, we have FOSS now, and I almost feel ,,yer ol’ vibes” of computers.
The NeXT was awesome. Imagine what the desktop computing world could have been if OpenSTEP had become the standard for PCs. Instead most people run that stinking piece of shit called the proprietary Microseft XP system. Thank God NeXT lives on OS X.
Supposedly (a rumor I guess) IBM wanted to license NextSTEP for their PCs.
“Supposedly (a rumor I guess) IBM wanted to license NextSTEP for their PCs.”
In Alan Deutschman’s book, “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” he details an account where IBM was very interested in NeXTSTEP… or at least licensing it. And even though NeXT desperately needed the cash at the time, he turned down the offer becuse the license fee was too low in jobs’ opinion.
In Alan Deutschman’s book, “The Second Coming of Steve Jobs” he details an account where IBM was very interested in NeXTSTEP… or at least licensing it
Yes, that is where I read it, but its hard to google info on it, so I was never sure of the validity of it. If that’s true then Jobs turning down the offer is probably the second biggest blunder in IT history, next Gary Kidall going out flying planes or whatever when the IBM guys came over to talk about licensing CP/M
“…biggest blunder in IT history”
You’re assuming that the IBM NeXTSTEP combo would have the same success that Microsoft did when they gained initial acceptance by riding IBM’s coat tails.
Microsoft’s dominance came about through 3 factors: Riding IBM’s coattails, HP reversing engineering IBM’s bios to make clones, and Microsoft’s exclusionary, anticompetative business practices.
Had NeXTSTEP been licensed or sold to IBM, IBM is unlikely to have licensed the architecture to others, and then the same exclusionary, anticompetative business practices that Microsoft employed would have to be used JUST to get an equal footing with Microsoft. If you ask me, Steve was right in holding out… no matter how desperate he was.
Look what that stance got him… a large sum of money for the opportunity to take over Apple.
Who says that Jobs would have given IBM an exclusive license? IBM might have asked for it, but who knows. In any case even if it was an exclusive license,
NextSTEP would have been so far ahead of any Microsoft offerings at the time that IBM probably would have been like Apple today, except much better (a bigger headstart), and much larger marketshare.
I stand by my original statement that if had IBM had made an offer to license NextSTEP then its the second biggest blunder in IT history. Jobs got lucky that he got back in Apple. Apple would have just bought BeOS if the price had been right.
“Jobs got lucky that he got back in Apple. Apple would have just bought BeOS if the price had been right.”
Actually, Gassee was only asking $100 million, while Amelio paid Jobs $400 million to take over Apple. My understanding is that Be’s people spent a lot of time talking about the technical aspects and weren’t very polished in their presentation, while Jobs did his usual carnival showman glitz and glamour – and he only got involved after he heard that Apple was talking to Gassee.
I played with BeOS on my dual processor 7600 (aftermarket card) and it was everything they said it was and more. There was even a full MacOS environment, which I believe later became SheepShaver. Be was getting it right in the mid-90s, while Apple/NeXT has taken eight years to reproduce what NeXT was doing in the eighties (they never even bothered to take the “NS” prefix out of the Cocoa APIs).
Changing the prefix of the OpenStep classes would break things for no good reason. It does however highlight how strange using transient things such as company names as “namespaces” is in source code. I thought about it a number of times with the rise of the “reverse DNS” package habit championed by Sun. Domain names and the ownership of intellectual property are completely transient things. You can change things and break old software (or at least require pointless, time-consuming renaming) or you can continue having some other name associated with your assets. D’oh.
“Changing the prefix of the OpenStep classes would break things for no good reason.”
Oh, I don’t know. Not making the existing Macintosh developers feel like second-class citizens and showing that the Macintosh wasn’t going to be a rebadged NeXT seems like two good reasons to me. Then again, since the intent was to do exactly those things, I guess there was no reason to change the prefix.
You seem to be insinuating that Mac developers are stupid.
“You seem to be insinuating that Mac developers are stupid.”
Quite the contrary, and I don’t know how you came to your conclusion. It has always been Jobs that has been very adamant that MacOS developers (the real ones not the NeXT transplants) are behind and holding the Mac platform back. The push has always been to abandon anything Macintosh and embrace everything NeXT. It wasn’t just the outside developers, either. Many, if not most, of the Macintosh engineers were targeted and pushed out. The Human Interface Group was personally tracked down and eliminated by Jobs. Here, I’ll make a prediction – Carbon will _not_ make it to the second release of Intel based OS X. Jobs will make some speech about it being in the past and not a lot of developers were using it anyways. Just another Macintosh memory he’ll try to exterminate.
If having ‘NS’ prefixed to a class name is an indication of:
“Not making the existing Macintosh developers feel like second-class citizens and showing that the Macintosh wasn’t going to be a rebadged NeXT seems like two good reasons to me.”
Then that sounds like you’re characterizing them as stupid to me. Breaking the OpenStep API for a prefix convention seems pretty stupid to me.
“Breaking the OpenStep API for a prefix convention seems pretty stupid to me.”
I have no idea where you’re coming from. “NS” stands for “NextStep,” the original name for the OS. Keeping NS made it clear that this was _not_ going to be Macintosh, it was going to be NeXT and if Macintosh developers didn’t like that, they could go away because they weren’t wanted anyways. Everytime you use a NS class in code you’re reminded that it’s NeXT classes, not Macintosh. That wasn’t accidental or an avoidance of breaking an API (which can all be handled transparently in precompiler macros and other substitutions). It was done to remind everyone that Jobs was back and he’d won.
Even your point that it was the OpenStep API ignores the obvious – it wasn’t NeXT OS, it was MacOS. NeXT was supposed to cease to exist once Apple bought them, except it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the Macintosh ceased to exist.
NS Does NOT stand for NeXTSTEP. NS stands for Openstep.
Having worked there and sitting through countless meetings when we went from NX_HOST to NS_HOST they had several obscure reasons for not switching to something like, OS_HOST.
Just remember the following: NX is for NeXTSTEP and NS is for Openstep.
“NeXT was supposed to cease to exist once Apple bought them, except it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the Macintosh ceased to exist.”
And considering the direction Macintosh was going when Jobs and NeXT came onboard, Thank Figging God.
“NeXT was supposed to cease to exist once Apple bought them, except it didn’t happen that way. Instead, the Macintosh ceased to exist.”
And considering the direction Macintosh was going when Jobs and NeXT came onboard, Thank Figging God.
In some ways, yes. But in quite a few ways, OS X manages to leave out useful features from both the OSes it descends from.
I obviously made the mistake of assuming that you weren’t a complete lunatic. If a two letter prefix makes any difference to you as to the nature of the technology used, then I can only hope that you are not a programmer.
Since you’re such a big advocate in breaking software and creating dozens of headers for wrapping one convention for another (making debugging a truly eye-opening endeavor) please take the hours necessary to write preprocessor definitions converting every instance to “AC,” “APPLE,” “MACINTOSH_IS_THE_BEST,” or whatever substitution will make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
Further, please rejoice when anything that makes use of classes dynamically breaks on you. Or when you use reflection to inspect running and objects…and they information isn’t what you want.
“My understanding is that Be’s people spent a lot of time talking about the technical aspects and weren’t very polished in their presentation”
I’ve heard several reports saying that the thing that sold Apple on NeXT was not so much the showmanship, (though I’m sure that was a great deal of it… Steve is all about the presentation) but the primary reason why Apple went with NeXT rather than Be was because NeXT’s development was much further along than Be’s was at the time. It would have cost Apple a great deal of time and money to get OS X to the level they wanted it to be at.
Microsoft’s dominance came about through 3 factors: Riding IBM’s coattails, HP reversing engineering IBM’s bios to make clones, and Microsoft’s exclusionary, anticompetative business practices.
Compaq reverse-engineered/clean-roomed the IBM BIOS. HP didn’t exist back then.
“Compaq reverse-engineered/clean-roomed the IBM BIOS. HP didn’t exist back then.”
They didn’t?
I suppose you mean to say that HP (who certainly existed then) hadn’t yet acquired Compaq. But truly, Compaq’s actions had a great effect on the explosion of the “IBM” PC platform.
Having worked at NeXT, IBM did license NeXTSTEP and guess what? When ported to IBM hardware it ran faster than AIX.
Well that didn’t sit well with certain executives, so they put NeXTSTEP inside and emulator layer, which slowed it down and managed to bs their higher ups that AIX was better and that NeXTSTEP was slower.
If more top executives knew about the technology their teams push perhaps we wouldn’t be sitting in a Windows World, albeit slowly dissolving[painfully slow].
You forgot about another stinking piece of shit called the proprietary OS X system.
http://www.landsnail.com/apple/1990s2.htm
A critical look at Steve Jobs and his NeXT computer company.
Actually, the original poster is correct about Lisa. Jobs only hijacked the Mac group once Lisa had failed.
Jobs got kicked out the Lisa project well before it failed, and then yes, did hijack the Mac project.
The article itself shows how out of touch Jobs is – it claims NeXT prepared the Cube for general public, only it was priced at $6500 to _developers_ in 1988.
Except, that also included in the article, was the out of court settlement between Apple and NeXT, forbidding from NeXT competing with Apple (i.e. in the lower-end market).
But, the article itself is out of touch with reality. Painted a way rosier colored picture about NeXT than what actually happened (As you mentioned, only having one profitable quarter, etc). Don’t get me wrong though, I love NeXT (have two turbo color slabs sitting on a shelf behind me).
This is over antiquarian interest…
let’s not forget it please, http://livecd.gnustep.org/
GNUStep is one of the few projects from the FSF that I am actually quite pleased with, and cannot wait until it is “fisnished.”
I’d like very much to see a Hurd live CD based on it, like the Linux one you linked to.
By the time the rest of the packages are complete, the Hurd might actually be usable for everyday things (read: has enough drivers ported to it).
A man can dream, can’t he?
stop posting stuff like this.. it’s boring =/
You know you don’t have to click on every story.
Try reading the headlines – this will give you a general idea as to whether the article will be of interest.
If after reading the headline you are not bored then read the summary.
If after reading the summary you are still not bored then read the article.
If after reading the article you are still not bored then you might like to participate in the discussion.
Remember you can halt this process anytime you are bored.
Actually he jacked it before it failed.
GNUStep is great, but they really need to build their own OS. And I’m not talking a linux live CD based on Morpix either, I mean take one of the BSDs (or linux I suppose, if you really want to deal with the GPL and ensure it will be a cold day in hell before you ever get any commercial drivers) and fork it into their own OS that they can make behave exactly the way they want it to instead of fooling around with symlink hacks and other trickery. Thats an OS I believe I’d actually enjoy using.
I bought a fully loaded NextStation Color Turbo when I was in college for around $15,000……best computer I ever owned.
Thanks to the miracle of eBay I’m now the proud owner of a mint Turbo Dimension Cube.
Now if only someone would sell me a Pyro card…
Don’t suppose any ex-Next engineers would want to create a 68060 based motherboard to run NextStep? Just for kicks? Anyone?
I bought a fully loaded NextStation Color Turbo when I was in college for around $15,000……best computer I ever owned.
Thanks to the miracle of eBay I’m now the proud owner of a mint Turbo Dimension Cube.
I traded an old SGI teal Indigo2 for a near mint Turbo Color Station.
I too have a Turbo Dimension Cube.
Excellent condition too!
Gno GnuStep.
Am I the only one sick of seeing these NeXT stories every other day on here?
Have to laugh when people call ‘next’ ahead of it’s time.
Come’on boys. Jobs is the ultimate copycat and salesman.
All the parts of next were basically off the shelf. Computers are just pieced together of everday store stuff.
Some of you people scare me . $6500 dollars for a computer. No way Jose !
Also, applications put the scrollbars on the right side of the window, where most people focus, rather than on the left, because the placement of the menu bar attracted peoples’ attention to the right side of the display.
Apparently, the author has problems knowing which side is left and which is right…
I found that especially funny with the image right next to the text showing that they were clearly on the left.
I was told NX is the short for NeXT, and NS the short for NeXT and SUN. Go read up the spec about OpenStep (they’re given out by SUN and NeXT).
/me is a proud owner of a NeXTstation Turbo
🙂