If only I had had money to buy Apple stock in 98 lol, be well retired now, instead of going to graduate school taking out a loan to buy tons of Apple stock would have been a far smarter move
20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
141–150 of 267 posts
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#142I copy from a comment of mine from last week. In case you wanna procrastinate on a fascinating story about how Apple transitioned to NextStep's stack without completely annihilating their already weak developer base, here's a few links: You get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations: Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch b…
I was for a while thinking of the case where Apple bought NeXT but Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock stayed as CEO, and CHRP actually happened. While PC margins was declining, I was thinking that Apple could mostly focus on the higher-end PC and workstation markets, especially as OpenStep/Rhapsody was a UNIX.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I…
> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS. Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.
Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Microsoft applications like Multiplan were available for a variety of platforms, running CP/M and a variety of other operating systems. You could get Multiplan for systems as small as the TI-99/4 and as large as Xenix!
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, Pixar totally "bought" Disney Animation and, to a lesser extent, the theme parks. I'm told John Lasseter has been deeply involved in them. That would be going home for him, he worked at Disneyland as a youth.
Sure, but Disney is a lot more than Disney Animation... Isn't i mostly Marvel and Star Wars anyway?
Disney is mostly ESPN, based on profits.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#145Your comment is not relevant or appreciated. Not only are you not adding to the discussion, this comment is simply a personal opinion coupled with an undependable generalizations about "many people" without even addressing the topic of discussion. Isaacson's book is not generally accepted as the de facto Steve Jobs biography. That is all.
Your comment is not relevant or appreciated. Not only are you not adding to the discussion, this comment is simply a personal opinion coupled with an undependable generalization about what "many people" consider relevant or appreciate without even addressing the topic of discussion.
You are a troll. Congrats on your attempt to be clever.
I believe that this line is actually quite on topic: "Isaacson's book is not generally accepted as the de facto Steve Jobs biography. That is all."
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the Taligent reference. Taligent happened while Jobs was out of Apple -- it was a competitor to NeXT back when everything was about "object-oriented desktops", and Jobs didn't like them, much like he didn't like OpenDoc, for pretty good technical reasons. It's not surprising that Taligent went nowhere, same as OpenDoc.
I was comparing NeXTSTEP with one of its contemporaries to show how innovative and polished it was. Taligent was supposed to be the standard and it was a true pain in the butt to program. Apple and HP bailed in 1995. I did like the concept of People, Places, and Things. It is a shame that little pieces of a good idea can be lost because of the overall failure.
Thanks, that makes sense — it sounded to me like you were saying Taligent was an example of a NeXT library.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#147I copy from a comment of mine from last week. In case you wanna procrastinate on a fascinating story about how Apple transitioned to NextStep's stack without completely annihilating their already weak developer base, here's a few links: You get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations: Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch b…
I was for a while thinking of the case where Apple bought NeXT but Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock stayed as CEO, and CHRP actually happened. While PC margins was declining, I was thinking that Apple could mostly focus on the higher-end PC and workstation markets, especially as OpenStep/Rhapsody was a UNIX.
According to Jobs they were at times 90 days away from bankruptcy. If that's true I'm thinking nothing but Jobs' full steam turnaround, including getting Microsofts' investor money could have saved the company. Doesn't seem to me like Armelio had either the energy nor the connections to do that.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS. Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.
Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Microsoft applications like Multiplan were available for a variety of platforms, running CP/M and a variety of other operating systems. You could get Multiplan for systems as small as the TI-99/4 and as large as Xenix!
> Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed.
Not actually true. DOS was already done when Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox Parc to start its application division in 1981.
Multiplan and Word were the first results, released in 1983, by which time it was obvious that Lotus 1-2-3 was going to win.
Simonyi had big ideas about "metaprogramming" and using what was basically a VM to make applications portable. (I ran Multiplan on a Tandy 100-style portable, where the program came on a chip!)
In an interview, Simonyi said:
QUOTE
"Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were. "Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel."
https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.comput...
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is generally considered the definitive biography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)
Definitely not true. As a concrete example disproving your fallacious post, I refer to Mr. John Gruber who called Becoming Steve Jobs "the book about Steve Jobs that the world deserves". Johny Ives says of Isaacson's book, "My regard couldn’t be any lower."
No, it's 100% true. It's the book Steve Jobs had written as his official biography, so it's de facto the official biography. It doesn't matter if there is a better book, and your aggressive tone is not helping your argument.
Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely not true. As a concrete example disproving your fallacious post, I refer to Mr. John Gruber who called Becoming Steve Jobs "the book about Steve Jobs that the world deserves". Johny Ives says of Isaacson's book, "My regard couldn’t be any lower."
No, it's 100% true. It's the book Steve Jobs had written as his official biography, so it's de facto the official biography. It doesn't matter if there is a better book, and your aggressive tone is not helping your argument.
"official" and "definitive" are not synonyms.