Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

512pixels.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 267 posts

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#171

Post by mycall »

ksherlock wrote: post #119
Apocryphon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amazing factoid. "NS" standing for NeXTSTEP would then be a popular misconception, then. It also introduces an interesting hypothetical of what if Sun ended up adopting OpenStep, if Java was not developed in time or fell through or whatever.

The OpenStep spec was a collaboration between NeXT and Sun. OpenStep was available as a full OS (for 68k NeXT hardware and 486 beige PCs) as well as running on top of Solaris (SPARC), HPUX, and Windows NT. Sun went with Java instead but Microsoft has a WinObjC project. Go Figure. Until 10.7 or so, OS X still included Windows NT theme graphics [1]. NeXTStep 3.0 used the NS namespace; 2.0 and earlier was NX. [1] http:/…

TIL WinObjC is alive and well.

https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#172

Post by kalleboo »

jcims wrote: post #161
rootbear wrote: post #25

I was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortuna…

Didn't Steve have an email that was in your mailbox by default when you got a new account on a NeXT machine? It had some embedded images and an audio file of him talking. Anyway, I sent whoever it was, pretty sure Steve, an email with read receipt enabled and he bitched me out for invading his privacy. This was ~93 or so.

Looks like it was Steve https://www.flickr.com/photos/allardjm/480786084

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#173

Post by adventured »

Ronleflore wrote: post #144
acchow wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's no longer the case. ESPN has seen its profitability roughly slashed in half in the last four years. Simultaneously they're rapidly bleeding subscribers while they've overpaid for sports rights at exactly the wrong time.

ESPN is at about $9.5b to $10b in sales for 2016 and $1b in operating income. Those numbers will decline until operating income is closer to $300m-$500m in the next few years.

By comparison, Disney did $9.3b in net income for 2016 ($14.2b operating income). ESPN is down to being closer to 10% to 15% of Disney's profits and 18% on sales. As a business it's a looming disaster of value destruction from the former peak.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#176

Post by rahoulb »

icedchai wrote: post #163
brians wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where's the $15k super machine for today? I'd absolutely look to pay that for something with a similar advantage over a MacBook Pro.

Most of the advantage was the software. NeXT gave up on hardware by 94 or so. Oh, and then the web happened, setting us back 20+ years in terms of application development productivity.

The web happened. On an NeXT

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#178

Post by SiVal »

tlow wrote: post #109
hbosch wrote: post #58

Earlier 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."

Yeah, sure. I worked with Jobs (not for him) when he was at NeXT and I was at a closely affiliated company. I asked Jobs once in a meeting if he would ever consider moving the NeXT software onto non-NeXT hardware to give it more reach. He exploded, as was his way, and answered my question by pointing out that he drove a very expensive Porsche while my car was just a cheap econobox. That was his entire counter argument to me. Many of us had read his first biography "The Journey is the Reward" and knew that the guy thumping his chest about how his expensive car demonstrated his superiority had fathered and abandoned a daughter who had been living nearby on welfare checks that were paid for by us little people who paid taxes and drove economy cars.

Talk about "my regard couldn't be any lower".... I think Isaacson's book pretty much described the guy I remember.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#179

Post by tim-- »

dglancy wrote: post #50
wineisfine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So OSX has nothing to do with unix/linux?

macOS (and older OSX releases) are UNIX (see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm for certifications). Linux is not UNIX (its not certified - not many are - see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index.html ) and could best be described as POSIX like.

Let's be fair here, K-UX is running Linux, and it's certified by the Open Group.

It's based on Red Hat. It has been officially certified as UNIX by The Open Group.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#180

Post by tim-- »

flomo wrote: post #164
wineisfine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the explanation. I thought Unix and Linux had something to do with eachother, but looking at the downvotes, I was wrong :D

UNIX is an open standard with a certification program, and Linux certainly tries to follow the standard. The only real reason that a Linux distribution hasn't been UNIX-certified is because RedHat and IBM found there was very little marketing value in calling it UNIX, that is, Linux is a stronger brand. And I suspect the only reason MacOS is UNIX-certified is because they advertised it as "UNIX" and were sued by The…

K-UX is Linux. It is certified. It's based on Red Hat.
Post reply on HN