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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

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Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#251
post #4

My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.

In 1995 my parents talked about letting me pick a couple hundred bucks of any stock as a high school graduation present. I loved our Mac LC and suggested Apple, but they never went through with it. I'm pretty sure they thought I would just be throwing the money away with that pick.

Eyeballing the chart, it would have been right around the last time they paid a dividend until 2012 and the stock price would have been around 1.5. Also, there were three stock splits between then and now.

Oh well, I probably would have lost track of the stock in the many many moves I made during my college years.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#252
post #178
post #109

Earlier 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."

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 argumen…

Thank you for this. It is definitely good, in my opinion, not to forget all his flaws. He was an asshole. But he was also a genius. Most great people are like this, imperfect in some way, and I think it is naive not to recognize that.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#253
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it would be keeping Microsoft competitive on the desktop front - instead of today's languished desktop developer story which remains frozen in 1998 (for Win32) or 2005 (for .NET). Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and…

I happily used an openstep-inspired (or directly derived?) desktop environment named WindowMaker in Linux somewhere around 1999. I also remember LiteStep for Windows being available around that time. So there were attempts at using that approach on other platforms. (Funnily, my current Xfce setup still visually resembles my OpenStep-like setup of that time.)

Interestingly, I used it on Apple's MkLinux on a Powermac. When I returned to that office, all the retired Powermacs were running it on the operations staff desktops. Felt good.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me what ticker symbol I should buy today, that will rise in value over 10,000% over the next two decades. Nobody can. Over a 20 year timeline, it’s essentially the same as a roulette wheel.

That is disingenuously retarded and trollish. You seriously can't fathom that knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. gives you more information than random chance? How do you make any informed choice about anything at all then?

I can fathom it, but not on a 20-year timeline. The market prices stocks with all the information available. It's not perfect obviously, but it's better than any other price-generation algorithm that lacks a crystal ball. I you happen to have a unique perspective that the rest of the market lacks, then you can invest in that stock and make a good return.

But 20 years out, the hypothetical "I wish I had bought AAPL in 1996" is just as useless as the "I wish I had bet on green" comparison. In this scenario, it's an apt comparison.

Anyone making an informed choice in 1996, knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. would have stayed the hell away from AAPL

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#255
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love BeOS and had NeXTSTEP 3.3 (& later OpenStep) and BeOS running in my office. There was no real comparison, NeXTSTEP was better in every way except doing video demos. It was easier to program and had a decent UNIX. NeXTSTEP was multi-user. BeOS was superior to quite a lot of the other OSes at the time though. We will really never know, but I suspect there were some serious problems when Palm bought the code and…

Palm bought the talent not the OS.

Is there a source to that? I seem to remember quite a lot of excitement as a proven company bought the OS.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#256
post #86
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is demonstrably false. MacOS Copland was scrapped in favor of a descendant of NeXTSTEP that became MacOS X. Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP

This is ridiculous pedantry, but the "NS" prefix actually means "Next / Sun". It was introduced in OpenStep [1], which was supposed to become Sun's GUI layer on Solaris until Java happened. Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

nice one--just checked your source and you're absolutely correct. I'm not a Mac OS so i had no idea how Cocoa methods were prefixed, but i recall listening to a reply of session from the Apple developer conference around 2007 in which a fairly senior apple dev, which giving brief summary of the history of Cocoa, said more or less that "NS" stands for NextStep"

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it would be keeping Microsoft competitive on the desktop front - instead of today's languished desktop developer story which remains frozen in 1998 (for Win32) or 2005 (for .NET). Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and…

I sometimes wonder if we need anything really new as a desktop paradigm. I know you say that systems are stuck in the early 00s, and I know that the underlying APIs are going through slow changes (they are mature after all). But the ability to take a Mac from nearly 20 years ago and take one from yesterday and be able to use them in nearly identical ways (mobileme instead of icloud eh) is quite impressive. I have see…

I don't think Linux will ever take the desktop, per se. The only opportunity is to leapfrog over the whole paradigm.

Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm.

I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a psuedo-desktop UI paradigm where they can't really reap their advantages. At some point in the next 10, 20 years I think both mobile and VR will have their WIMP-equivalent UI breakthrough and we will have a real horse race, and Linux will be in a different position. Speculation of course.

* "Windows, icons, menus, pointer" was the big breakthrough discovery of the meat and potatoes of desktop UI

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#258
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I joined Apple Software Engineering in 2001 as a writer, the first thing I noticed was that former NeXT people ran the company, made the important decisions, and believed fervently that the new Apple would be wildly successful. Oh, how right they were.

>Oh, how right they were. Well, there's a sentence you don't hear often, nowadays!

Yes, if you live in the Matrix that doesn't acknowledge Apple's victories and praises Google and Microsoft failures.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#259
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great. I mean, the fact that NeXT tech was preserved and made popular is great.

To an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it would be keeping Microsoft competitive on the desktop front - instead of today's languished desktop developer story which remains frozen in 1998 (for Win32) or 2005 (for .NET). Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and…

Who cares?

What would be interesting, it would be compiling iOS Applications to macOS and JavaScript.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes wonder if we need anything really new as a desktop paradigm. I know you say that systems are stuck in the early 00s, and I know that the underlying APIs are going through slow changes (they are mature after all). But the ability to take a Mac from nearly 20 years ago and take one from yesterday and be able to use them in nearly identical ways (mobileme instead of icloud eh) is quite impressive. I have see…

I don't think Linux will ever take the desktop, per se. The only opportunity is to leapfrog over the whole paradigm. Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a p…

> I think be the end of the desktop paradigm.

Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Photoshop, AutoCAD).

None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by recent interaction paradigms (i.e. smartphones, tablets, or voice-control). VR's useful for visualisation, but that's a very limited use-case, and VR has been used for architectural and civil-engineering visualization for decades anyway (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA ).

Granted, when considering an iPad paired with a keyboard - we see some of those use-cases become almost workable again (namely word-processing), but it's essentially the same thing as a traditional laptop - just with considerably more painful precision object manipulation due to the lack of a mouse cursor.

I feel the biggest paradigm-shift over the past 10 years is the movement of database business applications away from Access, VB6, Delphi, etc to be web-applications, usually hosted locally, and more recently to being moved to multi-tenancy, subscription-based services ("the cloud") - this has now become acceptable to businesses: the trade-off of no-longer being in exclusive control of their data is increased uptime, reliability, and significantly reduced start-up and (usually) running costs - and being browser-based this has meant a shift away from WIMP - where an activity is contained within a small-ish, often fixed-size, "window", to a "page", which has its own interaction model (e.g. no more modal windows because you can always open a new browser tab).

The next iteration of human/computer interaction we'll see that impacts our (society's) actual working lives will be something that enables me to be more expressive without resigning any degree of control over what I produce - and right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously, a keyboard with which I can enter commands or prose almost as quickly as I can think it (with a very low error ratio too), and a mouse for quick, precise, (gorilla-arm-syndrome-free) content/command selection.

Until something comes along that enables me to be more productive for my employer the desktop interaction model will still reign.

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