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A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

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Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#31

Post by jki275 »

munificent wrote: post #29

It's crazy to think that if: 1. Apple had bought Be instead of Next. 2. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep. 3. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of Objective-C. 4. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C. 5. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its shortcomings. Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C+…

Apple would not exist if they had bought Be instead. Buying Next brought Steve back, and that's the only thing that kept Apple alive.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#32

Post by btilly »

icedchai wrote: post #19
agloeregrets wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround sto…

Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)

The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience.

As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again.

Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#33

Post by arjunrc »

cmacaskill wrote: post #4
Tepix wrote: post #3

Fantastic read. Once again, the chaotic nature of our future unfolding. These days, the scientists that advise our countries‘ leaders about the pandemic can make a difference as Chris MacAskill made back then.

Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it and history will forgive you later.

OP shows up to comment! Love your article! I echo the first comment in your article, about writing a book. There can be never be too many books about 90s era Jobs.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#34

Post by sys_64738 »

coldcode wrote: post #7

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from…

Steve laid off a sizable chunk of non-Nexters when his people started to fill the top spots at Apple. The cutting was deep and brutal. Would you have survived?

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#35

Post by sys_64738 »

jhbadger wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #7

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from…

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

Apple was also in close to licensing Sun Solaris 2.5 which already ran on PowerPC. They just had to put the Apple UI on it but history happened.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#36

Post by zdw »

sys_64738 wrote: post #35
jhbadger wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

Apple was also in close to licensing Sun Solaris 2.5 which already ran on PowerPC. They just had to put the Apple UI on it but history happened.

The alternate timeline where sometime in late 200x Apple buys Sun (instead of Oracle) and still invests in Unixy datacenter things, ZFS, and similar tech that Sun was good at, and use it to build high quality services and hardware is a fun thought experiment to explore.

Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#37

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jhbadger wrote: post #10
coldcode wrote: post #7

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from…

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

Are there any engineers on HN who worked on Copeland? Because I've always found it astounding that while the stated reason for the NeXT aquisition and the transition to the OpenStep-based OS was that Copeland was still years away from completion -- but then after Jobs took over it was still 5ish years for OS X to finally be released... And in the meantime they continued to release OS 8 and OS 9 as updates, including some tech that was under development from before the NeXT acquire.

Surely Copeland could have been completed in that time period. Or was it _really_ that off the rails? 5 years off the rails?

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#38

Post by cmrdporcupine »

munificent wrote: post #29

It's crazy to think that if: 1. Apple had bought Be instead of Next. 2. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep. 3. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of Objective-C. 4. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C. 5. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its shortcomings. Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C+…

Dylan was the C++ alternative that was being developed at Apple before the Jobs coup. It had all kinds of awesome sauce, much much better than Objective-C. Likely a non-Jobs Apple would have used Dylan in conjunction with C++, or Java since that was in ascendency at the time. The hate for any tech that came from Newton or was non-NeXT in general was a Jobs thing.

Also it's nice to think about an alternate universe where we had Newton descended mobile products, rather than iOS.

Re: A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

#39

Post by cmrdporcupine »

chrislund wrote: post #30
munificent wrote: post #29

It's crazy to think that if: 1. Apple had bought Be instead of Next. 2. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep. 3. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of Objective-C. 4. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C. 5. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its shortcomings. Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C+…

I wonder then if iOS would’ve ever happened. Probably not, unless they still somehow got Steve Jobs. Apple at least incidentally got some of the benefit of BeOS, or really, the talent behind it: Dominic Giampaolo, who contributed significantly to BeFS, has been with Apple for some time now working on their file systems. I think he is/was a principal on APFS. I’m sure there are others! Also, muni! From robot frog!

Newton's OS was the iOS of the 90s. A very compelling system.
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