All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990) • Hacker News Board

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#81

Post by ConstantineXVI » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:48 PM UTC

thought_alarm wrote: post #58

jseliger wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to Model M keyboards? Or the recent editions of those keyboards (see more: http://jseliger.com/2008/05/07/product-review-unicomp-custom... )?

> How does it compare to Model M keyboards? The 1st-gen NeXT keyboards use Alps key-switches, like the Apple keyboards of the late-80s. The one I have is rock-solid and one of the finest keyboards I've used. It also had some clever innovations: - It is very compact. It has the same width as a traditional PC keyboard, but without the top row of function keys. That means it's only 5 rows high. - Consequently, the Escap…

The OS X keyboard technically still has a Caps Lock key; but you're free to remap it to any of the other modifier keys (or none of them) in the keyboard prefs. Being a Vim user I don't use Control much, so I put it to ⌘ to call up Alfred more easily.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#82

Post by zppx » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 2:52 PM UTC

zppx wrote: post #80

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT, effectively, acquired Apple for negative $429 million (and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock): As everyone knows by now, what began as an Apple purchase of NeXT has been turned inside out and become a NeXT takeover. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1997/03/2596 edit: I want to add a couple points to my followup. 1. NeXT's hardware was a resounding flop. Their state-of-the-art factory turned out to be for…

Takeover for me means change of hands of ownership and power of decision in the company, and whatever your technical or managerial arguments are I think the resulting company was owned by Apple's stockholders, Steve Jobs probably among then after the acquisition, not by NeXT investors.

For the 2 people that downvoted I would love to know what you consider a takeover. I'm pretty sure that in financial term takeover means change of ownership.

BTW, I'm quit, HN is just becoming a place where Steve Jobs and Rails must not be criticized, even when they must be. I will put some random string as my password and never return here, it was a good time but I think the community lost something in these years.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#83

Post by patrickgzill » Wed, Jul 06, 2011, 7:43 PM UTC

acg wrote: post #75

patrickgzill wrote: post #54

I used to sell NeXT software and hardware when working for a company called OpenSource (they actually owned the opensource.com domain name before RedHat got it). At that time "open" meant interopable rather than the current "open source software" meaning. For instance, the DBkit and EOF database software could talk to Sybase or Oracle or any other database for which there was a driver. As a result we used NeXTstation…

My understanding is the use of Open was used before this by Symbolics and possibly other lisp machine manufactuers. I'd argue too that their systems were more open, where the user could read the system software and patch it in while it was running. The foundations of the open source movement too stem from these communities (the GPL) not from NeXt. It would appear to me, like other Unix manufacturers, NeXt claimed ope…

The word "open" at that time, when used in conjunction with Unix, meant something along the lines of "POSIX" compliant. Even earlier uses were more along the lines of "uses TCPIP and supports NFS" IIRC, though that is before my time.

Open as used above, was started by the users, not the OS vendors, in reaction to APIs that weren't portable between different versions of Unix - the vendors were trying to create lock-in and the users didn't like it. Even Microsoft NT supported POSIX (not sure how well it worked).

Definitely the open source movement came from outside NeXT... Gnu was already around and used a lot, in fact the GCC compiler, ported for Next was the supported C/ObjC/C++ compiler.

Re: All NeXT Inc.'s Plant Lacks Is Orders (1990)

#84

Post by leoh » Thu, Jul 07, 2011, 5:40 AM UTC

recampbell wrote: post #65

mkr-hn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufacturing in the US has never been better. It's the number of people needed to manufacture stuff in the US that's been declining.

Yet both the iPad nor the iPhone were manufactured in China. Hence, I'm curious why Steve Jobs reversed an opinion he previously worked so hard to support, as evidenced by the article.

It might not have been his decision