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Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

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Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#101

Post by rjrjrjrj »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #4
ktallett wrote: post #3

They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware. I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.

NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features…

> All macOS is is just a different window manager

This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager.

From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word

By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#102

Post by hylaride »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #88
jorisw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded. But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books

To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.

Microsoft brought in an external OS designer (Dave Cutler) who had experience designing robust kernels that were actually used (most famously VMS). NT also was not required to be an instant switchover, and was "tested" first in niche (and often new) roles as a back-office server OS and NT/win2k corporate desktops for years before the general public was exposed to it via Windows XP. But Microsoft supported windows 3.11/9X/ME for more than a decade after windows NT was first released in 1993.

Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#103

Post by WillAdams »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #91
stevefan1999 wrote: post #67

Did people literally forgot that John Carmack's Quake was made on a NeXT workstation...

Even more significantly, Tim Berners-Lee made the first web browser and server on a NeXT Computer.

Yeah, I meant to work that into my post as the final twist --- his book _Weaving the Web_ was written using one of my favourite tools, NaviPress, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which supported the HTTP Push protocol (AOL later bought them out and made it available as AOLpress) --- really bummed that Amaya has been dropped and that there isn't a nice/free/opensource alternative (that I'm aware of).

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#104

Post by dosisking »

m0llusk wrote: post #90
dosisking wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.

Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.

According to his Wikipedia, Craig Federighi left Apple in 1999 for Ariba, and then returned to Apple in 2009, after Snow Leopard.

We all know that Snow Leopard is considered by many to be the peak of OS X, and Craig returned afterwards. Coincidence?

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#105

Post by pjmlp »

hedgehog wrote: post #92
pjmlp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While maybe biased, also shows a bit about the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field, and why Apple hardware costs what it costs, even when the delivery isn't up to the premium price.

If you want another take from that period the 1997 book "Apple" by Jim Carlton (WSJ reporter) is pretty good. The inside jacket starts "Whatever happened to Apple Computer?" and the forward by Guy Kawasaki frames the book as an after action review of a company that has failed. It has its own problems, but by avoiding the confusion of Apple's later success I think it provides more interesting coverage of some the stuf…

Thanks

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#106

Post by twoodfin »

elzbardico wrote: post #31

I consider that Steve Jobs saved the macintosh as a commercial product twice, not only at his second coming, but also when he overrode Jef Raskins ideas in the first iteraction.

Probably three times: If they don’t make the Intel transition, I don’t think the Macintosh survives the Tim Cook era. We’d all be using iPads.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#108

Post by abanana »

yardie wrote: post #10
cmiles8 wrote: post #6

In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.

Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was wo…

> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...

This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.

Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.

Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#109

Post by pinewurst »

dmazin wrote: post #5

If you want more on this, I recommend Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Stross. I’m not sure, but it might be the only extensive book about Next other than this new one. Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs. In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.

Why did it need to be charitable? Jobs was hardly a saint.

I remember that era well, working for an early (potential that never happened) NeXT software developer, then one of NeXT’s 1st commercial accounts. It was a quite horrible workstation, if pretty. The pre-release rumors about it _were_ enough to push Sun into the SparcStation 1 program (heard from a very connected person at the time). So, thanks Steve.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#110

Post by GTP »

mwenge wrote: post #107

[flagged]

I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
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