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

121–130 of 267 posts

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#121

Post by scholia »

itomato wrote: post #115
hota_mazi wrote: post #101

> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, Er... interesting revisionism, here. That acquisition didn't do much to save Apple from the financial hole it had dug for itself. Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.

> I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I…

> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac.

Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS.

Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#122

Post by johansch »

mwfj wrote: post #46
pfarnsworth wrote: post #21

I was applying for jobs back in 1997, and during that time they had a huge career fair called the Brass Ring fair. Employers from around Silicon Valley would have booths and hire people on the spot. I distinctly remember Apple's booth being completely barren, they were practically dead to most engineers. How the tables have turned since then. The big question is, Apple's path appears to be following the path after St…

Surely there must be a few suitable candidates at Apple waiting for Tim to screw up enough? I think Apple will need its own Nadella soon.

(Let's just hope the Cook era doesn't last as long as the Ballmer era - 14 years. It's been 5 years with Cook now...)

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#123

Post by mikekchar »

mwfunk wrote: post #63
j_koreth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GNU thing at NeXT. Can you elaborate on this?

There was a sort-of kerfluffle between the FSF and NeXT with regard to what was required for NeXT to be GPL-compliant. This is RMS' account: "I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning lik…

I'm not a first hand observer, but I was certainly around and following the issue at the time. My impression was that a lot of people watching the issue got upset. I never saw anyone from NeXT or the FSF complain about anything. Just like today, there are people who think that Apple are evil because they don't embrace software freedom. Similarly there are people who think that the FSF are evil for not letting people do whatever they want. To be honest, the acceptance for software freedom as a legitimate idea is far more advanced today than it was back then, and you see how much vitriol is spewed about 'zealots' and whatnot.

To be fair, I don't think Apple was ever interested in software freedom. This is pretty obvious from their actions since that time (moving away from utilising software under the GPL). But I've never heard anyone other than developers complain about it. From a business perspective, it makes sense -- a license is a license. You don't want to pay the price, you don't get the license. I got the sense that Apple's management understood this principle completely.

From the FSF's perspective, they got an Objective-C front end for GCC and they were particularly happy about that. It was a kind of triumph because the GPL did its job. Objective-C programmers had a free platform to work with, which never would have happened if GCC had not existed and was not GPLed. One can argue that these days more and more companies understand the benefits of open source development and might contribute large pieces of code willingly, but that certainly wasn't the case in those times.

I would also be interested in first hand views, but from my perspective, it was always a non-issue.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#124

Post by acchow »

robotresearcher wrote: post #97
wineisfine wrote: post #30

I read that the NeXT, let's call it, "adventure", is the reason Apple went with a Linux distribution as basis for their new OS and thus, we're all using OSX now?

You're getting downvoted to hell for a small misunderstanding, and the replies aren't necessarily helping. NeXT is the reason Apple went with a UNIX-type OS that evolved into OS X, yes. Linux is also a UNIX-type OS, but is not an ancestor of OS X. Linux is so popular now that it's easy to identify it with UNIX but historically it's only one of several implementations that work in roughly similar ways. Other replies a…

Linux = "Linux Is Not UniX"

It's in the name.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#125

Post by Anechoic »

hota_mazi wrote: post #101

> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, Er... interesting revisionism, here. That acquisition didn't do much to save Apple from the financial hole it had dug for itself. Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.

>Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#126

Post by nine_k »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #112
nine_k wrote: 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…

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.)

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#127

Post by scholia »

ebbv wrote: post #113
rvense wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs brought in a great team from NeXT - like Jon Rubinstein, who oversaw the development of the iMac and the iPod, and later came as close to rescuing Palm, Inc. (with the Pre) as was possible.

Yep that's a good point as well. Jobs wasn't the only valuable person who came from NeXT.

Another was Avadis "Avie" Tevanian, who worked on Mach at Carnegie Mellon University before joining NeXT. He took over Apple software.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#128

Post by statictype »

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."

So People involved with and around Apple didn't enjoy a book that was critical of Jobs?

I too liked Becoming Steve Jobs too, but I didn't think Isacsons book was as terrible as many people made it out to be.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#129

Post by DerekL »

protomyth wrote: post #20
bluedino wrote: post #6

>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.

Steve Jobs, the team he assembled, and a willingness to cut. Apple at the time was running the Newton which, although I loved programming it, was a totally wrong direction. It just wasn't connected as Mr. Jobs explained in his Q&A[1]. He built a much better OS than the Mac at that time. Palm couldn't build the iPhone with Palm and had to build WebOS. QNX is amazing, but its UI and client developer library wasn't ther…

> Truthfully, if Adobe and Microsoft hadn't insisted on Carbon[2], the Mac would have been much better off.

It wasn't just them. Pretty much nobody wanted to write two different versions of their apps.

You would have had a negative feedback loop. Users wouldn't upgrade to Mac OS X because most of their apps weren't native, so everything would run in Classic, which was just as crashy as MacOS 9 but slower. Then developers would hold off on porting their apps to Cocoa, because hardly anyone was running OS X. So the 9 to X transition would have taken much longer.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#130

Post by rthille »

threeseed wrote: post #85
SkyMarshal wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the tech really mattered, not much anyway. What Apple really got with NeXT was Steve Jobs' vision, along with a more seasoned CEO better capable of realizing that vision. Whether Apple had gotten BeOS or NeXT didn't really matter all that much in comparison.

Don't agree with this at all. NeXT was an actual operating system that people used. You could run word processing apps from which you could print and email. There was a fully fledged development platform with real developers building real third party apps. BeOS was more like a giant tech demo. If we focus on just the technologies choosing BeOS would have meant at least a few years more engineering effort. And you sti…

BeOS/BeBox was demoed at a MacWorld. There was a cool display of the utilization of each CPU and you could disable each CPU by unchecking a checkbox. The demo app didn't prevent you from disabling the last CPU. The booth-guy wasn't very happy with me.
Post reply on HN