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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

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Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#191

Post by dang »

tlow wrote: post #137

Your comment is not relevant or appreciated. Not only are you not adding to the discussion, this comment is simply a personal opinion coupled with an undependable generalizations about "many people" without even addressing the topic of discussion. Isaacson's book is not generally accepted as the de facto Steve Jobs biography. That is all.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please (re)-read them and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226087 and marked it off-topic.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#192

Post by pjmlp »

Apocryphon wrote: post #92
pavlov wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's an amazing factoid. "NS" standing for NeXTSTEP would then be a popular misconception, then. It also introduces an interesting hypothetical of what if Sun ended up adopting OpenStep, if Java was not developed in time or fell through or whatever.

You can get some information how Objective-C related to Java at Sun, by the original Java team.

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#193

Post by cturner »

brians wrote: post #160
beautifulfreak wrote: post #155

In the early 90s, I remember reading in NeXTWorld Magazine many articles about the speed of development under NeXTStep. Ten times faster, according to John Carmack, who was creating Doom. Every developer agreed. Each issue showcased apps with surprising and elegant capabilities, really new features available nowhere else. The proposition was that NeXT Cubes were really worth the price, that they enabled magical solut…

So where's the $15k super machine for today? I'd absolutely look to pay that for something with a similar advantage over a MacBook Pro.

Computing has changed. For CAD, games, a/v production, you still need a workstation. But the workstation is now obsolete in major fields that it once dominated.

Industrial simulation: these days the optimal approach is to get access to CPU is to crunch on headless servers, ideally in the cloud. Expand and contract computing power on a needs basis.

Front-office development: Objective C and Interface Builder was much better for prototyping ideas than C. Modern python/perl/racket/go/c#/etc are much further ahead. There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched. Now the most common expression of hackers is dynamic programming on fabulously powerful free tools. High-quality operating systems are also free. Documentation is free. And it's all far better than what people used to pay for.

Deployment: interactive user interfaces are now delivered through the a web browser. Previously a lot of workstations were sold to run custom internal apps.

Save your money! Get a digital ocean account, and run your macbook until the power supply dies. Perhaps in another ten years google-style web-browser laptops will be ubiquitous.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#194

Post by [deleted] »

brians wrote: post #160
beautifulfreak wrote: post #155

In the early 90s, I remember reading in NeXTWorld Magazine many articles about the speed of development under NeXTStep. Ten times faster, according to John Carmack, who was creating Doom. Every developer agreed. Each issue showcased apps with surprising and elegant capabilities, really new features available nowhere else. The proposition was that NeXT Cubes were really worth the price, that they enabled magical solut…

So where's the $15k super machine for today? I'd absolutely look to pay that for something with a similar advantage over a MacBook Pro.

[deleted]

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#196

Post by aerique »

nine_k wrote: post #126
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #112

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.)

I switched to i3 a couple of years ago but I've used WindowMaker the longest of any window manager in my 25 years of Unix usage.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#197

Post by Fomite »

flashman wrote: post #79
generj wrote: post #4

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

There was a magazine called MacAddict which I'm sure some here would remember. One of their mid-90s Christmas gift recommendations was Apple stock! I sometimes wonder how many small fortunes those few paragraphs created.

At least one, when teenage me bought some Apple stock because I loved the company and thought it had a chance.

Selling some of it represented a substantial portion of the downpayment on my first house.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#198

Post by cha-cho »

jcims wrote: post #161
rootbear wrote: post #25

I was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortuna…

Didn't Steve have an email that was in your mailbox by default when you got a new account on a NeXT machine? It had some embedded images and an audio file of him talking. Anyway, I sent whoever it was, pretty sure Steve, an email with read receipt enabled and he bitched me out for invading his privacy. This was ~93 or so.

I sent him an email from a NeXTStep configured PC in around 1996/97/98 stating I had some window GUI ideas that would give him a distinct advantage over Windows.

As I recall, his reply was terse, along the lines of:

~~~

What are they?

sj

~~~

I was doubtful it was actually the man himself responding. I thought it was some email administrator trying to steal my ideas (I was 20yrs younger then). I proceeded cautiously and don't recall if he replied again.

A decade later I learned terse replies were his MO.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#199

Post by 3chelon »

brians wrote: post #160
beautifulfreak wrote: post #155

In the early 90s, I remember reading in NeXTWorld Magazine many articles about the speed of development under NeXTStep. Ten times faster, according to John Carmack, who was creating Doom. Every developer agreed. Each issue showcased apps with surprising and elegant capabilities, really new features available nowhere else. The proposition was that NeXT Cubes were really worth the price, that they enabled magical solut…

So where's the $15k super machine for today? I'd absolutely look to pay that for something with a similar advantage over a MacBook Pro.

The advantage is already there, over Windows machines. It could be argued that the merger of NeXT and Apple democratised Unix.

In the 90s, most people were packing Windows 95 and if you wanted a Unix box you were going to pay for it. Silicon Graphics, NeXT, etc, were out of the reach of the general population and most developers. Only the CAD guys had them.

But many Windows users still complain today that the Mac is too expensive. So in that sense, if you want a Unix development machine you still have to pay a premium, just thankfully about an order of magnitude lower.

Of course, the democratisation would go much further: it is interesting that around the same time NeXT and Apple were merging, I first heard that some guy called Linus was busy porting Unix to the Intel architecture, and - unbelievably - he was doing it for free!

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#200

Post by 72deluxe »

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 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 seen the attempts to invent a new desktop paradigm in Linuxland with Unity and Microsoft's Metro attempt but I firmly believe that the windowing systems that we have at the moment are really as good as it is going to get, and more importantly, as good as it needs to be.

The eyecandy is all very nice (animations, fading in/out) and new compositors is great too but from a usability point of view, I don't think we really need to add anything new.

Am I alone in this? I mean Amiga got it right years ago and we've been trying to catch up since.... :-)

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