20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT • Hacker News Board

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#221

Post by NoGravitas » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 12:57 PM UTC

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…

GNUStep[0] is a thing that exists, and it's mostly Cocoa-compatible (at least for old versions of Cocoa)? I don't think it is very widely used -- it never got much desktop traction compared to KDE or Gnome. But you can write apps that compile and run on both GNUStep and macOS -- the "macOS" version of Emacs actually targets GNUStep, for example.

[0]: http://gnustep.org/

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#222

Post by cturner » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 12:58 PM UTC

riprowan wrote: post #214

cturner wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

What if I'm one of the tens of millions of people who do CAD, photo editing, and A/V production?

What are your thoughts about the parent question? Is there a machine in the 15k price range that would give you remarkable edge over a macbook pro? I don't know anyone who's in these professions. Perhaps a NT desktop box with niche io cards?

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#223

Post by coldcode » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:11 PM UTC

Painful to me, I left Apple in May of that year, thinking them toast.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#224

Post by ams6110 » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #222

riprowan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I'm one of the tens of millions of people who do CAD, photo editing, and A/V production?

What are your thoughts about the parent question? Is there a machine in the 15k price range that would give you remarkable edge over a macbook pro? I don't know anyone who's in these professions. Perhaps a NT desktop box with niche io cards?

Maybe something like this...

https://www.icc-usa.com/blackhole-hpctower.html

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#225

Post by hellofunk » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:36 PM UTC

riprowan wrote: post #215

chmaynard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I joined Apple Software Engineering in 2001 as a writer, the first thing I noticed was that former NeXT people ran the company, made the important decisions, and believed fervently that the new Apple would be wildly successful. Oh, how right they were.

Can't tell if sarcastic or serious.

It's accurate, regardless.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#226

Post by ams6110 » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:37 PM UTC

TzlZAT8GSEDww00 wrote: post #152

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…

> Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy. Never say never, but none of the UI parts of Cocoa are written in Swift, and porting them to Windows/Linux would be way more than just writing them in Swift anyway. Curious, in what way is Windows's development story stuck in 2005 and the Mac is not similarly "stuck" in 2001 (or perh…

The port was already done in the 1990s. You could run Enterprise WebObjects on Windows NT, and it came with several NeXTStep apps on the CD including Mail.app.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#227

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:42 PM UTC

TzlZAT8GSEDww00 wrote: post #152

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…

> Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy. Never say never, but none of the UI parts of Cocoa are written in Swift, and porting them to Windows/Linux would be way more than just writing them in Swift anyway. Curious, in what way is Windows's development story stuck in 2005 and the Mac is not similarly "stuck" in 2001 (or perh…

Apple pretty much said that Cocoa would be the basis for all future work they do on Mac OS X since 2001, and they've continually improved it, such as adding new widgets, adding functionality to existing widgets, high-DPI support, and so on. I see there's a lot of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) going on: there is only one GUI platform and UI toolkit for macOS: Cocoa. While the groundwork isn't new it is kept up-to-date.

Compared to Windows where the "original" widget-toolkit (Window classes and the Common Control library) haven't been significantly updated since Windows XP - Wndows 7 did add some new controls, but they aren't exactly easy to use unless you're already a very experienced C++ Win32 GUI developer.

The old low-entry-barrier dev story was VB6, which had a mix of Common Controls and ActiveX reimplementations, then it moved over to VB.NET and WinForms, which is a wrapper around the same - but the last significant update to WinForms was in .NET 2.0 in 2005 - Microsoft recently announced that they would not be adding true high-DPI support to WinForms, advising desktop app developers to use WPF or UWP instead - and therein lies a problem: WPF and UWP are both completely separate UI and application stacks. WPF is not perfect and like WinForms, hasn't seen much of an update for a while (it still runs on DirectX 9) and UWP is just confusing: it's arbitrarily limited to only run in a restricted sandbox environment, the standard widget library is very anemic (e.g. still no tree-view!) and it shares nothing in common with the rest of the entire Windows ecosystem.

If you want to write a "real" Win32 desktop application you're best-off sticking with MFC, but there's so much legwork that's necessary, and legacy cruft (I swear the MFC codebase is still C++89 compatible) it just doesn't make sense for small applications, especially line-of-business systems that face constant changes, to be built with it. Compare with Cocoa on macOS where everything: from Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, to the built-in Jigsaw Puzzle mini-game, is all built with the same framework.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#228

Post by LordKano » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #204

LordKano wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew at the tine that Gassee was making a huge mistake. Be had some fantastic tech but it wasn't otherworldly. A MacOS based on Be would have been amazing, at the time. X ended up being a better way to go, the other changed made when Jobs came back turned me off of Apple's products but I can appreciate the overall improvements.

But Be was really really fast and the demos showed its power. It had a tidy C++ API for application development as I remember?

I still remember sitting there with my mouth hanging open watching 4 quicktime movies play at the same time after I installed the BeOS Preview Release on my 6400.

What I particularly liked was how BeOS would run on any PCI PowerMac. The Rhapsody DR1 release had much smaller supported hardware and it was later than BeOS.

Gassee overplayed his hand and lost big time.

I LOVED Apple stuff. A BeOS based MacOS would have been phenomenal.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#229

Post by riprowan » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #222

riprowan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I'm one of the tens of millions of people who do CAD, photo editing, and A/V production?

What are your thoughts about the parent question? Is there a machine in the 15k price range that would give you remarkable edge over a macbook pro? I don't know anyone who's in these professions. Perhaps a NT desktop box with niche io cards?

The "standard" for high end audio processing is Pro Tools HD/HDX, which does cost this much in its fully-fledged form.

Users can run a CPU-only version of Pro Tools called HD Native which (along with its competitors like Logic, Sonar, etc) are useful and powerful programs. However they lack the power and depth of plugins available for the hardware-accelerated version of ProTools (and other hardware-accelerated plugins like UAD).

I think the Holy Grail is and has always been to "go native" and get rid of these sorts of accelerator cards as money is better spent on the general-purpose devices that retain their utility better. But we still aren't there yet - when you load up even the best CPUs with lots of convolution processing, too much latency is introduced. So yes, I think there's at least a niche market for the $15K general-purpose computer that truly represents a "bottomless pit" of audio processing power.

I haven't even touched on video editing or 3D rendering, both of which can be even more CPU intensive. When you add all these niches together, they still look like the original power-creative niche Apple was targeting 10 years ago with the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro, and we still want more power.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#230

Post by icedchai » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 2:41 PM UTC

rahoulb wrote: post #176

icedchai wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the advantage was the software. NeXT gave up on hardware by 94 or so. Oh, and then the web happened, setting us back 20+ years in terms of application development productivity.

The web happened. On an NeXT

But not web apps. That's what I mean.