20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT • Hacker News Board

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#241

Post by mikey_p » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

rwc wrote: post #65

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.

This is demonstrably false. MacOS Copland was scrapped in favor of a descendant of NeXTSTEP that became MacOS X. Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP

Yes at the time all the major mac magazines were acknowledging that it looked like Copland would never ship, but the question was whether to replace it with NeXTSTEP or BeOS. Both had strong ties to former Apple execs with obviously Jobs being the bigger draw at NeXT, but Jean-Louis Gassée at Be was not to be discounted either.

Both Jobs and Gassée were both forced out by Sculley who alot of people credit with driving Apple toward the mediocrity that defined it in the mid 90s.

The other big factor at the time was the fact that BeOS ran on PowerPC, and NeXTSTEP did not. NeXT had done some work to produce their own hardware with dual 601s, but never shipped it and abandoned that work to focus on the IBM PC hardware. This meant that the first few years of the Apple/NeXT merger were spent just getting NeXTSTEP running on PowerPC.

The biggest buzz of the time was that even though Steve's return to Apple had killed the growing Mac clone industry, maybe Rhapsody would run on x86 hardware. There were rumors all over that they would make this happen, although they were many years too early, as Apple wouldn't make that switch until 2005.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#242

Post by njharman » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #89

njharman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an utterly ridiculous comparison. Companies / stock prices are not a normal, random distribution like roulette results. There are masses of information available on companies / stock market. Assuming roulette wheel is fair, there is none other than 1/32 chance known.

Please tell me what ticker symbol I should buy today, that will rise in value over 10,000% over the next two decades. Nobody can. Over a 20 year timeline, it’s essentially the same as a roulette wheel.

That is disingenuously retarded and trollish.

You seriously can't fathom that knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. gives you more information than random chance? How do you make any informed choice about anything at all then?

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#243

Post by njharman » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 6:24 PM UTC

PacketPaul wrote: post #169

njharman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an utterly ridiculous comparison. Companies / stock prices are not a normal, random distribution like roulette results. There are masses of information available on companies / stock market. Assuming roulette wheel is fair, there is none other than 1/32 chance known.

Actually a lot of people believe they are a random distribution. There is a great book "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" which explains it. The basic idea is the market is efficient (the Efficient Market Theory) and all information about the stock is alreay priced into the stock. Picking a stock to beat the market average is basically a random chance.

Sure, across all investments. Pro-tip don't invest in all investments.

Real life markets are very clearly not perfectly efficient. Nor is stock price a perfect reflection of available information. Many/most/all? stock is prices on expectation i.e. guesses, not facts. Then there are all sorts of shenanigans like astroturfing and illegal manipulations/trading.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#244

Post by jkchu » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

wineisfine wrote: post #27

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…

That's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?

Consider reading relevant parts of 'Creativity, Inc.' by Ed Catmull if you want another side of the Jobs & Pixar events.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#245

Post by scott_karana » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 6:50 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #193

brians wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I was agreeing until this point:

> There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched

Maybe I'm missing something, but:

1950s: Lisp and Fortran

1972: Prolog

1977: Bourne shell and Icon

1978: C shell

1979: REXX

1980: Smalltalk-80 (on Macs, even!)

1983: Korn shell

1983: C++

1987: Perl 1.0

1988: Modula-3, and NeXT computer is launched

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#246

Post by qubex » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 6:56 PM UTC

zippergz wrote: post #93

iblaine wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I haven't heard someone mention BeOs in over a decade. That was a pretty OS, but I'd take that black NeXT case any day. Those NeXT boxes were so cool.

There have been a few late nights where I found myself searching eBay and other places for a used BeBox. Sadly, they're hard to come by (and expensive). I used to have a bunch of NeXT hardware and it is indeed cool. I got rid of it in a move a few years ago because it was just taking up space in my closets, but I still miss it....

I have a dual 603e-133 BeBox in working condition (not for sale). About 800 of them were produced. I've had mine since 1997.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#247

Post by AimHere » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

wj wrote: post #235

AimHere wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things annoy me too, but thankfully it's been years since anyone sent me one (unless my mail clients have been silently reporting back to people other than the NSA, of course). I assume the read receipt request button has been made harder to find in newer versions of Outlook or something. I reckon the correct way to handle these receipt requests is to configure the mail client to send a modified receipt email w…

It has been a while but with Outlook there was an option to ignore all read receipt requests. Maybe you turned that on?

I don't use Outlook; what I mean is that it seems that other email users aren't sending so many read receipt requests for some reason (such as changes to Outlook's user interface). Either that, or I correspond with a better class of email user these days.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#248

Post by jandrese » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 8:32 PM UTC

scott_karana wrote: post #245

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…

I was agreeing until this point: > There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched Maybe I'm missing something, but: 1950s: Lisp and Fortran 1972: Prolog 1977: Bourne shell and Icon 1978: C shell 1979: REXX 1980: Smalltalk-80 (on Macs, even!) 1983: Korn shell 1983: C++ 1987: Perl 1.0 1988: Modula-3, and NeXT computer is launched

Having dug around a bit with Awk that might be a true statement. Awk has an entire ocean of features that mere mortals are completely unaware of hidden behind the 1960s teletype optimized interface. So the statement that there were no tools more powerful than Awk might be true, but only because we don't know if there is a full fledged AI hidden under the layers of impenetrable interface.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#249

Post by jason_slack » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 8:39 PM UTC

locusm wrote: post #91

msimpson wrote: post #38

"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." However, it was not Apple's first choice. They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out for $275 million and lost the deal in a surprise move when Apple, instead, bought NeXT.

Heh, threw out my last BeOS floppies yesterday in a cleanup.

LOL, as I look over at my BeBox on a shelf, wishing I had a use for it. I learned so much about c++, SMP, threading, etc from BeOS.

Re: 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT

#250

Post by jandrese » Wed, Dec 21, 2016, 8:45 PM UTC

hasenj wrote: post #104

nateguchi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that would be an interesting alternate timeline! / MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /

The Mac would not have been a huge success probably in that scenario.

I don't know. A BeOS foundation for MacOS would have made it even better at multimedia production. The tradeoff of course is that it probably would have been late to the whole Internet thing that was becoming something of a big deal around that point. BeOS's network stack was different enough from Berkeley sockets that porting network apps was a challenge. It lacked a version of Netscape at a time when even FreeBSD had a native version for example. In the late 90s this was not acceptable. Apple's engineering culture wasn't one of embracing open standards either, they could have very well stuck with the Be network paradigm and made it a headache to port any POSIX application.

Be's heavily multitasking kernel would have been quite a boon for Apple when off the shelf processors started going wide though. They could have been really reaping the benefits from C2Ds and beyond.