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NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

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Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#51

Post by [deleted] »

compuguy wrote: post #34
mrbill wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not by a long shot! Put in there by the friend who threw together a working system for me from the ones he had lying around. A lot of those original sub-gigabyte drives in the slabs eventually went out with bad bearings (oh my the screeching sounds...) We had a few Turbo Color slabs at an ISP that I worked for in the late 90s that had been acquired from a surplus place; they had "PROPERTY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGE…

I still don't understand why they strip memory from machines from a classified setting. Once powered off, the data is only recoverable for a short time.

[deleted]

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#52

Post by milcron »

ci5er wrote: post #46
milcron wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep... Lisp machines were thoroughly in the "mini"computer (cabinet-sized) category and completely missed out on the microcomputer revolution. IBM PCs were cheaper and got the job done. To an extent. The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity.

I only played with one on a VMEBus on a Sun, so I wasn't aware of their stand-alone form factor (i.e. I was guessing) > The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity. Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in Austin Texas (and Doug Lena…

(I wasn't alive then, so I'm only informed by what I've read.)

A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp code faster than the dedicated hardware!

But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went belly-up, unable to sell their hardware. The standardization of Common Lisp in 1984 did help somewhat.

The Japanese Fifth Generation project was oriented around logic-programming, was it not? I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#54

Post by tambourine_man »

kls wrote: post #47
wilsynet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think that there was ever a point where Systems 7, 8 or 9 were worse than Windows 95. Systems 7, 8 and 9 had better font handling, prettier icons, a more comprehensive GUI experience (eg. drag and drop worked everywhere), and a richer desktop publishing ecosystem. But with respect to multitasking, 32-bit application support, protected mode, and networking, including support for, you know, the Internet -- Wi…

Agreed, watching a Photoshop filter lock up an entire machine was painful in those days. Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get. I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's deficiencies all the more apparen…

>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get

Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte...

Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch: https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#55

Post by ci5er »

milcron wrote: post #52
ci5er wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only played with one on a VMEBus on a Sun, so I wasn't aware of their stand-alone form factor (i.e. I was guessing) > The AI winter didn't help Lisp's popularity. Really? I wouldn't have thought a symbolic machine company would have been noticeably affected by the Minsky-triggered AI winter. Or are you talking about the post Japanese Fifth Generation project slow down? The MCC project in Austin Texas (and Doug Lena…

(I wasn't alive then, so I'm only informed by what I've read.) A few short years after Minsky's comment, microcomputers were in full bloom and expensive Lisp machines were no longer viable. Cheap PCs could run Lisp code faster than the dedicated hardware! But Lisp never really gained a strong foothold on microcomputers. Existing code continued to run... but development slowed down as Lisp companies went belly-up, una…

> I had the impression they focused on technologies like Prolog rather than Lisp.

It was a "full stack" thing. From silicon on up. And it definitely got fuzzier the higher up in the stack you went. Prolog-ish was big in the upper tiers of the stack (esp. as it had to do with "modularized knowledge" paks), but "support-all-symbolic-approaches" were motivating requirements on the lower tiers.

I lived in Japan, doing systems engineering for what are now called SOCs, before I moved to Austin during this period, and the PR around the 5th Generation Project had both the Japanese officials feeling high-on-life and the American officials a little deer-in-the-headlights panic-ey. IBM and Fujitsu (and Toshiba, and Motorola and AT&T) all made some bank off of frightened (or overly ambitious) politicos.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#56

Post by kalleboo »

tambourine_man wrote: post #54
kls wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, watching a Photoshop filter lock up an entire machine was painful in those days. Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get. I actually came over to the Mac (for my home machine) for a little while after the writing was on the wall for the Amiga and it felt like a painful step backwards. At work we had been running NeXt boxes for a while, which made it's deficiencies all the more apparen…

>Not to mention all of the other random beach balls one would get Beach balls were a Next invention, which was bright along to OS X. It was monochrome originally and supposed to represent the terribly slow CD-ROM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_pinwheel#From_NeXTSte... Classic Mac OS had a wrist watch: https://i.stack.imgur.com/orvO6.png

Classic MacOS also had a beach ball https://i.stack.imgur.com/sGdwO.png

It didn't plague the OS like it did in OS X though, usually it was accompanied by a progress dialog box.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#57

Post by rubicon33 »

KirinDave wrote: post #26

My father was a lead in hardware engineering and manufacturing at NeXT. I have tons of footage of the amazing assembly technology that they used. I wonder if people would be interested in it. It was heavily top secret at the time, but NeXT built their own custom robotics system (called thor) and had all sorts of amazing in-house manufacturing tech that was incredibly automated. The hardware itself was just beautiful,…

Yes! It would be so cool to see that.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#58

Post by derefr »

ci5er wrote: post #39
lngnmn wrote: post #2

Like Symbolics, it was way ahead of its time.

Aren't Lisp machines always ahead of their time? What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the minicomputer?

I don't know if I'd say Lisp machines really died; like NeXT, their rival architectures+platforms of the era only outcompeted them by absorbing them and becoming them. Modern processor architectures look a lot more like that of the Lisp machine than they look like its competitors of the era.

Instruction pipelining and memory caching to allow for "cheap" dereferences; a "flat" virtual memory; loadable modules that are source on disk and get JITed into native objects when loaded into memory... these are just generic features you could expect out of most architectures+platforms today. But those were the differentiating factors for the Lisp machine.

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#59

Post by ci5er »

derefr wrote: post #58
ci5er wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Lisp machines always ahead of their time? What killed them? The advances in COTS microprocessors that also killed the minicomputer?

I don't know if I'd say Lisp machines really died; like NeXT, their rival architectures+platforms of the era only outcompeted them by absorbing them and becoming them. Modern processor architectures look a lot more like that of the Lisp machine than they look like its competitors of the era. Instruction pipelining and memory caching to allow for "cheap" dereferences; a "flat" virtual memory; loadable modules that are…

I remember people wondering how the hell we were going to ever use the 50 million transistors per die that Moore's law assured us was coming straight at us in just a few years...

Re: NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened

#60

Post by m_mueller »

calcsam wrote: post #45

OSX is one of Steve Jobs' least-discussed successes. The original Mac, Pixar, the iPod, the iPhone are all talked about -- but without OSX as a Unix-based OS, application-development on Macs, and adoption of Macs in the '00s would have been much slower and more sparse.

Also, without NextStep Steve Jobs wouldn't have had a way into Apple again - Apple would look completely different today if it still existed at all.
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