Apple's 15 years of NeXT - Page 2

I can't argue with someone who possesses no logic.

You say the writer "pulled from his butt" and then turn around beat up an invented strawman about Apple being on the brink of bankruptcy that is not anywhere in the article. Well played, troll.


Neither OpenStep the API specification nor NeXTSTEP the OS were even remotely similar to Copland, which was a continuation of the embedded system software for the Mac dating back into the mid 80s. Another 5 years of Copland would have produced nothing at all, but you also seemed to miss that Apple worked on both the Classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP/OS X. That's where Mac OS 8/8.1/8.5/9.0/9.2 came from. That's a pretty gaping logical hole in your theory.


Compare the 1989 Mac II with the 1988 NeXT Computer to get some idea of how far behind Apple was in competing against Jobs. The rest of Apple just kept falling apart, largely due to directionless management. Loyal Mac buyers like you weren't aware of how bad of shape Apple was in, because blundering companies can slide for some time before they reach the death spiral. Look at RIM, Microsoft, Nokia. They were all looking like leaders until all of a sudden they were sideswiped and are now scrambling for relevancy. Except they were actually in trouble systemically for years before it became obvious.

I have two things to say.

1) Amiga Forever!

It was a can o whoop ass and is still unbeaten in certain advances. I weighed up buying an Amiga 1000, Atari ST 540(?) or a Mac II back in the day. I ended up going the Amiga 1000 due to its graphics prowess. I seriously lusted after a NeXT, the pizza box model but could not afford one and it would not have been useful in the field I was in.

2) Apple would be long dead

There was a comment about how Apple would still be kicking around if NeXT and Steve had not come on board. I seriously doubt it. The Amiga still has legions of fans over 15 years since the last model was released and Commodore went splat.

Legions of dedicated fans in the end mean nothing in the face of gross incompetence from the corporate chieftans.

Three options probably exist.

A) Rather (from Amiga evidence) there would be Apple memory sites, occasional rumor news about how a new no-company had scooped up some rights and was about to revive the dream and some long beards managing to strap together random bits of MacOS with various open-souce bits and slap it on new hardware in YouTube videos.

B) NeXT and Steve Jobs may have made an offer to buy out the backrupted shell and we might still be where we are today regardless

C) Steve realised it was pointless to buy the backrupt shell, NeXT went on to become the foundaton stone of web commerce, Pixar got bought out by Disney. Steve is still alive and heading up some kind of expanded Disney media platform.

So comes the question...

Would you prefer Apple alive making cool stuff and Steve dead or Apple dead and Steve alive making waves across the media industries.

Hmmm

OK, antitroll. I was not responding specifically to the article. I was responding to eric475, the only poster quoted in my post. troll 1, antitroll 0


OK, let's see. After Apple abandoned Copland, it searched for an existing OS to replace Copland. It did not go out looking for any ole OS. If any ole OS would do, then it would have adopted Windows NT. Microsoft would have been only too happy to accommodate Apple. No, Apple searched for an OS that would meet some of the same design goals as Copland. It looked at BeOS. BeOS had a rabid fan base that begged Apple to adopt it. Be also lobbied Apple and Apple's customer base for Apple to adopt BeOS. Apple also looked at OpenSTEP. The OpenSTEP supporters were strong, but not as rabid as the BeOS supporters. Steve Jobs was not out there demanding that Apple buy NeXT. However, Apple went with OpenSTEP because it deemed BeOS to be immature.

Nowhere did I say that NeXTstep and Copland shared APIs. What I said is that OpenSTEP satisfied many of Apple's design goals. antitroll, it might surprise you to learn that that there is more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Display PostScript in OpenSTEP and NeXTstep satisfies the same goal as QuickDraw GX in Copland. Services in OpenSTEP satisfies many of the same goals as OpenDoc in Copland. Do you understand?

Let me go on. It is simply not true that Copland yielded nothing. To the contrary, it yielded quite a lot. Many Copland technologies were incorporated into System 7.5. Copland technology persists to this very day in MacOS X 10.7. troll 2, antitroll 0


Lest there be any confusion, the Macintosh II was introduced in 1987. In 1989, I purchased my first Mac, a Macintosh IIcx. The NeXTstation was a $10,000 computer that targeted education. To say that Apple competed with NeXT is like saying that Cadillac competes with Rolls Royce.

You may assert that Apple was falling about, but assertion is not proof. Apple is today the World's highest capitalized company. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple was smaller company with problems. However, Apple had fantastic products and it had fans who would buy nothing else. Compare this to Apple's erstwhile competitor, IBM. In 1996l, IBM was still in the personal computer business, but it was IBM that was irrelevant--not Apple. IBM had lost the OS battle to its "partner," Microsoft. It had lost the CPU battle to the likes of Compaq and HP. Whatever Apple's issues, Apple was never irrelevant.

What is that now? trolll 3, antitroll 0

And between 1989 and 1996, NeXT kept innovating too, widening the gap. It took Microsoft 20 years to ± catch up with the 1989 NeXT.


Exactly.

I came to Apple via NeXT. I noticed how conservative and anti-change the loyal Apple fans generally were at the time. In hindsight, it is pretty logical that they were. They were the ones that stayed, that did not change to another platform, and part of that was that they thought the Mac was better. In a couple of aspects it still was (because Microsoft was not that brilliant either), like some UI aspects (Windows was a mess). But in terms of stability (bombs), software availability and raw speed/price, they had been passed by Wintel.

The ones that stayed were probably also in part the ones most by nature opposed to change. Apple had not only a loyal, it also had (as far as computer use) a conservative user base. Then Apple started to change and they were the most harsh critics. I remember the early days of OS X and the vitriol that was poured out in forums.

You are confusing vaporware bullshit with operational products. DPS and QD GX might have overlapped a bit in the goals that they targeted, but were not remotely functionally equivalent. DPS actually worked, QD GX was a three story brick building built on top of a lump of sand. Services similarly has little to do with OpenDoc, but again had real functionality, not just a core intent driving toward being a product.

NextSTEP was an advanced, modern object oriented development system build on a Unix OS, and was used in the real world for half a decade before being left on the shelf without a clear future.Copland was never anything more than an alpha level development project with silly goals. It was layers of bandaids on top of a mess of embedded System Software created in the early 80s.


Hardly. There were bits of Copland that were salvaged for Mac OS 8, including the multithreaded Finder. That was completely replaced in Mac OS X long before Lion. Apart from a few raw technology concepts from the mid 90s (Vtwin search indexing, ColorSync, Data Detectors), there isn't even a flitter of anything related to Copland in Mac OS X. Even the bits of Mac software that were added to OS X, such as QuickTime, have since been radically rewritten. Even Carbon is essentially gone now, and it was largely rewritten during the initial development of Mac OS X.


Right the II was introduced in 87, and the original NeXT debuted in 88. NeXT started around 8,000 and got more expensive as you added RAM. But the same went for the Mac II line. Adding 8 bit color made it rather expensive, and matching some of the specs of the NeXTstation made it equally expensive.

Your 1989 16Mhz 030 Iicx with 2MB would have started at $6k. A 1990 25Mhz 040 NeXTStation with 8MB cost $5k. Hardly out of the league of high end Mac systems in price, just faster.


Oh come on, read a book. Apple spent the early 90s under Spindler trying to sell itself to Sun and IBM. It was directionless and headed toward irrelevancy. in 96/97, Apple began losing nearly $1 billion a year back to back.



Nothing you say there is relevant at all.

Indeed. Around 1989, I started to look for a new computer, using an Atari 1040 ST (running GEMDOS or Minix) until that day. I wanted a unix system, with a GUI, networking and I wanted OO Programming. In the end, I compared an Apple with A/UX, a x86 machine with SCO Unix and a NeXT. With comparable specs, NeXT was a bargain compared to the other two. That was of course, because the NeXT price included about everything and if you added a printer you got 400dpi laser while the other systems you ended pricewise with a 360dpi dot matrix.

With SCO Unix on a 386 PC it was like this: add a math co-processor (or anything floating point would be slow as molasses) to the hardware, add an ethernet card. Then for the OS. TCP/IP was $200 extra, NFS was $200 extra, X11 was $200 extra, OSF/Motif was $400 extra, a compiler (Microsoft C) was $$ extra, adding a C++ (ugh!) compiler was probably extra. the monitor was either tiny or very expensive, the 2-bit grayscale megapixel was in fact a perfect match for huge (at that time) screen size at affordable cost. The 486 was new and still very expensive, it would have made the price comparison even worse.

I did the math and apart from being a beautiful machine, NeXT was by far the most affordable option.

Oh, really now. You know how much I paid my my Mac IIcx and how much RAM it had? I have never paid more than $5300 for any Mac that I have ever purchased, monitor included. In the case of my Mac IIcx, the $5300 purchase price included 5 MB RAM. BTW, I still have the computer. troll 4, antitroll 0

Come on, friends, It's Christmas time and we're supposed to be peaceful and forgiving

A colleague of mine told me that, but it looks like you are right, or at least it's not settled:

Cocoa lookup in wikipedia. not saying its the best source.

Cocoa classes begin with the acronym "NS" (standing either for the NeXT-Sun creation of OpenStep, or for the original proprietary term for the OpenStep framework, NeXTSTEP)

Overall nice article although the bit about the world essentially standing still without apple is slighty exaggerating apples importance.

A lot of the tech in iPhones, iPads etc is not invented by apple. Capacitive touch screens were not invented by apple, multi touch was not invented by apple. Arm would still have built the processors we have in these phones and screen resolutions would still go up. The people working for apple that designed these devices would still be working, some may have even started there own company with the ideas they had. I think every geek since they were young thought of the idea of a tablet, the real key was putting the screen with the processor and designing a nice ui.

The one bit of credit that can be given to Steve jobs and next was that he blindly kept loosing a load of money for the sake of paying some people to keep progressing with there ideas, because he cared more about the product than profit. If he hadn't then it may have all taken a bit longer. But ultimately most of the people that had these ideas would have still had them. They invented this stuff because it's there passion. At that level, even if nobody's paying you, you still do it.

Nonsense. You make the same mistake that people have been making about Apple and its products for decades. A few examples:

1. The iPhone is not just an assembly of parts. Use any of its multitouch competitors and this fact becomes all too clear.
2. Without Apple, ARM may be manufacturing processors, but the iPhone does not use discrete ARM microprocessors. iPhones use Apple-designed SoCs (Systems on a Chip) that are based on the ARM processor design. The fact that you labored under the misconception that the iPhone was based on a discrete ARM microprocessor is an indication that the Apple approach was neither obvious nor inevitable.
3. It is likely but by no means certain that, in the absence of Apple, the engineers who brought the iPhone to life would still be working. However, there is absolutely no evidence that they would be working on phones or even working in the personal electronics industry. These bright people might be working for any number of corporations, foundations, or government agencies. The chances that they would have developed the iPhone in this alternate timeline are remote in the extreme.
4. You are confusing the Steve Jobs after NeXT with the Steve Jobs before NeXT. The Steve Jobs after NeXT put an end to Microsoft's red ink and turned the company into the highest capitalized company on Earth.
5. The Apple that we know today is the product of a very special group of people. Steve Jobs assembled a group of truly remarkable people--Tim Cook, Avadis Tevanian (no longer with Apple), Jonathan Ive, and many, many others. Each of these people has a unique skill set without which Apple would be a different company. Without Steve Jobs, it is likely that none of them would work for Apple. Without Apple, it is unlikely that they would work for the same company.

As of this date, no major company has developed a culture that is in reminiscent of Apple. Perhaps now that we know the "secret" to Apple's success, some company may try to replicate its culture. If they do, they will be copying a preexisting model. If this happens, then we will never know if the corporate culture that Steve Jobs created would have developed independently of him. Until it happens, we will know that this corporate culture did not develop independently of him. Without that corporate culture, there is no iPhone.

timgriff is right. Look it up Mr Me; page 78 in the English hardcover by Walter Isaacson: Mike Markkula's values were much aligned with Jobs'. He emphasised that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last".

you are wrong. I was there at that time. I read many many texts, explanations, testimonies and articles about Apple, NeXT and others at that time.

I saw these software and I read about Jobs presenting all that work and what was apple in that time

_yes_, Jobs saved Apple. More exactly, when he succeeded to convince Apple to merge with Next, he bring to them excellent software years in advance to everything, good development tools and excellent engineers.

the result paved the way to the iPad and forward. NeXTstep was THAT important.

No you are confusing a comment disagreeing with the articles point about the tech industry essentially standing still if Apple hadnt bought next with a comment against what apple had done.

Like you say use any other smartphone and you can see the iPhone isn't just the sum of it's parts. Leaving aside arguments of what's better between iOS and wp7 (personally I think wp7 follows apples design principles even better than iOS). We would still have smartphones similar to what we have today. They may only be at the android level but we would still have them. We would still have gestures on phones to. Things like pinch to zoom date back to the early 90s. A lot of the concepts in apples products arnt new, but what's prevented it coming out before is the tech available. A lot of the tech wasn't designed by apple. In many cases they bought the companies that did make it but the point is it would have still been made.

The only thing that can't be said either way is would the guys that came up the iPhones ui have ended up somewhere else and been able to do it. But there's no way of telling. The same as there's no way of telling if they could have achieved something even better.

Surely, you jest.


Nonsense. The iPhone came to market 133 years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The assertion that the absence of Apple would have delayed the iPhone-like mobile phone by just four of fewer years is fantasy. The first Android phone was the HTC Dream which was released on 22 October 2008, nearly two years after the iPhone's 9 January 2007 introduction and 16 months after the iPhone's 29 June 2007 first sales.



The HTC Dream Android phone is pictured above. This is was the best that the Android people could do with nearly two years to find an answer to the iPhone. I defy anyone to argue that the Android phones that we have today could have been developed in four years without having an iPhone to copy.

It's just not possible when you look at all the SW and HW "flattery" put into other vendors after the iPhone arrived. We even have evidence from before the iPhoned to even after the iPhone launched. We can go back to how the market was and Google imitating the then market smartphone leader, the Blackberry. We also plenty of reports of how the iPhone will sell because it doesn't have things like a stylus or HW keyboard; things you don't see much of these days. We're even seeing newer smartphones with non-user replaceable batteries.

Nope. Leaving aside the general style difference of large letters. The fundamental design of wp7 using gestures to move between tabs rather than clutter a screen up with buttons is very apple. The home screen also being simplified to one list of your favourite apps and a jump list of everything ages of icons is also very apple (think osx dock of favourite apps and search box for everything else).


The Prada phone that had a capacative touch screen which was announced before the iPhone would still have existed.

The tech world is made up of so many companies and individuals sharing ideas or being bought by people like apple it is inconceivable that the tech wouldn't still have been invented. It may not have been as popular, but that's an argument about the importance of advertising over how good a product actually is.

WP7 is great which is a great example to show that innovation doesn't necessarily breed immigration or adoption.

There is no way the single-touch Prada phone could have ever been the industry game changer the iPhone was because of a single feature they shared in the common. The iPhone from HW I the OS to the apps to the philosophy (e.g.: making true phone just another app) to the announcement of Xcode and AppStore 6 months later were all responsible for its success.

I agree completely. However, the AppStore was not required to Mac the iPhone a success. Remember late 2006 and early 2007. There was no confirmation that Apple would actually introduce a phone, but the rumor sites were rife with speculation of what the iPhone would look like. How wrong the rumors were. However, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in January 2007, everyone got it. The iPhone went on sale in late June 2007. During the nearly seven months that intervened, the iPhone became a cultural icon. It was referenced in popular songs of the day. By the time that customers queued-up at their local AT&T Stores to get their iPhones, its success was assured.

The naysayers complained that it did not do 3G. They lamented that it was not a smart phone because it customers could not install downloadable apps. They brayed that it was available only on the AT&T network. The naysayers were correct on all accounts, but it made no difference. The naysayers were spec sheet whores. What they did not get was the iPhone worked as advertised and worked well. By the time that third-party apps became available, the iPhone had already revolutionized the dumb phone market. With the introduction of third-party apps, the iPhone stood poised to revolutionize the smart phone market. It has now done just that.

Oh, my heavens. You really think that this is an argument in your favor, don't you?


What do these sentences mean? They don't say anything about anything. They're (likely intentionally) nebulous and have nothing to do with the argument at hand.

Didn't say it would be a game changer. I said that what the article says which is...

Is putting far to much importance on NeXT, when for certain we would have touchscreen phones the fact that the Prada phone was announced fractionally before the iPhone demonstrates that someone else would have thought of keyboards on touchscreens rather than buttons like the article suggests.

The claim that there would also be no effor to build ultrabooks like the MacBook Air is also incorrect as it was only a couple of months after the Air was released Apple was told they had to stop advertising it as the thinnest laptop due to it not being any more. And it wasn't a device made in response to the Air that ended up being thinner.

I'd accept that we may not have devices that look as nice (although a lot of tech is following a Web 2.0 style that has nothing to do with Apple), and there might not have been anyone that would try to quadruple the price people pay for phones. But to assert that the rest of the industry would stand still is complete rubbish.

I think your making a lot of incorrect assumptions about how technology progresses. I don't see any evidence that everything Apple did to reinvent the market would have naturally happened.

As for thinking of an onscreen keyboard that had been done before and before that was imagined in science fiction. The different from before and after the iPhone is how that tool's useability is perceived. When the iPhone was announced it would be crap because all such keyboards are crap. I assumed it would be good but slower than a HW keyboard on phone. Turns out it's faster but does have the abet of requiring the tyre to look. Would this have become standard eventually? Sure, eventually, but it was because of Apple that this is standard on smartphones today.

Look at the mindset back in 2007 compared to today. Not all of it has changed but at least mug of it has been challanged... by Apple. I can't see how this would have happened by now without the iPhone.

I have a fully loaded Turbo Dimension Cube and a Turbo Color slab.

Frankly I prefer the simplicity of NeXTStep to OSX sometimes. At least the interface is consistent...

I also have one of only a few processor accelerators for the Turbo slab - a 50Mhz 040 I believe.

.

Excellent Article - could say it's a nice overview/primer for Birth of Digital Age

And for some of us, a trip down memory lane

.

Glad it included the One Single Factor that's made Apple "Different", will seal its place in History, and continue to have all others chasing them for many years to come.

"Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts"

Where Apple's been since Day One. And rest of "Tech Wannabes" are not only unable to find that place, they don't even seem have it on their map (assuming they do HAVE a map?).

With that 'location' firmly established, all Apple had to do was wait for the 'Tech Side' of things to catch up to the 'vision' they (Steve, et al) knew would be realized in time.

Things like 'Vectors' to figure Pi faster, so able to get 'arcs/circles' drawn correctly and not need 'anti-aliasing' computations to slow down the processor stuck with x/y algebra methods to eliminate those 'stair steps' in an 'arc/circle'.

Which finally showed itself by the 2000s as Apple kicked the chit out of everyone else doing what everyone always laughed about for so many years - "Yea, Macs are great for graphics, but if you want to get any real work done, go Microsoft".

Ok, and that "real work" was basically an adding machine, calculator, and cash register - with some email/text thrown in on the side.

Not the kind of 'things' that the World wanted to 'change'.

But - needed those 'graphic calculations' (again, the vectors/trig) to do Music/Media/Video/etc ... and do them properly and fast.

And took a while for the processors/tech stuff to catch up enough to make it all 'fly' - when it finally did ? Say hello to iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc

'Things' Apple was just waiting to 'invent' once the time was ripe - how did Steve describe it when he intro'd the iPod ... "Music, low hanging fruit"

On and on - imagine any of you who known the 'depth of tech' and the History over the years can fill in the blanks (and offer any 'corrections') to the 'general idea' I'm pointing at here.

Should be obvious to those who are able to 'see'.

.

Oh, and one other Biggie, about Steve

When did he come back to Apple, about 1998 ?

So until his death, he spent 12 or 13 years bringing Apple back from the dead, and chart a course for the future that will carry Apple for these many years to come.

And - he did it all for what ?

His $12 or $13 in salary over those years ?

Uh huh - yea, right

THAT is why Steve/Apple are what they are

THAT is what will Change the World™

.

Steve Jobs returned to the fold when Apple bought NeXT in 1996. Gil Amelio was ousted in 1997 and was replaced by Steve Jobs. Jobs announced the iMac in 1998. The iMac signaled to the popular press and to a large fraction of the buying public that there was a "new Apple."

The original LG Prada phone was not Android. It was an embedded OS running a UI built with Flash Lite. It could not be considered an "easy to use touchscreen" anywhere compatible to the iPhone. And it was a commercial failure. The only thing successful about it was its being compared to the iPhone in a "we did it first" sort of way by LG before it threw everything about the Prada away and started copying Apple's design as closely as it could. There is really nothing of value left from the original Prada design. It was nothing more than a prototype experiment offering nothing but a high price tag. It was not an important bit of smartphone history in any respect.


Again, the value of the MacBook Air was not just its thinness. It was an overall package, built on top of lots of engineering skill. Nothing has replaced it yet, and there aren't even any capable competitors in place. To suggest that the MBA design was fated to be invented by somebody is rather silly, given that the PC market didn't innovate worth a damn for decade under the rule of Microsoft, apart from chips getting faster.


Nobody said industry would stand still. There has been lots of progress apart from Apple. But very little of that progress has considered the importance of usability, desirability, and esthetics that Apple has imparted into its products.

Look at any other industry and you see lots of companies competing to deliver those aspects (automobiles, clothing, food, hospitality and so on). Among tech companies, there seems to be a myopic drive toward increasing the MHz and RAM, delivering it cheaper, and that's about it.

That's not a fanboy flattery of Apple, it's a reality that mocks the tech industry and its overall inability to recognize the importance of basic humanities.

Awesome article!

I am still to this day astounded by the hardware and software made by NeXT. It was easily 15 years ahead of the rest of the industry. That is a mind boggling lead in the computer industry. I hope that within my lifetime, there will be another Steve Jobs to orchestrate such an impressive achievement. These technological leaps don't come along that often.