OpenStep, Rhapsody, Darwin, BSD, Mach...

dstranathan

Everyone loves to say that OS X is a *NIX, and that FreeBSD is a large chunk of Darwin, but few people these days mention NeXt or OpenStep. I was wondering about NeXt today...



1) I understand how Mach (Avie Tevanian), and Display PostScript fits into Apple's master modern OS plan, but was it really worth $400 million dollars? Besides Mach, was this hefty purchase primarily for Steven P Jobs and his band of NeXt think-tank engineers? Or was it source code and intellectual property? The Apple G4 cube wasn't based on NeXt's "cube", was it?



2) Did NextStep/OpenStep have any BSD components?



3) Did NextStep/OpenStep use netinfo? (and isn't Apple killing NetInfo? Apple's recent OS X Server docs refer to it as "legacy" technology)



4) if OpenStep was so great, why did Apple rip it open and add so many FreeBSD components?



5) What were the weaknesses of OpenStep?



6) Will we see functionality of OpenStep added to OS X in the future?



7) Who were the biggest users/clients of NeXt products? I remember that ID Software developed Doom and Doom 2 on NeXtStep or OpenStep, right?



8) What made NeXtStep different than other flavors of UNIX?



9) What does Linus Torvalds think of NeXt, Darwin, and the BSDs in general?



10) Did Display PostScript become Quartz (and QE)?



11) Can someone give a brief history of OS X as it stands today?



12) Anyone have links to NeXt-related stuff?



<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/dstranathan/PhotoAlbum4.html"; target="_blank">http://homepage.mac.com/dstranathan/PhotoAlbum4.html</a>;



[ 01-26-2003: Message edited by: dstranathan ]



[ 01-26-2003: Message edited by: dstranathan ]</p>

ghost_user_name

To get you started, here is a fairly detailed "tree" of Unix's history including Mac OS X.



<a href="http://www.levenez.com/unix/"; target="_blank">http://www.levenez.com/unix/</a>;

ghost_user_name

[quote]Originally posted by dstranathan:

<strong>The Apple G4 cube wasn't based on NeXt's "cube", was it?</strong><hr></blockquote>



The Mac cube had absolutely nothing to with the NeXT cube in design at all (Well. Beside for the obvious)







Notice the size of that mutha ****ar.



But that said I think it has been obvious that Apple is in their post-modern periode:



First Mac: AIO. First OMG product from Jobs the White (the iMac) AIO (Hello again)



NeXT Cube and G4 Powermac Cube



The Newton Puff. The Dock Puff.



Anyone got more examples?

buonrotto

Originally posted by dstranathan:

1) I understand how Mach (Avie Tevanian), and Display PostScript fits into Apple's master modern OS plan, but was it really worth $400 million dollars?



Well, it's kpet them operating for this long, so by nw, it's paid itself off anyway. I'd say yes personally, but it subjective really.



Besides Mach, was this hefty purchase primarily for Steven P Jobs and his band of NeXt think-tank engineers?



I believe the mach kernel is another open/public domain project, Apple doesn't have exclusive rights to it.



Or was it source code and intellectual property?



It was a lot of people and technology they paid for, what was Cocoa, WebObjects, other frameworks, their enterprise contacts, their personnel, etc.



The Apple G4 cube wasn't based on NeXt's "cube", was it?



Maybe inspired by, the spirit of the neXT cube, but not derived from it specifically. the NeXt cube was big, black and didn't have the same technology inside at all. It was a totaly different design in execution, and really was a high-end workstation, not an attempt at a mid-range product. (NeXT wasn't even allowed to compete with Apple's markets and price points due to Jobs' severance agreement with Apple.)



[b]2) Did NextStep/OpenStep have any BSD components?[b/]



Yes, it has always been a variation of BSD unix with a Mach kernel, though Jobs even then insisted you never had to use BSD "directly", i.e., through a CLI.



3) Did NextStep/OpenStep use netinfo? (and isn't Apple killing NetInfo? Apple's recent OS X Server docs refer to it as "legacy" technology)



Yes, and yes I think. It was created by NeXT and I find it rather messy at least at a glance. Plus it's proprietary, so they're moving towards standards here too.



4) if OpenStep was so great, why did Apple rip it open and add so many FreeBSD components?



They have aways kept pace with the other BSDs, improving the *nix component like everything else. Networking and security have changed a great deal especially, so they need to keep up here.



5) What were the weaknesses of OpenStep?



Can't really speak to that since I haven't used it, only seen it. Seems like it was a niche product that originally ran on insanely expensive hardware, then moved to PCs but Windows was already the 800 lbs. gorilla of the business world, cheaper and Macs took up the creative and lower education markets.



6) Will we see functionality of OpenStep added to OS X in the future?



We already have a huge chunk of it, though there are some new frameworks in OS X and some old OpenStep frameworks that haven't made the trip (RenderMan for example). Cocoa and the architecture of OS X's system software are direct descendants of OpenStep.



7) Who were the biggest users/clients of NeXt products? I remember that ID Software developed Doom and Doom 2 on NeXtStep or OpenStep, right?



John Carmack liked what is now called Cocoa -- the Object-oriented nature of programming (think Interface Builder and Project Builder). But OpenStep and WebObjects (which were more like peers in those days) were popular with a lot of enterprise customers, especially financial institutions.



8) What made NeXtStep different than other flavors of UNIX?



The Mach kernel, the Objective C libraries (now Cocoa), Display Postscript, it unique hardware (NeXTstep became OpenStep once NeXT stopped making hardware).



9) What does Linus Torvalds think of NeXt, Darwin, and the BSDs in general?



Well, he did write his own imitation of *nix, so he probably likes BSD in general. But he doesn't (didn't?) like the Mach kernel, I would bet he's suspicious of the Darwin license agreement and anything less than full GPL compliance.



10) Did Display PostScript become Quartz (and QE)?



Sort of. Adobe charges an arm and a leg to license Display Postscript. Rather than pay a huge license fee per machine and raise the price of Macs even more (this is one reason that made NeXT hardware so damn expensive), they realized that the open PDF spec was free and gave them most if not all of what Display Postscript gave them. So that open PDF spec is the basis of Quartz, and does more than what even Display Postscript did then, though with a few tradeoffs I think.



11) Can someone give a brief history of OS X as it stands today?



a start:



<a href="http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/03/cocoa_history_one.html"; target="_blank">Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa part 1</a>



<a href="http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/05/10/cocoa_history_two.html"; target="_blank">Part 2</a>



I can't seem to find a continuous narrative.



12) Anyone have links to NeXt-related stuff?



<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/troy_stephens/OpenStep/screenShots/"; target="_blank">Troy Stephen's homepage</a>



<a href="http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/"; target="_blank">French NeXT site</a>



and especially:



<a href="http://www120.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/intro.htmld/"; target="_blank">Intro to NeXTstep</a>



<a href="http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?OpenStep"; target="_blank">CocoaDev thread</a>



<a href="http://www.objectfarm.org/Activities/Publications/TheMerger/index.html"; target="_blank">the merger</a>



cached Google page:



<a href="http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:rqv8DUAFuLcC:homepage.mac.com/troy_stephens/OpenStep/history/content.html+History+of++OpenStep&hl=en&ie=UTF-8"; target="_blank">Troy Stephens again</a>



don't forget to peruse old articles at StepWise.com!



[fixed link]



[ 01-26-2003: Message edited by: BuonRotto ]</p>

torifile

Good post, BuonRotto! Very educational.

henriok

AIX, Solaris, IRIX, Digital UNIX, True64 also used/uses Display Postscript... I have no clue how many of them actually uses the technology in current offerings.



The last edition of Display Postscript on Adobe's site is dated 1993, so I guess that it's not exactly state of the art I guess Quartz is.