20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
512pixels.net
512pixels.net
Johny Ives says of Isaacson's book, "My regard couldn’t be any lower."
I too liked Becoming Steve Jobs too, but I didn't think Isacsons book was as terrible as many people made it out to be.
Talk about "my regard couldn't be any lower".... I think Isaacson's book pretty much described the guy I remember.
Anyway, I sent whoever it was, pretty sure Steve, an email with read receipt enabled and he bitched me out for invading his privacy. This was ~93 or so.
There must be someone at Next clothing (next.co.uk) dreaming that Apple sell that domain name to them one day.
mail.next.com goes to 127.0.0.6
As I recall, his reply was terse, along the lines of:
~~~
What are they?
sj
~~~
I was doubtful it was actually the man himself responding. I thought it was some email administrator trying to steal my ideas (I was 20yrs younger then). I proceeded cautiously and don't recall if he replied again.
A decade later I learned terse replies were his MO.
Like most every idea I came up with at the time, it had the word “smart” in it.
Smart Windows.
What are “Smart Windows”? So glad you asked. At the time both NeXTSTEP and MacOS only had resizing handles on the bottom of windows(if I remember correctly). What I proposed was a full perimeter border on windows like what was seen in the Motif Window Manager, CDE, et al.
But wait there’s more...
If you double-clicked the border, the window would jump-move in that direction until it hit either another window border or the edge of the screen. If you held the shift key while double-clicking the window would instead expand in that direction. All together it was a precise way to quickly move and arrange a full screen panel of windows without ever having to drag a window or window border.
I eventually tested out the idea on Windows NT 4.0 inside a Visual Basic project. It was super dope. SJ missed out.
I reckon the correct way to handle these receipt requests is to configure the mail client to send a modified receipt email which also has a read receipt request, and keep replying in kind until your correspondent gets the message (or the mail servers break down due to two bots telling each other that they read the notification that they just read each other's mail telling them they read their mail, of course).
Disney is in big trouble as cordcutters proliferate.
ESPN is at about $9.5b to $10b in sales for 2016 and $1b in operating income. Those numbers will decline until operating income is closer to $300m-$500m in the next few years.
By comparison, Disney did $9.3b in net income for 2016 ($14.2b operating income). ESPN is down to being closer to 10% to 15% of Disney's profits and 18% on sales. As a business it's a looming disaster of value destruction from the former peak.
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.
(Funnily, my current Xfce setup still visually resembles my OpenStep-like setup of that time.)
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 perhaps 1995)?
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.
But the ability to take a Mac from nearly 20 years ago and take one from yesterday and be able to use them in nearly identical ways (mobileme instead of icloud eh) is quite impressive.
I have seen the attempts to invent a new desktop paradigm in Linuxland with Unity and Microsoft's Metro attempt but I firmly believe that the windowing systems that we have at the moment are really as good as it is going to get, and more importantly, as good as it needs to be.
The eyecandy is all very nice (animations, fading in/out) and new compositors is great too but from a usability point of view, I don't think we really need to add anything new.
Am I alone in this? I mean Amiga got it right years ago and we've been trying to catch up since.... :-)
Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm.
I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a psuedo-desktop UI paradigm where they can't really reap their advantages. At some point in the next 10, 20 years I think both mobile and VR will have their WIMP-equivalent UI breakthrough and we will have a real horse race, and Linux will be in a different position. Speculation of course.
* "Windows, icons, menus, pointer" was the big breakthrough discovery of the meat and potatoes of desktop UI
Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Photoshop, AutoCAD).
None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by recent interaction paradigms (i.e. smartphones, tablets, or voice-control). VR's useful for visualisation, but that's a very limited use-case, and VR has been used for architectural and civil-engineering visualization for decades anyway (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA ).
Granted, when considering an iPad paired with a keyboard - we see some of those use-cases become almost workable again (namely word-processing), but it's essentially the same thing as a traditional laptop - just with considerably more painful precision object manipulation due to the lack of a mouse cursor.
I feel the biggest paradigm-shift over the past 10 years is the movement of database business applications away from Access, VB6, Delphi, etc to be web-applications, usually hosted locally, and more recently to being moved to multi-tenancy, subscription-based services ("the cloud") - this has now become acceptable to businesses: the trade-off of no-longer being in exclusive control of their data is increased uptime, reliability, and significantly reduced start-up and (usually) running costs - and being browser-based this has meant a shift away from WIMP - where an activity is contained within a small-ish, often fixed-size, "window", to a "page", which has its own interaction model (e.g. no more modal windows because you can always open a new browser tab).
The next iteration of human/computer interaction we'll see that impacts our (society's) actual working lives will be something that enables me to be more expressive without resigning any degree of control over what I produce - and right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously, a keyboard with which I can enter commands or prose almost as quickly as I can think it (with a very low error ratio too), and a mouse for quick, precise, (gorilla-arm-syndrome-free) content/command selection.
Until something comes along that enables me to be more productive for my employer the desktop interaction model will still reign.
Well, the command line is already more powerful, if less accessible. Piping streams together, writing code. These are very powerful things that would give you superworkers if your staff could do them. People stopped developing command line UIs because there was a gold rush on WIMP, so command line usability stopped getting funded. It's also just proven a hard nut to crack. People in academia have been trying and failing a more usable command line for a long time. Seems like just a matter of time to me though. It's only been 20 years.
Mobile is interesting, not because it is particularly better at anything, but just the opposite: there's no space on the screen, so it forces designers to reconsider more stream-based UIs. I.e., return to the command line paradigm and pick up where we left off in the 80s. WIMP and big screens give designers a bunch of idioms to rely on, and lots of space to fill up and they get lazy.
VR doesn't inherently do a whole lot more than a rectangular screen in terms of productivity. I think most VR UIs will be things you could make a rough approximation of on a desktop screen, minus immersion. But it's a playground in which to explore interaction ideas that will become the fundamentals of AR....
AR is where there is a new idea, which is that you can leave things lying around in space. A desktop is a window, and a relatively small one at that. You have to keep tidying it up. You waste a lot of time context shifting. Most workplaces are much larger than the few square feet a desktop provides. The killer feature of AR is basically just "spread out".
So, combine those three things... stream-based UI, with programming features (iteration, DSLs, pluggable objects), and then spread that out into space and I think you get something that will make desktops seem quaint.
Lots of human-computer interaction PhD dissertations between here and there though.
[0]: http://gnustep.org/
What would be interesting, it would be compiling iOS Applications to macOS and JavaScript.
Well, there's a sentence you don't hear often, nowadays!
My answer: your application programming wasn't actually that valuable to real humans. The web leapt 20 years ahead on the things that actually mattered to the world, and we lost some glitz that really didn't.
I think the web actually has far too many capabilities for most applications, and application frameworks are mostly a racket to keep application programmers and professional application users in a lucrative dance of wasting each other's time.
The vast majority of people can't even string together two functions, which js quite possibly the most powerful thing computers can do. For all of our effort we can't even give the people that most basic of capabilities, something five year olds can do with a little guidance. Because programmers are obsessed with GUI animations and digital cockpits and enabling professional app users to bend to the arbitrary whims of their supervisors. Because when we imagine "power" we don't picture collective control of outcomes that matter to us, we think of the sensation we get when we can individually make a fancy tool do arbitrary things.
I realize that's just a rant, so I'll ask: what outcomes matter to you, that you feel are impossible on the web?
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 better for prototyping ideas than C. Modern python/perl/racket/go/c#/etc are much further ahead. There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched. Now the most common expression of hackers is dynamic programming on fabulously powerful free tools. High-quality operating systems are also free. Documentation is free. And it's all far better than what people used to pay for.
Deployment: interactive user interfaces are now delivered through the a web browser. Previously a lot of workstations were sold to run custom internal apps.
Save your money! Get a digital ocean account, and run your macbook until the power supply dies. Perhaps in another ten years google-style web-browser laptops will be ubiquitous.
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.
> 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
In the 90s, most people were packing Windows 95 and if you wanted a Unix box you were going to pay for it. Silicon Graphics, NeXT, etc, were out of the reach of the general population and most developers. Only the CAD guys had them.
But many Windows users still complain today that the Mac is too expensive. So in that sense, if you want a Unix development machine you still have to pay a premium, just thankfully about an order of magnitude lower.
Of course, the democratisation would go much further: it is interesting that around the same time NeXT and Apple were merging, I first heard that some guy called Linus was busy porting Unix to the Intel architecture, and - unbelievably - he was doing it for free!
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.
/ MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /
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.
I see the package manager addition to Haiku and wonder if this was what was really intended for BeOS - it always struck me that it was more akin to the Mac and DMGs on there instead of a Linux-style package system.
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.
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.
And completing the circle: Gassée was partially responsible for Jobs leaving Apple, and was promoted to Jobs' former position after Jobs resigned. He founded Be after also being forced out of Apple.
Silicon Valley really can be thoroughly incestuous at times.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7... http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/14
Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP
Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces.
Merriam Webster actually lists both meanings (small fact and non-fact). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
NeXTStep 3.0 used the NS namespace; 2.0 and earlier was NX.
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.
NeXT was an actual operating system that people used. You could run word processing apps from which you could print and email. There was a fully fledged development platform with real developers building real third party apps. BeOS was more like a giant tech demo.
If we focus on just the technologies choosing BeOS would have meant at least a few years more engineering effort. And you still wouldn't have been able to replicate the ground breaking nature of OSX in the short time frame required.
I suspect both financially and in consumer mind share they would have never recovered from selecting BeOS.
You get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations:
Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch basically everyone asleep at the wheel except Jobs, the man with a plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrX047-v-s
WWDC Q&A - 'the art of saying no'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM
Jobs' hostile takeover in July by doing a (probably illegal?) stock dump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer
Announcing a Deal with Microsoft as de facto CEO in August, booed by the crowd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOs6hnTI4lw
Internal meeting in September 1997
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMQhOm-Dqo
iMac introduction 1998 - Apple is back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwmF0OJ0vg
Macworld 1998 - Apple is essentially saved as a company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYiqVzPjAc
OSX Strategy reveal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5dWDg6f9eo
1999 - OSX Server launch
https://youtu.be/NuCYHrSig94?t=48m40s
2000 - OSX launch
Not just a plan but the Plan, which Apple has followed ever since. It's fascinating to watch this section of Jobs's 1997 comeback presentation, knowing how successful this strategy was with the iPhone and the App Store: https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=7m40s
Wouldn't have taken much to make a lot of money.
Of course, most people, even if that lucky, would have sold early iPod era thinking "This can't continue" and wouldn't have made the profits they would if they held until the last year or two.
You should only have regrets for decisions that would have made sense with the knowledge at that time. Buying Apple stock in the 90s wouldn't. But when I first saw an iphone, my first thought was "Wow, I need to buy one". My second thought then should have been "and I need to buy Apple's stock".
The stock has had 3 splits 2:1,2:1,7:1 in that time frame. 10 shares in 1996 would have had a cost of $7.50 and a present market value of ~$32,000.
$32,000 doesn't sound like too bad a return.
The percentage increase in value is astronomical 426500% increase, but "Not buying 10 shares in 1996" is hardly missing out on 'fuck-you' money.
Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply. But if I had one there's a lot better ways to make money than using it to buy 10 shares of Apple 20 years ago.
Yes, but Apple, from 1999 until Jobs died at least, and for some time more, gave people opportunity after opportunity to buy a constantly sky-rocketing stock. If someone didn't see it with the first iMac (1999 IIRC), they should have seen it with the iPod. If not, then with the iPhone. They had many chances to buy that stock.
The point is, right now, any of the hundreds of startups you see just starting now /could/ potentially be the next Facebook. Statistically, most won't be. But of course in 20 years, you won't remember thinking about buying stocks for all the companies that failed. You'll only remember how you once considered buying stock fort his one company that is huge now.
That's the same for every company, so it's a moot point. What would the lesson from that be? Nobody has a crystal ball, so nobody should invest in any stock?
Since investing does happen, and is based on signs and trends, what I'm saying is that Apple gave many of those repeatedly, and if someone didn't see a revived company when the original iMac came out, and then OS X 10.0, and then the iPod, and then the iPhone, and then the iPad, etc, then they only have their selves to blame.
There are masses of information available on companies / stock market. Assuming roulette wheel is fair, there is none other than 1/32 chance known.
Nobody can. Over a 20 year timeline, it’s essentially the same as a roulette wheel.
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?
But 20 years out, the hypothetical "I wish I had bought AAPL in 1996" is just as useless as the "I wish I had bet on green" comparison. In this scenario, it's an apt comparison.
Anyone making an informed choice in 1996, knowing financials, track record, ceo, products, pending deals, etc. etc. would have stayed the hell away from AAPL
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.
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.
Selling some of it represented a substantial portion of the downpayment on my first house.
That might have been the world's most expensive iPod.
Worst thing is that my reasoning was solid. Limited stock of a thing people might want = it'll probably go up.
Actually, no. Worst thing is that I sold them for very little, not long after, probably to buy beer. That is an expensive beer.
And how long would he have held on to them before selling?
That's the really fun part of trading: it's one thing to see a profit, and quite another to bet on whether it's as good as you're going to get, or go 5x - 10x - 100x higher.
Did that with Tesla too. And Netflix.
Eyeballing the chart, it would have been right around the last time they paid a dividend until 2012 and the stock price would have been around 1.5. Also, there were three stock splits between then and now.
Oh well, I probably would have lost track of the stock in the many many moves I made during my college years.
Microsoft buys the pieces that eventually become MS-DOS?
Going back further, pharma companies buying tech that they turned into mass produced antibiotics and gave us the sulfa drug revolution?
Apple buying NeXT hardly compares to the acquisition of steel smelting.
I don't believe Microsoft acquired QDOS, just the IP.
Furthermore, bringing Jobs back to Apple resulted in Apple going from nearly bankrupt a top 5 Market Cap Company in the world (http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm)
I wouldn't be surprised. It's a common affliction around here.
This is just one of those 'what if' scenarios.
If Apple didn't buy NeXT someone else would've innovated a good capacitive touchscreen device. Maybe it would've been Nokia. They were busy with experimenting with that long before the first iPhone got released, see the Nokia 770 and Maemo (or actually check its successor, the Nokia N800). Perhaps Elop would never have become the CEO of Nokia. Perhaps Nokia would've still be around. Perhaps not? We'll never know. Everything's connected.
Er... interesting revisionism, here. That acquisition didn't do much to save Apple from the financial hole it had dug for itself.
Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.
I have no doubt in my mind that this was the plan for Apple as well. Whoever managed that deal on the Apple side must have been on their toes. Of course, the investment paid off handsomely for MS, but I'm quite sure that this wasn't their intent.
So while I think it is true that Apple required the cash infusion they got, they managed the situation masterfully. Whether or not they could have secured funding some other way, we'll never know because they took MS's money.
Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS.
Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.
Not actually true. DOS was already done when Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox Parc to start its application division in 1981.
Multiplan and Word were the first results, released in 1983, by which time it was obvious that Lotus 1-2-3 was going to win.
Simonyi had big ideas about "metaprogramming" and using what was basically a VM to make applications portable. (I ran Multiplan on a Tandy 100-style portable, where the program came on a chip!)
In an interview, Simonyi said:
QUOTE
"Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were. "Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel."
https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.comput...
Microsoft was the Mac's biggest supporter, and Bill Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch. For which he has been richly rewarded with decades of Apple fanboy bile ;-)
The disbelief in the room is stunning, including the shouts of "NO!!!!!!". Very amusing today, perhaps not then.
What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux...
What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important.
The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
Imagine if our iPhones ran BeOS.
We will really never know, but I suspect there were some serious problems when Palm bought the code and couldn't build a phone / PDA OS out of it.
(incidentally it wasn't just a Unix kernel but also the Mach microkernel. Interface Builder? Display Postscript? Sticking a DSP in the original machine? Lots of design decisions with potentially interesting history)
A solid UNIX operating system with a well-designed UI certainly helped in terms of technology. As did Objective-C. Technologically, Apple's achievements would've been difficult to realise with their classic Mac OS (which Apple knew quite well as they had been shopping around for a new operating system technology for quite some time at that point).
NeXTSTEP and Objective-C probably hit a sweet spot there, albeit one that would only come to fruition years later. I doubt Apple's current success would've been possible (in the way it turned out to be at least) with BeOS (another serious contender at the time) or Linux.
Palm couldn't build the iPhone with Palm and had to build WebOS. QNX is amazing, but its UI and client developer library wasn't there or else RIM / Blackberry would have used that. Apple had used Linux, and frankly, there was no way Apple would have done a Linux-based system after the whole GNU thing at NeXT.
I do think Objective-C, the developer tools, and NS class libraries don't quite get the credit they should. They were very good (go read the Taligent documentation). Truthfully, if Adobe and Microsoft hadn't insisted on Carbon[2], the Mac would have been much better off.
Apple had done an Intel translation internally and had the institutional knowledge already from the 68K to PowerPC transition.
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MrpLyUOo8 - its pretty amazing some of the statements, guess the clone thing changed
2) not absent the Classic layer, just absent Carbon.
NeXT wanted to keep the Objective-C frontend to GCC proprietary, but Richard Stallman believed that would violate the GPL.
I know, it's terrible: NeXT had to contribute back to a community they only wanted to take from.
"I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.
So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL.
The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free."
(from http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...)
I'd be curious to hear more firsthand details from any parties involved. There's a widely held perception that this was a really divisive and drawn-out fight that left a lot of bad blood on both sides, but based on RMS' account, it wasn't. RMS' account just sounds like Jobs contacted him about it, said "is it OK if we ship it this way?", RMS checked with his lawyer and responded, "no, you need to ship it this other way to comply with the GPL", to which Jobs' replied, "OK, we'll do it that way then".
To be fair, I don't think Apple was ever interested in software freedom. This is pretty obvious from their actions since that time (moving away from utilising software under the GPL). But I've never heard anyone other than developers complain about it. From a business perspective, it makes sense -- a license is a license. You don't want to pay the price, you don't get the license. I got the sense that Apple's management understood this principle completely.
From the FSF's perspective, they got an Objective-C front end for GCC and they were particularly happy about that. It was a kind of triumph because the GPL did its job. Objective-C programmers had a free platform to work with, which never would have happened if GCC had not existed and was not GPLed. One can argue that these days more and more companies understand the benefits of open source development and might contribute large pieces of code willingly, but that certainly wasn't the case in those times.
I would also be interested in first hand views, but from my perspective, it was always a non-issue.
I did like the concept of People, Places, and Things. It is a shame that little pieces of a good idea can be lost because of the overall failure.
It wasn't just them. Pretty much nobody wanted to write two different versions of their apps.
You would have had a negative feedback loop. Users wouldn't upgrade to Mac OS X because most of their apps weren't native, so everything would run in Classic, which was just as crashy as MacOS 9 but slower. Then developers would hold off on porting their apps to Cocoa, because hardly anyone was running OS X. So the 9 to X transition would have taken much longer.
> the whole GNU thing at NeXT.
My observation of the smartphone market is that Moore's law always wins. Microsoft knew that from the start; they build a mobile OS (Windows CE) designed more for future devices rather than current devices (like Palm did). So ultimately when the technology matured enough, Microsoft was ready and Palm languished trying to modernize. Ultimately, Apple did one better over Microsoft and simply ported over their desktop OS to a smartphone and beat everyone.
Err, Steve Jobs and having an actual vision?
>They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux...
Well, Palm was worth more than Apple at the time, so no. And if Palm wasn't, BlackBerry, Nokia etc surely were, and they didn't make the iPhone.
And Microsoft was putting one half-assed PC/tablet hybrid after another for a decade before the iPad, and only had crap to show for it.
If Apple had planned to build the iPhone in 1996, they probably would have bought Palm and ended up with something a far cry short of the iPhone as we know it, for obvious reasons.
Palm's OS was designed for what mobile hardware was capable of in the 90s, whereas NeXT's OS was designed for what workstation hardware was capable of in the 90s. By the time the iPhone was released, Moore's Law had made mobile hardware capable of running the superior NeXT software (full unix kernel under the hood, Objective-C and its APIs, etc.) and you end up with a better end product.
Palm OS wasn't even suitable for 90s mobile hardware. It was a buggy mess.
Ten years into the iPhone age and I still can see the Treo IMAP client error as plain as day.
Steve always thought big whereas Bill (Gates) thought practical. Steve got back into Apple at the perfect time to finally take advantage of the technology for something that a non-geek wanted.
Some say 'Next bought Apple'
Stallman was a prodigious programmer and wrote GCC (GNU C), a debugger and Emacs. He also created the GPL and founded the Free Software Foundation (from which the "open source" movement split off).
GNU was most of an OS by 1990 but didn't have a proper kernel (which was intended to be the ambitious Hurd).
In an unrelated move, Linus Torvalds used Stallman's tools to write a mini-OS and released it under Stallman's license in 1991. It naturally got incorporated into what some people (including Stallman) then called GNU/Linux. It was, in code terms, roughly 97% GNU and 3% Linux.
The naming is arguable because Linux was never a GNU or FSF development. However, Stallman's GPL allowed Linux operating system packagers (eg Debian) to use things that had been developed by or adapted for GNU.
Otherwise, Stallman told me he wouldn't have bothered with GNU if he'd known that BSD Unix was going to be available as free software. Unfortunately, FreeBSD wasn't released until 1993.
The only real reason that a Linux distribution hasn't been UNIX-certified is because RedHat and IBM found there was very little marketing value in calling it UNIX, that is, Linux is a stronger brand.
And I suspect the only reason MacOS is UNIX-certified is because they advertised it as "UNIX" and were sued by The Open Group, who owns the trademark. [1]
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-in-court-dispute-over-unix/
It's based on Red Hat. It has been officially certified as UNIX by The Open Group.
And that means all the basic tools and system calls one expects on a true UNIX machine are present in OSX.
”MkLinux started as a project sponsored by Apple Computer and OSF Research Institute, to get "Linux on Mach" ported to the Macintosh computer and for Apple to explore alternative kernel technologies on the Mac platform. At the time, there was no officially sponsored PowerPC port of Linux, and none specifically for Macintosh hardware”
> Around 2005, Jobs faced a crucial decision. Should he give the task of developing the device’s software to the team that built the iPod, which wanted to build a Linux-based system? Or should he entrust the project to the engineers who had revitalized the software foundation of the Macintosh? In other words, should he shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod? [1]
When this article first came out, I made the assumption that this statement meant iPod OS was Linux-based---also feel like I heard that somewhere else---but I have not found any sources to confirm this. Anyone else know?
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-10-12/scott-for...
http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Little-known-startup-w...
NeXT is the reason Apple went with a UNIX-type OS that evolved into OS X, yes.
Linux is also a UNIX-type OS, but is not an ancestor of OS X.
Linux is so popular now that it's easy to identify it with UNIX but historically it's only one of several implementations that work in roughly similar ways.
Other replies are telling you which code OS X was actually descended from.
It's in the name.
(I'd just like to interject, etc.)