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Comment by contingencies | Hacker News Reader

Cool stuff: Box made of magnesium, included Illustrator and FrameMaker, familiar UI from using WindowMaker, email from Steve Jobs in the mbox file when you start up, first version of the WorldWideWeb browser by Tim Berners Lee, first ever website displayed in said browser.

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Oh my, that Steve Jobs email with the audio clip. The moment I read those words, I said, "aaaaaand". Thankfully, somebody has it in all its glory here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3DI3l1tYFc

Also cool, at least at the time, was Objective C, a Smalltalk-influenced C, and their custom kernel, based on Mach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)

I haven't kept up in Apple-land, but I believe the NeXT stuff is still foundational to their whole range of current OSes. When it was still NeXT, they went from supporting only Motorola processors to Sun's SPARC and Intel's processors, in hopes of finding a bigger market. I understand that OS flexibility enabled Apple to be much more strategic in their processor choices.

I remember trying and finally getting the i86 version of NeXTSTEP 3.3 running. Ended up with a Digital 486 base with parts from about three other machines for supported SCSI adapter, video card, CD-ROM, and special startup incantations. When it finally booted in glorious 2bit (4-level grayscale and I'm not even being facetious), it was honestly all worth the effort.

Interface Builder was mind-blowing. It's why we have .nib (or is it .xib now) files on macOS as well as all the NS* classes. The layout constraint solver was really slick back then too.

I suspect that 'porting' the operating system, but not really supporting machines of the day didn't help.

Yeah, I loved Interface Builder. In a sense, it's responsible for me mainly focusing on back-end work. Because after building GUI apps with IB and ObjC, writing anything for Windows seemed like stone knives and bearskins.

I think the reason for modest hardware support was that at the time they were chasing the high-end custom development market that had been so receptive to their workstations. At the time I was working for financial traders. We were buying machines specifically to run our in-house software, so we were happy buying whatever was supported.

Their strategy for broader adoption was OpenStep, which was taking the great NeXT-specific stuff and making it run on Windows NT. It would have been interesting to see where that went, but as you know Apple's acquisition put an end to all that.

"I think the reason for modest hardware support"

Also they only had 250 or so employees. So not a lot of staff to track down hardware compatibility issues, and not a lot of motivation from vendors to help.

That said, they did pretty well.

It went Motorola to Intel to HP PA-RISC and Sun SPARC. You could click checkboxes in the IDE and your app would compile into a 4-way fat binary.

Some non-GUI bits for "Portable Distributed Objects" servers were apparently available on Alpha.

DOOM, the game that put first-person-shooters (now a multibillion dollar industry) on the map, was written by John Carmack and associates on NeXTstation.

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