Steve Jobs and the usable computer (2011)

>Programming the WorldWideWeb client was remarkably easy on the NeXT. There was already a software module, the Text Object, which was an editable multifont editor. I just had to subclass it to make a hypertext object, and add the internet code. Designing the app’s menus was trivial — just drag and drop with InterfaceBuilder. The code framework of the app was generated automatically. That is a platform: something which allows you to build things which without it would have been possible, but a lot of work.

Strange to think what the web would've been if Berners-Lee didn't have such a strong platform and tooling to build his ideas with.

I was born in the late 1980s and thus was too young to experience NeXT in its heyday, but sometime in high school was when I learned Mac OS X and its NeXT heritage. I was enamored by a highly usable Unix GUI, and since then I've been a fan of Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP. I even own a non-working NeXTstation Turbo Color that I bought on eBay with the intention of restoring it.

However, I was so intrigued with NeXTSTEP as Unix with a polished GUI that I didn't realize or appreciate its Smalltalk influences until roughly a year or so ago. In a way, NeXTSTEP could be thought of as the realization of a polished Smalltalk desktop, albeit with Objective-C and Unix rather than actual Smalltalk. On one hand, NeXT lacks Smalltalk's image-based, live-object environment, which I think is something that would still be revolutionary if a desktop operating system environment offered this today. (My dream is a desktop based on live objects, but the substrate I'd personally pick would be the Common Lisp Object System with its support for multiple dispatch.) On the other hand, Objective-C brought the benefits of Smalltalk-style message-passing object-oriented programming to NeXTSTEP programmers while being compatible with C, which was important for supporting an ever-growing base of software written in C. NeXTSTEP also sweetened GUI programming through its Interface Builder, which was originally for Lisp.

On a somewhat related note, there were attempts by Apple to catch up to NeXT or to even leapfrog them. The Pink/Taligent project would have created a modern operating system (e.g., one with preemptive multitasking and memory protection) with an object-oriented API, though that API was in C++ instead of something more dynamic such as Smalltalk, CLOS, or Dylan (Apple's own internal language that was heavily Lisp-influenced but had an Algol-like syntax). Unfortunately this project failed, which led to a scaled-down effort called Copland (the original plans for Mac OS 8) which also failed, which ultimately led to the purchase of NeXT and the return of Steve Jobs.

It's a shame what happened to macOs since then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434529

https://birchtree.me/blog/undiscoverable-ui-madness/

I once blew up a Next. We had sent one (our only one) back to the States from the UK to fix a fault (can't remember what the original fault was). When we got it back I was stoked to plug it in and start using it. When I did - BANG! The Americans had left the voltage selector on the power supply set to 120V, rather than the UK 240V.

Edit: Thinking back, I think it was actually the monitor (which was a Next one) that blew, not the computer itself.

A video of the welcome to NeXT multimedia mentioned in the article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4

The source code for WorldWideWeb is available: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb. I've got it in the back of my mind to try to get it building at some point (either in Previous, or on real hardware; I have a few working NeXT machines).

As an ObjC programmer who started 15 years after it was written, it's interesting to see how different it is from even NeXTStep 4.2 (aka OpenStep) era code. Most methods don't have explicit return types (still valid, but ~never used), lots more C, no Foundation (didn't exist yet), AppKit was still using NX, etc.

That said, you can tell it's fundamentally the same toolset. There are still classes that more or less exist and work the same way today on modern Mac OS versions, it uses a NIB file, etc.