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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> That and Intel hardware became better than what the workstation vendors had.

Exactly. As much as I liked the environment the premium you paid for what was sub-par performance really killed the market. And when SGI ended up selling intel Windows boxes the writing was on the wall for them as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation

I disagree that next got 'eaten early' though, effectively every Mac you've used since those days was a Next workstation marketed under a different brand. Next morphed into Apple much more than that Apple acquired Next.

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Without the Apple deal NeXT were toast, just like all the other workstation companies. They just didn't have the resources needed to elevate NS to the level of polish of OSX, or the market power to engage that may developers on their own.

Conversely, without the NeXT deal Apple would have likely been toast. That worked out for the best for everybody involved.

I am not so sure. At the time I thought BeOS was a better purchase. I wonder what could have been if Apple had gone with Gasse instead of Jobs.

At a guess it wouldn't be the most valuable company in the world today.

Steve knew how powerful and essential networking was to the compute paradigm we accept.

Be’s TCP stack was never very good. It never had big money applications like Frame or Illustrator, and lacked the robust dev platform (and paying customers) that Next had.

BeOS was also a single-user OS, which made it a nonstarter for businesses. It wouldn't fit within corporate IT as it existed at the time. NeXT, however, and Mac OS X based in large part on it were both multi-user OSes which could actually be used by businesses more reasonably.

And I'm using "business" in a generic sense. This was an important quality for schools, as well, where Macs were incredibly popular (for a number of reasons, including favorable pricing from Apple and historical support for schools since the 80s). Single user OSes just don't fit within any organization trying to at least pretend to have decent IT.

I am mystified by your comment.

How has OS X's "multi-userness" helped organizations?

Do you literally mean two or more people using the same Mac?

Has it been useful for organizations that users can ssh into Macs? Or is Apple Remote Desktop involved? (Does Apple Remote Desktop even allow 2 people two use two instance of OS X's GUI at the same time?)

Or by "multi-user" do you refer to the services that can be enabled using the "Sharing" pane of System Preferences (e.g., file sharing, printer sharing, remote management, internet sharing)?

I mean that BeOS didn’t have a way to login as separate people and use the same computer at different times with a clear separation of access rights. Mac OS X did, like most Unix or Unix-related OSes.

It’s not about simultaneous use, but standard user management, access control, and permissions.

Though yes, technically this also allows multiple to access it simultaneously via ssh and other things that’s not the important part for IT in this instance.

Thanks. For some reason I couldnt think of that on my own.

May be BeOS is better, but I would bet money Gasse wouldn't have save Apple. In the end it was NEXT, the OS, Hardware, Software or Engineers they were buying. It was Steve Jobs.

This entire subthread is silly.

- BeOS was not a great choice, though certain aspects were much better than NeXT, primarily the filesystem. There were a lot of things missing, but BeOS's lack of printer support was the headline issue; seems ridiculous today, but "desktop publishing" still mattered to Apple at the time, and it spoke to immaturity of the BeOS graphics stack.

- Aside from WebObjects, the vaunted NeXT software stack was bitrotting. It was buggy and unstable on commodity PC hardware, and it was never polished enough for non-Unix-savvy end users. Apple spent something like six years bringing it up to a consumer-ready spec before they felt comfortable dropping classic Mac OS.

- The original iPod used no NeXT-derived software.

- But without the NeXT purchase, Apple wouldn't have gotten Steve back.

- Without Steve back at Apple, the iPod wouldn't have existed.

- Without the iPod, you don't get the iPhone.

tl;dr: As a result, they bought back Jobs

Oh, I agree. But at the time, I thought BeOS had the edge from a technical standpoint. With Gasse, I doubt we would have seen the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Hindsight is 20/20.

I would argue that Jobs saved Apple with iPods. NeXT was just a way to be rid of a legacy business that was collapsing on itself with something that did not sad mac face if you looked at it wrong.

That would be a bizarre argument to make given that Nextstep first became MacOS X, and then iOS, the most commercially successful operating system in history.

it did go on to be a success. but at the time apple was cash flow negative. ipods and itunes changed that.

That is true.

This is not: “NeXT was just a way to be rid of a legacy business”

Apple needed an OS, they bought NeXT which was a superb investment given how critical the OS has been.

They also needed cashflow, and more importantly to appeal to consumers and differentiate themselves from Windows PC. The iPod was a successful part of that strategy.

The iPod served its purpose and now is gone. NeXT became the most commercially successfully operating system of all time.

They could have continued to develop and sell WebObjects, a Java based application server and framework. It was amazing for what it did at the time and many major companies were using it. They were leaders in that market. Unfortunately, it died on the vine at Apple.

Also, according to Avie Tevanian, Steve Jobs lost interest in NeXT when it shed its hardware business and shifted to a software company primarily selling to the enterprise business community instead of education, its intended market. Jobs focused his attention on Pixar, leaving management to the VPs of sales, engineering, and finance.

That thing was very clearly a hybrid - SGI's graphics stuff glommed force-ably onto NT. I remember trying to get PC code to work on it and basic stuff definitely didn't work. Probably it worked better the other way around (SGI app -> visual workstation NT). I never tried that though.

For a practical example of this, see http://next.com

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