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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of an under appreciated Jobs quote[1] from the NeXT era on his fabled visit to Xerox PARC:

They showed me what they are working on. And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one that I didn’t even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object oriented programming – they showed me that but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system… they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.

Maybe the best way to describe NeXT is Jobs getting back to the two other things he missed at Xerox.

[1] https://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2012-03-22/appl...

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I agree with your assessment regarding NeXT. NeXT can be thought of as a pragmatic Smalltalk machine that was adapted to the needs of the higher-education market that NeXT originally courted up to the release of the NeXT cube. For example, instead of pure Smalltalk with its live object environment, NeXT chose Mach + 4.2BSD as its foundation (which made NeXT able to run Unix software), and it chose Objective-C as the primary programming language for implementing NeXT software, which added Smalltalk's object system to C.

I've been knowledgeable of NeXT's history for over 15 years (I was a high school student when I first learned of the history of NeXT), but I'm curious about the decisions that led to NeXT picking Mach as opposed to pure 4.2BSD? I'm aware that Avie Tevanian, who was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon who worked on Mach, was an early NeXT hire, and I'm also aware that before Steve Jobs founded NeXT, he led a project called the BigMac which would have integrated the Macintosh with Unix (https://lowendmac.com/2013/apples-bigmac-project-failed-prec...). NeXTSTEP could be thought of as a continuation of the BigMac project.

I haven't watched it in a while, but you will probably enjoy Avie's oral history (along with Blaine Garst and Steve Naroff's).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCdKU9uYnE

Straight up BSD from the CSRG at Berkeley had an absolutely abysmal virtual memory subsystem. Processes had very small and hardcoded VM size caps in the kernel, and some algorithms that worked okay with 1 or 2MB of RAM were scaling poorly with the massive 4 or 8MB systems showing up.

Despite being meant as a research system, Mach2 was effectively 4.3BSD with a good, fast, and scalable VM system. I imagine this had to play a role.

(The Mach VM would be reabsorbed into 4.4BSD and inherited by all the *BSDs -- it's since been replaced in all AFAIK, but still interesting)

I do not know it is earlier or later. The control guy side Steve did meet Linus to adopt linux. Somehow the personality not fix. He moved to BSD. Linus is very opposite to the Mach philosophy. Hence it may go the non-Mach way. I do not think the Mach sounds like Steve level choice. But if he has a hand the simplicity is. And the choice of objective c is also amazing. Still using unix (or linux) is the choice.

This story is fiction, Linux didn't exist in NeXT's early days. Jobs did offer Torvalds a job at Apple in 2000 to work on OS X. Torvalds turned it down because he despised Mach and refused to stop Linux development, which was a condition attached to the offer.

Guess he never a networked guy and as bill has teased him never a programmer. But his impact beyond his limited self and beyond of limited self is what is great about him in his next stage. Otherwise we are still using a small iphone to these days. (I like that one and even get a SE for small size. But not only that.) RIP Steve. He is the greatest IT guy that does not that much in love with networking and programming.

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