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Comment by kozak | Hacker News Reader

Every modern macOS computer is a continuation of the NeXT lineage.

I had to use Macs in college. They crashed just as bad as the PCs. I worked with a Mac programmer. He explained in bits and bobs all of the things he had to take care of to make a program look like it was doing four things at the same time. Oof.

My Mac friends kept trying to get me to switch. I said I'd switch when it got a real OS. Enter OS X. On first boot my first thought was, "This is a NeXT with the dock rotated 90º clockwise" I was less wrong about that than I expected.

I remember the 90's as the era of instability in desktop computing.

It really was (though I can't speak for the people working on NeXT boxes and Sun Workstations, etc). It wasn't really a matter of if a given computer would become unstable and crash every day, but how many times and how much you would lose. Somehow I still developed a liking for computers, but even with the incredible increase in complexity which works against it, a $30 prepaid Android burner phone today is more stable and reliable (though it isn't more fast and responsive) than any Mac or PC introduced in the 90s.

Like many that lived through (survived?) that era of computing, I still periodically press command-S by reflex, without being consciously aware that I'm doing it.

If you had accounts on the NeXT machines, you wanted to work on your papers there, because it was much less likely to crash and take hours of work with it.

>I had to use Macs in college. They crashed just as bad as the PCs.

I also used Macs a lot in college, and had the same experience. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but pre-Unix MacOS's own failings made things that much worse for using the emerging WWW.

>Enter OS X. On first boot my first thought was, "This is a NeXT with the dock rotated 90º clockwise" I was less wrong about that than I expected.

I also used (and liked) NeXT machines in college, but not nearly as often as the other platforms; by the time I got to them, they had been relegated to running helpdesk-client software.

I first tried out OS X in 2003. I've been using Linux at home since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. OS X was a revelation.

I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.

(I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)

Documentation for the NSObject objective C class : http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/...

Many of the classes in http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nd/... would likely still be familiar.

The userspace C++ framework for drivers replacing IO Kit, is called DriverKit, which happens to be an homage to the Objective-C framework for writing drivers in NeXTSTEP.

Yes, but we are missing:

- vertical main menu - pop up main menu under right-mouse button - Shelf - Workspace as native app (instead it was re-written in Carbon) - robust support for Services

I'd give my interest in Hell for a way to install Mac OS X so that only Cocoa apps were loaded/available.

And iOS device!

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