NeXT Computer
johnmirandaphoto.com
johnmirandaphoto.com
Um, no. The NeXT cube competed mostly directly in price and market against MIPS and SPARC boxes which ran rings around it (quite literally 4x faster on typical CPU benchmarks in many cases). It was never a performance platform, and would only fall farther behind as the 68k architecture failed.
There were many things to like about the platform, but really NeXT was a very flawed system. It lacked the speed and features to compete with machines in its price range, yet was priced out of the PC and Mac world where it's UI and integration would otherwise have been attractive.
Like Apple today, you have to look at the entire package. The difference being that Apple mostly targets the general consumer today while NeXT was targeting a more advanced and smaller but richer market back then.
If you were doing CAD work in 1990, you might not be so forgiving of a device that cost almost as much as a years salary for its user. And the market wasn't.
Having used a lot of SPARCs and NeXT boxes side by side during that period, I'm scratching my head as to what features you're referring to, at least among machines which directly competed with, say, the NeXTstation Color Turbo. Looking back I'm really amazed at how ahead of its time that machine was.
But the critical item, I think, was the OS. NeXT had NeXTSTEP. Sun had heaven help us all) SunOS and later Solaris. SGI had IRIX. There was absolutely no comparison. I think this is why NeXTSTEP still lives on in OS X, and Solaris, um...
http://openindiana.org/ and http://illumos.org/ are actually pretty frikken awesome.
I love some of the lower-level tech that came out of Solaris, but NeXt was about desktop user experience rather than server stuff.
This was about the time both MIPS and SPARC were finding their legs and Intel started to get its act together with the 486. In addition, this was the time the first wave of commodity graphics accelerators were on the market and NeXT couldn't scale up the way SGI could.
If they had managed to exploit the ND boards, it may have been a different story and SGI may have failed to secure the graphics workstation market, but they really didn't have much of a chance against Windows and SPARC on technology or HP and IBM on financials.
NeXT was already out of the hardware business for three years when 3dfx introduced Voodoo in 1996, same year NeXT bought Apple for negative $400M.
3dfx was, for obvious economic reasons, not a slice of the solid, high, or extreme IMPACT graphics that were available on the desktop at the time of its release. It was more competitive with the options for Ultra, but Sun had already conceded the high end graphics market to SGI.
But yeah you wouldn't buy it because of its superior performance vs the RISC competitors, you got it because of the software and the dev tools etc. A bit like Mac vs Windows in the PowerPC days (only with the RISC vs CISC roles reversed!)
Scroll bars are on the left, and the scroll buttons are at the same end of the scroll bar.
NeXTSTEP GUI programs adhered to a well-defined concept of an application: they're stored on-disk as self-contained app bundles that appear in the file manager as a single file, there's one Dock tile per application, one menu per application, and zero or more windows per running application. OS X has somewhat weakened this.
Menus are vertically arranged, and can be re-positioned. Sub-menus can also be torn off and re-positioned.
Unlike OS X's Dock, when you fire up an application that isn't already in the Dock, the app icon goes in the bottom-left corner of the screen (which is also where minimized windows go). The app icons in the Dock are only the ones that you have selected to stay in the Dock even when the application isn't running.
The window close and minimize buttons are in different corners, and the close button provides visual indication of a window containing an unsaved document.
The display is grayscale, but the software supports color.
That was the best computer I've ever owned.
Which was also the case in OS X, up through 10.3.
The other scrollbar-related behavior is what happens when you click on an empty part of the scroll bar. On NeXTSTEP, the scroll thumb jumps to where you clicked. On Windows, it scrolls down one page/screenfull. OS X has defaulted to the Windows behavior for at least the past several major releases.
Smalltalk scroll bars were hidden entirely when the mouse pointer was outside a scrollable view. When shown they were on the left, they were proportional and went up/down with a left/right button mouse press. The code for this is probably still in Squeak somewhere - it's certainly how old versions of VisualWorks Smalltalk worked.
Lisa made scroll bars always visible, moved them to the right, made the thumb/elevator non-proportional (users didn't get why it changed size), and added arrows to the ends - and then added page-scroll buttons too. Lisa also came up with the resize corner, rather than resize-by-any-edge or resize-by-explicit-command.
The Mac streamlined this further by getting rid of the page-scroll buttons and making it what happened when clicking in the bar background. Later the Mac also came up with zooming a window to a proper size to fit its contents. (Which isn't the same as maximizing it to fill the screen.)
NeXT moved scroll bars back to the left, put the arrows together at the bottom, made them proportional again, and made clicking in the the bar background scroll to a point.
Mac OS X kept the arrows together and proportionality but matched the positioning of the Lisa and Mac. Scroll-to-point instead of scroll-by-page remained an option in System Preferences though, and holding the option key inverts the behavior.
OS X Lion hid the scroll bars once more, at least for users with touch-scrolling devices like trackpads and the Magic Mouse, and got rid of the arrows.
I loved the left scroll bars and still feel the menu on NeXTSTEP is better than the Apple menu (UI laws be damned) because I didn't have to constantly scroll to the top of the screen for menu options. The ability to tear off parts of the menu was amazing.
The Library app was something they should have kept. The NeXTSTEP file view / shelf still is better than Finder.
Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of daily usage.
In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons.
A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc. and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on X. etc.
If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!
Citation? This is an interesting factoid, so I googled for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find any numbers on how many total newtons were sold, and how much apple lost on them. Really interested in any supporting data you might have.
The link you provided, btw, states, "Although the exact scale of the Newton losses remains unconfirmed, some sources say that the company sunk a billion dollars into the Newton and recouped only about one quarter of that amount in sales."
"Some Sources" might have merit if that was the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times (though, in both cases, those "sources" might have ulterior motives") - but they aren't useful in this context.
Also, as a later poster indicated, losing $750mm over the lifetime of a multi-year project, is a lot (lot) different than losing $1B/year.
I'm still intrigued, and would love if (anyone) could track down some data on the Newton, and it's losses. Or even how many units it actually sold.
The Newton was hardly a money-maker, but IIRC, Apple invested somewhere north of $500 million over the course of the Newton project, and sold about $150 million in units. Many of its sales were the last models, notably the MP2100, largely because these units had such impressive processors for their time (162MHz StrongARM). That is, the Newton got Steved just when it started picking up.
More importantly, as part of the Newton project, Apple invested $1.5M in ARM, and made some $800M in profit from that investment. That ARM investment and early Newton-driven design is still reaping dividends in Apple's current low-power devices.
Wow. That is fascinating.
OT: I wish their was a way to delete my fucking account. This site is a bunch of armchair CTO's who don't know their eye sockets from their assholes.
Not sure how that would have gone with all the geeks that went for Mac OS X without an Apple background, just because it is UNIX.
It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.
That has had me rethinking your what-if. I don't think the unix is a big deal - the Be and Haiku terminals feel unixy, and BeOS offered a big subset of the unix system calls even into v3 (time of Apple purchase).
By v4.0 (two years after), BeOS had become a remarkable system for single-user, close-to-the-metal computing. The user experience was very fast and stable. The system gave a skilled developer easy access to video and audio.
I've been trying out haiku again this morning. They've done good work. It now boots on my thinkpad, but, like OSX or Windows, feels sluggish in a way that Be never did. It needs some serious performance tuning. They need to get their out-of-the-box development experience sorted out too. OSX has done an excellent job of that.
And as someone that will gladly do C++ development, it felt really nice to have an OS done in it.
But I feel Apple would have needed a different type of marketing to attract developers back then.
When I was at CERN they were selling us "It is BSD/NeXT with a nice UI" story.
Thanks for the link, by the way.
Yeah - I've always been unable to describe that weird connection to the platform, what you call the Amiga feeling.
Going to boot back into haiku now and see if I can get blender working :)
While Apple saved NeXT, it was a near thing for both companies. Without the 'loan' Jobs was able to secure from Microsoft, it's doubtful Apple would still exist as a separate entity. Whether it was Sun, Oracle, or another company, it would probably remain today as an object framework and not much else.
Remember at the time that Apple had been running at a loss for the last year or two before this and had started to cut R&D funding. This is when Apple was struggling to hold onto about 2-4% of the personal computing market, dropping from about 10% just a year or two before. They had experienced a precipitous drop across the board, in technology, sales, and financials.
It was quite feasible to entertain thoughts of takeovers, hostile or otherwise, from Sun and Oracle. Either of them (and MSFT) had the ability to make it happen at the time. Oracle priced the effort at about $700m but expected a worst case scenario of about $1.5-2b. The motivation was mainly a "FU" move by Ellison to put Jobs back in control of Apple, but floated as a way of accelerating their JavaStation and client computing vision.
This was also when Apple laptops were burning people before burning people was cool. :-)
Apple watchers from the time often joked that NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million. Buying NeXT is what turned Apple from a perpetually "beleaguered" niche computer company (remember that word?) to one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
The modern Apple, Inc. is much more NeXT Inc. than it is Apple Computer, Inc.
It's similar to the break Microsoft got when IBM inadvertently handed it the PC OS business. It was a great opportunity, but not every company would have leveraged that opportunity to dominate computing for two decades.
If Jean Louis Gassee got the same opportunity for BeOS that Jobs got for NeXT, do you think he would have gone on to create the world's most valuable corporation?
When I was at CERN Apple was giving sessions selling UNIX heart of Mac OS X as a way to attract UNIX fans to the platform, which many enjoyed given the OS's pedigree.
Not sure if the same would have worked wit BeOS as base, although I really enjoyed it as OS and follow Haiku's development.
Except that it is the only comparison that ended up mattering. PC obliterated the workstation market.
For one, it would show all young developers that there was a time where OS were implemented in languages other than C.
And also that Live Editing so trendy nowadays, was already available in the early 80's in the form of Lisp Machines and Smalltalk.
You can easily install it in major GNU/Linux distributions through the package manager, look for wmaker and gworkspace.app packages.
2. Holly cow, I didn't know it could look nice (screenshot on the link). I mean I did, but all of the screenshots in the RSS/email announcements on gnu lists have a theme that looks like the screenshots in the article!
I hardly see any difference since 2004, the last time I used WindowMaker as my desktop.
As for GNUStep the web site wiki is very confusing, as it is not easy to find out how close they are for Objective-C language version and NeXTSTEP/Cocoa libraries.
Again, many of the pages look the same as back in 2004.
There's still activity on the GNUstep front. Just a few things I can think of,
- Their runtime, libobjc2, has done a great job keeping pace with Clang and modern Objective-C. It now has a Cmake based build system and doesn't require any bootstrapping with GNUstep-make.
- GNUstep-base (the Foundation alternative) is solid, though some parts go back as far as OS X 10.6 and others OS X 10.4. You'll have to check the headers to see what's up to date. They do have an extremely capable implementation of distributed objects, last I heard they were planning to make it integrate with Apple's distributed objects implementation, but that project still seems to be pending.
- GNUstep-gui (AppKit alternative) just added support for 10.6's NSCollectionView very recently. Most activity there has been in the form of refinements. As I recall, drag and drop is still on their todo list... they really could use some manpower there.
- GNUstep-back (the backend renderer) still uses an API that's largely based on Display Postscript. They are planning to pitch a GSoC project to replace the Display Postscript API with one based on GNUstep-Opal (a Core Graphics alternative), and they already have a largely proof of concept Core Animation alternative running on it (GNUstep-QuartzCore.)
The project's current vision is to focus on making it easier to port Objective-C to other platforms, rather than to be a desktop environment. But like most small, mature open source projects, there's a lack of manpower keeping them from easily achieving those goals. Would be nice to see more activity there, in the future.
You can check out all of the projects I've named in the Github mirror at https://github.com/gnustep , but don't expect them to be responsive to pull requests. The mailing lists at http://gnustep.org/information/gethelp.html are strongly preferred.
As for the current website, I think Scott Stevenson designed it a decade ago long before he joined Apple. I like the design, personally, but I do understand that it's a bit difficult to navigate... and several of the docs haven't been updated in some time.
I've actually been using it for a decade and a half (trying others from time to time as well). It's very light and fast on modern hardware, the codebase is remarkably stable (development has just re-started after stagnating for 6-7 years), and it's configurable (I've got numerous hotkey shortcuts defined which I miss terribly when I'm in another environment).
In a world where I'm coming to appreciate calming interfaces, WindowMaker is very much one such. I've only recently discovered Readability (similar to InstaPaper or Pocket / Read It Later), and there's a certain similarity of spirit between the two.
Also, as others have noted, Cocoa for OS X contains a lot of NeXTstep-isms under the hood.
Posting here for those interested.
http://yummymelon.com/devnull/next-is-the-reason-why-you-hav...
A copy and someones review of those seven here: http://wemmick.net/writings/next-predictions/
Optical storage maybe not. But others like Unix, multimedia email and "programmer productivity" faired fairly well.
Some machines are really nice inside. IBM (and some Lenovo); some HPUX machines; etc; have really nice well laid out insides.
It's a shame that this approach is dying, even though most people don't need it and benefit more from semi-disposable hardware.
For runner-up I would say the SGI Octane2, and for a non-desktop machine, the Sun E4500 was an extremely well designed, well manufactured system. Also a real joy to work with (although weighs something like 100 lbs fully loaded)
From what little I've seen, Sun gear of a similar vintage seems better built than the Octane.
And, sure enough on looking it up, MazeWar [2] is cited as inspiration for MIDI-Maze.
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/BlastApp/...
I did some NeXTStep programming 20 years ago. I converted the Tetris game to color when they finally shipped the NeXTstation Color. If someone has the Tetris source, I'd like to look at again and see how close it is to the iOS stuff I'm doing these days.
http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/m... (tar.gz file)
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If you are using a monochrome system, you should copy the Tetris blocks from MonoBlocks to this directory. You can design blocks of your own by using Icon and saving them as Block1, Block2, Block3 and Block4. Be sure to save you images as 16x16 files. NOTE: Icon will open(and save) the Block images as 48x48 so you will have to change the image size back to 16x16.
Also, if you would like to design a color icon for Tetris, please NeXTmail me the TIFF at the following address.
melling@cs.psu.edu
Also, I'm interested in hearing about any features that you would like added.
-Mike
All this is most likely non-functioning, but anyone who wants it is welcome to it. I can be contacted at gmail.com
The amazing design and focus on graphics power may have hurt sales in these circles because it would have been hard to justify a high price for eyecandy over raw cpu power and most universities outside the US were probably not adequately funded at that time (perhaps Jobs overestimated that market?).
http://www.johnmirandaphoto.com/next/_DSC6359.jpg
there is something under the cube. What is it? A hard drive maybe...?
OK - now the important stuff about the Cube: