NeXT Lives -- In Apple 276
mikey writes: "vnunnet.com has an
interesting article about Steve Jobs; his love for cubes, a bit of a history behind NeXT, why it failed, also why it was so way ahead of its time, also some Bill Gates stuff. All in all, a great piece, and to give Slashdot readers some insight into what was NeXT, and how now it has basically taken over Apple."
Re:Floppy drives? (Score:2)
blessings,
The Cube HW was not for me... (Score:2)
A lot of folks seem to have very rosy memories of the NeXT cube. I'll be the first to admit that software-wise, it was cool. The hardware, on the other hand, was not ``years ahead of its time.''
My educational institution got some of the first cubes out. They came with
I'll admit to having coveted the development environment. But I've never wished I owned that hardware.
Re:Heheh (Score:2)
Go read the history of Be, please. It started running on Hobbit processors in the BeBox. From there, a small stone's throw to PPC, because at the time, the hardware platform for PPC was relatively open for all. After a while, Apple upgraded to G3 and closed down the specs, cutting Be off. They moved to x86 and never looked back.
There's no use holding a grudge against Apple for not buying your precious OS, because you can still go and run it on a nice Ghz Intel box.
Who the hell is holding a grudge? My entire point for posting was to point out how much better off I think Be is for the future, compared to Apple.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:2)
> mobile processors. How long until they are way
> behind again?
Have you ever shopped for a notebook?
Apple has always had the fastest notebooks and the longest-battery life. Intel cripples their 40 watt chips to make slow 15 watt chips that run at half speed on batteries, AMD doesn't have a mobile offering, and Transmeta is having a troubled time of it, to say the least. All that work that Transmeta has done with emulation and code morphing is solely to create an x86 chip that uses 3-5 watts
On the iBook side, try and find another notebook with six hour battery life and a $1499 price tag (including office suite, FireWire, movie editing software, and DVD drive).
> I believe that platform has been at 500Mhz for the
> entire year of 2000.
The G4 chip was stuck at 500MHz, but in mid-2000, Apple started to put two in each machine. A dual 500MHz Mac is as fast as a 1GHz PC for most tasks, and much faster for some tasks, like encoding video.
Re:Absolutely true... (Score:4)
I'm amazed that this still comes up in every Apple thread. Get it straight: Apple licensed technologies from Xerox. As in "paid for."
NeXT - Almost a Miracle, Destroyed By Java (Score:5)
While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.
In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.
All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.
In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.
Nightspore
Re:It also lives in GNU/Linux... (Score:2)
I've just got to figure out a way to work that phrase into my daily vocabulary. What a visual!
Re:Do you understand... (Score:2)
Sorry, time for me to move on to a new thread with an Apple antagonist who has a clue.
Re:good, but not quite second to none (Score:2)
It was a breakthrough in one important area: it made Unix easy to use. More specifically, it was a Unix system easy enough for one's grandmother could use. This isn't a "breakthrough" in the traditional operating systems sense, but it's something no other Unix system had done before. And other than OS X, and no Unix (or Unix-like) OS has done it since. Including Linux.
In the early '90s, after the NeXT cube came out, I started using Solaris, which Sun claimed they were going to sell to the masses. Compared to NeXTStep, it was pathetic. You couldn't even access a floppy disk without using obscure shell commands and/or su'ing to root. Linux today is better, but compared to NeXTStep it's still more of a challenge than it should be: there's still too much resorting to the shell and the editing of configuration files.
What are you talking about? (Score:2)
If Be needed the specs, they just could take info from LinuxPPC, MkLinux (a weird os that made Mach handle Linux kernel API calls), or recently they just could get info based on Darwin (or any Opensource OS for PPC out there).
Be didint wanted to develop for the mac anymore because they had investments from intel, and because they didnt want it to be second to the mac os in a plataform were the principal reason to buy a hardwere that is a little more expensive is the OS.
The other reason is because now that Steve Jobs is calling the shots, his Job would be far more dificult than in the Amelio era, so was better to leave the PPC.
Jean Lui Gasee left Apple to found his own company, knowing that some day Apple would come to him (because they would need to repleace the aging MacOS) and beg for help
He was right... Apple did come, but he was stupid... he ask for to much (he tought he was the only choice, and didn't try to impress them)
He was wrong, because he wasnt the only choice, and the other guy realy impress Apple, (he was Steve Jobs, and he can convince anybody of anything he wants).
Not that Apple made a bad choice... I think OS X was a better choice. At the time when this decitions were made, Be OS Couldnt even print (it needed a lot of work)...
Re:Are you sure? (Score:2)
the higher end desktops actually use the 7450 processor(or G4+), which runs at up to 733MHz, as opposed the the 7410 in the lower end desktops and TiBook, which can only go up to 600MHz. the 7410 has a 4 stage pipeline and IIRC uses about 7 watts. the 7450 has a 7 stage pipeline(yeah, they increased it just like Motorola), a better Altivec unit(which means it absolutely cleans up in things like PS), and IIRC uses about 14 watts.
if you look at the heatsink/fan on the G4/733, you'll see that it's not going in a laptop - ever. now hopefully Apollo, the SOI version of the 7450, won't take too long to arrive. what that'll allow Moto to do is scale the processor in two directions. one thing you can do is up the clock speed by 30-35%. the other choice is to lower the power consumption by anywhere from 30-60%(the numbers we're hearing are varying a lot).
the upshot of all this is that we'll have faster G4s in the desktops and cooler G4s in the laptops. should be excellent
yeah right (Score:2)
Re:Heheh (Score:2)
When it came down to it, Gassse asked for too much money (your "Be passing on Apple?" comment in #28 is a load), and was forced to wander the forest of Intel hardware incompatibility.
Who the hell is holding a grudge?
You, for example, seem to be pretty unhappy about the no G3 support issue. If Apple's so dead in the future, why do you want their hardware?
--
Re:Too positive. (Score:2)
Now let me get this straight -- Mac users should measure how fast their machines are by using a benchmark instead of how fast it accomplishes the work they need to do? I am gobsmacked.
Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:3)
Why do Be fans keep bringing this up? It's embarrassing to Be.
Absolutely true... (Score:2)
Regardless of what their machines are capable of or whether or not their current OS crashes more than Doze, we owe a great deal to this company.
*shrug*
Re:Are you sure? (Score:2)
Re:Something for Be to think about... (Score:2)
another important NeXT user (Score:3)
Re:Years? (Score:2)
Macs basically have the exact same hardware in them as Intel computers, except for the fact that they use a PowerPC CPU from Motorola or IBM, and have some additonal features like 802.11 wireless networking and antennae, IEEE 1394 (Apple calls it "FireWire") busses, and they use a DVI-3 connector (Apple calls it "Apple Display Connector") for digital video instead of the simpler and more common DVI-1. These things are all standard items. Even the firmware is open
Re:Something for Be to think about... (Score:3)
During my short stay at Caltech (another crucial disaster, but never mind that), I saw a number of NeXT boxes. They were very pretty...and not much else. An acquaintance of mine joked that the NeXT boxes in the undergraduate computer lab could have been replaced with those cardboard computer props that furniture stores use, and nobody would have been able to tell the difference. I also remember my astonishment at the hard drive space NeXTStep demanded, over 200 MB, I remember--this at a time when my personal computer had an 80 MB hard drive and I barely felt the need for more.
NeXT failed, deservedly; but now Jobs is back, fighting old battles, playing all the same old tricks. Release dates have been pushed back so many times as to become meaningless--remember, back in 1997, when Jobs had regained power, that Rhapsody was supposed to be the future? Functionality has taken second place in importance to Jobs's pedestrian notions of how computers ought to be pretty, e.g. his quixotic attempt to revive the cube. And system requirements have bloated monstrously. If Apple had gone with Be, they would have had an OS with a spare, functional interface, which booted in ten seconds and required not even 100 MB of hard drive space.
I do agree that Be's best chance was acquisition by Apple. That would have rendered irrelevant most of the problems which made BeOS such a poor competitor in the desktop OS market. Its paucity of drivers wouldn't have mattered, because it would have been running on proprietary hardware. It would have had an established audience with a small, but significant, share of the market.
It's too bad. Be and BeOS are still around, but the company seems intent on making one dumb mistake after another. Their ludicrous attempts to position themselves as players in nonexistent niche markets didn't convince anybody--BeOS wasn't a "Media OS" (whatever that is), and nobody outside of a few trade shows cares about "internet appliances". And just visit www.be.com these days--they barely admit that BeOS is one of their products.
hyacinthus.
Re:Are you sure? (Score:3)
If you do not want integer tests, how about a number crunching solution, that is perhaps equally optimised on both sides of the fence. How about Distributed.net [distributed.net] client?
Some g4 rsults:
Power PC_7400_G4 433 3,903,000
Power PC_7400_G4 450 3,794,467
Power PC_7400_G4 500 4,383,581
Power PC_7400_G4 733 6,529,242
Some intel PIII results:
Intel Pentium III 1000 2,818,393
Intel Pentium III 850 2,379,094
Intel Pentium III 733 2,034,363
Intel Pentium III 500 1,383,202
Some TBird (AMD K7) reults:
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1200 4,283,940
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 1000 3,549,885
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 850 3,021,021
AMD K7 Athlon Thunderbird 450 1,589,342
I am not trolling, but i am trying to point out that for properly optimised code, you can get decent real world scientific FAST crunching from the G4 processors, even though they operate at 1/2 the clock.
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Re:Too positive. (Score:3)
I agree that the 500 MHz PPC is fast but I disagree when you say that the clock was "artificially" increased to 1 GHz: Apple fans should really use a good benchmarck and compare SpecInt/SpecFP instead of PhotoShop..
i don't understand why people pass off the Photoshop benchmark as useless. i think it's a lot more useful than an integer or floating point benchmark.
i don't understand the way people around here (and people in general) buy computers. do you buy your cars based entirely on horsepower? or do you buy one on which meets your needs best? most of the time a computer user lets their processor sit idle (say while surfing the web). if so, then why is speed speed speed paramount? of course speed is important, but "speed" in computers is not black and white, faster and slower. consider my situation:
i own a Mac. most of the time my computer sits there while i traverse files, surf the web, telnet to linux boxes (or drop to the terminal in MacOS X), read email, and write word processing documents. the rest of the time i spend using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Image Ready and GoLive.
so which processor fits me best? the one that can crunch Integers the fastest (Intel/AMD), or the one that's opitmized to beat the shit out of Intel/AMD in Adobe applications? even though the vast majority of the time my CPU sits idle, the few times i really need that speed is when i'm using something like Photoshop.
so quit passing off the Photoshop benchmark as a useless statistic.
the G4 is a great chip, mostly because of the Altivec engine. i'm going to start watching DVDs on my computer more often: oh look! the Apple DVD player is going to be Altivec enhanced! that means i'll get a great, clear picture from my software DVD decoder. the "Photoshop" benchmark represets an "optimized for Altivec" benchmark, and this benchmarks is far more important to me than a simple integer benchmark.
if you don't think you need a G4, that's fine. but don't pass of this benchmark as useless for everybody just because it doesn't fit your needs.
- j
Re:It's called the e Villa (Score:2)
No Sony? You say you work for a company that makes chips for IA's and you haven't heard of the e Villa?
of course i've heard of it, but you didn't read very well. i told you that most designs hardly make it to production, and very few make it in the marketplace. perhaps the eVilla will, but it's no guarantee. i'll tell you that there are other projects in Sony that don't use Be however. which one of these will be sucessful, only time will tell.
- j
It's called the e Villa (Score:4)
Be's press release - Be Announces Development of BeIA Client Software for Sony's New e Villa Network Entertainment Center [be.com]
Sony's press release - SONY SIMPLIFIES -- AND MAXIMIZES -- THE INTERNET WITH NEW e Villa(TM) NETWORK ENTERTAINMENT CENTER [imgusa.com]
CNET - Sony trots out Web-browsing eVilla with Be OS [cnet.com]
BeNews - Sony's eVilla "Network Entertainment Center" Uses BeIA [benews.com]
It's just Sony's entry into the IA market, and it used BeIA. But then, Sony are just a little company after all.... :P
Re:Years? (Score:2)
Re:IMHO (Score:2)
> them to buy Be. Now I realize that if they would
> have, there would probably be no more BeOS for
> me to use. They would have ruined the Be
> community.
> There already was no more NeXT, so nobody
> looses out on that one.
Apple has sold more copies of Mac OS X Server (formerly OpenStep) than Be has of BeOS. There is, and always has been, a good community of people around the NeXT technologies, even after Apple bought them. They are pretty much at a fever pitch right now, with the upcoming release of Mac OS X.
> Steve Jobs is back, and right now he is cool. Let's
> see where is is in one year.
Have you read Steve Jobs' resume? He coined the term "personal computer" when the company he founded shipped the very first one. He's not exactly a one-hit wonder.
great things about NeXT (Score:2)
PS. My alma mater's CS department had NeXT cubes running as servers up until 1999 when upgrading them for Y2K was going to be $400 a pop. They wisely chose to switch to Linux.
Such an old, broken concept (Score:2)
Some questions:
[1] How do you expect Apple to make money?
[2] How do you expect them to take on Windows on its home turf?
[3] How will OSX succeed without any apps (like Office, Explorer, etc)? The only ones that would run on x86 would be the old OpenStep apps. The others are far too processor-specific. Sure, they could come up with a Windows emulator, but what's the point? If you're going to do that, you might as well run Windows.
[4] The Mac loses a lot of its core value once you take it off native hardware. What is it that you like about OSX? Just the interface?
A lot of OSX's value is due to a wide variety of applications and tight intergration with hardware. You lose both of these with OSX86. But at least you'll have seventh OS to select from in lilo.
This simply doesn't make any sense if you look at the details.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
Interface Builder is revamped (Score:2)
Apple is now distributing a much-updated Interface Builder for free, along with all the other OSX dev tools like Project Builder.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
Re:The interesting viewpoint department? (Score:2)
~5 million Macs a year. If my math is right (and it's requently not), that boils down to an an average of 9 or 10 Macs sold every minute. I think that's pretty good, however massively bigger the wintel figures may be.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
Post from another artcile -- serial trolling! (Score:2)
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
Re:I've said this same things many times (Score:4)
When the NeXT came out, I was at Georgia Tech. Several guys in what was essentially the campus IT group got cubes, went to NeXT class, etc. Within a few months, most of them were relegated to being NFS and print servers for the Sun 3 boxes on their desks. I never saw anyone on campus make better use of the cubes.
I think what killed NeXT, in our case, was a combination of the Sun 3 and the Mac II. The Sun3 did everything we needed as an academic Unix workstation (though the NeXT eventually had an X server). The Mac II was the "consumer" machine for all the students that needed to write their term papers and resumes and forget to save them on floppy. The PC? What PC? We did have some IBM PS/2's that ran WordPerfect in DOS.
As neat as the NeXT was, everything was just too expensive. I think that for the price of one cube, we could have gotten at least two Mac II's or maybe even a Mac II and a Sun 3. Even the $50 price for a "floptical" disk was too much for beer-swilling students who usually just swiped a beat-up boot floppy from one of our diskless Mac SE's to save their only copy of their thesis.
I used to have this [ebay.com] NeXT poster which stated "In the 90s, we'll probably see only ten real breakthroughs in computers. Here are seven of them." The seven:
- R/W Optical Disk
- The power of Unix (with a GUI)
- VLSI chips
- Postscript (display and printing)
- Digital sound
- Multimedia e-mail
- Object-oriented / visual development
So, how many of these were right? We may not have magneto-optical drives, but most of us have cd-burners. Even if you run NT or 2000, you have a very Unix-like OS (much more Unix-like than the MacOS, DOS, or Windows of 1990). VLSI chips was a gimme. Postscript may be the only loser on the list. Who doesn't have digital sound and look at what MP3s have done (the NeXT was the first place I saw pirated digital media files of CD tracks, btw). Multimedia e-mail may not be a huge hit for everyone, but it was a precursor to the web. The NeXT development environment in 1990 still beats a lot of current ones.So what are the other 3 or 4 breakthroughs?
I'm going insane here... (Score:3)
I'm going to lose my mind. Will you please visit this page at Apple [apple.com] and tell me how Apple's G4 tower is not the easiest machine to service on the planet? Other than the chipset, what component in this box is proprietary? The PCI slots? The AGP slot? The PC133 DIMM slots that accept up to 1.5GB of RAM? The USB ports? The NVIDIA card? Perhaps it's the gigabit ethernet controller?
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu [wildtofu.com]
Thank God NeXT rules Apple... (Score:2)
Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:4)
Theres a statement in the article about the Apple chairman at the time not being able to come to terms with Be on using BeOS to replace the aging, cooperative multitasking system with a true preemptive multitasking design. I would really like to hear some details on the negotiations that took place between Be and Apple at that time. If you ask me, Be passing on Apple as a customer or an aquirer is right up there with CP/M or whatever it was passing when IBM came looking for an OS for the new PC...
Re:The Cube HW was not for me... (Score:2)
Yep. According to the story they were short on software, but they were targeted against Sun and DEC workstations, and they had tons more easy-to-use software. It shipped with Mathmetica and a WISIWIG word processor! It was swimming with software.
On the other hand it was more expensave then the Sun 3/60 (mono) -- I think. And not much faster. Slower for disk I/O even (MO drives were kinda slugish). And by the time UofMD was buying them the SPARC1 was allready out, which was way way way faster then the 68030. Bad timing for NeXT.
I also think they did poorly at universities because they had poor security. You could play sounds, or record from the mic of any NeXT without logging on (no cleartext password needed even!). I remember learning enough ObjectaveC to do that. It was great fun to start playing the "Paper is jammed in your printer" sound on the lab aid's NeXT and watch him/her rush off. Every five minutes. (OK, I was a bit childish, but it was a decade ago!)
Still, it had wonderful software. A pity it took ten years to get it anywhere!
Something for Be to think about... (Score:5)
Be is a visually appealing OS (IMHO, of course), and is easy to create simple apps with. Many of the aspects of it's OS design are great, as well.
Unfortunately, it came about in a time when there was already a standard (Microsoft). People who didn't want to use that standard, for whatever reason, still had Macs. To make matters worse, Linux was really starting to get a buzz, and drawing exactly the type of people BeOS would want.
And there were problems...It is closed source, so FSF types didn't want it. And old Amiga users didn't care about it after it went solely to the x86 platform. (It was originally supposed to be the new Amiga, or an OS styled after Amiga, or whatever.)
So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.
Re:The Cube HW was not for me... (Score:2)
When that came out, simply nothing on the market was as good. And if it wouldn't have been from their closure, they would have brought the NeXT Dimension JPEG daughterboard. Only one prototype is known to exist today.
Info available here [channelu.com]
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Re:It also lives in GNU/Linux... (Score:4)
When I saw recently that Mac OS X now has a cool customizable toolbar API that works just like the toolbars in IE 5 for Macintosh, I thought Apple had ripped of Microsoft, but then a NeXT user informed me that these toolbars were in NeXTSTEP as well. Big surprise, I guess.
Re:Something for Be to think about... (Score:2)
- Disk space isn't much of a problem these days.
- If you don't like Aqua wait for someone to port a different GUI to OSX.
- I could care less how long it takes to boot, because I won't be doing that much.
BeOS is cool, I have the demo version of 5 and play with it frequently. But I am happier having the Unixy goodness of OSX.
When NeXT bought Apple.... (Score:2)
Steve Jobs and Perot (Score:4)
The other element in the whole article is how much Mac OSX is similar to the main vision of NeXT, just from a software viewpoint alone. Never mind the hardware angle.
Talk about being ahead of the times.
Re:Steve Jobs: first GPL violator? (Score:4)
I was looking to see if Andy Tai's statement was true (it was stated so tersely I took it to be an unwarranted attack.
good, but not quite second to none (Score:5)
The NeXT software was an excellent and practical engineering achievement: it married Smalltalk-like object-oriented technology with the C language and a UNIX kernel. By industry standards (i.e., compared to Windows, MacOS, and UNIX) it also had good tools and a good development environment.
But it wasn't second to none. The NeXT machine, like the Macintosh that preceded it, mostly just took selected aspects from Smalltalk and similar systems and brought the to the masses on a more mainstream platform. But the originals actually arguably had better development tools and a better runtime.
The NeXT machine was a smartly packaged, excellent practical compromise. Jobs deserves a lot of credit for good taste and practicality. But it wasn't breakthrough or even particularly novel technology given the systems that preceded it by nearly a decade. And, of course, reasonable as it was technically, it was still considered too radical and too expensive by industry.
The real missed opportunity of the 1980's was probably Smalltalk. Sun had actually apparently considered bundling Smalltalk-80 with every Sun workstation sold, but the deal fell through. The world of computing would be a very different place if the graduate students of the 1980's and early 1990's had grown up with that software on their Sun workstations.
Re:good, but not quite second to none (Score:3)
If you say that they were the first machines to bring a Xerox/Macintosh style UI to a commercial, UNIX-based platform, I think that would a bit more accurate. But even then, Smalltalk provided that kind of UI on UNIX platforms years before NeXT.
But there are many other styles of easy-to-use UIs. Your ATM probably runs on UNIX--is it difficult to use or administer? Many uses of UNIX in banking, offices, and other applications have similar, highly specialized and very easy-to-use UIs. And I have seen many non-computer folks become productive with the UNIX command line with no problems; it's not rocket science and only takes a few hours.
If you use something like Webmin [webmin.com], you get an easy-to-use, browser-based administration system for Linux. I don't think even NeXT has come close to that kind of simplicity.
Still, I don't want to diminish the significance of the NeXT machine. It was an excellent engineering achievement and its legacy lives on both in Java and in MacOS X.
Re:Floppy drives? (Score:2)
They are very expensive per megabyte. They are incredibly slow. And they are fragile. I've had more 3.5 hardcased floppies go bad than 5.25 truely floppy floppies. the problem is that apple ditched the floppy in hopes of letting a new standard come about but without actually offering or choosing the new standard.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:2)
Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:2)
When he was Apple, he was famous for his OPENMAC licence plate (meaning, unlike Jobs, he believed that adding slots to the Mac made it worth $10K on the market), but he was also the person responsible for killing the OS licencing plans, as well as the main force insisting that Apple have proprietary networking techology which absolutely killed them in corporate sales later.
Jobs at the very least produced some astounding tech at NeXT that still will be astounding when it ships again in a couple months. Gassee was one of those most responsible for positioning Apple as a high-end nitch workstation vendor, while letting the tech foundation crumble to dust. If Gassee would have done his job back in the 80s and beg/borrowed/stole/developed a Real OS for the Mac, Amelio wouldn't have been sitting there entertaining he and Jobs.
Re:NeXT - Almost a Miracle, Destroyed By Java (Score:2)
I respectfully disagree. Objective C is not a hack, it does many things much more cleanly than Java. Off the top of my head there's dynamic binding of all messages, categories (adding new methods to an existing class, without needing the source), true class methods, and 100% ANSI C compatibility. If it had Java's namespaces and garbage collection it would be almost perfect.
NeXTStep was sold on the basis that you could develop apps "five times faster" than conventional methods. This was pure marketing bullshit.
I don't know about "five times faster", but if you write an identical application in MFC, Swing, Carbon, and Cocoa (assuming experience with each, of course), the Cocoa app will be finished sooner and with much fewer lines of code. It's not all marketing hype.
Re:It also lives in GNU/Linux... (Score:2)
Perhaps he meant GNU instead of Gnome... AFAIK, Window Maker (note the space between the words, added a couple years ago) is the only official Gnu window manager.
"Oh twap!"
It also lives in GNU/Linux... (Score:4)
AfterStep actually used to be CmdrTaco's fave window manager [cmdrtaco.net], before he sold out to the Enlightenment camp. Fun fact: Taco is the author of the dockable CD applet "ascd", which looks really cool but dumps core more often than Shaft smacks hoes.
Apple may be trying some NeXTstepish things with OS X, but IMHO they should instead bring back the NeXT tradition of awesome, sleek black hardware. [obsolyte.com] It is my hope, even though I don't use Macs, that the iMac's successor embodies this aesthetic philosophy... but I'm not holding my breath; despite the fact that Jobs wants to appear rebellious and artsy, he will never again sell a machine whose external appearance might frighten their now-core userbase of little kids and grandmas.
All generalizations are false.
Re:IMHO (Score:2)
Slashdotted after 21 comments (Score:2)
Re:great things about NeXT (Score:2)
Interface Builder! :)
Dude, you guys are making me wanna get my Cube running again! It has been sitting in the closet since the (original?) 660MB hd died. Finally I have a hub with coax on it so I can plug it into my DSL, but where can I get apps for it???
Re:lol (Score:2)
Well, it won't be palm pilots, but a derivative thereof, and it will be much more than just that (entertainment appliances, information appliances, kitchen appliances, you name it), but yes, if both those things happen, Be will be "the future" as you put it.
Let me give you a clue: there are more non-geeks than geeks. Therefore there is a bigger market for appliances than personal computers.
Re:Steve Jobs: first GPL violator? (Score:2)
Re:Contrarian Bullshit (Score:2)
Re:Steve Jobs and Perot (Score:2)
Then again, back in 79. . . Microsoft might not have made the IBM move without Gates' mommy's contacts at IBM. And therefore, we'd all be using some obscene windowing tool bolted on top of CP/M (instead of some obscene windowing tool bolted on top of DOS).
Re:Errr, I think you have it backwards! (Score:2)
It was all about price (Score:2)
And in hindsight, Apple got a hell of a deal, buying Jobs for $400M and getting Next thrown in with the deal . . .
Re:It also lives in GNU/Linux... (Score:2)
I too would LOVE to see more NeXT stuff utilized at Apple: the Next Dock instead of the OS X Dock. Tear-off menus. Black cubes. Openstep runtime on NT and Solaris. (my conspiracy theory of the day: Microsoft made Jobs agree not to ship the YellowBox runtime for NT in return for Microsoft agreeing to doing Office98/2001).
Re:Something for Be to think about... (Score:2)
NeXT was already dead, so there was not a community to ruin there. Apple took NeXT and did whatever they wanted with it, and nobody cared.
Now the really interesting thing will be if they can draw in *NIX people to their club...
Re:Years? (Score:2)
The truth is that it wasn't anything to do with the specs for the G3. BeOS was able to run on G3's. It's the controller chips that Apple refused to release the specs for.
i don't pretend to have all the answers, but i was specifically told (by an Apple employee, granted) that the information Be wanted was information that they could have compiled/learned, but were more interested in having Apple do the work to get it together. do you have a source for the "controller chips" bit? i don't exactly know exactly which chips you mean by "controller chips" (as it's a pretty generic term). is it a custom ASIC that Apple makes? that would seem very strange. though i'm not that intimately familar with the innards of G3s.
still, i have a very hard time believing the Be story. first of all, Apple's side of the story was never told. in fact if i remember correctly the Be story was only told through the comp.sys.be.* newsgroups, and there was no "official" announcement. that sounds like an unfounded rumour to me.
i also can't believe they'd really be scared of a lawsuit: reverse engineering is completely legal, otherwise you wouldn't have IBM clones (thank you Compaq)! the story doesn't fit, and after what i heard from some people at Apple, i'd be more inclinded to believe it was a half-truth started by certain Be employees because they were bitter about the situation.
- j
NeXT/Apple and Linux/DOS two philosophies (Score:2)
I'm surprised that Jobs has returned to the NeXT philosophy (and been successful with it). Perhaps it is the high profit margins of the we-package-everything in our niche market that has made it survive so well.
I have an old next box that I use occasionally, and I like it. I kind of hope that OSX will really bring that os style to the forefront. I hope, though, that OS X will be more open than NeXT...
-Moondog
Re:Heheh (Score:2)
- MkLinux is still available for older systems (NuBus based Power Macs, and I believe pre PowerPC systems).
Not quite. NuBus based PowerMacs, yes. Pre-PPC, no. That's Linux/mac68k [linux-m68k.org]'s job. The rest of your post is right on though.Oh my! (Score:3)
(Quickly checks CNN.com)
No, Hell hasn't frozen over yet. Hrm. Must be Katz's day off
Slashdot. Where bashing anything but Linux is not just a job, it's a way of life!
Re:I've said this same things many times (Score:2)
UNIX = Linux, OS X
Postscript was actually a big winner in the 90's. Desktop publishing may have started in the late 80's, but it hit its stride in the 90's.
Add to that the fact that PDF is a variant of postscript, and it looks like PS has fared very well.
Digital Sound = MP3
Multimedia email = trying to imagine..."Hey, send me a big multimedia email attachment over my smokin' hot new 2400 bd modem!"
Object-oriented / visual development = yup.
The other three? How about...
* Networking in general (including the internet)
* The web (born on a NeXT computer)
* 3D animation
drooling over NeXT in OS/X (Score:2)
I absolutely need Unix for my work. I don't number crunch; nothing that element. I find new ways to bash numbers into submission.
At times, I drool over the next step features in OS/X, but at least for this machine, I won't be going that way
If I were designing these as classroom demos, though . . .
*sigh*
I wanted a NeXT cube back then, but it wasn't really something I could justify to run a law office
but I still wish I could have the next-step interface on the fortran compilers for hte mac . . .
Wrong wrong wrong... (Score:2)
Umm, that's strange, it is still PPC/x86. Be can't help it if there are just more x86 users than PPC. No doubt PPC will fade entirely from the Be landscape eventually (unless something drastic changes), but that's market dynamics, not a choice by Be to phase out PPC. (More like a choice by Apple to cut off Be from their specs.)
So they effectively alienated (almost) everyone they could sell to, and are now left as an example of what not to do, much like NeXT.
Are you kidding? I haven't read anything this ludicrous in weeks. Where shall we start?
1. The x86 market is so much bigger than the PPC market, it's scary. Be ported to this platform, while keeping PPC. A brilliant move, their number of users skyrocketed.
2. Microsoft owns the desktop market. Period. End of story. Be tried, but could not compete against their tactics with exclusive OEM deals.
3. Be has now shifted to a market where they can be hugely successful: IA's. They've already started showing off some of their new partners.
If Be follows your good idea, they should stay on a relatively obscure platform (PPC), target themselves towards Mac users running old hardware (since Apple will not share the G* specs), and eventually run out of money and die.
Yeah, you're right, much better plan!!
-thomas
Re:Too positive. (Score:2)
they don't use the "same set of Photoshop filters in every benchmark," for your information. they actually have real aritsts record layer actions of the complete creation of a piece of artwork (usually a movie poster, as they're done at very high resolution, and are quite large). it's not like they say "Guassian Blur x second on G3, y seconds on Pentium." what this means is that they actually get a sample of a whole suite of Photoshop filters.
i'm sure they pick the set of layer actions that shows the biggest difference between the two processors, but you can hardly blame them for that. the fact is, they don't select just certain filters each time, they actually show the creation from start to finish via Photoshop actions.
this reminds me of something i've realized as of late: i've only been a Mac user for about a year and half, and i used to think that Mac evangelists were so crazy, going on about the system all the time. now that i actually use Macs on a regular basis, i've learned why: there are a large group of people out there who have it dead set so deep in their mind that Apple can do nothing right that they find every opportunity to shoot them down. Mac users need to go on all the time just to stop the completely unsubtantiated rumours. Apple is not perfect, but they're not even remotely close to as evil, inefficient or overvalued as most people make them out to be (including just about everybody that posts here).
- j
Re:IMHO (Score:2)
CORRECT Google cached address (Score:3)
Re:kind of sad. (Score:2)
Seriously, though, saying that putting GNUStep onto Linux somehow makes it approach NeXT is pushing it. X doesn't compare to anything NeXT OS 5.0 (OS-X
They've shipped source code for years! (Score:3)
I'm really, really tired of reading this nonsense. Apple has been shipping source code first for Linux, and then for Darwin, kernels that use Apple hardware! How much more information do you need, ferchrisakes?
Be, Inc. made a decision to stop pursuing Mac hardware, and the excuse that Apple stopped spending resources to help Be is a really flimsy excuse to hide behind.
Re:Years? (Score:2)
Be had a fairly strong marketing plan for invading Apple's market; what they didn't have was a similarly strong plan for invading the PC market, where variety is the norm, not the exception. And on top of that, they squandered the 4 years that Apple took to get OS X out the door.
exactly, and i'd like to add that this is a good reason to argue against MacOS X on Intel machines (unless they're Apple-only, based on Intel processors). Be saw the x86 market as a huge sea where even if they got a little chunk of it, it would be better than half the Mac market. unfortunately for them they were lost in that sea, and couldn't build up enough market share to hit a "critical mass" and go anywhere. now they're suddenly "Internet Appliance" OS manufacturers. right. changing your corporate direction every couple of years is a good way to go bankrupt.
the fact of the matter is that Be was extremely bitter about the fact that they didn't get bought by Apple. they thought they had the greatest technology, and were doing Apple a favour by allowing them to use their OS. the whole story can be found in this bit out of the book Apple Confidential [macspeedzone.com].
in retrospect, Apple was best to buy NeXT. NeXT was (and is) a great operating system that had time to mature and get a lot of the kinks out. Be had good technology, but it wasn't so good that it was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest, and the OS, as flashy as it may be, was still lacking in a LOT of necessary refinements. NeXT gave Apple a good solid UNIX foundation upon which to build MacOS X (which i think is a phenomenal operating system). also, bringing back Steve Jobs who inspired the iMac (and the recent resurgence of Apple) was worth the $427 million alone.
- j
Re:not (Score:2)
A) Has a better media API.
B) Is much, much faster.
C) Has a better filesystem.
D) has a level of integration between apps that OS-X can just dream of now.
True, I am sitting here drooling at Quartz, ObjC, and XML, but all the other stuff that OS-X will force me to live with (aging version of FreeBSD, antiquated Mach microkernel, slightly long in the tooth filesystem, etc) makes OS-X more of a "great try, needs work" rather than a "good god, I'm ditching Be."
Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:2)
i'm sorry i didn't notice this original message earlier. i posted it already in this thread, but it might be hard to find.
if you're looking for the whole story between Apple and Be, the full details can be found in this piece out of the book Apple Confidential [macspeedzone.com].
the jist: Be thought they were Apple's only choice, so they played hardball. Apple's due dilligence valued them at about $50 million, be wanted about 3 times that, and Gasee added to that a very arrogant attitute in all negotiations. the rest is history.
- j
Re:good, but not quite second to none (Score:2)
Basically, NeXT might have been based on Unix, but it didn't really learn the essence of the Unix "New Jersey" philosophy- that good enough and available beats great and unavailable. It was a wonderful piece of technology, but they tried to cram so much immature, overpriced hardware into the mix that it wasn't affordable to the average Joe. That meant that it was always going to be a niche product that would only appeal to people who were willing to pony up a lot of cash for its advantages. But its real advantages weren't from the expensive hardware, nice as it might be, but from the software. In that sense it's a lot like the Mac, where Apple has used its superior user interface to sell overpriced hardware, only more so.
Re:Google Cache (Score:2)
Anyway, let's hope Apple doesn't fold completely before the new NeXT has a chance to get off the ground. (If it does, I'll be a user! I loved the original NeXT...)
Re:The magic is gone (Score:2)
Re:one button mice are not flexible enough (Score:2)
In addition, the keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are very uniform between apps, so many, many Mac users know the keyboard shortcuts for New, Save, Open, Close, Quit, Print, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find, Find Again. These all work in all applications, uniformly. In Mac OS X, Command+Q (Quit) quits the current app, and Command+Shift+Q logs you out of the system. You just hold down the right shift and do the same Command+Q you're used to when quitting an app and you logout. It's easy to remember this stuff.
The Mac also uses more drag and drop than Windows or most other systems. You can drag a selection of text and drop it into a folder and it appears there as a text clipping that you can drag into another document to paste it there. Another reason not to use a right-click context menu.
Context menus are superfluous on the Mac UI, and if you like them, then buy a $15 USB 2-button mouse with scroller and that works just fine, too. This is not a big deal
When I switched from Windows to Mac OS, I bought a 2-button mouse right away, then replaced it with a 1-button later when I realized I wasn't using the second button. You can press the single button with two or three fingers, and that feels much healthier for my hand.
news from teh future (Score:3)
can you say y2k+1 problem? i can
hahaha
actually, i can't.
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
Re:one button mice are not flexible enough (Score:2)
You can drag and drop into a folder or onto the desktop to create a clipping. Then you can drag and drop that clipping into a million documents after that. Or, double-click the clipping and copy it to the clipboard and paste from there.
The combination of easy to hit menus that you can't overshoot, uniform key commands, and pervasive drag and drop is easy to use and becomes second nature. It's simplicity. It's Zen. You ought to try it before you criticize.
It's funny how a Linux guy would never stomach command-line tips from a Mac user, but Linux guys never hesitate to prounounce their own GUI theories to be much better than Apple's. A little humility
Re:apple drives the industry (Score:2)
> has it done since then?
FireWire is huge
Re:taken over Apple? - not in article (Score:2)
Not to dismiss NeXT and the actual products they shipped and the customers they served. Apple is just getting started with rolling this stuff out the door. They have a shit-load of technology under wraps that they are going to deploy once the Mac OS X era is underway. They own the best handwriting recognition in the world, for example
Re:Apple couldnt come to terms with Be? (Score:3)
Granted, Be would've given Apple a new OS based on some really cool technology. But it was unrefined. Development tools were still very new at that time.
There were a couple other options on the table as well. Including continuing development on Copland and talking to Microsoft about using the Windows NT kernel.
Then a few days before the decision day, Hancock thought to call NeXT. Steve brought his crew and wow'd the brass at Apple. Then a bit later, Apple bought NeXT for roughly the same price that Be wanted.
However, NeXT was a far more refined OS than Be and more "user-friendly" conscious. Not to mention getting more engineering talent and a larger userbase in the merger.
Definitely it was a tough call for Apple and time will tell if it was the right one. So far, i'd say it looks very promising.
Tom
Years? (Score:2)
As for having the necessary source code shipping "for years" (huh?), where'd you hear that? Let's assume that what is available for Darwin is now enough for Be to port BeOS to G*... it's too late, they are focused on BeIA. Maybe down the road they'll re-evaluate, but it doesn't matter any more.
Apple made their bed, and now they'll lay in it. Instead of selling more hardware running BeOS and MacOS, they decided to try and screw Be.
Incidentally, I believe this pissing match started when BeOS was blowing away MacOS on the same hardware, back before G* closed them down...
-thomas
best book about SJ & NeXT (Score:2)
The best book I have read about SJ/NeXT is "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing" [fatbrain.com] (out of print, get it from your library). This is the "anti-reality-distortion-field" book, and is very condemning of Jobs as a technician, leader, and businessman. While this book is very informative and well-written from these perspectives, it misses a very important perspective.
Those who condemn Jobs as a charlatan and a showman should try considering him from the perspective of someone whose ultimate goal is to make a serious impact on how people look at things, which is typically the role of the "artist" in a society. While Picasso was a bastard of a human being and made plenty of self-indulgent crap as well as revolutionary art, he deserves recognition for introducing powerful and influential new ideas to the culture at large.
So, I think that being the leading "artist for the computer world" is what Jobs is ultimately most interested in, much more so than any particular bottom-line, technical, or political goal regarding computers (though it obviously galls him that the role of "most influential" is not that same as "most successful and dominant").
Now, if someone wrote an analysis of Jobs' performance as an influence on society's changing attitudes and conceptions of computers and computing, I'd buy the book. Of course, the recent "gold rush" mentality has the entire computing community focused on $ and world domination, so I don't see anything not of that perspective coming soon.
I've said this same things many times (Score:5)
In fact, I'm one of those people that will jump ship from Linux to use OSX. It's got the right underlying guts (BSD 4.4), it's got a pretty interface, it's got a bad-ass programming environment. A macintosh can be a real programming platform, instead of the toy that MacOS has made it for so many years.
--
The
The interesting viewpoint department? (Score:3)
I live with a Mac sympathizer, so I know what it's like to have that viewpoint that Apple keeps coming out with cool things even though they sell like ice cubes in Alaska. I do have a certain amount of sentimental feeling that wishes Apple to stay alive, as well as an eye for aestetics that really likes the computer models that came out in the past few years... but at the same time, I'd be pretty ignorant to say that a company should stay alive if I personally wouldn't buy anything they sold even though I could USE it.
Then again, the main point of this message wasn't to bash Apple... it was to make fun of timothy for coming up with a lame dept.
Contrarian Bullshit (Score:3)
Be, on the other hand, is on its deathbed. Worth a paltry $70 million dollars, Be is very near being delisted and will likely be delisted ion the next twelve months given the current trend in its stock. They're so succesful they can hardly stay in business. Given their brutalized finances and grim outlook, I can't figure out at all how you came to your absurd conclusions, but why not put your money where your mouth is and make a substantial investment in Be? Seriously, with a sizeable loan, you could end up owning a substantial part of the company. If Be is going to be the next Microsoft, you could easily turn $10 million now into $20 billion...but something tells me you know deep down that you are full of shit.
zila!? (Score:3)
Any NeXT would come with a free app : Zila, allowing its applications to be multithreaded across a local network.
So, no.
I tried and this.... Damn! *R*O*C*K*S*
I could do a billing system in a week with a bunch of old NeXTstation.
--
Floppy drives? (Score:3)
Re:Are you sure? (Score:5)
Of course they will make money on the Titanium - in fact, they will probabily make a killing on it. The PowerBook has always been a high-margin item, and I doubt that they would sacrifice this. Whoever wrote this article forgot a few things:
The G4 Processor has a much smaller die size than the x86 competitors. It can be manufactured more cheaply - especially now that they have been getting good yields at lower speeds.
Apple owns a sizeable portion of Korea's Samsung electronics, which is the company that manufactures those larger screens. Therefore they are in a much better position to get a sweet deal on those screens than many other manufacturers.
The Titanium case will actually cut down on many costs. Sure, the material itself is cheaper, but think about this: most laptops today have a plastic outer skin molded over a magnesium or aluminum skeleton. This process requires two sets of machines, and two toolings to do - both very expensive. By going to a hard, titanium "exoskeleton", you can eliminate one of the toolings by eliminating the inner skeleton. Furthermore, assembly is made much easier, since the parts simply "bolt-on" to the case, rather than being bolted first to the skeleton, and then to the plastic case.
There are many other ingenious ways that they've been able to save money on the product, but I don't have time to list them now. Obviously, the person who wrote the article had not even considered the obvious.
The 500MHz PPC is a fast chip. Keep in mind that many of the x86 processors were "artifically" increased to 1GHz. They do that by lengthening the processor's pipelines. This increases the clock speed, but at the same time the processor is doing less work for every clock. The G4s in these laptops are the same ones in the desktops. The chips that AMD and Intel are producing are actually hobbled. Transmeta's chips haven't been well accepted in the marketplace yet, as they haven't been able to live up to the hype. I'd say that Apple has a pretty decent machine here and I think that they'll sell alot of them. There's been a pent up demand for a G4 laptop for quite some time now.
Re:Years? (Score:3)
I cannot claim to be proficient enough in Apple code to know what is needed for Be to legally get BeOS running on the G* platform, but I do know that when Be was focused on BeOS, Apple was not forthcoming with that information. The reason the Linux PPC crowd got it working was because they reverse-engineered the information they needed. It would not have been rational for Be to do that and open themselves up to lawsuits by Apple.
BULLSHIT. i am sick and tired of hearing this drawn out crap about Apple "refusing to give Be the specs" for the G3s.
let me explain something to you: there's no magical book at Apple that's labelled "specs for the G3 for operating system writers." sure there are specs for their parts, and all the information is available, but it would take some serious man-hours to compile it all to make it available to a 3rd party.
Be came along and basically said to Apple "please, go out of your way to use your engineering resources to compile all the specs to your machines neatly so that we can support it." Apple said, "why should we spend our engineering resources to help you?" Be then left the PPC platform (something they were planning on doing anyhow) and blamed Apple for the whole incident.
let's face it, Gasee isn't a big fan of Jobs. and it isn't Apple's job to bend over backwards an support Be. the whole "lawsuit" line and "reverse engineering" was a bullshit line by Be to try to slam Apple on the way out of PPC. after the clones were killed, they actually had to WORK to support the G3 platforms, and they didn't want to do it. period, end of story.
i was a HUGE fan of Be, and even had an original BeBox. i was also a fan of NeXT, and used a NeXT Cube at my school for years. i followed this whole thing very closely, and even lived in Menlo Park (where Be's HQ is located) while this whole Apple-vs-Be war was going on. i don't claim to have all the answers, but i do know that the line Be employees were feeding people was mostly bullshit, done out of spite. Apple was not in the wrong on this one.
meanwhile Be moved over to x86 and instead of being a great operating system on a great chip in a small market, became swamped in the sea of x86. they're not going to make it anywhere. i now work for a company that supplies a fair number of chips to the embedded (including IA) market, and let me tell you, NOBODY is talking about BeIA. the big IA OS: Linux. Be dug their own grave, and none of it was Apple's fault.
- j
Steve Jobs: first GPL violator? (Score:5)
Today gcc is still the system compiler of Mac OS X. Steve Jobs depends on the work of Richard Stallman for his OS.
Re:Apple 1984 ad (Score:3)
Re:Errr, I think you have it backwards! (Score:5)
Apple is non-existant here. Be is turning into a BIG player. (Sony, Qubit, Compaq, Intel, and FIC, to name a few recent deals.)
wow, you need a reality check. have you been following the embedded market at all? Be is a drop in the bucket. QNX, WindRiver WinCE and Linux all completely swamp Be in marketshare and in design wins. i work at a company that designs chips for the IA market -- i know it very well. i have yet to hear a single one of our clients (including Compaq and Sony) mention Be. they're all designing around Linux right now (and quite frankly, i think Linux is the best solution. i push it whenever possible).
the IA market is very volitile right now, and over 90% of the IA appliances, even from the big companies, don't make it to market, and of those that do, very few have taken off. so when you see these product announcements from Be, take them with a grain of salt. i'm not seeing Be in any of major designs that i've dealt with, so i highly doubt they'll be dwarfing Apple anytime soon.
i was a huge fan of Be, but their inability to choose a market segment (high end audio, no! high-end graphics! no, consumer workstations, no! internet applicances, yeah!) is making a complete mockery of the great concepts they've designed in the OS. i think the best thing to happen to them right now would be to go out of business and opensource their code. at least then their great ideas would find a niche, because it's obvious that their marketing crew can't figure out what to do with it.
- j