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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

History Of The NeXT Platform 96

Posted by timothy from the now-previous dept.
ToothBrush writes "OSNews published an article about the BSD/Mach-based NeXT Platform, discussing its history and its capabilities back then. The article has lots of screenshots and it is generally a good introduction --of the once innovative platform-- for younger readers who are unaware of the inheritance that lead to Mac OS X."
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History Of The NeXT Platform More

History Of The NeXT Platform

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  • Doom! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by trompete ( 651953 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @08:26PM (#6448899) Homepage Journal
    Isn't that where the original Doom game was developed and tested?
    Is that also the platform the source code was for when they GPL'd it?
  • Sadly, there was no sound, but it ran very well, and you could netplay with others on the LAN. I was introduced to these machines in 1993 (about two years before they were phased out in favor of PCs, sadly) and they were truly awesome...
    • Wanted to add "before they were phased out at my university." Damn, no edit feature. Anyway, anybody else have fond NeXT memories? This took me back to my freshman year. Used to make flyers for my anime club using the Draw program (which was way over-powered for what it was: you could import .eps files!)
      • I first used NeXT on 486 in 1995 at a print shop, it was running a big ( room sized) Oce printer/scanner. It was really slick.

        Then when Mac OS X Server 1.0 came out we bought that and used it to replace an AppleShare IP 6.5 install.

      • Re:I once played that version of Doom... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rworne ( 538610 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:20AM (#6450421) Homepage
        I rescued some equipment from a horrible fate from my university computer store. The University was phasing them out in favor of going over to Windows NT.

        Now they are getting more and more into OS X. Funny how that worked out.

        As for the NeXT machines, my Cube and Turbocolor served me well from 1995 to 1998, and I did pretty much all of my CS work on it.

        By 1998, it was quite long in the tooth, and I reluctantly switched over to NT, and thankfully later to Windows 2000.

        OS X came out (10.1) and I summarily dumped my PC and switched over to a PowerMac. I haven't looked back since.

      • Re:I once played that version of Doom... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @04:12AM (#6450885)

        anybody else have fond NeXT memories?

        Only recent ones! I picked up a reasonably priced NeXT slab on Ebay - it's in mint condition with colour monitor, original software and manuals. The quality of the GUI and API's is amazing, especially when you consider that the thing's only got a Motorola 68030 in it. My Macinstosh LC II (running MacOS 6) has a responsive and pleasant GUI, but using the Programmers Workbench is nowhere near as fun as developing with the NeXT stuff.

        Despite my love of NetBSD, I'm giving serious consideration to buying an Apple laptop and running MacOS X on it.

        Chris

        • The quality of the GUI and API's is amazing, especially when you consider that the thing's only got a Motorola 68030 in it.

          The slabs all had '040s. Oh, and color, too - yeah, that's an 040 for sure.

          Despite my love of NetBSD, I'm giving serious consideration to buying an Apple laptop and running MacOS X on it.

          Dude.

          Save a little dough and buy the laptop - you'll be glad you did.

  • Objective-C (Score:5, Informative)

    by AtrN ( 87501 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @09:22PM (#6449260) Homepage
    The article states NeXT created Objective-C. They didn't. Brad Cox did. NeXT did however add a couple of things and implement Objective-C in gcc (and get in a fight with the FSF) but they didn't create the language.

    • Re:Objective-C (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That is not the sole error from the article. For instance:

      "After the demise of NEXTSTEP, the company renamed the OS -- updated with the new APIs -- and called it OpenStep (as opposed to all-capitals OPENSTEP framework). Three versions saw the light of day, 4.0 to 4.2."

      Nope. It is just the opposite. OPENSTEP is the OS, OpenStep the APIs.

      And anyone can guess that the author did not really worked with NeXTstep:

      "One weird quirk of the system, though, is the fact that while the mouse has 2 buttons, I only fo

  • Mathematica? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @09:29PM (#6449300) Journal
    Why exactly does the Mathematica Preference panel [osnews.com] include a switch for "Automatically Italicize Mathematica?

  • Interesting article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by coolmacdude ( 640605 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @09:33PM (#6449330) Homepage Journal
    I have heard that there is still an internal competition going on at Apple between the old school OS 8/9 developers and the Next guys they brought in. Basically the 9 devs want to incorporate more features from 9 back into X, while the Next people want to further separate them.

    • Re:Interesting article (Score:5, Insightful)

      by questamor ( 653018 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:00PM (#6449519)
      As long as it's internal competition, and not complete downtreading of either OSs features.

      The thing that introduced me and kept me on the mac was the UI of OS7.6.1 of all things, when I started doing prepress work. The consistency, the pure simplicity, and an OS that did what I wanted without me needing to think about the OS itself. That sounds awfully cliche, but it was all just -there-. I could design, draw, colour correct, print, network... no thinking of the OS needed, all my thinking could go on producing good work.

      OSX 10.0 lost quite a few obvious things. They're slowly coming back, and not losing any of OSX's advantages either. It's shaping up well I think
      • OSX 10.0 lost quite a few obvious things. They're slowly coming back, and not losing any of OSX's advantages either. It's shaping up well I think

        I don't really agree to that... the 10.3 (panther) finder is supposed to grow back towards OS9 friendlyness, but it still sux imho. That right-half bar is almost useless (you can go to all these places with the Go menu, or put stuff in your dock. Its big, takes up space and sits in my way. They should at least have assigned a keyboard shortcut to show/hide it.).
        • I've been running 10.3 for a few weeks, and I think that they've passed MacOS 8 by a mile.

          Expose is wonderful - it's astoundingly better than any other method of managing large numbers of windows. After using it, I have no idea how I ever got work done on a UNIX machine without it. Also, the OS is far more responsive than 10.2 -- MacOS X is now at least as responsive as 9 (without crashing, etc.). Also, the new Finder's guiding users towards the standard directories for things (home directory, applications

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @09:55PM (#6449489)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Did you ever get Doom to run with audio? I never got this to work on my Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).

      33 MHz of 68040 firepower, baby! DMA, a great DSP. *sigh*. Its power supply finally died in 2002 - it was running as a secondary DNS server until the last.

      • Fastest NeXT unit ever made (Score:5, Informative)

        by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:05AM (#6450741)

        Color NeXTStation Turbo (which was the fastest unit they ever made).

        That is not true. It is the fastest unit NeXT ever *sold*. They had prototypes running with dual 68k and single PPC cpus.
        Also there were Nitro [channelu.com] and Pyro [channelu.com] boards that could accellerate stock NeXTs.

        • I hearby nominate you for the "Nitpicker of the Year" award.

          Just don't let it go to your head.
        • The fastest released NeXT platform was the HP 735-125. Of the unreleased systems, the fastest was NeXT port to the DEC Alpha that would support multiprocessing. It might have scaled up to 8 CPUs. The NeXT RISC Workstation used two Motorola 88000 CPUs. One was devoted to the display.

          NeXT Time was a video compression system that worked quite well, particularly for the time. NeXT also had a JPEG video compression card for non-linear editing, based on the C-Cube. This was designed to be a plug in daughter card
      • Actually, the Mono Turbos were faster, but only because they only had to deal with 2-bit grayscale instead of 16-bit color.

        The styling is better too. (no separate soundbox)

        I still use the used one I bought 6 years ago.
        • What do you use it for?

          Before mine died, I occasionally used it for web browsing. There was a good version of Omniweb for OpenStep, but it was SLOOW on the Black hardware. Lynx worked great, of course.
          • I use mine for working in TeX---the integration allows one to do things like http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate (with a little help from Omega on the G4 here at work)

            TeXView.app's ``TeX eq - - eps'' Service is way cool.

            Display PostScript programming, and the ability to program custom strokes and fills and have them render on-screen in real time in Altsys Virtuoso (direct antecedent to Macromedia FreeHand v4) is as yet unmatched in Mac (incl OS X) or Windows.

            The above helps w/ light illustration work too,

  • WindowMaker (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Laur ( 673497 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:08PM (#6449891)
    In case anyone didn't know Window Maker [windowmaker.org] is the free implementation of GNUstep [gnustep.org]. From the website "In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface." It's actually quite a nice lightweight window manger and runs great on older hardware (for which GNOME & KDE are much too bloated) and has a pretty good developement community.

    • Re:WindowMaker (Score:4, Informative)

      by klui ( 457783 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:10AM (#6450194)
      No. Window Maker is not a free implementation of OPENSTEP. GNUstep is the free implementation of OPENSTEP. Window Maker only looks like NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP but it is in no way coded using GNUstep classes.

      • Re:WindowMaker (Score:5, Informative)

        by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:49AM (#6450510) Journal
        In fact, WindowMaker is coded in C, using the WINGS--WINGS Is Not GNUStep [ozemail.com.au] widget library. WindowMaker is designed to cooperate with the GNUstep environment, though.

        Though NextStep was designed to "look good" it was also designed to be easy to program. If you only install WindowMaker, you would be missing out on the AppKit-- Next's programming framework. (At least on my Mac, it's easy to use. I've never used the OpenStep/NextStep implementations.)
      • Window Maker is not a free implementation of OPENSTEP.

        I didn't say that Windowmaker was a free implementation of OPENSTEP, I said it was a free implementation of GNUstep, please parse my origianl post again. From the Window Maker page "Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment." If it doesn't actually use the GNUstep framework then this is a bit misleading. Still, it's very NeXTish and is quite a nice window manager.

        • Most people who are familiar with NeXT technologies take "implementation of GNUstep" as "something that provides the frameworks of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/GNUstep." GNUstep is that free implementation?

          I use Window Maker under my FreeBSD partition so I am already familiar with it. Lightweight and efficient. But it is not NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP under its skin, just on the surface.
    • This was the first gui I used on Linux way back and until I benched my Linux desktop in favor of OS X last year, it was the one I still used.

      And even with Gnome improvements and the like, it's what I *still* use if I have to work on a Linux box. Something about the simplicity. I think nowadays that's a lost art. Apple's probably the closest to it, but I remember NeXTStep being really powerful, but really simple.
    • Yeah after using Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, Ion, went on a console only kick for a while I think I found a desktop I like. I saw OS X and was like this is pretty, saw the dock and was like isn't that nifty, discovered its NeXT origins, found Windowmaker and GNUstep. I realized that it wasn't the prettiness that attracted me to OS X (although that helps) it is the almighty Dock. All hail the Dock. The Dock and the up/down scroll buttons right next to each other. Why doesn't everyone do that?

  • I had one (Score:5, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:18PM (#6449929)
    I had a early pc version of Nextstep. rand on a 486Dx, 1 gig disk.

    it was the freindliest unix at the time.

    One reason the black hardware was so expensive was that it was all top of the line. THey had the first mega pixel displays for ordinary users (woo hoo, but then they were mind blowing). The screen was done in display postscript using a custom chip to make it possible. this gave all objects smooth reziability. at the time the competition for Windows was all bit map graphics so things were pretty jagged when you changed their sizes. Mathematica came with it. so did the collected works of shakespeare (which I actually used for a science project on entropy in text). it also came with renderMan, one of the early CG movie quality shaders.

    It also came with a neat little program called Zilla which is the forerunner of todays grid computing. if you ran zilla then any time your computer was idle it donated its cycles to a master zilla project server. I've read several really interesting things were solved by zilla. apparently parts of the four color map theorem proof were done. as were some of the first hollywood cg effects.

    the mail program was I thik the first to make mimetypes a standard hence you could send voice e-mails even way back then (its still hard!).

    they were early adopters. Postscript printers were required (impact printers still ruled the market back then) and the very first black Nexts were based off of optical disks instead of hard disks. that was a terrible move in hindsight. and they quickly moved to large hard disks. but at the time they thought they would have to be distributing large software and large databases hence having the largest possible removable media had an appeal.

    the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market.

    marrying it to apple was thus a good fit. apple had the developer base. they had the OS.

    • one good word processor (Score:5, Informative)

      by timothy ( 36799 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:33AM (#6450465) Journal
      " the thing that killed it I believe was lack of applications. there were no great word processors. it had the sam set of basic level apps a the early macs did. basic word, draw, paint. thus it got its but kicked in the bussiness market."

      OK, I am guilty of having some favorite / sentimental applications, but WriteNow was available on the NeXT, in fact I think the copyright even mentions NeXT. I think it was versions 3 and 4 that I used -- but I was using the Mac version. I only know that it was NeXT related because people have told me this ;)

      Too bad WriteNow went to the software afterlife ... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today ;)

      Reasons for my sentiment: Word crashed frequently, was slow to start -- WriteNow started up near-instantly, never crashed. Very nice UI, simple but not simplistic, did the things I needed to write papers in high school and part of college. Much cheaper than Word, too. Faster spell-checker. Less bloat.

      OpenOffice is one of my favorite pieces of software (and projects), but I'd still like to see a quick, nimble thing like WriteNow for most writing tasks.

      timothy
      • WriteNow was okay for small notes and the such. In our lab we used the NeXT port of FrameMaker.
      • man I had forgotten all about WriteNow. I loved that app. It was still our editor of choice back home until I got my father to make the X switch and I gave him Office. Quick to start, never crashed and did it's job very well.
      • I remember reading that WriteNow was written in 680x0 assembly. Free license or not, I doubt anyone sane would want to maintain it now!

      • Too bad WriteNow went to the software afterlife ... if it had been under a friendlier license, perhaps it would have led directly to a clean, fast word processor today ;)

        My understanding was that WriteNow was written almost entirely in 680x0 assembly, which not only explained its speed, but also its lack of significant updates after the Mac line shifted to PowerPC chips. Too bad, though, since it was one of the best programs ever written, on any platform. (Well, 'cept for vi.) ;^)

        And speaking of bl

        • "And speaking of bloat, it's interesting to note that the version of SimpleText that shipped with Mac OS 8 was bigger, in kBs, than the original MacWrite (which had more features). That's progress!"

          Yes, I wish the original MacPrograms had been kept around and included, even if only as kitsch, but with appropriate updating to make them run on current systems ;)

          MacWrite really could take care of most of my word processing needs!

          OTOH, now you can have a complete Linux system with more programs than you can

    • Re:I had one (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm pretty sure that WordPerfect ran on Next too. (recall entering a contest where WP was giving away 1 of each kind of machines they ran on - Sun, Mac, PC, Next, etc)

    • Re:I had one (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lysol ( 11150 ) * on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @08:22AM (#6451873)
      All true. Altho I never had a cube, I remember reading about Zilla in some computing mag. Back then I was totally blown away by NeXT.

      But, I think it was their high price and Jobs' attitude that ultimately killed the company. Plus, they were in debt to Hitachi by like, $400mil or something.

      A good audio book to get about Jobs, which talks quite a bit about NeXT is called The Second Coming of Steve Jobs via audible.com. Talks about how he tried to get NeXT into various companies and how he would try to woo execs on features - features they wouldn't really need or understand - while they just saw a high price tag vs. pc's. Interesting stuff.

      But, yah, apps are a big problem too. If you look at NeXT back then and Apple today, some of the same attitude still plays out. All the little 'cool' features like built in PDF to the OS (most people in the pc world probably don't give a shit about this), the animation on the fast user switching, booting off external fw drives, etc... It's almost like it's all just too far ahead and whatever M$ makes, the dumb herd will accept.

      • Re:I had one (Score:4, Informative)

        by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:00PM (#6453747) Journal
        All the little 'cool' features like built in PDF to the OS (most people in the pc world probably don't give a shit about this)

        Bad example. That feature makes all the PC users at my office go a warm wet one. It's the only thing that ever turned their heads for a brief second to even notice macs.

      • But, I think it was their high price and Jobs' attitude that ultimately killed the company. Plus, they were in debt to Hitachi by like, $400mil or something.

        When I was a student, NeXT was trying to market those machines at us. They were cool machines, but much to expensive (and the optical drive of the first models was a stupid idea).

        What killed them was SUN with much more bang for the buck (!) and shortly after that cheap 32 bit PCs.

        Actually, back then we said "Get a NeXT - you'll get three machines

  • Fond memories working at NeXT (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tyrione ( 134248 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @01:01AM (#6450368) Homepage
    If you meet anyone that has worked at NeXT and ask them if they had custom software they developed, in-house solely, that still is ahead of most commercial software and they said no, they'd be lying to you.

    We had some of the most kickass stuff. I got at least 3 times as much productivity daily than I do now.

    Here is hoping OS X version 11 or whatever they call takes off where Keith Ohlfs and company wanted Openstep 4 to go and was never released.

    I WANT SOUPS (ask about SOUPS) and perhaps someone like Peter Grafanino (sp? sorry Peter it's been a while) just exactly what is was going to be.

    Quartz eXtreme rules btw! Thanks a lot and that goes for Andrew Barnes and the rest of the Quartz team!

  • Steve Jobs and NeXT (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jdb8167 ( 204116 )
    I still remember when Steve Jobs came to Boston to hype the new NeXT Cube. Awesome demo. Amazing machine at the time if a little pricey. But you couldn't buy it. Had to be in school or a developer.

    Ok, I'm a developer.

    Steve is in the hall after the event answering questions. Someone asks, "how can I become a registered developer?" Steve's response, "well we don't need any _garage_ developers." Nice.

    Never bought a NeXT after that. I suspected they weren't going to be popular.

  • Interesting Article (Score:3, Interesting)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @11:24AM (#6453389) Journal
    That is a well written and interesting history of NeXT. I remember when these things came out. They were way ahead of their time. Most "serious" business computers were 80286s with a megabyte of RAM and VGA graphics if you were lucky (640x480x16 colours). Then you had to suffer the cold inhospitabilites and primitive features of MS-DOS. The NeXT machines showed just what you could do with good hardware (i.e. not 8086 comaptable) and imaginitive software engineering. It's even more incredible that the rest of the world has only just caught up with the sophistication of NeXT. Yes, hardware is two orders of magnitude faster, but that's what a decade does for you. The software, however, is only just getting there.

    NeXT Step is a shining example of what vision, Open Source UNIX, and Objective C can achieve :-)

    Is there any lesson we can learn?

  • more detail (Score:2, Informative)

    by piobair ( 586119 )
    Its a pity the article doesn't go into EOF (Enterprise Object Framework) and WebObjects. Two of the real crowning-achievements of the folks at NeXT. EOF was the first usable Object-Relational mapper and, in my opionion, still the only usable one. While WebObjects combined with EOF was the pre-cursor to the whole n-tier application-server thing.

  • Spreadsheets to die for (Score:3, Funny)

    by Frequency Domain ( 601421 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @02:45PM (#6455389)
    Lotus developed Improv on NeXT computers, and then ported it over to Windows. I've heard at conferences that Lotus killed off Improv because sales were eating into 1-2-3, which they considered their bread and butter product.

    When Improv got shut down, a group called Lighthouse Design built a functional workalike called Quantrix. They also made several other excellent apps such as Diagram!, the precursor to OmniGraffle. Lighthouse was bought out by Sun for their expertise in object-oriented design, but Lighthouse threw their licensing keys into the public arena when they stopped shipping. Sadly, Sun owns the rights to the code, and has no interest in releasing it - I say sadly, because I suspect it would be relatively easy for someone to resurrect the apps on OS X.

    Improv and Quantrix spoiled me for life - to this day, I can't stomach working in Excel. This is particularly ironic since I'm required to use Excel in several courses I teach.

    I still have my NeXTDimension Cube boxed up in the garage, I don't have room to set it up but can't bear the thought of selling it off either. I guess when I die, my grandchildren will dig it out and fire it up to see what computing was like "way back when". Won't they be surprised to see that Excel still hasn't caught up to what Quantrix could do back in the 90's.

  • First on NeXT (Score:3, Interesting)

    by macmurph ( 622189 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:05PM (#6455564)
    Adobe Framemaker, Visio, and Max/MSP were all created on the NeXT. When Adobe bought Framemaker, they claim they "lost" the NeXT source code. The NeXT cube had a thrid party DSP board with 5 DSP chips that allowed Max/MSP to happen (the board was like $18k). I heard Visio used to be cool before it became a PC app.

    I own a NeXT dimension cube. Its as fast as a G3 class mac but its only 25 MHz. The motherboard was designed with a revolutionary architecture.

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