27 Jan
2023
27 Jan
'23
10:12 p.m.
NEXTSTEP was (is?) interesting for many reasons IMO, especially what
Berners-Lee did at CERN, and can still run today on appropriate 486
machines.
I was in the thick of getting NEXTSTEP on 486. See
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-exploring-nextstep-48…
and
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-reviving-timbls-world…
Though our JAWS machine was Jobs' preferred demo machine for NEXTSTEP
486, NEXT supported a surprising variety of machines and peripherals by
the 3.3 release. I have NEXTSTEP 486 (and other old OS) running on a
couple of more popular Dell 486 machines as well as JAWS
(https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/09/26/koko-welcome-to-eight-jura…).
There are probably many other early 90s 486 machines that could be made
to run NEXTSTEP 486.
Charlie
On 1/27/2023 9:53 AM, Dan Cross wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 11:08 PM Will Senn
<will.senn(a)gmail.com
<mailto:will.senn@gmail.com>> wrote:
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Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer
[snip]
I also remember that they were bemoaning having to give up their NeXT
boxes for racks and racks of some other machine to do equivalent work
(at the time, I was completely clueless as to what they were talking
about).
With decades behind, I have a clue about one
workstation being oh so
powerful and about server farms doing rendering, but I really don't know
nothing about NeXT, it's boxes, or what I'm really wondering about - its
relationship with unix (although I'm pretty sure there is one). I
know that
Sun was working with them on OpenStep and
OpenStep and the NeXT
cube were predecessors to my favorite contemporary system (my Mac),
but that's about it. So, how does NeXT fit into the unix world? And was
it all that? I remember after talking to them that I really, really
wanted one...
As Chet mentioned, NeXTs ran NeXTStep, which was based on Mach and
4.3-ish BSD. My sense was that they were underpowered and overpriced for
the time; they were 68k based in an era where RISC processors were
dominant (or becoming dominant) on the high end and they cost something
like twice or more that of a contemporary Macintosh while targeting
roughly the same userbase.
The software was really the interesting thing on NeXT machines. Oh the
hardware was nice enough, don't get me wrong, but compared to a SPARC or
MIPS-based workstation, I'd choose the latter every time. However,
NeXTStep was not very "Unix-y" if you were used to BSD or even System V
Unixes of the time. Things as basic as the directory structure were
weirdly foreign (though will look familiar to users of macOS now), and
it used "netinfo", which was a distributed directory service they'd
built, rather than NIS or anything remotely interoperable with the rest
of the world. But the NeXTStep user interface was very nice, and Display
PostScript was beautiful. The Objective-C foundation classes were very
powerful. But it was clear that you were meant to interact with it
through the GUI, and CLI-style interaction was an almost totally
separate universe (or so it seemed to me at the time).
One got the sense that NeXT was targeting users who had sort of outgrown
the Macintosh, but weren't ready to make the leap to a full-on
workstation on the low-end, and simultaneously trying to bring users
from high-end machines into a totally new ecosystem. But that was a
really small market and application vendors didn't jump on board: the
Unix applications weren't there, and neither were the standards from the
Mac world. A few things got ported, and that was cool, but perhaps
sadly, Jobs just couldn't pull off the magic twice, and NeXT failed.
Much of the technology lives on in macOS, though.
There's a great book about it, "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing"
that's worth a read.
- Dan C.