[TUHS] NEXTSTEP 486 [was Re: Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

[Charles H Sauer (he/him)]

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-486/ 
and 
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-reviving-timbls-worldwideweb-browser/

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-jurassic-o-s-on-1992-dell-486d-50/). 
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 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:will.senn at gmail.com>> wrote:
>  > [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.
> 

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