NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X 328
*no comment* writes "the folks over at OSviews have a nicely done article that explains the evolution of NeXTSTEP into Mac OS X. 'With the beginning of 1996, Apple realized that with the next generation PC's running Windows NT to be released within the decade, they would need a new, modern operating system to run on their machines. ... Amongst Apple's other options were to license Solaris from Sun, NT from Microsoft, or to purchase a small net services company called NeXT. Apple chose the latter.'" OSNews had another nice Mac-oriented look at NeXTSTEP last year; the Wikipedia entry is also worth looking through.
Net services company??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BeOS (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they should have bought both, though -- maybe they would have come out with Spotlight sooner.
Re:BeOS (Score:3, Insightful)
The key purchase: Jobs and Unix (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: Going NeXT saved Apple by getting Steve Jobs back and getting OS X based on Unix BSD. Steve Jobs might be a crazy man, a meglomaniac, whatever, but he has vision and taste and the drive to force others to follow his vision. The interregnum of Sculley et al was consumed with internal fighting and a zillion product teams smashing each other.
Also, the move to NeXT helped Apple acquire OS rock-solid stability and the Alpha Geek population, as O'Reilly puts it. So now, even though market share is sitting around 5%, OS X is still guaranteed lots of cool stuff.
And finally Tiger is going to start pulling in some of those BeOS metadata ideas...
The real reason Apple didn't choose Be (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, Apple spent far more to acquire NeXT, but they got Steve Jobs along with it, which was easily worth as much as the operating system.
Can you imagine JLG as Apple CEO, trying to push fruity-colored iMacs? It just wouldn't have happened...
Re:Windows NT? Oh man.. (Score:2, Insightful)
You think Gassee could have revolutionized Apple? No chance. Period. Apple would be dead.
Re:BeOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows NT? Oh man.. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is one reason apple has failed... (Score:2, Insightful)
They should have realized this back in the late 80's. 1996 was far too late. Apple was already relegated to a niche market by then.
Re:This Article is riddled with inaccuracies. (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't release their products because they insisted upon CARBON.
Now that Cocoa is finally getting its just dues how long before we see replacements to these Gorillas
I am sooo over the Carbon apps. Why won't these %*#@! companies get with the times and hire some of us Cocoa programmers already!! I'm cheap, I swear!! Beyond that, Objective-C... it's *still* the way to go!! Stupid Carbon apps will never really work 100% right, I swear... freekin' Word *still* has problems with long file names, that's SO unacceptable!!
Oh, wait, I see the problem. Do I want to work for Macromedia?? I think I know too much about how that ship is run... Quark? If they're not smart enough to see that they've lost market share already... Microsoft? Adobe? Oh. Yea. They might have enough money, but they haven't offered it yet, if you know what I'm saying...
So who wants to pay me to replace one of these "Gorillas"? Oh, and I'll probably need 8 or 9 other Objective-C programmers to get the job done soon enough for marketing drones to be happy...
Re:Well, there was another choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
We considered a lot of other OSes. We looked at NT, but it looked like it would never be practical to port to a big-endian processor. We looked at Solaris, and it was a serious contender. There was no decent UI layer, though, by the standards we used to judge such things. Remember that things like KDE and GNOME were quite young and immature at the time.
Getting back Steve was a plus for the company, but wasn't a part of our deliberations as technical folks. NeXT Looked like the best technical choice, really. Linux was simply too young in 1996 to be a serious cnsideration, even though Apple had an internal mkLinux project.
Who knows what it might have been today, given a new shot at choosing. But back then, there was nothing that stood up to NeXT given the constraints of Apple's business.
Re:BeOS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is one reason apple has failed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Failed? It's hard to see Apple as a "failed" company with successes like the iMac, the iPod, iTMS and recent financial figures. I confess I haven't checked stock price and financial statements, but I understand anecdotaly that Apple is doing quite well, "niche" or not.
Don't make someone bust out the old argument of market share and comparisons to companies like Lexus, etc. etc. You're just not a "success" unless you become some sort of a monopoly, is that it?
I'd better go enjoy my G5 since Apple has so miserably failed and is, true to predictions since about 1990, about to close its doors.
It's insightful? Come on, guys! (Score:4, Insightful)
obliges. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This Article is riddled with inaccuracies. (Score:1, Insightful)
Such a mixture of brilliance and foolhardy arrogance. Any doubts I might have had that you truly ever worked with Steve Jobs were erased when I saw that combo.
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
But I guess whatever it takes to get you karma on Slashdot.
Did Copland failing actually help Apple succeed? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the Copland project (aka the real Mac OS 8) hadn't floundered like a beached whale, it wouldn't have left Apple in the desperate position of needing to buy a new OS foundation.
That means, they wouldn't have had to buy either Be or NeXT, which would have meant no Mr Steve Jobs. Even the non-fanboy audience here wouldn't question that it was his vision guiding Apple into an undisputed innovator in the "OS-with-power-AND-style" and "digital lifestyle" arenas (despite having negligible marketshare) that has truly saved Apple from extinction (for the moment).
If Copland HAD worked out, Apple might have kicked around for a few years as a viable alternative to Windows 95/98/NT for loyal Apple supporters, but ultimately the onset of very cheap PC hardware and a genuinely superior NT-based OS would have pummeled them into powder.
(BTW, hold the flames: I'm saying NT was superior to the nuKernel of Copland, not to modern Mac OS X, which I'm sure hands NT's ass to it on a plate when it comes to things like multitasking.)So... as I see it, Copland's failure saved Apple!
Re:A Small future. (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux best hardware support my ass.
There have been 4 major releases of OS X on the market. Along that time I'm sure changes to the kernel have been made, possibly during security or x.x.1 point revisions also.
If Mac OS X was based off Linux. That's a shitload of clueless people recompiling their drivers.....or asking "which one of these 4 drivers (multiplied by version releases) are we are supposed to install?" just because kernel modules on Linux arn't portable.
I think it's borderline pain in the ass already and I use Gentoo. If I were using Fedora, and didn't already install Gentoo to learn all that compile stuff, I'd never get this working right (without months wasted).
You call that hardware support?
Support doesn't mean "oh, tech support phone guy will walk me through a kernel source install, driver compile, and copying modules around on my system."
Support means that "oh, I plugged it in, ran old ass installer CD from 3 versions ago dug out of the rotting box, and *poof* whatever the hell it is suddenly works."
And it's not like this is all that hard to put into the Linux kernel. IT'S BECAUSE LINUS AND THE KERNEL DEVELOPERS WANT IT THE WAY IT IS NOW. Having Apple back Linux won't change that one bit. Would you really want them to fork it instead?
Want an example of it done right (relatively)? Look at printing on OSX.
There's cupsd. Not exactly the easiest user friendly of all printing systems. (I mean, grandma isn't going to know what http://localhost:631 is supposed to mean) But nice and powerful. There's also the pre-cupsd OSX printing system there, which wasn't so hot because while it was uniform to code drivers for, it just didn't have any to begin with. And then there's the UI wrapper that combines both of them behind some UI.
Now, I'm using a Epson 480SXU. It's a printer so cheap that it doesn't even have a power button. It cost me less including cartridges, than it would if I just bought ONE of the two cartridges alone.
It also only has Windows drivers. Lucky for me, my Powerbook has cups, which has mild support for it. And with my unix knowledge, I got my printer working.
Now..... if I had a hypothetical deskjet 9999 or whatever the heck they're on, there's no CUPS support yet cuz it starting shipping 3 hours ago. But they were nice enough to include OSX drivers......tested for 10.1..... you know, before cups came on OSX......you know, like 2 years older than OSX 10.3. (this situation actually happened with a DJ1152 or some number in that range)
Sure, they chose not to open source their drivers to protect whatever patented dithering system they might have coded in. But lucky for me! The old school printing API on OSX is solid enough to let me run some crappy driver with unoptimized code. Sure it might suck as a v1 driver, but it was easy to install and any moron could do it.
And you can't do that with Linux right now. All because of the lame kernel modules API. The lesson learned? Somebody ought to make a new Linux API specifically for hardware support so we can actually pass around binary drivers.
And then...for REAL plug & play, make it possible to embed these drivers on the device themselves [serial EEPROM] so that if there's no newer driver on the system, it'll load the old one that came on release of the hardware. That is the kind of hardware support we should look at. Afterall, there's already an EEPROM that just holds the PCI ID anyways, might as well fill it up.
Perhaps hiring Be employees is even better... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The key purchase: Jobs and Unix (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BS Detector Beeping (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a lot more to getting an OS ported than just porting the kernel and a few system apps. Just because you can recompile for a platform doesn't make it commercially viable. The work to try to reorganize code so that it could run at competitive speeds on PowerPC looked pretty terrible to us. NT was terribly tied to PC architectures. It ran on other instruction sets, but they never ever caught on in a big way, remember? Ever imagine there might be a reason?
The work to try to integrate it with existing PowerPC Mac applications looked even worse. The issues with simple things like screen sharing, and keeping multiple screens going, and so on, looked prety grim to us. The graphics models of the two platforms are quite different. And there's that horrible tendency in NT to run a graphics subsystem at the core of their kernel, which looked like a real bear to keep running on Mac hardware in anything like a stable fashion.
And for all of this work, we would have gotten maybe a few dozen Windows developers to recompile and support it on our new platform, if we were lucky. We were looking at huge porting effort, and ongoing maintenance problems, for very little upside indeed.
Re:Thinking outside of the KDE/GNOME box (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, I like the NeXT UI but I'd have to say that it's still not as good as the CDE. The implimentation that Xfce [xfce.org] has made is increadably good.
Re:Thinking outside of the KDE/GNOME box (Score:2, Insightful)
While it may be a question for discussion whether or not this causes division/reduction of progress in any particular WM or toolkit (you can't say for sure whether people who prefer C would work on Qt classes and vice versa), it definitely causes user confusion.
Personally, I'd prefer to see a unification of theming and desktop stuff along the lines of freedesktop, GTK-QT, etc. A single platform (with as many bindings as necessary) that can be pushed and developed to the point where user confusion ends.
Granted, there's a large and legitimate contingent in the community that prefers lots of choices, but 'civilian' end users won't bite unless there's a unified, universally-supported (in terms of software, hardware and tech support) easy-to-use GUI platform that approaches Win32 or OS X in terms of usability, ubiquity, completeness and interoperability.
IMHO, KDE/Qt comes closest, even to the whole Framework concept that NeXT/Cocoa pioneers. DCOP is very handy, KParts is pretty much solid and complete in 3.3, and the latest versions have been pretty fast. ARTS is IMHO the last problem that needs to be solved or removed. But that's just me.
Re:BeOS (Score:4, Insightful)
As it happened Apple chose to buy NeXT instead and paid even more for them. I believe that Be were offering themselves for $300M and that NeXT was bought for $400M.
At the end of it all I think that Apple totally made the right choice. Steve returned the focus needed for Apple to succeed again. OpenStep provided a very solid foundation for Mac OS X, arguably a better one than BeOS, then Apple managed to acquire a number of key people from Be who have helped add some of the show case BeOS technologies into Mac OS X. In essence it got both.
If you look at where we are now with the current builds of 10.4 with CoreImage, CoreData and Spotlight it's difficult to imagine that things could have worked out better if Apple had gone with Be. Certainly the dev tools inherited and evolved from NeXT have enabled Apple to develop the OS at a faster rate than the competition and they've managed with with less resources.