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.
BeOS (Score:4, Interesting)
It's true that Apple currently employs several key Be developers, but I think the Mac platform would eb even further ahead if they went with Be.
Just my
Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Interesting)
So I just took some photos with my digital camera...
Either way the UI was totally cool. I wish Mac OS X looked more like Rhapsody, or even better, NeXT..
Well, there was another choice. (Score:5, Interesting)
At the time, also available was the BeOS. A lot of Mac die-hards at the time, myself included, thought that Apple purchasing Be and using that would make the most sense.
From my memory, I seem to remember that Be wanted more money than Apple was willing to spend. It could have also had something to do with the fact that the head of Be, Jean Louis Gassée, was a former Apple man and there was probably some politics there. In addition, NeXT had Steve Jobs and all the personality that went along with that.
I would be interested in reading some of the discussions that went along with passing up Be in favor of NeXT.
It would be interesting reading to see what might have developed out of a Macintosh + Be combination (as opposed to the Macintosh + NeXT we have now).
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Interesting)
Some guy on ebay is selling an empty cube [ebay.com], though, and it's already up to $78.
I bought my NeXT slab, monitor and laser printer for $150 or so from a coworker a few years ago...
No working systems are on ebay, though ( mine works ). And there seems to be some weird thing where these machines don't have their logos attached, what's that all about?
Anyway, NeXT had stopped making those boxes long before 1996 ( it was more like 1992-1993 that happened ), it's likely that a lot of folks at NeXT were using NeXTStep for Intel by 1996... now, where did I put my copy of NeXTStep for Intel?? Darn it...
Re:BeOS (Score:5, Interesting)
As a licensed BeOS devloper who still has a Rev2 BeBox sitting around I must say you're wrong. BeOS was NEVER as far along as Nextstep was even when taking into acount the hardware transition. BeOS had poor to no network or print servies. We where promissed that they would be released "real soon now" for years. Granted what Be had was better then the same stuff on Next. But Be lacked a lot of very important stuff.
The NeXT big thing (Score:5, Interesting)
NeXT made a big splash in the trade magazines by using standard UNIX industry hardware like the 680x0 processor, standard RAM, SCSI drives, etc. They did some neat stuff like having a 600M rewritable optical disk, unheard of capacity at the time. Unfortunately, no one else followed suit.
The big thing was the apps, though. Everything was done in Postscript, and there were several desktop publishing applications. As a math student at the time, Mathematica made my jaw drop. I figured out how to use it under ASCII mode via dialup, and checked all my homework that way.
The programming environment was interesting, though I never really delved into it. Underneath (or beside) the pretty GUI there was a 4.3BSD system with a Mach kernel. I was mostly interested in this compiler they had for it, gcc. They wanted you to copy it! And hunting around the ftp sites I found this new scripting language, perl, that was really great.
Too bad stuff like that will never catch on.
Re:BeOS (Score:1, Interesting)
This Article is riddled with inaccuracies. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Cocoa is finally getting its just dues how long before we see replacements to these Gorillas? They didn't want to invest in Cocoa programming then, but now six years later will they have taken the time to find the talent to do it now? Hard to tell but these are my predictions.
If they don't they'll be left behind. Adobe sees it by Apple entering into the market with better products.
Macromedia sees it but lets see if they really see it.
Quark seems to be the most cautious and I'm guessing they'll hedge their bets and have invested in such talent already.
Microsoft? Never. They'll figure that Office will always guarantee them supremacy in the platform. Then again I'm sure they'll be quite pissed if Apple releases a compatible Office suite worthy of knocking off Office. Afterall, XML is the measure of compatibility on all future Office suites.
The last section is obviously just conjecture but conjecture with history.Re:Vandalism on Wikipedia? (Score:3, Interesting)
The link actually goes to a page that redirects you to the real article. When I went there, someone had vandalised the redirection page to be just blank. I was initially confused, realized that it was a vandalism, and when I went to revert it, I found that in those few seconds someone else had already done it.
So although the increased traffic is resulting in more vandalism, it's also resulting in more oversight, so it all evens out in the end.
It's amusing to look at the history and see what various vandalisms were done. There's a lot of typical Slashdot trolls, so it's obvious a lot of vandals are Slashdot users.
Ignition point of Magnesium (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/m0088.h
Fire:
Autoignition temperature: 473C (883F)
When heated in air to a temperature near its melting point, magnesium may ignite and burn. Dangerous in the form of dust or flakes, and when exposed to flame or by violent chemical reaction with oxidizing agents. Magnesium may react with moisture or acids to evolve hydrogen gas, which is a highly dangerous fire or explosion hazard.
Autoignition temperature is for Magnesium turnings or ribbon.
Explosion:
Fine dust dispersed in air in sufficient concentrations, and in the presence of an ignition source is a potential dust explosion hazard. Minimum explosible concentration 0.030 grams/liter. Water used on molten magnesium will produce hydrogen gas and may cause an explosion.
Fire Extinguishing Media:
Use metal extinguishing powders such as G-1® graphite powder, Met-L-X® powder, powdered talc, dry graphite, powdered sodium chloride, soda ash, or dry sand. Warning! Do not use foam, chlorinated products such as Halon®, carbon dioxide, or water to extinguish magnesium fires, because dangerous reactions will occur. Use of water on molten magnesium will produce hydrogen gas and may cause an explosion.
Special Information:
In the event of a fire, wear full protective clothing and NIOSH-approved self-contained breathing apparatus with full facepiece operated in the pressure demand or other positive pressure mode. Fire fighters should protect their eyes and skin from flying particles. In order to prevent eye injury, do not look directly at magnesium fires.
Against The Grain? (Score:4, Interesting)
-the user interface was better
-file management was better
-Digital Webster
-no bar fixed across the top of the screen
Excited by old articles in Byte magazine, I bought a used NeXT Mono-Station from Sam Goldberger, who ran a company called Spherical Solutions. It ran great and I loved it. But when I wanted to buy a copy of Openstep 4 for my PC, NeXT wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $900.00 for it. I think that had a lot to do with NeXT's inability to compete in the PC market.
Today, I run a PowerMac G4 with Mac OS X 1.3.6.
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:3, Interesting)
What's that mean, 'real' sales?
I know I went to a nice university, but we had NeXT machines in pretty good numbers by 1991... I can't believe they were actually that much... then again, a hard drive was pretty pricy back then, I bet you could easily configure a machine at that price! But, uh, I'd take that number with a grain of salt, it's not like they sold only one model, and that's a wiki entry with no source to back it up...
Oh, BTW, I remembered the site that specializes in NeXT hardware is BlackHoleInc [blackholeinc.com], get yer NeXTStation Turbo Color for a low, low $499 !!
Yea, all things considered, that's some hardware that's held it's value pretty well... try getting that for *any* PC from 1992!!
Woman-shaped PCs.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Screenshots (Score:5, Interesting)
For those not familiar with nxhost, here it is from http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/NeXTFAQ-new/NeXTFAQ.
4.3 How do I run NextApps remotely?
Remote running
On the local machine make sure you have public window server access, this is set from the Preferences application. On the foreign NeXT machine run the application from a terminal window with the -NXHost . Both machines should be running the same version of NeXTstep.
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A Small future. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why the Darwin kernel? Why not the Linux kernel -- it's got the best hardware support. What about the L4 microkernel that has incredibly fast messaging rates?
Why Smalltalk? Why not Ruby or Objective-C or Python? Or maybe ML? All of them are pretty flexible and configurable languages with some nice rapid-development features.
Why the latest graphics technology? What makes a modern graphics system inherrently better in any relatively substantial way, other than sheer bandwidth and 3D rasterization performance.
Mostly, what you need is a clueful UI, which is really independent of any programming properties. You need the OS to not get in the way of blasting data around so that it can play media fast enough. You need the OS to have a low latency so that it can react to input fast enough.
But, most of all, you need useful applications.
All of these things are independent of each other. A crappy kernel, a crappy framework, and bad graphics technology can still have useful applications.
Anyone want to buy a NeXT Cube? (Score:1, Interesting)
One of the early Cubes, upgraded to a 25MHz 68040 (Turbo NeXTstation). 64MB RAM, 2GB SCSI HD, 17" greyscale megapizel monitor.
Pick up or deliver in Boulder, Colorado.
mail rousseau67 at gmail dot com for more info.
NEXTSTEP changed my life. I hope it changes yours.
Re:Anyone know what happened to blue - pink - red? (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing that was really physical that you could call red was 'Raptor', a future Mac OS that was being developed to run on any hardware on the planet. Not to be confused with "Star Trek" which was an attempted port of Mac OS to x86 architecture (which did quite well given the circumstances).
I think they were going to merge the two and just use some of the Star Trek codebase to keep working on Raptor but the dino bit the dust sometime in the 90's. Probably some whining about 'exorbitant costs' and the company 'bleeding red ink everywhere' - pfft! Weaklings!
Re:The NeXT big thing (Score:5, Interesting)
The NeXT was QUITE interesting at the time - the 68030/40 was not a bad chip at the time, NeXT added interesting hardware like the Motorola 56000 DSP, Display Postscript was as you said very interesting, tons of custom silicon on the NeXT, interesting and for the time BLAZING fast 400dpi laser printer (there were no 600 dpi laser printers at the time). Again as you mention, the optical drives were really unique, and should have always been used as supplementary media rather than as boot media (this lesson got learned by the time of NeXT 040 and slabs). This machine tried hard to really bend what was possible.
You are very right about the APPs - nice bundling there. Underlying OS was pretty stable - we had a pair of NeXT slabs running for 1100 days at one point that shared
NetInfo was way too obtuse to catch on, but a valiant effort at solving the NIS-is-crap problem, and ObjectiveC with InterfaceBuilder effectively created the RAD industry. NeXTStep was (and is, in current MacOS X implementation) quite cool, if not quite fast. To my thinking, Objective-C programming is an elegant solution to object-oriented programming (much nicer than C++), though certainly not perfect (run-time dynamic library resolution was a surprise to me, and Iwas disappointed that more invisible memory-handling features weren't provided).
sloth jr
Complete Teardown (Score:3, Interesting)
A little off topic, but related nonetheless. Does anyone have any links to pictures and perhaps even step by steps of a complete teardown of one of these? I've seen the TurboStations .... they are very similar to a same year model Sun Pizza box. Layout and all of my SparcStation 5 is very close (not cookie cutter mind you, but still you can see that the inspiration was there)
These cubes are so huge ... 12" by 12" ... compared to a similar Pizza box. In fact it looks like you could have two Mainboards in a Cube? How many drives did this thing hold? What's the internal chassis look like? I'm curious to know, but don't have a lot money (shipping a computer that size/weight is enormous) to spend to just strip the thing with no intention of ever actually using it. (I have 6 various Sparc machines, none Ultra, that just sit around already)
Thanks in advance for any info.
Re:Complete Teardown (Score:1, Interesting)
The stations and some Sun pizzaboxes both used a wedge-shaped external box to hold the speaker, the audio connectors, and (I think) keyboard/mouse connectors.
I think Sun and NeXT both used frogdesign to design their computers - that might be the source of some of the commonality.
" In fact it looks like you could have two Mainboards in a Cube?"
Only by mangling the backplane. The Cube could hold four 12"x12" boards. The most common board was the NeXTDimension 32-bit color display board. A Cube could be configured with three of those, plus the mono monitor plugged into the main CPU card.
The connectors were just NuBus.
There were two slots on each side of a central column. The bottom half of the central column was the power supply. The top half of the central column had room for two 5.25" full-height drives.
When I say column, I mean column. If you open the back, the central column is one sheetmetal structure. Remove some hex-head screws and the column (with power supply and disk drives) slides out. It's heavy...
Take the central column out, and you see the backplane which was a fairly plane board with the four NuBus connectors. One for the main CPU card, and the rest for expansion.
Adding a second CPU card requires that you cut traces on the backplane so that the CPU cards aren't aware of each other.
You can fit in plenty of drives, especially if you MacGyver a little. I once wanted to add a half-height 3.5" drive, though I'd run out of mounting holes in the central column, and didn't want to drill any. (The column only has mounting holes for full-height devices.)
I wound up using pieces of aluminum from a soda can to hang the drive from another 3.5" drive which was attached at mounting holes. I just punched four holes in the aluminum, and drove screws through the holes into the mounting holes in the two drives.
Worked like a charm.
I still use OPENSTEP4.2 on Athlon CPU, Dual DDR (Score:2, Interesting)
I do a lot of graphics work using WetPaint and Virtuoso. For some reason I'm always able to get a lot more work done each day on OPENSTEP than on a Windows machine which unforuntaly I still need to run for certain tasks.
Windows XP is a sloppy, bloated cluttered POS OS, can't even hold a candle to an 11 year old OS from NeXT!
Re:Did Copland failing actually help Apple succeed (Score:5, Interesting)
(By the way, people forget that Dave Cutler--who spearheaded the Windows NT project back in the late 1980's and early 1990's--essentially used a lot of the stuff he did at DEC in writing Windows NT.)
But MacOS X was different: it essentially put the Macintosh interface on top of the BSD Unix kernel--probably a lot of stuff borrowed from NeXTSTEP. As such, MacOS X (for the most part) has the memory stability and multitasking/multithreading functionality of BSD Unix.
Re:Well, there was another choice. (Score:3, Interesting)
Copland failed for reasons entirely within Apple's own control: it had the unrealistic goal of providing modern OS features to existing binaries; in other words exsiting Mac apps would be first class citizens on Copland. OS X of course requires at the bare minimum a recompile, and practically speaking a Mac app of that era required months of engineering to port over to OS X. Very different goals.
The other reason was the unruly nature of Apple engineering at that time. Technology teams were using Copland as an excuse to go on wholesale rewrites and add a slew of unnecessary features. (OpenDoc, CyberDog, QuickDraw GX, the list goes on and on)
Had the Copland steering committee had the discipline to keep the technology teams in line, and the management had the flexibility to realize that binary compatibility with full features was unattainable, Copland might have succeeded. A Blue box approach to binary compatibility could've alone made the difference in the success of the project. But then, maybe Copland's failure was a blessing in disguise. Its a matter of opinion I guess..
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NeXT background (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course, never forget about GNUstep!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Copland Memory Management (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually they were trying to invent the steel-belted radial. The Copland swap system, for instance was a strange beast, using 256 swap files (for some reason) and performed better than unix or NT swap systems.
Don't forget, we got alpha seeds of Copland - you can run it today if you have the right hardware. They just hadn't finished backwards compatibility (yes, that old song again) when it was "too late" and they went shopping for something else.
We're better off today for it, I'm sure, but it's disingenuous to represent that they didn't get memory management working.
Re:Port of ReactOS to PowerPC (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd really prefer they move away from Mach and towards Linux as a kernel, but there are some fairly serious changes to their graphics system that would need to be made in order to have a decent performance level atop Linux. They depend pretty heavily on Mach IPC constructs and have optimized the crap out of that path to make the OS X window server work.
Re:This Article is riddled with inaccuracies. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Power macintosh 6100 was introduced in March 1994.
NeXT had ported NeXTSTEP to Power Mac hardware well before they were acquired and is what tilted the balance. That and the fact that Gassé wanted 400 million for BeOS, wich was nowhere near as complete as NeXTSTEP was at the time.
Display PDF: read up, bob: some intro info here [prepressure.com]
Display PDF is a rendering engine that displays PDF. What Quartz does is raster graphical commands (actually, the same calls that Cocoa had for Display PostScript, what was eventually dubbed CoreGraphics and then, as a whole, Quartz 2D), plus bells and whistles for OpenGL acceleration (further enhanced with Quartz Extreme) to build up these images and pass-em on to the underlying PDF rasteriser.
In Quartz Extreme, provided hardware supports it, these rastered images are sent as textures in the OpenGL video hardware for final composition on screen.
Re:This Article is riddled with inaccuracies. (Score:3, Interesting)
NeXT had ported NeXTSTEP to Power Mac hardware well before they were acquired and is what tilted the balance. That and the fact that Gassé wanted 400 million for BeOS, wich was nowhere near as complete as NeXTSTEP was at the time.
The price tag and lesser capabilities of BeOS were a big factor, as was the demonstrated portability of OPENSTEP. At the time, OPENSTEP 4 was running on a variety of architectures, but Power PC wasn't one of them.
Display PDF: read up, bob: some intro info here
Gee, thanks. Notice that they refer to a PDF drawing model. That's basically PostScript vector drawing, without the PostScript language and non-drawing operators. We call that Quartz.
Display PDF is a rendering engine that displays PDF. What Quartz does is raster graphical commands (actually, the same calls that Cocoa had for Display PostScript, what was eventually dubbed CoreGraphics and then, as a whole, Quartz 2D), plus bells and whistles for OpenGL acceleration (further enhanced with Quartz Extreme) to build up these images and pass-em on to the underlying PDF rasteriser.
Um. No. This inaccurately implies all rendering passes through a PDF form. In normal usage, this is done only for printing, using the PDF form as a spooling format.
What Quartz does is present a set of functions which render into a context. That context may be targeted to produce on-screen drawing, such as what Cocoa does, or may be a CGBitmapContext to generate off-screen rasters, or a PDF context to produce a PDF output stream. Additional context types exist to support specialized tasks. The actual API is often referred to as the "Quartz 2D" API in developer documentation. These functions implement a drawing modelsimilar to the drawing model beneath PDF.
Quartz also provides a PDF interpreter which calls the same Quartz APIs to generate window content (Preview.app), bitmap output via a CGBitmapContext, or other output forms.
The PDF output capability and the PDF rendering pass are primarily used by the Mac OS X printing system, which uses the PDF form as a spooling format.
Quartz window contexts transparently accelerate operations based on hardware capabilities. Quartz Extreme is one good example of this, accelerating the Quartz Compositor back end at the heart of the window system. This functionality was added in Mac OS X 10.2.
Tiger will be extending GPU use a bit through new functionality such as CoreImage. http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/core.html [apple.com]
Thinking outside of the KDE/GNOME box (Score:4, Interesting)
i've been spending considerable time of late conceptualizing building a new distro based solely on GNUstep and its associated apps. in my opinion, there is a critical mass of GNUstep-powered apps that run on Linux to create a user experience that rivals that of NeXTstep. it's low-hanging fruit that IMHO no one is reaching out to grab. i would like to grab it.
you might not understand the sheer power NeXTstep affords its users to appreciate why I would want to build something like this--i encourage you to find an old NeXTstep box and see for yourself why I would be excited about NeXTstep years after its demise.
i'm sure some believe KDE/GNOME already provide ease-of-use for end users, but having had the power of NeXTstep under my fingers for years, and having been a Linux user since 1995, I'm not sold. I'm currently working with a small Linux distro vendor to explore the possibility of building such an environment. We're trying to figure out if it would have any commercial promise. So far, well, it looks promising, but we might do it anyway for the sheer fun of having NeXTstep back on top of Linux. (Scratching an itch, in other words.) Although I believe KDE and GNOME have come a long way, IMHO they still lack the sheer ease-of-use that NeXTstep provided back in the day. I think the time might be right for an alternative to KDE/GNOME that is based on the NeXTstep experience.
I'm interested in readers' thoughts on this matter. Email me if this sounds interesting.
Re:Net services company??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:1, Interesting)