6 ms·

Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane. I constantly

by tbrock 11y ago

Apparently Steve Jobs narrowly missed Berners Lee demonstrating his browser for inclusion with an upcoming version of next step to catch a plane. I constantly think about how them meeting that day may have moved the mainstream adoption of the web up by 5 years.

wpietri 11y ago
Could you say more about how you think that would have happened? I was a NeXT developer at the time, and I'm having trouble imagining it. At the time, NextStep was a struggling niche OS. Jobs didn't get any real power until he returned to the helm of Apple in '97, and NextStep technology didn't hit the mainstream until 2001 with the release of the consumer version of OS X. In contrast, Netscape's first product was released in late '94, and it was popular enough that they IPO'd in 1995.
- twoodfin 11y ago
  I can imagine an alternate universe where Jobs has a "Xerox" moment and immediately pivots NeXT's software efforts to developing a cross-platform graphical browser. The "cross-platform" part is the most optimistic, to be sure. But if Jobs believed that NeXT's real value was the software (as OS X, and especially iOS, bear out), then you can imagine a strategy that used a web browser as a Trojan Horse for a platform that could overthrow the currently dominant Windows monopoly. That was basically Netscape's strategy a few years later, after all.
  - ams6110 11y ago
    NEXTSTEP was cross platform, so not really such a far fetched idea.
    - stickfigure 11y ago
      NeXTSTEP only became "cross platform" (meaning: ran on x86 hardware) as a desperate alternative to their failing proprietary hardware business. Seeng as how at that point the OS itself was NeXT's business, it's hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes. Even today the only real cross-platform product Apple makes is iTunes, and that only exists so they can sell iPods (and now iPhones) to windows users. Facetime, ApplePay, iBooks... all would be better as cross platform apps, but Apple isn't interested because it doesn't help them sell more macs/iphones.
      - wpietri 11y ago
        > it's hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes. Perhaps hard to imagine, but they actually did it. OPENSTEP Enterprise allowed you to use the NeXT development tools to build apps for 32-bit Windows platforms. That came toward the end of the NeXT saga, so you could argue it was a move of last resort. But it clearly wasn't out of the question.
        ksherlock 11y ago
        until 10.5 or 10.6, OS X still included the classic NextStep and Windows GUI images. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - joshu 11y ago
        this is not correct. please be more careful not to assert opinions as facts.
      - joezydeco 11y ago
        And that decision almost never happened: While it seems a given that the iPod was to be made compatible with Windows, Jobs was very resistant to the idea. At one point he said that Windows users would get to use the iPod "over my dead body". After continued convincing, Jobs gave up: "Screw it," he said at one meeting where they showed him the analysis. "I'm sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want." http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/25/steve-jobs-biography-what-might-have-been/ http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/25/steve-jobs-biography-wha... Think about what iPod sales would have been if iTunes never made it to the PC platform. Would there have been enough profit to fund the development of the iPhone? Would we be where we are today?
        digi_owl 11y ago
        Well Android may still have happened (but perhaps looked more like Blackberry in its initial form). And Nokia may be around selling Maemo based phoned, though i wonder if what sunk them was Samsung (and later Chinese companies) undermining their feature phone sales in Africa etc.
    - Esau 11y ago
      But Nextstep was a very expensive OS. I looked into it and they wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $900.00 for a copy. I eventually bought a used NextStation from Sam Goldberger's Spherical Solutions.
      - wpietri 11y ago
        Sure, but that's only because they were selling it into niche markets willing to pay a lot for its advantages. If they had been targeting deployment to consumer platforms, they would have priced it appropriately.
  - dboreham 11y ago
    Regular people couldn't afford Next computers. They used PC clones (running mostly 16-bit Windows at the time, which is why Netscape was successful -- their browser ran on 16-bit Windows).
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Which is why the parent mentions "cross platform" repeatedly.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Interesting. The problem with the NextStep stuff at the time was that it required high-end hardware. Even years later when they started to make cross-platform development tools, they were limited to niche markets where you new your users would pay up for plenty of RAM. That was fine for, e.g., financial trading. So I think they would have had to start basically from scratch, sullying their hands by writing for the sad world of 16-bit Windows 3.1. If they had done it, though, it could have been incredible. On the other hand, they could well have been killed by the same issue that killed Netscape: the web, being definitionally open, doesn't provide a lot of defensible advantage to early movers.
    - twoodfin 11y ago
      All true. I think this is good evidence we live in the best of all possible worlds: A Jobs/NeXT WWW browser a couple of years ahead of Netscape probably would have fared even worse against Microsoft's inevitable counterattack. For all we know, we could have ended up in a "Blackbird" (aka MSN) dominated universe, and without a revitalized Apple to give us Unix on the desktop. Still, I do find it totally plausible that Jobs could have been inspired to redirect NeXT's struggling business to the nascent web. Some of those old WebObjects interviews that get posted to HN periodically demonstrate the he "got" the web and its potential as an application delivery platform much earlier than most.
- tbrock 11y ago
  I know it almost happened because Tim Berners Lee said it did: https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ "We almost met once. There was a get-together of NeXT developers in France, and we set up demos at tables around the room. Robert Cailliau and I set up the WorldWideWeb.app on one table. Steve arrived, and started making his way around the tables chatting with each project He didn’t get to us before he had to leave." Isn't that incredible?! Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to admit he would have instantly understood the power of what Berners Lee was showing him. I think about that story a lot. Gives me goosebumps.
  - azinman2 11y ago
    Maybe. If this was a read-write version, then it's easy to mentally box it into a network-backed word processor (since that's what it would have been most similar to). The power of the web took quite a few leaps in terms of a distributed effort making it into something new each time. When cast in the original scientific philosophy, it's not clear that this would seem any more important than the prodigies, compuserves, and aols that already existed.
  - dfc 11y ago
    > Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to > admit he would have instantly understood the power of > what Berners Lee was showing him. I see no reason to think Steve Jobs was omniscient. Do you really think he could instantly an accurately assess the future importance of a technology?
    - tbrock 11y ago
      Seems to have worked out for him all the countless other times. For examples see Apple Computer, Pixar, NeXt... Berners Lee himself writes about the possibility decades later. Decades later! The inventor of the web browser! Remembering and writing about something that almost happened... but didn't. He's clearly given some thought to the matter. It's not like you remembering the time a co-worker ate vanilla ice cream at lunch time last week. This is Tim Berners Lee reminiscing about an opportunity to show Steve Jobs his wares.
johansch 11y ago
What enabled mainstream web adoption was mainstream computers (Intel 486) and modems (14.4k/28.8k) getting fast enough to make something like the web useful. Jobs wasn't in a position to speed that up. They got affordable in 1993. (TBL defined the cornerstones of the WWW in 1989.) In 1989 Jobs was still selling (very few) Next computers for an entry price of $10k.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  The legislation that allowed someone to get their own connection to the internet (essentially to become an ISP) without having a government sponsor didn't exist until 1995.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    But commercial ISPs with full access to the Internet existed in the USA since 1992. The first one was The World. Details at http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html
    - fit2rule 11y ago
      Yeah, there was no such legislation - or if there was, it wasn't being followed by those who had Internet access in the early 90's.
  - icedchai 11y ago
    Untrue. You could get commercial internet connections from UUNet and others much earlier (1992?)
NvidiaCUDA 11y ago
What the heck? The "web" had one of the fastest adoptions I can imagine. People started using it before data communications speeds were truly ready for it.
DanielKehoe 11y ago
Harumph. I was an editor for NeXTWorld magazine [1] at the time TimBL invented the web. "WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12" was the first web browser I used. Mass adoption of the web was held back by lack of ISPs. It may seem strange now, but in 1991 there was no way to connect to the Internet unless you were affiliated with a university or a big R&D company. in 1991, TimBl's WWW wasn't any more relevant to NeXT than Gopher or Brewster Kahle's WAIS or, for that matter, CompuServe. Some of us at NeXTWorld, including John Perry Barlow, Simson Garfinkel, and Seth Ross saw the potential of the WorldWideWeb, but we never wrote about it at NeXTWorld because most NeXT users couldn't connect to the Internet. I don't know when Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb but he had many opportunities and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. By that time, Marc Andreessen had released Mosaic, the first web browser for Windows, and ISPs were sprouting up to enable consumer connections to the Internet. NeXT computers would have needed to provide a modem, and PPP for TCP/IP over dialup, and NeXT-provided connection points (through a 3rd party partner?) to make the web useful to NeXT users outside of academia and government. [1] http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html
- yoda_sl 11y ago
  > and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. Not sure exactly what you mean by that since WebObjects was created at NeXT way before Steve was back at Apple. In fact before the acquisition Steve was the main WebObjects promoter so way before being back at Apple. True at Apple, Steve did continue to promote WebObjects internally for a couple years but afterwards he moved on.
  - DanielKehoe 11y ago
    Ah, you're absolutely right. I forgot WebObjects was a NeXT project. Now I'm wondering when Steve Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb.
- MrTonyD 11y ago
  The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem (remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn't need PPP, since we had arranged a proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I've forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided that we didn't want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address. Ultimately, it came down to "unsupportability" by NeXT. Several people other than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time, the organization in Virginia didn't want to support the software either - the software was a "black box" mostly provided by us on their machines. So we killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.

by tbrock 11y ago

wpietri 11y ago

Could you say more about how you think that would have happened? I was a NeXT developer at the time, and I'm having trouble imagining it. At the time, NextStep was a struggling niche OS. Jobs didn't get any real power until he returned to the helm of Apple in '97, and NextStep technology didn't hit the mainstream until 2001 with the release of the consumer version of OS X. In contrast, Netscape's first product was released in late '94, and it was popular enough that they IPO'd in 1995.

twoodfin 11y ago
I can imagine an alternate universe where Jobs has a "Xerox" moment and immediately pivots NeXT's software efforts to developing a cross-platform graphical browser. The "cross-platform" part is the most optimistic, to be sure. But if Jobs believed that NeXT's real value was the software (as OS X, and especially iOS, bear out), then you can imagine a strategy that used a web browser as a Trojan Horse for a platform that could overthrow the currently dominant Windows monopoly. That was basically Netscape's strategy a few years later, after all.
- ams6110 11y ago
  NEXTSTEP was cross platform, so not really such a far fetched idea.
  - stickfigure 11y ago
    NeXTSTEP only became "cross platform" (meaning: ran on x86 hardware) as a desperate alternative to their failing proprietary hardware business. Seeng as how at that point the OS itself was NeXT's business, it's hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes. Even today the only real cross-platform product Apple makes is iTunes, and that only exists so they can sell iPods (and now iPhones) to windows users. Facetime, ApplePay, iBooks... all would be better as cross platform apps, but Apple isn't interested because it doesn't help them sell more macs/iphones.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      > it's hard to imagine Jobs supporting software that ran on competing OSes. Perhaps hard to imagine, but they actually did it. OPENSTEP Enterprise allowed you to use the NeXT development tools to build apps for 32-bit Windows platforms. That came toward the end of the NeXT saga, so you could argue it was a move of last resort. But it clearly wasn't out of the question.
      - ksherlock 11y ago
        until 10.5 or 10.6, OS X still included the classic NextStep and Windows GUI images. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/mac_images/
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - joshu 11y ago
      this is not correct. please be more careful not to assert opinions as facts.
    - joezydeco 11y ago
      And that decision almost never happened: While it seems a given that the iPod was to be made compatible with Windows, Jobs was very resistant to the idea. At one point he said that Windows users would get to use the iPod "over my dead body". After continued convincing, Jobs gave up: "Screw it," he said at one meeting where they showed him the analysis. "I'm sick of listening to you assholes. Go do whatever the hell you want." http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/25/steve-jobs-biography-what-might-have-been/ http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/25/steve-jobs-biography-wha... Think about what iPod sales would have been if iTunes never made it to the PC platform. Would there have been enough profit to fund the development of the iPhone? Would we be where we are today?
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        Well Android may still have happened (but perhaps looked more like Blackberry in its initial form). And Nokia may be around selling Maemo based phoned, though i wonder if what sunk them was Samsung (and later Chinese companies) undermining their feature phone sales in Africa etc.
  - Esau 11y ago
    But Nextstep was a very expensive OS. I looked into it and they wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $900.00 for a copy. I eventually bought a used NextStation from Sam Goldberger's Spherical Solutions.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Sure, but that's only because they were selling it into niche markets willing to pay a lot for its advantages. If they had been targeting deployment to consumer platforms, they would have priced it appropriately.
- dboreham 11y ago
  Regular people couldn't afford Next computers. They used PC clones (running mostly 16-bit Windows at the time, which is why Netscape was successful -- their browser ran on 16-bit Windows).
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Which is why the parent mentions "cross platform" repeatedly.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Interesting. The problem with the NextStep stuff at the time was that it required high-end hardware. Even years later when they started to make cross-platform development tools, they were limited to niche markets where you new your users would pay up for plenty of RAM. That was fine for, e.g., financial trading. So I think they would have had to start basically from scratch, sullying their hands by writing for the sad world of 16-bit Windows 3.1. If they had done it, though, it could have been incredible. On the other hand, they could well have been killed by the same issue that killed Netscape: the web, being definitionally open, doesn't provide a lot of defensible advantage to early movers.
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    All true. I think this is good evidence we live in the best of all possible worlds: A Jobs/NeXT WWW browser a couple of years ahead of Netscape probably would have fared even worse against Microsoft's inevitable counterattack. For all we know, we could have ended up in a "Blackbird" (aka MSN) dominated universe, and without a revitalized Apple to give us Unix on the desktop. Still, I do find it totally plausible that Jobs could have been inspired to redirect NeXT's struggling business to the nascent web. Some of those old WebObjects interviews that get posted to HN periodically demonstrate the he "got" the web and its potential as an application delivery platform much earlier than most.
tbrock 11y ago
I know it almost happened because Tim Berners Lee said it did: https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ "We almost met once. There was a get-together of NeXT developers in France, and we set up demos at tables around the room. Robert Cailliau and I set up the WorldWideWeb.app on one table. Steve arrived, and started making his way around the tables chatting with each project He didn’t get to us before he had to leave." Isn't that incredible?! Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to admit he would have instantly understood the power of what Berners Lee was showing him. I think about that story a lot. Gives me goosebumps.
- azinman2 11y ago
  Maybe. If this was a read-write version, then it's easy to mentally box it into a network-backed word processor (since that's what it would have been most similar to). The power of the web took quite a few leaps in terms of a distributed effort making it into something new each time. When cast in the original scientific philosophy, it's not clear that this would seem any more important than the prodigies, compuserves, and aols that already existed.
- dfc 11y ago
  > Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to > admit he would have instantly understood the power of > what Berners Lee was showing him. I see no reason to think Steve Jobs was omniscient. Do you really think he could instantly an accurately assess the future importance of a technology?
  - tbrock 11y ago
    Seems to have worked out for him all the countless other times. For examples see Apple Computer, Pixar, NeXt... Berners Lee himself writes about the possibility decades later. Decades later! The inventor of the web browser! Remembering and writing about something that almost happened... but didn't. He's clearly given some thought to the matter. It's not like you remembering the time a co-worker ate vanilla ice cream at lunch time last week. This is Tim Berners Lee reminiscing about an opportunity to show Steve Jobs his wares.

johansch 11y ago

What enabled mainstream web adoption was mainstream computers (Intel 486) and modems (14.4k/28.8k) getting fast enough to make something like the web useful. Jobs wasn't in a position to speed that up. They got affordable in 1993. (TBL defined the cornerstones of the WWW in 1989.) In 1989 Jobs was still selling (very few) Next computers for an entry price of $10k.

nickbauman 11y ago
The legislation that allowed someone to get their own connection to the internet (essentially to become an ISP) without having a government sponsor didn't exist until 1995.
- pmontra 11y ago
  But commercial ISPs with full access to the Internet existed in the USA since 1992. The first one was The World. Details at http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html http://www.indra.com/homepages/spike/isp.html
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    Yeah, there was no such legislation - or if there was, it wasn't being followed by those who had Internet access in the early 90's.
- icedchai 11y ago
  Untrue. You could get commercial internet connections from UUNet and others much earlier (1992?)

NvidiaCUDA 11y ago

What the heck? The "web" had one of the fastest adoptions I can imagine. People started using it before data communications speeds were truly ready for it.

DanielKehoe 11y ago

Harumph. I was an editor for NeXTWorld magazine [1] at the time TimBL invented the web. "WWWNeXTStepEditor version 0.12" was the first web browser I used. Mass adoption of the web was held back by lack of ISPs. It may seem strange now, but in 1991 there was no way to connect to the Internet unless you were affiliated with a university or a big R&D company. in 1991, TimBl's WWW wasn't any more relevant to NeXT than Gopher or Brewster Kahle's WAIS or, for that matter, CompuServe. Some of us at NeXTWorld, including John Perry Barlow, Simson Garfinkel, and Seth Ross saw the potential of the WorldWideWeb, but we never wrote about it at NeXTWorld because most NeXT users couldn't connect to the Internet. I don't know when Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb but he had many opportunities and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. By that time, Marc Andreessen had released Mosaic, the first web browser for Windows, and ISPs were sprouting up to enable consumer connections to the Internet. NeXT computers would have needed to provide a modem, and PPP for TCP/IP over dialup, and NeXT-provided connection points (through a 3rd party partner?) to make the web useful to NeXT users outside of academia and government. [1] http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html http://www.fortuityconsulting.com/danielkehoe/earlyweb.html

yoda_sl 11y ago
> and it never was important until he got excited about WebOjects at Apple. Not sure exactly what you mean by that since WebObjects was created at NeXT way before Steve was back at Apple. In fact before the acquisition Steve was the main WebObjects promoter so way before being back at Apple. True at Apple, Steve did continue to promote WebObjects internally for a couple years but afterwards he moved on.
- DanielKehoe 11y ago
  Ah, you're absolutely right. I forgot WebObjects was a NeXT project. Now I'm wondering when Steve Jobs first saw the WorldWideWeb.
MrTonyD 11y ago
The prototype I evaluated at NeXT was supposed to work with any modem (remember Hayes compatibility?) and didn't need PPP, since we had arranged a proprietary handshake with the organization that gave out IP addresses (I've forgotten the name. At the time I believe there was just one entity allowed to give out IP addresses.) We discussed requiring a specific modem - but decided that we didn't want that to be a requirement for getting an IP address. Ultimately, it came down to "unsupportability" by NeXT. Several people other than me told Steve that things would go wrong connecting to the Internet, and when they did we would be mostly helpless to support them. At the same time, the organization in Virginia didn't want to support the software either - the software was a "black box" mostly provided by us on their machines. So we killed the project. I never heard anybody mention browsers.