8 ms·

Ahhh, NeXT... probably the nicest environment/OS/machine that never took off....

by TickleSteve 11y ago

gcb0 11y ago
wasn't it just a bad clone of irix? why the hype?
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?) but it could render 3d protein fold simulations from PDB files circa 1995 with little difficulty compared to the other gear in his lab. I also remember IRIX being used heavily for CGI in major motion pictures. (I want to say Lightwave or Maya was originally SGI only, due to architectural limitations on every other platform.) AFAIK NeXT didn't even come close to putting out any hardware that came close to allowing that sort of rendering capabilities. Xerox PARC's platform is probably the closest analogue.[1] Basically all of our modern day GUI paradigms are based off of what they did in the late 70s. @pjmlp will jump in with more detail if he sees this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintos...
  - bluedino 11y ago
    >> IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. >> I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly Every workstation vendor had their own UNIX back then. SGI built in what became OpenGL and had the graphics hardware to pair it with. Later on they added things like the XFS file system (think 9TB volumes in 1994), 64-bit MIPS support, and multi-CPU support. All which were key in allowing SGI to do the things they did with 3D.
    - arca_vorago 11y ago
      To this day I still have an irrational love for SGI systems. I've been keeping an eye out for a case to use in a modern build just because. SGI also did a lot of pushing of the industry in good directions imho.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        SGI is basically the company that shows amazing engineers cannot overcome psychotic management. From their Windows strategy to their spending, SGI is the pulled defeat from the jaws of victory company.
        pklausler 11y ago
        I wonder whether it all went wrong when SGI bought Cray Research in '96 or if things were already sliding downhill by then.
        protomyth 11y ago
        I think in 1995 with the Windows NT strategy marked the end. They were sliding in 96 and had already sold patents to Microsoft by then.
        rvense 11y ago
        I think they were just torn between doubling down on their own RISC processors or moving with the times and going Intel. They ended up trying to do both, and that's never going to work.
      - saganus 11y ago
        Same here. And the colors! those purple shades, wow. I remember seeing my first Indigo machine and being utterly amazed at both the design of the computer, the big ass monitor, the graphical interface (my friend and I just stood there opening and closing the program groups since they had this very cool 3D effect... and of course we were younger so this was super rare for us). Amazing machines. I would love to get my hands on one of them.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    "I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?)" It had 64-bit processors, high-bandwidth NUMA links for CPU's/boards, plenty of RAM, interconnects from CPU's to graphics cards that removed obstacles to performance, often custom graphics cards, custom software interfaces, whole-program optimization, and ability to scale up to 256 CPU's and hundreds of gigs of RAM in one image. Compare original Final Fantasy movie to anything 3D animated from that time period to see what SGI Onyx machines could do. ;) Hell, it still looks good despite all the advances since then by gaming and rendering engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ That doesn't happen a lot. Quite a bit can be done in real-time on modern systems. A few things in trailer still look better to me than modern games. I recall the detail even included individual strands of hair's physics and rendering. Too bad the plot and acting sucked because it was first to look real enough to fool people passing through the living room. Scared the rural ones, too. Took 32 Onyx2 Machines fully loaded plus tons of custom software. For desktops, Bill Gates and SGI did this demo on a machine with two, 150-200Mhz processors plus their graphics cards: https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s I start there because the first trick will impress you if you recall what multimedia, graphics, or concurrency were like on Windows PC's in 1998.
- gamache 11y ago
  Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics performance. NeXTSTEP broke with Unix tradition in many ways, notably using Display PostScript rather than the X Window System for display, offering Objective-C rather than vanilla C as the primary systems language, and attempting to provide a friendly WIMP interface as the primary mode of usage rather than the somewhat primitive windowmanagers in use on Unixes at the time. The NeXT hardware, in contrast, emphasized multimedia features (like CD audio, megapixel display, and desktop publishing) over graphics rendering performance.
  - dalke 11y ago
    IRIX UI displays were based on Display PostScript, before SGI switched to X.
    - gamache 11y ago
      Huh, I did not know that! You're right, looks like DPS and X got merged in during IRIX 4.x.
      - mrpippy 11y ago
        SGI's X server (Xsgi) continued to support the DPS X extension up through 6.5.22. It was removed after that, either for licensing or support reasons depending on which rumors you believe. Some of the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator) used DPS.
      - dalke 11y ago
        I still remember how neat it was to type PostScript into a console window and see the result appear on the root window.
  - kps 11y ago
    Sun's NeWS previously used Postscript extended with an event system. Of course that meant a heavyweight display client running arbitrary code in an interpreted Turing-complete language communicating with application backends over a network, and something that ridiculous could never catch on.
bluedino 11y ago
NeXT (with a bunch of Mac baggage) is basically the current OS X
- wcummings 11y ago
  The "NS" you see all over OSX API's stands for NextStep http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-prefix-mean http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-p...
- TickleSteve 11y ago
  Absolutely, OSX has a great heritage, but they're also backing away from the purity of the design too... (e.g. Microkernel, simplicity, mimimalism, etc).
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    NeXTStep was never running on any more/less of a microkernel than OS X. Mach is essentially a microkernel PLUS most of a BSD kernel wrapped around it, all running in ring 0. It's not very microkernely in a true sense. This was done to achieve performant Unix compatibility, which was a major goal of the CMU research project Mach originated as. NeXTStep used Mach 2.5, where the BSD personality was based on 4.3 BSD. OS X upgraded to Mach 3.0, with the BSD personality derived from FreeBSD. In both cases all of the drivers are running in kernel space -- NeXTStep never had, eg, filesystem drivers running in user-space like you'd expect from a "true" microkernel.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Well, they removed quite a bit when they added the Mac baggage. I still would rather have the interface to OpenStep 4 than the current OS X. The whole concept of the menu bar on the top was nice on a 9" display, but it is a major pain on a 34" monitor.
  - kitsunesoba 11y ago
    Conversely, I find it annoying to have to chase down menubars that follow their parent windows around on large, high resolution screens. The principles of a global menubar (being able to throw your cursor to hit it) still work on large screens... I just crank up cursor speed so hitting it takes roughly the same amount of physical movement as it did to do the same two or three decades ago.
qubex 11y ago
The platform was quite successful in financial and scientific circles where ease and speed of development was key. That's what led to Tim Berners-Lee having such a machine on his desk whilst at CERN and hence developing the HTTP protocol, the HTML language, and basically the first web server and browser with it.
- TickleSteve 11y ago
  yeah... I know... I've got a cube and 2 NeXTStations... but while they were popular in engineering circles, they deserved more mass-market appeal than that. Unfortunately, they were also pricey in their day...
  - qubex 11y ago
    At those prices they never stood a chance of becoming anything more than a niche item — and this was very clear to those who formulated the pricing strategy. They did expect a higher success rate in Universities and higher education generally, and the consequent students-choosing-to-work-on-the-platform-they-learnt-on but new graduates had almost no say in such choices “back then” and there was never much take up in the educational sector to begin with.
- julian_1 11y ago
  Do you know if that work was done in (more-portable) C or in Objective-C?
  - mpweiher 11y ago
    The work was done in Objective-C and took around 5KLOC (including editing). I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms [1]. You can download the source code. TBL got permission from his manager to do WWW as a side project. For NCSA Mosaic, it took a team of 5 a year to produce 100KLOC of C. In other words, it would not have been possible as a side project, and thus we would not have the WWW. [1] http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
_pmf_ 11y ago
> Ahhh, NeXT... probably the nicest environment/OS/machine that never took off.... That would be BeOS.
- qubex 11y ago
  I'm so delighted to find somebody else who remembers BeOS.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I regularly cite it as an alternative to mainstream desktops and example of a microkernel system that performed well. Here's a post with it and a bunch of other systems with excellent properties worth copying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020
    - buttershakes 11y ago
      I loved Beos. I still have R4 disks lying around, very nice system.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        We were discussing microkernels vs monolithic recently with BeOS as example. Opponent believed compilation times and apps doing many file accesses (web server) should be really slow on such a system vs Linux or Windows. Did you do either of those on BeOS and alternatives? If so, what was your experience with that? Note: BeOS is a special case since the filesystem is a database. So it cant prove his point unless it has XFS or something. But still curious.
- jernfrost 11y ago
  I was a big BeOS fan back in the day, but honestly in retrospect I think NeXTStep was a more advance and better thought out system. BeOS went with C++ for GUI programming e.g. which is a terrible language to do GUIs in. I wasted about 10 years of my life doing GUI programming in C++, and any C++ solution which didn't totally suck essentially ended up duplicating in a crappy way what had already been figured out in Objective-C. BeOS approach to multithreading was really just a dead end. Nobody does multithreading that way anymore. NeXT also had a more sophisticated display system, based on 2D vector graphics. They had the bundle concept and a lot of other things which I think in sum made it a better system. What I liked about BeOS was the heavy use of the file system attributes, and the translators were you could just drop in a GIF translator and then all you graphics apps could suddenly read GIF images.

Ahhh, NeXT... probably the nicest environment/OS/machine that never took off....

gcb0 11y ago

wasn't it just a bad clone of irix? why the hype?

iheartmemcache 11y ago
IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?) but it could render 3d protein fold simulations from PDB files circa 1995 with little difficulty compared to the other gear in his lab. I also remember IRIX being used heavily for CGI in major motion pictures. (I want to say Lightwave or Maya was originally SGI only, due to architectural limitations on every other platform.) AFAIK NeXT didn't even come close to putting out any hardware that came close to allowing that sort of rendering capabilities. Xerox PARC's platform is probably the closest analogue.[1] Basically all of our modern day GUI paradigms are based off of what they did in the late 70s. @pjmlp will jump in with more detail if he sees this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintos...
- bluedino 11y ago
  >> IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. >> I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly Every workstation vendor had their own UNIX back then. SGI built in what became OpenGL and had the graphics hardware to pair it with. Later on they added things like the XFS file system (think 9TB volumes in 1994), 64-bit MIPS support, and multi-CPU support. All which were key in allowing SGI to do the things they did with 3D.
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    To this day I still have an irrational love for SGI systems. I've been keeping an eye out for a case to use in a modern build just because. SGI also did a lot of pushing of the industry in good directions imho.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      SGI is basically the company that shows amazing engineers cannot overcome psychotic management. From their Windows strategy to their spending, SGI is the pulled defeat from the jaws of victory company.
      - pklausler 11y ago
        I wonder whether it all went wrong when SGI bought Cray Research in '96 or if things were already sliding downhill by then.
        protomyth 11y ago
        I think in 1995 with the Windows NT strategy marked the end. They were sliding in 96 and had already sold patents to Microsoft by then.
        rvense 11y ago
        I think they were just torn between doubling down on their own RISC processors or moving with the times and going Intel. They ended up trying to do both, and that's never going to work.
    - saganus 11y ago
      Same here. And the colors! those purple shades, wow. I remember seeing my first Indigo machine and being utterly amazed at both the design of the computer, the big ass monitor, the graphical interface (my friend and I just stood there opening and closing the program groups since they had this very cool 3D effect... and of course we were younger so this was super rare for us). Amazing machines. I would love to get my hands on one of them.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  "I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?)" It had 64-bit processors, high-bandwidth NUMA links for CPU's/boards, plenty of RAM, interconnects from CPU's to graphics cards that removed obstacles to performance, often custom graphics cards, custom software interfaces, whole-program optimization, and ability to scale up to 256 CPU's and hundreds of gigs of RAM in one image. Compare original Final Fantasy movie to anything 3D animated from that time period to see what SGI Onyx machines could do. ;) Hell, it still looks good despite all the advances since then by gaming and rendering engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zQ-LhwYqdQ That doesn't happen a lot. Quite a bit can be done in real-time on modern systems. A few things in trailer still look better to me than modern games. I recall the detail even included individual strands of hair's physics and rendering. Too bad the plot and acting sucked because it was first to look real enough to fool people passing through the living room. Scared the rural ones, too. Took 32 Onyx2 Machines fully loaded plus tons of custom software. For desktops, Bill Gates and SGI did this demo on a machine with two, 150-200Mhz processors plus their graphics cards: https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s https://youtu.be/zuMSk_S2ARI?t=1m22s I start there because the first trick will impress you if you recall what multimedia, graphics, or concurrency were like on Windows PC's in 1998.
gamache 11y ago
Not at all. Irix was a fairly standard System V-derived Unix that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware, which typically was specially built for high graphics performance. NeXTSTEP broke with Unix tradition in many ways, notably using Display PostScript rather than the X Window System for display, offering Objective-C rather than vanilla C as the primary systems language, and attempting to provide a friendly WIMP interface as the primary mode of usage rather than the somewhat primitive windowmanagers in use on Unixes at the time. The NeXT hardware, in contrast, emphasized multimedia features (like CD audio, megapixel display, and desktop publishing) over graphics rendering performance.
- dalke 11y ago
  IRIX UI displays were based on Display PostScript, before SGI switched to X.
  - gamache 11y ago
    Huh, I did not know that! You're right, looks like DPS and X got merged in during IRIX 4.x.
    - mrpippy 11y ago
      SGI's X server (Xsgi) continued to support the DPS X extension up through 6.5.22. It was removed after that, either for licensing or support reasons depending on which rumors you believe. Some of the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator) used DPS.
    - dalke 11y ago
      I still remember how neat it was to type PostScript into a console window and see the result appear on the root window.
- kps 11y ago
  Sun's NeWS previously used Postscript extended with an event system. Of course that meant a heavyweight display client running arbitrary code in an interpreted Turing-complete language communicating with application backends over a network, and something that ridiculous could never catch on.

bluedino 11y ago

NeXT (with a bunch of Mac baggage) is basically the current OS X

wcummings 11y ago
The "NS" you see all over OSX API's stands for NextStep http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-prefix-mean http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-p...
TickleSteve 11y ago
Absolutely, OSX has a great heritage, but they're also backing away from the purity of the design too... (e.g. Microkernel, simplicity, mimimalism, etc).
- msbarnett 11y ago
  NeXTStep was never running on any more/less of a microkernel than OS X. Mach is essentially a microkernel PLUS most of a BSD kernel wrapped around it, all running in ring 0. It's not very microkernely in a true sense. This was done to achieve performant Unix compatibility, which was a major goal of the CMU research project Mach originated as. NeXTStep used Mach 2.5, where the BSD personality was based on 4.3 BSD. OS X upgraded to Mach 3.0, with the BSD personality derived from FreeBSD. In both cases all of the drivers are running in kernel space -- NeXTStep never had, eg, filesystem drivers running in user-space like you'd expect from a "true" microkernel.
protomyth 11y ago
Well, they removed quite a bit when they added the Mac baggage. I still would rather have the interface to OpenStep 4 than the current OS X. The whole concept of the menu bar on the top was nice on a 9" display, but it is a major pain on a 34" monitor.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  Conversely, I find it annoying to have to chase down menubars that follow their parent windows around on large, high resolution screens. The principles of a global menubar (being able to throw your cursor to hit it) still work on large screens... I just crank up cursor speed so hitting it takes roughly the same amount of physical movement as it did to do the same two or three decades ago.

qubex 11y ago

The platform was quite successful in financial and scientific circles where ease and speed of development was key. That's what led to Tim Berners-Lee having such a machine on his desk whilst at CERN and hence developing the HTTP protocol, the HTML language, and basically the first web server and browser with it.

TickleSteve 11y ago
yeah... I know... I've got a cube and 2 NeXTStations... but while they were popular in engineering circles, they deserved more mass-market appeal than that. Unfortunately, they were also pricey in their day...
- qubex 11y ago
  At those prices they never stood a chance of becoming anything more than a niche item — and this was very clear to those who formulated the pricing strategy. They did expect a higher success rate in Universities and higher education generally, and the consequent students-choosing-to-work-on-the-platform-they-learnt-on but new graduates had almost no say in such choices “back then” and there was never much take up in the educational sector to begin with.
julian_1 11y ago
Do you know if that work was done in (more-portable) C or in Objective-C?
- mpweiher 11y ago
  The work was done in Objective-C and took around 5KLOC (including editing). I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms [1]. You can download the source code. TBL got permission from his manager to do WWW as a side project. For NCSA Mosaic, it took a team of 5 a year to produce 100KLOC of C. In other words, it would not have been possible as a side project, and thus we would not have the WWW. [1] http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

_pmf_ 11y ago

> Ahhh, NeXT... probably the nicest environment/OS/machine that never took off.... That would be BeOS.

qubex 11y ago
I'm so delighted to find somebody else who remembers BeOS.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I regularly cite it as an alternative to mainstream desktops and example of a microkernel system that performed well. Here's a post with it and a bunch of other systems with excellent properties worth copying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020
  - buttershakes 11y ago
    I loved Beos. I still have R4 disks lying around, very nice system.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      We were discussing microkernels vs monolithic recently with BeOS as example. Opponent believed compilation times and apps doing many file accesses (web server) should be really slow on such a system vs Linux or Windows. Did you do either of those on BeOS and alternatives? If so, what was your experience with that? Note: BeOS is a special case since the filesystem is a database. So it cant prove his point unless it has XFS or something. But still curious.
jernfrost 11y ago
I was a big BeOS fan back in the day, but honestly in retrospect I think NeXTStep was a more advance and better thought out system. BeOS went with C++ for GUI programming e.g. which is a terrible language to do GUIs in. I wasted about 10 years of my life doing GUI programming in C++, and any C++ solution which didn't totally suck essentially ended up duplicating in a crappy way what had already been figured out in Objective-C. BeOS approach to multithreading was really just a dead end. Nobody does multithreading that way anymore. NeXT also had a more sophisticated display system, based on 2D vector graphics. They had the bundle concept and a lot of other things which I think in sum made it a better system. What I liked about BeOS was the heavy use of the file system attributes, and the translators were you could just drop in a GIF translator and then all you graphics apps could suddenly read GIF images.