4 ms·
No way. Even if Microsoft had been prepared to throw out Windows 3.1 and DOS compatibility (or engineer it in at substantial expense), NeXTStep would never have
by twoodfin 10y ago
No way. Even if Microsoft had been prepared to throw out Windows 3.1 and DOS compatibility (or engineer it in at substantial expense), NeXTStep would never have run acceptably on the low-end target machines.
It was a decade after the '95 release before optimization and hardware advancement had a NeXTStep-derived OS running 'snappily' on consumer desktops.
- pvg 10y agoNextstep ran on 68030s. Had it been a Microsoft product (since the late 80s) there's nothing inherent in it that couldn't have made it a consumer OS by 1995.
- yuhong 10y agoI think one of the problems is the RAM prices back then, which also affected Windows NT sales. 4Mbit DRAM chips was for example costing more than $10 a piece.
- pvg 10y agoThat's true but the original Next machine shipped with 8 megs which by 1995 was the recommended amount for Windows 95. There are lots of reasons Nextstep was a commercial failure, I just don't think 'hardware requirements' is fundamentally very high on the list. 1995 was just at the beginning of a rapid decline in DRAM prices, to boot.
- yuhong 10y agoMS spent a lot of effort trying to fit Win95 into 4 megs for a reason. I don't think NeXTStep with only 8 megs were a popular configuration, many was upgraded to 16 megs.
- pvg 10y agoWin95 didn't fit in 4 megs all that well. But that's neither here nor there since we're in a parallel universe in which MS started working on Nextstep in 1985 and released a consumer OS based on it in 1995. This seems totally plausible. Next Inc was never really making a consumer OS. In 2007, Apple shipped a Nextstep derivative that ran in 128 megs while its desktop (and consumer) counterpart wasn't really happy with anything less than a couple of gigs.