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NeXT vs. Sun (1991) [video]
- agumonkey 10y ago"Sun" was trimmed out of the title. Still an enjoyable video.
- hayksaakian 10y ago'interface builder' 1991 reminds me a lot of interface builder from xcode in 2016
- methehack 10y agoYou probably know this, but it's the same stuff -- I would wager a hunk of the original interface builder code written for the NeXT machine runs on your Mac today when you use the interface builder part of xcode (though I haven't looked recently). You probably know this too, but all those classes that begin with the "NS" prefix come from "NeXT Step" -- same stuff, just updated. It seems likely to me that all these dev tools from 1991 have something to do with why there are > 1M iPhone apps today. That and the enormous market attracting developers...
- stuaxo 10y agoWhat was in the Next box CPU wise? You would need Rosetta or something like it to run the old binaries... though it would be awesome if someone implemented this (in fact... bring back rosetta, ffs!)
- patrickg_zill 10y agoThe original NeXT was Motorola 68030; but performance got decent after they added the 68040 running at either 25Mhz or 33Mhz (which was called the NeXT Mono Turbo if the display was mono or Turbo Color if 4096 colors display).
- dredmorbius 10y agoCPU Motorola 68030 @ 25 MHz, 68882 FPU @ 25 MHz, 56001 digital signal processor (DSP) @ 25 MHz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer
- kitsunesoba 10y agoInterface Builder remained nearly unchanged all the way up until Project Builder turned into Xcode and shortly after IB got blended in. Here's a screenshot from IB under OS X 10.2: https://cl.ly/0J1g1p1m0T3C https://cl.ly/0J1g1p1m0T3C I personally liked the two being separate applications. IB is still great today, but it (and Xcode) slowed down noticeably when the two combined.
- protomyth 10y agoIt was so much easier to fire up interface builder and build something to play around with ideas than the all-in-one Xcode must define a project of today. I think anytime I have to create a project in any software, it adds a wall of ceremony that just keep adding more layers. It's the difference between QuickTime Pro and iMovie for editing.
- meddlepal 10y agoI had almost forgotten about the horrendous horizontal pinstripes in early OS X. Looking back it's hard to understand why people drooled over the early OS X UI.
- hayksaakian 10y agodoes this have something to do with rendering on CRTs? How they draw horizontal lines?
- sho_hn 10y agoNo, nothing.
- slashblake 10y agoFor one of my summer jobs in college, this is around 2005, I had to port an old NeXTSTEP phone system to Mac OS X. I was amazed at how easy this was, considering it was just taking Carbon to Cocoa, and amazed at how ahead of its time NeXTStep's APIs were. Project Builder (XCode) and Interface Builder were created on these machines. Then bought by Steve@Apple.
- aaronbrethorst 10y agoCarbon was the name for the cleaned up, sanitized version of the old Classic Macintosh APIs that was compatible with OS X[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API) Steve founded NeXT after getting fired from Apple, as is reflected in part by the name of the company. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996 for $429mm, which is how Steve Jobs came back to Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_merger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me... [1] Well, what was then called OS X.
- charlesism 10y ago...and Avie, from this video, came to Apple with him :)
- duncan_bayne 10y agoI've heard that purchase described as "Jobs buying Apple for $-429mm" :) I still remember reading reviews of the NeXT OS as a child, wishing I had the hardware to run it (from memory I was still running a PC at the time - an original IBM PC, which was considered a dinosaur even then).
- eddieroger 10y ago> Then bought by Steve@Apple. Um, what? Steve founded NeXT and was with them with Apple bought them out for the OS.
- deanCommie 10y agoI wonder if the Sun programmer knew he would be portrayed as a patsy..
- ebbv 10y agoI mean he knew it was a video for NeXT, so I don't know what else he would have expected. Though I would say I don't think he was portrayed badly in this video, the point was not that he was a problem, the point was that NeXT's application development environment is better.
- primis 10y agoWhat I found interesting, up until the Tiff issue, they were basically on par. The Sun programmer said his code would basically work with anything except tiff. The NeXT people probably knew this was a limitation of a specific library he was using and threw it in to make it less fair.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lopatin 10y agoI always feel like the Sun programmer, writing web apps today.
- asenna 10y agoHave you tried some of the newer magically-handles-everything frameworks like Meteor? Yes, it may not suit every project and I too use the more traditional tools for a lot of my work. But when I do use Meteor for a project, I feel exactly like the NeXT developer in this video.
- akhilcacharya 10y agoBut ultimately most application developers wouldn't be using $15K workstations anyway.
- trimbo 10y agoExactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer service representatives) and the competition within that market (Sun). Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there. Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off.. but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.
- pjmlp 10y agoI wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y agoIsn't that ASP.net?
- pjmlp 10y agoKind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript mess.
- youdontknowtho 10y agoThat was really fun to watch. I love old tech videos...thanks!
- Narishma 10y agoHere's one of a demo of Lucid's Emacs-based C++ IDE from around the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk
- Asooka 10y agoWow. This is parsecs away from the embarrassment that's modern Linux IDEs. What the heck happened?
- youdontknowtho 10y agoNice. Thanks for that. Enjoyed it very much.
- api 10y agoOne of the things that really disappoints me about computing is how GUI development is such a horrid treadmill of constant reinvention and total reboots with no overall cumulative progress. The Web is just now reinventing things with React and components that were perfected in several different desktop systems at different times. Something about UI development makes long term reuse and depth building impossible. I think one factor is that good UI and UX is nearly always proprietary, so these great platforms get built but then ultimately die when the market moves on.
- wtallis 10y agoThere's nothing dead about this UI platform. It got a new theme in 2001 and is still going strong today. The colors have shifted over the years and the scroll bars switched sides and have mostly faded away, but it only takes a glance at the code to see that it's the same platform at heart.
- dredmorbius 10y agoExcept that some elements have changed massively. You no longer have window-independent focus. You cannot bind hotkeys to windowing events. You cannot toggle through all windows via alt-tab, you can't set focus-follows-mouse. Source: I've been use WindowMaker (a NeXTstep clone) for 20 years.
- wtallis 10y agoI really don't see how some tweaks to window manager behavior to make it more accessible to Mac and Windows users are more fundamental and massive than the aforementioned change to scrollbar behavior to make it more accessible to Mac and Windows users. They were all noticeable, for sure, but from a technological perspective they were all quite minor. Plus, I'm not sure how many of the things you mention are even changes relative to genuine NeXTSTEP rather than just differences from WindowMaker's imperfect emulation of it. Focus-follows-mouse was an X11 thing WindowMaker shoehorned into its NeXT-like environment; genuine NeXTSTEP was click-to-focus, though it could be hacked to emulate focus-follows-mouse: https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Misc94-II.html https://ftp.nice.ch/peanuts/GeneralData/Usenet/news/1994/_Mi...
- acqq 10y agoAnd the same year, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had "world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:First_Web_Server.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...
- Razengan 10y agoLet's not forget the development of Doom on NeXT, which ironically went on to make PC/DOS cool in gaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom#Programmin...
- acqq 10y agoIt wasn't ironic, at these "earlier" times it was common to use significantly stronger computers to develop for the "smaller targets": in 1975 Altair Basic, the first product of (then called) Micro-Soft, which had to run on the 8080 computer with only 4 kilobytes of memory was developed on the PDP-10 computer owned by Harvard University: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC Paul Allen wrote an emulator for the microprocessor which run on PDP-10. He was able to extend his previous version of emulator for that. At the time Microsoft developed MS-DOS (actually modifying the program they have bought), around 1981, they owned their own DECSYSTEM-2060: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20
- csl 10y agoAlso, the original Lucasfilm Commodore 64 games, such as Maniac Mansion, were cross-compiled on UNIX workstations, transferred over the network and uploaded to running C64s — way back in 1987! (Source: The Thimbleweed Park podcasts [0], which I highly recommend.) [0]: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com
- acqq 10y ago
- mistersquid 10y ago@12:19: https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg?t=739 https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg?t=739 > At this point, we threw the programmers an unexpected but not unrealistic curve. > Like a typical user, we asked them to add a feature not in the original spec. In this case, a button would recall all the trouble logs for a particular customer. > Using NeXT Step, the NeXT programmer completed the task in about 20 minutes. > [NeXT progammer discussing some details] > The sun programmer also estimated a time of 20 minutes, but it took about 45 before he was ready to test his version. This was about 20 hours in, which means that since they started on Wed, 30 October 1991 and assuming maximum 8-hour days, they have missed Halloween and would be at least halfway into Friday. The video states that the programmers finished on Sat, 2 November. The video goes on to state that the NeXT system enabled the NeXT programmer to add a number of features such as system fonts and button icons "for free", which goes to show that the video's intended audience are managers and executives of software development teams who would of course want faster development, ad hoc requests, and cost-free features. I personally would have been tempted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ once they announced a planned "unexpected" feature request because rather than train users and customers to frontload requirements in order to benefit from the design decisions that would be made as a result, the video encourages customers to believe their out-of-spec requests will be more quickly accommodated if only their programmers were using object-oriented NeXT Step. 25 years later, we know the truth about how easy it is to shoehorn in 11th-hour feature requests when using object-oriented code. EDIT: link to specified timecode; formatting; additional detail about date code was written.
- m_mueller 10y agoThe main problem is that managers and users - lacking a mental model of the software - have no idea what's an easy problem and what's a hard problem (that would take lots of engineering). Thid creates unrealistic expectations.
- colejohnson66 10y agoThe problem is people think that just because it's easy for them, it's easy for a computer. Obligatory xkcd[0]. "What!? I can clearly tell that's a bird! You mean to tell me that you can't make a computer do the same?" [0]: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- therealmarv 10y agoAm I the only one who had the same development feelings but only on Windows with Borland Delphi? You could do the same video with Delphi vs. Visual C++ playing in the 90s.
- snaky 10y agoThat's why Microsoft stole all of the key people from Delphi team.
- msh 10y agoHow can they steal them? They were not slaves.
- therealmarv 10y agoC# is the copycat today.
- kristopolous 10y agoMan that control to put on the multiple buttons and give them spacing was really something. Kinda useless but really quite impressive.
- mwcampbell 10y agoDoes anyone know what kind of database the NeXT version of the application probably used? Plain text files? .plist files? A relational database? Something else?
- ams6110 10y agoIIRC the NeXT workstations came with a contemporary version of Sybase (ancestor to SQL Server).