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At the time I was (coincidentally) using NeXTStep at work and a BeBox at home, and I have a bit of extra perspective to add. You are quite correct that NeXT wa

by qubex 9y ago

At the time I was (coincidentally) using NeXTStep at work and a BeBox at home, and I have a bit of extra perspective to add. You are quite correct that NeXT was undoubtedly, upon close inspection, the ‘superior’ OS (UNIX lineage, stable, multi-user, etc.) but as a user (and sometime programmer) it wasn't that evident: my relatively cheap dual-604e BeBox outperformed my dual PentiumPro NeXT machine by a significant margin, or rather, felt like it did because the “pervasive multitasking” made the system extraordinarily responsive, and the lack of legacy code and backwards compatibility definitely kept the system snappy and lithe. Multi-user support didn't really change much from the user perspective either, as security was something of a remote concern and running any kind of ‘server’ on one's desktop was pretty exotic. BeOS was POSIX compliant to a degree such that many people still (erroneously) believe that it is a Unix or Unix-like, and you could run all the open-source command line tools you could possibly want. The BeFS filesystem's metadata capabilities were extraordinarily, and I liked both UIs equally (the etched vs. graffiti aesthetic legacy has etched itself into my neural circuitry), but probably NeXT was more innovative in terms of user interaction and rendering model whereas BeOS basically aped Windows and Classic MacOS quite closely. NeXT's development tools and environment were clearly superior. It was comparatively a resource hog. So yes, there was a technical edge, and probably knowledgeable influencers at the upper echelons of power probably recommended as such. But at the time I had the feeling that Jean-Louis Gassée (the founder and CEO of Be Inc.) significantly overplayed his hand, and made ridiculous demands because he thought he had Apple cornered by virtue of their failed OS development attempts, growing obsolescence, and perceived lack of serious alternatives. There's the diffuse feeling that Gil Amelio (Apple's then-CEO) eventually grew weary of batting back the demands and started looking for apparent alternatives just as a means of introducing some competition to the negotiations, and eventually the plonked for NeXT much to everybody's surprise. He even made a droll remark about “choosing Plan A rather than Plan Be” or something to that effect. All things considered, it was a very counterintuitive decision, mainly because NeXT had such hefty resource requirements and we hand't quite yet absorbed the implications of Moore's Law (or rather, were used to Microsoft squandering any and all increase in hardware performance with increasingly inefficient code, leading to no perceivable improvement year over year). Amelio deserves more credit for having seen through all of that and made a brave, surprising, and obvious-only-in-hindsight decision that favoured a mature, stable, and extensible platform. At the time I felt it was an utter mistake, but I was fourteen, and pretty ignorant of the ways of the world. I think history speaks for itself. Amelio deserves more respect for the decision he made, because it was ultimately his decision that led to adopting the superior, extensible technology, and of course brought Steve Jobs back on board (who promptly stabbed him in the back and ousted him in a boardroom coup). I had a brief flirtation with Windows NT4/2000/XP in 1999-2003, but then I switched to OSX 10.2 on a dual PowerMac G4 and have never looked back since. Only of late have I started to feel that as Apple's focus has switched to iOS on mobile devices they've started to let their development effort and quality control really slip to borderline-unacceptable levels. I can understand that OS X is no longer the enabler for high-margin computer sales it once was, and that that role has passed on to iOS, but OS X (macOS of late) is the platform where the apps that form the bulwark of the iOS ecosystem get developed. Apple really shouldn't let the desktop OS languish or endure the kind of high-profile mishaps that have occurred of late.

Cyberdog 9y ago
> At the time I was (coincidentally) using NeXTStep at work… > I was fourteen Wow. What's the story behind that?
- walrus01 9y ago
  Totally wild guess, but possibly faculty kid of somebody who worked at a university with a major EE/CS department, many of which had NeXT workstations at the time. NeXT workstations were really expensive and showed up in all sorts of places like astronomy departments. Same general environment and reason why Berners-Lee's workstation at CERN was NeXT.
  - qubex 9y ago
    Very close: my mother was an academic statistician and had a faculty NeXTCube at home that at one point she developed some business models for my father in Mathematica on. After she passed away the machine went back to the faculty but my father wanted to be abler to continue using the models he had come to understand and rely on, so he bought a NeXTStep-capable machine, licensed Mathematica and S on it, and roped me in since I was the most mathematically inclined in the family and was able to get a grip on how they worked, keep them up-to-date, adapt them when circumstances changed, and even improve them sometimes.
- qubex 9y ago
  Family business owned by my father (at the time). My mother had built a lot of business-related models for him on Mathematica running on her work workstation (a NeXTCube) . She passed away. I was the only person that understood anything about them so I was roped in to cope with them. A few years down the line the Cube (a 68030) became too slow and a succession of more powerful machines were purchased, up to a dual PentiumPro. It’s kind of an odd story, my use of ’work’ needed some explaining but I thought it would slow down the discussion to go off on a tangent lot narrate this story.
  - Cyberdog 9y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

by qubex 9y ago

Cyberdog 9y ago

> At the time I was (coincidentally) using NeXTStep at work… > I was fourteen Wow. What's the story behind that?

walrus01 9y ago
Totally wild guess, but possibly faculty kid of somebody who worked at a university with a major EE/CS department, many of which had NeXT workstations at the time. NeXT workstations were really expensive and showed up in all sorts of places like astronomy departments. Same general environment and reason why Berners-Lee's workstation at CERN was NeXT.
- qubex 9y ago
  Very close: my mother was an academic statistician and had a faculty NeXTCube at home that at one point she developed some business models for my father in Mathematica on. After she passed away the machine went back to the faculty but my father wanted to be abler to continue using the models he had come to understand and rely on, so he bought a NeXTStep-capable machine, licensed Mathematica and S on it, and roped me in since I was the most mathematically inclined in the family and was able to get a grip on how they worked, keep them up-to-date, adapt them when circumstances changed, and even improve them sometimes.
qubex 9y ago
Family business owned by my father (at the time). My mother had built a lot of business-related models for him on Mathematica running on her work workstation (a NeXTCube) . She passed away. I was the only person that understood anything about them so I was roped in to cope with them. A few years down the line the Cube (a 68030) became too slow and a succession of more powerful machines were purchased, up to a dual PentiumPro. It’s kind of an odd story, my use of ’work’ needed some explaining but I thought it would slow down the discussion to go off on a tangent lot narrate this story.
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  Interesting. Thanks for sharing.