6 ms·

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talki

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from NeXT made a huge difference, but Steve was, Steve. If I'd know this would happen I would have never left.

jhbadger 7y ago
Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.
- agloeregrets 7y ago
  Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO. A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of startup OPs pain under his belt.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)
    - btilly 7y ago
      The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience. As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again. Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
      - icedchai 7y ago
        Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Guru Meditation :)
    - lproven 7y ago
      It wasn't unique to the 68K world. Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection. Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection. A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries. Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't. This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable. OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.
  - gumby 7y ago
    I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      Indeed. BeOS would have made Macintosh as successful as the Amiga.
      - lproven 7y ago
        A good, pithy summary. BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS. But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't. Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS: • best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder • Steve Jobs. No contest, I'm afraid. Even if personally I preferred BeOS.
  - chx 7y ago
    https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcription-be6df9dd692c https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri... > The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Be was a tech demo at best. It looked finished on the surface but had less than 10% of what a complete operating system needs in terms of feature depth, libraries and extensive real word testing. Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.
    - kls 7y ago
      Right it was a great single user workstation, but had no where near the underlining stack to compete in a corp environment. Be did one thing and, did that one thing light years better than anything on the market. next was the clear choice for what apple needed to stay competitive.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Proof that a good CEO is worth the money.
    - usefulcat 7y ago
      Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Not just anybody is hired to be a CEO. A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how.
        usefulcat 7y ago
        If you know of a reliable way to identify CEOs who can effect the kind of turnaround that Jobs executed at Apple, then, with respect, I tend to think you may be in the wrong business :) My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.
        WalterBright 7y ago
        Most CEOs run their companies successfully. The ones that don't get the boot and are not likely to be recruited for another CEO position. After all, would you?
        nl 7y ago
        Counter example: John Scully
        WalterBright 7y ago
        Who'd you hire for the top job - someone with a track record of success, or another with a track record of failure?
  - kls 7y ago
    A big piece to that power play was Bill Gates backing Job with capital. It was a win win for both of them, Steve used it to wrangle political control of the company and Gates used it to stave off an impending anti-trust litigation. Had Steve not had the capital from Gates a year after rejoining, the story would have been much different.
- nradov 7y ago
  BeOS might have worked well enough in the short term but it would have turned into a disaster later. It lacked the fundamental security foundations that Nextstep already had built in. Retrofitting that level of security would have been extremely difficult, perhaps just as hard as adding preemptive multitasking to classic MacOS.
- sys_64738 7y ago
  Apple was also in close to licensing Sun Solaris 2.5 which already ran on PowerPC. They just had to put the Apple UI on it but history happened.
  - zdw 7y ago
    The alternate timeline where sometime in late 200x Apple buys Sun (instead of Oracle) and still invests in Unixy datacenter things, ZFS, and similar tech that Sun was good at, and use it to build high quality services and hardware is a fun thought experiment to explore. Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Apple was doing some half-hearted enterprise-y efforts at the time like the Xserve. As an IT industry analyst at the time I got invited for various briefings related to such things. However, as you note, once the iPhone in particular really took off, Apple pretty much stopped pretending to be anything other than a consumer company, especially after BYOD became the norm.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Are there any engineers on HN who worked on Copeland? Because I've always found it astounding that while the stated reason for the NeXT aquisition and the transition to the OpenStep-based OS was that Copeland was still years away from completion -- but then after Jobs took over it was still 5ish years for OS X to finally be released... And in the meantime they continued to release OS 8 and OS 9 as updates, including some tech that was under development from before the NeXT acquire. Surely Copeland could have been completed in that time period. Or was it _really_ that off the rails? 5 years off the rails?
  - linguae 7y ago
    I was in elementary school during Copland and the NeXT acquisition and so I wasn't there, but based on everything that I've read, the reason for the long gap between the purchase of NeXT in December 1996 and the release of Mac OS X 10.0 in March 2001 had largely to do with the inclusion of the Carbon API. The story goes as follows: after Copland was cancelled in 1996, Apple then pursued the idea of purchasing or licensing an operating system from another company and then building a new Mac operating system on top of it. Existing Mac programs running on then-current System 7.5 would run in emulation under what's called the "Blue Box," which would later be known as Classic Mode in Mac OS X. New programs would run under a then-undefined API called Yellow Box that ran natively on Apple's future operating system. The questions were: (1) what would be Yellow Box, and (2) what would be the native operating system? The choices were Windows NT, Solaris, BeOS, and OPENSTEP. BeOS and OPENSTEP ended up making it to the "final round." In the end, Apple bought NeXT, and work started on a project called Rhapsody, which was essentially OPENSTEP with a Mac OS 8-style theme. Yellow Box was the OpenStep Objective-C based API, which would later be renamed Cocoa in 1998. Rhapsody was supposed to be released sometime in 1999 if I recall correctly. In the beginning, it was expected that Mac developers would port their software from the classic Mac API to Yellow Box. However, some developers balked at the prospect of porting their code to Yellow Box, most notably Microsoft and Adobe. Given the importance of products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop to the Mac platform, during WWDC 1998 Apple announced the Carbon API, which was similar to the classic Mac API but was designed to take advantage of features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory. Also, Apple announced that both Carbon and Cocoa would be based on a common substrate of C functions, allowing "toll-free bridging" between the two APIs. The addition of Carbon was a significant engineering effort that contributed to the delay of the release of Mac OS X. There may have been some other factors, such as designing the Aqua interface and incorporating the feedback received from users of the Mac OS X Public Beta, which was released in 2000. In the meanwhile, Steve Jobs was able to buy time for Apple through the introduction of well-received, now legendary products such as the iMac and the iBook. By 2000 Apple got its mojo back, and the attention became less on when Apple would finally release Mac OS X and more on anticipating what type of products Apple would come out with next. Eventually Mac OS X 10.0 would get released in March 2001, just in time to compete against Windows XP, the first consumer version of Windows based on Windows NT as opposed to MS-DOS.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  What I really don't get was how even Windows 3.1 had better multitasking than MacOS. Really. I get the multiple issues with MS and Windows, but at that time, they had the better system for Home/SME users. Ok maybe not for Graphical Designers, but still.
- librarian42 7y ago
  I used BeOS. It had some great features, but it wasn't great the way NeXTStep was great. If it had been built on top of C++ 11 or later, instead of whatever C++9x they were using, maybe.
macintux 7y ago
Definitely. Steve was unique, and his fanatical devotion to simplicity and quality established Apple as a force to be reckoned with.
sys_64738 7y ago
Steve laid off a sizable chunk of non-Nexters when his people started to fill the top spots at Apple. The cutting was deep and brutal. Would you have survived?

jhbadger 7y ago

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

agloeregrets 7y ago
Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO. A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of startup OPs pain under his belt.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)
  - btilly 7y ago
    The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience. As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again. Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
    - icedchai 7y ago
      Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Guru Meditation :)
  - lproven 7y ago
    It wasn't unique to the 68K world. Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection. Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection. A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries. Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't. This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable. OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.
- gumby 7y ago
  I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Indeed. BeOS would have made Macintosh as successful as the Amiga.
    - lproven 7y ago
      A good, pithy summary. BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS. But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't. Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS: • best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder • Steve Jobs. No contest, I'm afraid. Even if personally I preferred BeOS.
- chx 7y ago
  https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcription-be6df9dd692c https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri... > The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Be was a tech demo at best. It looked finished on the surface but had less than 10% of what a complete operating system needs in terms of feature depth, libraries and extensive real word testing. Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.
  - kls 7y ago
    Right it was a great single user workstation, but had no where near the underlining stack to compete in a corp environment. Be did one thing and, did that one thing light years better than anything on the market. next was the clear choice for what apple needed to stay competitive.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Proof that a good CEO is worth the money.
  - usefulcat 7y ago
    Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Not just anybody is hired to be a CEO. A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how.
      - usefulcat 7y ago
        If you know of a reliable way to identify CEOs who can effect the kind of turnaround that Jobs executed at Apple, then, with respect, I tend to think you may be in the wrong business :) My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.
        WalterBright 7y ago
        Most CEOs run their companies successfully. The ones that don't get the boot and are not likely to be recruited for another CEO position. After all, would you?
      - nl 7y ago
        Counter example: John Scully
        WalterBright 7y ago
        Who'd you hire for the top job - someone with a track record of success, or another with a track record of failure?
- kls 7y ago
  A big piece to that power play was Bill Gates backing Job with capital. It was a win win for both of them, Steve used it to wrangle political control of the company and Gates used it to stave off an impending anti-trust litigation. Had Steve not had the capital from Gates a year after rejoining, the story would have been much different.
nradov 7y ago
BeOS might have worked well enough in the short term but it would have turned into a disaster later. It lacked the fundamental security foundations that Nextstep already had built in. Retrofitting that level of security would have been extremely difficult, perhaps just as hard as adding preemptive multitasking to classic MacOS.
sys_64738 7y ago
Apple was also in close to licensing Sun Solaris 2.5 which already ran on PowerPC. They just had to put the Apple UI on it but history happened.
- zdw 7y ago
  The alternate timeline where sometime in late 200x Apple buys Sun (instead of Oracle) and still invests in Unixy datacenter things, ZFS, and similar tech that Sun was good at, and use it to build high quality services and hardware is a fun thought experiment to explore. Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Apple was doing some half-hearted enterprise-y efforts at the time like the Xserve. As an IT industry analyst at the time I got invited for various briefings related to such things. However, as you note, once the iPhone in particular really took off, Apple pretty much stopped pretending to be anything other than a consumer company, especially after BYOD became the norm.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Are there any engineers on HN who worked on Copeland? Because I've always found it astounding that while the stated reason for the NeXT aquisition and the transition to the OpenStep-based OS was that Copeland was still years away from completion -- but then after Jobs took over it was still 5ish years for OS X to finally be released... And in the meantime they continued to release OS 8 and OS 9 as updates, including some tech that was under development from before the NeXT acquire. Surely Copeland could have been completed in that time period. Or was it _really_ that off the rails? 5 years off the rails?
- linguae 7y ago
  I was in elementary school during Copland and the NeXT acquisition and so I wasn't there, but based on everything that I've read, the reason for the long gap between the purchase of NeXT in December 1996 and the release of Mac OS X 10.0 in March 2001 had largely to do with the inclusion of the Carbon API. The story goes as follows: after Copland was cancelled in 1996, Apple then pursued the idea of purchasing or licensing an operating system from another company and then building a new Mac operating system on top of it. Existing Mac programs running on then-current System 7.5 would run in emulation under what's called the "Blue Box," which would later be known as Classic Mode in Mac OS X. New programs would run under a then-undefined API called Yellow Box that ran natively on Apple's future operating system. The questions were: (1) what would be Yellow Box, and (2) what would be the native operating system? The choices were Windows NT, Solaris, BeOS, and OPENSTEP. BeOS and OPENSTEP ended up making it to the "final round." In the end, Apple bought NeXT, and work started on a project called Rhapsody, which was essentially OPENSTEP with a Mac OS 8-style theme. Yellow Box was the OpenStep Objective-C based API, which would later be renamed Cocoa in 1998. Rhapsody was supposed to be released sometime in 1999 if I recall correctly. In the beginning, it was expected that Mac developers would port their software from the classic Mac API to Yellow Box. However, some developers balked at the prospect of porting their code to Yellow Box, most notably Microsoft and Adobe. Given the importance of products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop to the Mac platform, during WWDC 1998 Apple announced the Carbon API, which was similar to the classic Mac API but was designed to take advantage of features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory. Also, Apple announced that both Carbon and Cocoa would be based on a common substrate of C functions, allowing "toll-free bridging" between the two APIs. The addition of Carbon was a significant engineering effort that contributed to the delay of the release of Mac OS X. There may have been some other factors, such as designing the Aqua interface and incorporating the feedback received from users of the Mac OS X Public Beta, which was released in 2000. In the meanwhile, Steve Jobs was able to buy time for Apple through the introduction of well-received, now legendary products such as the iMac and the iBook. By 2000 Apple got its mojo back, and the attention became less on when Apple would finally release Mac OS X and more on anticipating what type of products Apple would come out with next. Eventually Mac OS X 10.0 would get released in March 2001, just in time to compete against Windows XP, the first consumer version of Windows based on Windows NT as opposed to MS-DOS.
raverbashing 7y ago
What I really don't get was how even Windows 3.1 had better multitasking than MacOS. Really. I get the multiple issues with MS and Windows, but at that time, they had the better system for Home/SME users. Ok maybe not for Graphical Designers, but still.
librarian42 7y ago
I used BeOS. It had some great features, but it wasn't great the way NeXTStep was great. If it had been built on top of C++ 11 or later, instead of whatever C++9x they were using, maybe.

macintux 7y ago

Definitely. Steve was unique, and his fanatical devotion to simplicity and quality established Apple as a force to be reckoned with.

sys_64738 7y ago

Steve laid off a sizable chunk of non-Nexters when his people started to fill the top spots at Apple. The cutting was deep and brutal. Would you have survived?