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What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
- bognition 6y agoI love reading stories about Steve Jobs at NeXT. He had been fired from Apple and wasn't on the winning team but he was still fighting to build great products. I know he's a controversial figure but he did great things. Personally I find that Steve at NeXT is far more relatable than post iPhone Steve.
- ngcc_hk 6y agoHeard a lot of story and this about him talk to the story guy about his wife passing away. Can’t imagine it happened in Steve I. It is cruel to say the best thing happen to Beethoven is his deaf. And Steve his being fired. But life service you lemon and sometimes it is the good thing. Less arrogance as he was quoted to say.
- tekproxy 6y agoHello gpt3
- markus_zhang 6y agoWait this is some AI?
- st1x7 6y agoOr a person. We're achieving human-level AI by keeping AI where it is and bringing human intelligence down.
- iratewizard 6y agoIt's an alternate solution to the Turing test, but it is a valid solution.
- sugarpile 6y agoIdk, could be but given some anti-mainland posts I've seen from them I lean towards non-native speaker from HK
- randallsquared 6y agoProbably just not English-as-a-first-language. GPT3 will typically have great grammar/spelling but nonsense meaning, but if you allow for slightly odd or near-correct word choice, the gp comment is pretty clear.
- travisjungroth 6y agoYeah it’s like the inverse. A bot would never draw an analogy between Beethoven’s deafness and Jobs’s firing, but then say “life service you lemons”.
- odonnellryan 6y agoGPT-3 would surprise you, I feel like you could get it to make analogies, which is kind of frightening.
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- pmiller2 6y agoHere is a rare instance of Steve Jobs actually backing down from an argument... with Paul Rand, over the specific shade of yellow used on the letter 'e' in the NeXT logo: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056684/remembering-the-design-legacy-of-steve-jobss-other-great-computer-company https://www.fastcompany.com/3056684/remembering-the-design-l...
- forgotmypw17 6y agoaccessibility link: https://archive.vn/HGkBb https://archive.vn/HGkBb
- perardi 6y agoWould Steve Jobs’ have been tolerated these days, in a post #MeToo era? Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today? (Assuming he didn’t mellow or adapt with age.)
- PretzelPirate 6y agoEven ignoring the specific movement, hopefully we all pressure our bosses to be less abusive (no abuse is acceptable). I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked. Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him. This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.
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- crazyjncsu 6y agoThe problem is when “no abuse is acceptable” and at the same time we continue to redefine these types of terms to apply to lesser and lesser offenses. I personally am tired of working at a firm where everyone has a voice that they’re always using.
- PretzelPirate 6y agoCan you list some examples of these “lesser and lesser” offenses? I’m a manager, I treat my employees with respect, and no one has ever complained about me abusing them. I’d like to know how “small” these claims are getting.
- shuckles 6y ago
- sbuccini 6y agoWhen I was an intern at Apple, I somehow finagled my way into some long-time manager’s backyard cookout. A lot of Apple old-timers were there, including Blaine. Really neat guy and a great raconteur. That’s when I realized engineers of that era were cut from a different cloth.
- MisterKent 6y agoCare to elaborate?
- dleslie 6y agoMany of that era are/were formally educated as electrical engineers.
- justapassenger 6y agoI’d dare to say that there were educated as engineers. Majority of software engineering courses doesn’t really teach you how to be an engineer. It’s much closer to trade school than proper engineering.
- keyanp 6y agoCould you elaborate on what it means to you to be "educated as engineers"? What qualities or learnings are stressed in that model that you think current CS education misses?
- simonh 6y agoNot the OP, but Computer Science is a scientific discipline not an engineering discipline and is generally taught as such. Unless you take specific Software Engineering topics you're unlikely to learn things like unit testing, build and integration tools, how to use a debugger effectively beyond maybe a brief introduction at best, etc. If you were being taught software engineering as an engineering discipline, these should be absolute bread and butter core components of the course.
- jbirer 6y agoI am a sucker for these type of stories.
- hikerclimb 6y agoIt sucked.
- enraged_camel 6y ago>> One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people there understood all aspects of the machine. Software people could talk about ASICs and CPU instructions, and the hardware people understood the software stack. Every aspect of what it takes to make a computer work was represented in one building: analog hardware, chip design, motherboard design, compiler design (objective C), loader, operating system, windowing system, application layer, and applications. Where other companies had engineering teams, NeXT would have a single individual. This is in stark contrast to most of today's companies, where you have front-end engineers who don't know anything about the backend they are interacting with, backend engineers who don't care about the frontend they are serving data to, database engineers who care about neither, etc. And that's just software. The hardware might as well be a black box for the vast majority of software engineers working at your average software company today. Where did we go so wrong?
- tclancy 6y agoI don't think we did; there's a bit of selection bias at play for NeXT where they had a large network of stars to choose from and a reputation that would attract a large pool of other people worth choosing. It's just that a lot more people are involved in the industry now so there's a lot more entry-level/ grunt work to be had.
- samhuk 6y agoI think you are misunderstanding. Do you think that engineers designing the plumbing system of the F1 rocket engine knew pretty much anything about "compiler design" or "motherboard design"? What you are in fact observing is a human system's tendency to adapt to growing complexity. Human systems adapt to growing complexity by specializing it's members to particular skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization). It's just a fact that way back then in the NeXT days, the computer was not as complex, the understanding of which was just about achievable by 1 human. Eventually, that metric exceeds 1. For the case of the first apple computer, it was ~1 (Wozniak), in the case of Apollo, it was >100. Cognitive Specialization is an aspect of all living things, but is very apparent in the Human species. Computers got more complex in just the same fashion as how farming went from a farmer, a bull, and a blacksmith, to gigantic conglomerates to make the fertilizer, tractors, watering system, etc., that comprise of >10,000 humans.
- jrochkind1 6y agoI am still in awe of NeXT's software technology, generally. It was just so carefully and intentionally designed as a coherent whole; one would hope this was where we were going as we got better at architecting software (as individuals, as a field), but disappointingly in retrospect it appears as a kind of high-point, after which we continued to descend into ball-and-twine mediocrity. For Reasons economic and and social that I think people could argue about a lot, but we don't because in part because as a field we don't seem to even agree on what excellence in software architecture/design even means anymore. But what I want to talk about instead is: > Like EOF, our database layer that still puts Ruby-on-Rails to shame. I spent a couple years programming with EOF (the "Enteprise Object Framework", an ORM), and many more recent years programming with ActiveRecord. EOF had a few features that ActiveRecord still doesn't that I miss (like properly functioning multi-table inheritance; and lazy "eager loading" triggered on first access for all associations; Rails 6.1 has a welcome feature to RAISE on n+1 behavior, but why not just lazily trigger the efficient load instead, which is probably no harder to implement? Maybe nobody thought of it, having not used EOF?). But I wouldn't actually say it still puts ActiveRecord "to shame". ActiveRecord is very similar to EOF in design, by 2020 nearly as mature, with 80-90% of the features. Yeah, it's striking that ~20 years later we can say AR is mostly as good as EOF haha (and doesn't have anything of note that EOF didn't already have, it hasnt' superceded it in any ways). It's internal architecture isn't quite as elegant. But it really is nearly as good as EOF, it's deficiencies compared to EOF aren't large enough to be particularly shameful, in my experience/opinion, it's in the ballpark! AR is so similar to EOF that I have always wondered if some of it's designers had experience with EOF.
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- anonymouse008 6y agoAnd I'm upset I didn't get an opportunity to properly work with WebObjects. WebObjects with Swift would revolutionize the web - IMHO - it was gone too soon.
- sjg007 6y ago
- moonbug 6y agoSounds exploitative.
- nemo 6y agoOh that brings back some memories. An old manager of mine at Apple had moved into Apple from NeXT with the WebObjects team. We had a lot of black hardware and tons of NeXT docs, etc. and ran the Austin corp NetInfo server. He worked with Jobs for WebObjects demo/keynotes. He told some stories about Jobs, mostly about things he would throw when demos went badly. I still have a lot of NeXT swag that was eventually given away and have a color turbo slab gathering dust.
- mattl 6y agoWhat swag do you have? I'm working on a private collection museum to showcase NeXT to Mac OS X via Rhapsody...
- nemo 6y agoI'll try to follow up this eve. I have a S3 Project Team magic 8 ball for my work on the Mac OS X Server 1.0 release (sadly the fluid somehow leaked/dried, but I still cherish it), a lot of magazines and developer docs, and I think some stickers as well as other branded materials.
- mattl 6y agoThank you. Email is my username here at hey.com if you want to do that instead :)
- xkeysc0re 6y agoYou should boot up the slab and put it on /r/battlestations
- codpiece 6y agoYou should join us over at http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/index.php if you haven't already. We would love to see your collection and hear stories!
- peatmoss 6y agoMy biggest regret from all this was that Apple became the sole inheritor of the NeXT workstation vision. I feel more now than ever that an Open Source OpenStep (OSOS?) could have been an epically productive relationship for the Mac and Linux communities.
- AprilArcus 6y agoGNUstep existes but it never really took off.
- mattl 6y agoGNUstep is Cocoa, not the OS. OPENSTEP the OS (aka NeXTSTEP but with new OpenStep APIs) and OpenStep the thing that became Cocoa are frustratingly named.
- peatmoss 6y agoNextSpace is an attempt to build a full OS around GNUstep: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace The person behind it seems to still be plugging away. I’d love to see some real inertia behind this kind of effort.
- danbolt 6y agoIt's miles away, but I kind of feel like System76's Thelio tries to inch a little in that direction.
- ransom_rs 6y ago> NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds This line really interests me. As someone graduating pretty soon - are there tech companies out there that that still have this culture? Everything seems marketing / product focused today. Besides going to graduate school, does anyone here feel like they are at a company like this?
- kyawzazaw 6y agoChatting with national lab folks gave me a feel like this. Especially LANL. I suppose Bell Labs might feel the same. I have a prof who goes to work there on summers occasionally taking a couple undergrads with him. He is one of the best teachers.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoYes, research labs like CERN have that culture. Startups, particularly those sharing incubator space, are often friendly. (I'm at a startup now, and we play table football every lunchtime).
- markus_zhang 6y agoI think within big tech companies (Google/Apple/MS/etc.) you can find teams that have this kind of culture. IMO any team that does serious system programming (Compilers/OS/Libraries/etc.) should have it.
- rhodysurf 6y agoSome small DoD S&T/R&D contractors have similar culture, but they can be hard to find.
- echelon 6y ago> The Microsoft tax (later judged monopolistic, too late, as Ray Noorda of Novell confessed to me as had happened to him) killed our PC business. Do as I say, not as I do. Apple is every bit as monopolistic as old Microsoft. They need to be forced to open iOS. They sell generic computers you can't run freely, and they're screwing over small businesses that just want to write and sell software. Prior to iOS, you distributed your program. Now you go through the gatekeeper, follow mundane rules, and pay absurd tax.
- blub 6y agoNo it's not at all as monopolistic as MS was. MS was the alpha and omega of software at one point, you couldn't get around them if you wanted to sell to consumers or to businesses. This is not true of Apple, one can build a business and completely ignore them. Google on the other hand, good luck with that.
- rvense 6y ago> This is not true of Apple, one can build a business and completely ignore them. These days, there is a very, very large class of "potential businesses" that are only realistically realizable as smartphone apps. In my country, iPhones that can only run Apple-approved apps account for over half of the installed base for smartphones, as far as I know. Making and selling a better smart phone is not as simple as making a better hammer, and there was never such a thing as a hammer that would only work with nails approved by the manufacturer of the hammer you had. This is really a new situation with no pre-tech analogies. We cannot rely on pre-tech laws to cover it. And it's clear that consumers and small businesses are not being protected very well, if at all, from Apple. I should not be forced to be spied on by Apple or Google to park my car, but this is the situation we are in, since there aren't meters in all places in my city, only an app. A lot of supermarkets are developing their own apps for scan + pay, how long before I can pick between Apple and Google when I want to get food? There are more scenarios like this by the day, and in my mind there is no question we will need regulation to address it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
- jonsno56 6y agoI had two professors who worked for Steve. They loved him absolutely
- jcims 6y agoOne of my first experiences with Unix was getting an angry email from Steve Jobs. He had a default message in the NeXT mail client back in the early '90's. I for some reason felt it was a good idea to send him an email and enable 'return receipt'. He replied, fuming at the violation of his privacy and never answered my question. Edit: The internet never forgets, the default email in question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCPlGgA6tE4
- alisonkisk 6y agoHe was mad at you because he didn't like his software made by the company he owned?
- wpietri 6y agoThat is perfectly, perfectly believable. He was never interested in being accountable to others. As Steve Wozniak said, "He had very, very, very negative sides and he didn't seem to care what other people felt."
- markus_zhang 6y agoActually a lot of success people are like that. For successful careers you got to be comfortable stepping on others' toes and persuading others to do things in your way. Human nature. Most of us are just herds who secretly want to be led by a strong, charismatic leader.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoTop level executives very often lean to psychopthic tendencies than your average worker bees at corporations. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-psychopaths-australian-study-finds/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-... . You have to be a cold person to do a lot of what they do or at the very least have a very strong conviction that what you're doing is for some greater good (good chance it's yourself). I also suspect that ratio increases the larger the corporation.
- d3ntb3ev1l 6y agoJava was not made from “his” ideas. Not by a long shot
- pmiller2 6y agoWow, 81 comments and not one mention yet of the NeXTcube. That perfect 305mm x 305mm x 305mm (1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot) magnesium cube was hell to produce, but gorgeous to look at. And, it was the machine that the original web server ran on at CERN. [0] I've kind of always wanted one of them, but I've also kind of wondered if I'd be disappointed by it, if I got one. After all, it only ran at 25mhz. What I'd really like to do is get an empty case and put a modern PC inside it. That would be awesome. You'd probably have to gut the case and put in new mounting hardware, but a mini-ATX or micro-ATX board would definitely fit in there. There should be room for drive rails and a PSU, but I wonder if ventilation would be a problem. Perhaps the most fitting thing to stuff in there would be a Mac, or, maybe, a Hackintosh. --- [0]: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-computer-used-by-sir-tim-berners-lee-to-design-the-world-wide-web-next/6QHcxbuGnQ4rng?hl=en https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/original-next-comput...
- mattl 6y agoIt was called the NeXT Computer. Only later models were called the Cube.
- icedchai 6y agoThis seems kind of pedantic, since the "NeXT Computer" and the "Cube" where both cubes. They needed to change the name after the slab (NeXTstation) was released.
- mattl 6y agoThey’re different models I think. The slower one is the Computer and then later they’re Cube with a faster chip.
- icedchai 6y agoYes, I understand they are different models, but informally both are referred to as Cubes (obviously due to the shape of the case.) In fact, if you look on ebay, the first "NeXT Cube" I found was actually a "NeXT Computer." I believe they may both actually have the same N1000 model number, despite CPU differences.
- OnlyMortal 6y agoAs someone who worked on NeXTStep and OpenStep, when it came to UI it buried anything else. Years ahead.
- dep_b 6y agoSlightly off-topic but still relevant: I remember seeing a NeXT vs IBM development demo featuring interface builder. I have sought it again a few times but couldn’t find it anymore. Anybody here still remembers?
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoI think you mean the NeXT vs. Sun demo, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg&lc=UgidKu1gsNhVQngCoAEC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg&lc=UgidKu1gsNhVQ....
- dep_b 6y agoThank you so much!
- bogomipz 6y agoFrom the Blaine Garst post: >"We lost our custom hardware. The any workstation you want sprints (solaris, hp, alpha) didn’t pan out. The Microsoft tax (later judged monopolistic, too late, as Ray Noorda of Novell confessed to me as had happened to him) killed our PC business. We ditched the OS and ran on Windows. We sold our source code to Sun to make a multiplatform OpenStep. No cigars. (They made Java out of it using many of our/my ideas) This is interesting. This is the first I've heard about a link between NeXT and Java. Does anyone have any further information about this? I thought James Gosling developed Java from a language called Oak. That's the earliest origin story I've heard until I read this post.
- panic 6y agoJava interfaces are based on Objective-C protocols, which were one of Garst's contributions to the language. But I don't think you could say they "made Java out of it".
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoI seem to remember hearing that there are portions of the original JDK whose API seemed quite inspired by elements in the OpenStep (now Cocoa) API. Not UI pieces, but some utility classes and the like. But I can't think of any specific examples, and I'm suspecting this is more bluster than anything. Both have obvious extensive Smalltalk influence.
- rektide 6y agoRandom note, i- for no reason- went looking at WebObjects, which hailed from NeXT I understand. I liked the idea of entity based systems. Discovered that Apache Tapestry, which I used a decade ago, was inspired by WebObjects. It was a very interesting fairly seamless backend centric web development experience, worked quite well, & I say this as someone who loves JS, thick client architectures, client side architecture. I didn't see a ton of objects seeming like generic web objects like ideas though. In WebObjects it seems primarily like there were objects, then different bindings to re-expose and/or convey updates between the object & the various front ends it might show up on. I'm probably over glamorizing how shared, how web, objects in WebObjects really were.
- lizknope 6y agoThis is a 3 hour interview with Blaine Garst by the Computer History Museum. Blaine is one of the people quoted in the main link. I listened to it the last time Blaine was mentioned here and it is pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEIq7fe_KQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtEIq7fe_KQ
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoAlso here’s the PDF version, though he’s the kind of personality I preferred watching and listening to instead: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2017/06/102717171-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20....
- lupinglade 6y agoIf only we could get NeXT back... or Apple would build something as well designed, clean and productive. Give us a proper streamlined UI, not this over-spaced baby blur and give us proper APIs for everything. Security is good, but it needs to be handled in a more consistent way, with less trouble for developers.
- ThinkBeat 6y ago> The Web was happenin’ (invented as you may recall on a NeXT workstation) and we lost This is true but not entirely. I have recently for no productive reason become interested in computers built by different nations early in in the computer revolutions. There was so much competition, so many ideas, so many opperunties. Anyways I live in Norway now and Norway had a company called Norsk Data that I had never heard of until about a year ago. They designed their own hardware, and operating system. For a while they made a "super computer" Some highlights: The NORD-5, the world's first 32-bit minicomputer - beating the VAX, often claimed to be first - by 6 years ND-570/CX, was at the time it was released 32-bit supermini ads i 1983, 7.1 Whetstone MIPS Their greatest claim to fame aside from what listed above but closely related, they delivered the computers for the CERN colder back when that was starting up. They also delivered computers to help create F16 flight simulators. For a short period of time Norway had best in class computers. I had no idea. To the relevant part, sorry about the long wait Norsk Data claims: " The World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN.[4] They also used ND-NOTIS, that was based on SGML, and emailed with NOTIS-MAIL, using tcp/ip, coded in HTML. " It is partially backed up by https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=1989%3A%20Tim%20Berners%2DLee%20invents,Particle%20Physics%20in%20Geneva%2C%20Switzerland https://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html#:~:text=19.... I have only seen ND machines in the museum and on the web. I wasn't around at the time so its based on Norwegian documents for the most part. I do know that there were Nord server used in the Norwegian military up until at least 1995. The ginormous task of creating the replacement system took a very very long time The very early origins of Norsk Data was at FFI, a defence research agency. (Kinda like (D)Arpa)
- xorcist 6y agoNorsk Data were one of the big computer companies in the 80s. Together with Bull, Wang, Datasaab, NCR, and a few more they pretty much defined minicomputers. They dominated the computing space for about a decade. Then they were undercut from the UNIX companies. Which in turn were undercut about a decade later by microcomputers, PC hardware and things like Linux took over. In their short run, minicomputers were commercially successful and quickly became entrenched and neither their business models nor their expensive hardware could compete with the later generations of computers. All of the above companies went into bankruptcy or were bought out and stripped during the early 90s. Computing hardware generations seem to get a longer lifespan though as we are still stuck with PC-style hardware. It has managed to evolve as stay relevant, probably in large because of Intel.
- vatican_banker 6y agoProbably off-topic but Blaine Garst’s writing style is super engaging and fun.
- porpoise 6y agoCtrl+F for "quora", only one occurrence. Man, HN's ability to stay on topic has drastically improved!