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For anyone interested in the history of NeXT, I highly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing."[0] (And I regret that I may have persona

For anyone interested in the history of NeXT, I highly recommend Randall Stross's "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing."[0] (And I regret that I may have personally had some role in the current outsized prices of used copies -- my apologies!) We also had a really interesting Twitter Spaces discussion of both the book -- and on NeXT more generally.[1] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316.Steve_Jobs_the_NeXT_Big_Thing https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/226316.Steve_Jobs_the... [1] https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-spaces/blob/master/2021_07_05.md https://github.com/oxidecomputer/twitter-spaces/blob/master/...

spitfire 5y ago
Wow. That audio chat was obnoxious. Nerds laughing at themselves about how smart they are (in hindsight). NeXT was attempting to bring OOP programming to the masses, along with some really excellent for the time (and even now) rapid development tools. Try some of the applications (FrameMaker, Mathematica, IB, etc) on NeXT. Then try the equivalents on Sun (which they were holding up as the exemplar in that audio chat), not even in the same ballpark. They actually got very good traction in financial services and a few other areas. Just too late. As for the hardware, they were 3 years too early for what they wanted to do. Had they held in until 1996 they could have had a fast enough machine for the price target they wanted. (Say 100mhz, 32meg ram, ~gig disk, high res colour). Edit: Of course it turned out NeXT was right once they got a large enough market for it when they acquired Apple.
- bcantrill 5y ago
  Sorry you felt it was obnoxious; certainly, I came away from the book much more interested in NeXT than I was going in. (The NeXT view that Sun was their primary competition was surprising to me for the reasons you outlined.) That said, there were a bunch of decisions that NeXT made that were highly questionable. (Stross's book is well-researched, and goes into many of these.) But I think it's also clear that the NeXT experience informed Jobs at Apple, where those mistakes (especially with respect to the market) were not repeated.
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    same as you, i came away from reading that book much more interested in NeXT (and steve jobs as well) its a great business case study (especially if you read it knowing what comes later) imo
  - twoodfin 5y ago
    On a related note, I was shocked to read in Steven Sinofsky’s (excellent) Substack[1] that Gates in the early ‘90s saw NeXT as the primary rival for Windows in attracting developers. Enough so to have stood up multiple teams “chartered to compete with NeXT”. [1] https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-password-is-nextstep https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...
  - spitfire 5y ago
    The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make the Mac after all). Disappointed they couldn't have it, they went out, got a bottle of tequila and got drunk. Half way through the bottle one of them said "You know what? We could build Smalltalk on top of UNIX!". and thus was born obj-c and Nextstep. There are still things that nextstep is more than ahead of the bleeding edge with. Time tends to erase perspective. Here's an example: // get a connection to some server id server = [NXConnection connectToName: "exampleserver"]; // Then use objects on that server. List *aList; Widget *aWidget; aList = [server widgetList]; aWidget = [aList objectAt: 0]; NB: This example is fantastic for building distributed apps. BUT accessing objects made a local proxy copy of the object. So you wouldn't want to run your world weather model through it - it would copy gigabytes of data over the network. Also, as you can probably imagine it was horribly insecure, with no encryption. It was the late 80's, early 90's.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Except that Objective-C originally did not have anything to do with NeXT, it was latter when NeXT a acquired a license to use it for NeXTSTEP. "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332
GeekyBear 5y ago
Another interesting resource is Jobs speaking at the MIT Sloan School of Management while NeXT was in the process of pivoting to enterprise rapid application development. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI

spitfire 5y ago

Wow. That audio chat was obnoxious. Nerds laughing at themselves about how smart they are (in hindsight). NeXT was attempting to bring OOP programming to the masses, along with some really excellent for the time (and even now) rapid development tools. Try some of the applications (FrameMaker, Mathematica, IB, etc) on NeXT. Then try the equivalents on Sun (which they were holding up as the exemplar in that audio chat), not even in the same ballpark. They actually got very good traction in financial services and a few other areas. Just too late. As for the hardware, they were 3 years too early for what they wanted to do. Had they held in until 1996 they could have had a fast enough machine for the price target they wanted. (Say 100mhz, 32meg ram, ~gig disk, high res colour). Edit: Of course it turned out NeXT was right once they got a large enough market for it when they acquired Apple.

bcantrill 5y ago
Sorry you felt it was obnoxious; certainly, I came away from the book much more interested in NeXT than I was going in. (The NeXT view that Sun was their primary competition was surprising to me for the reasons you outlined.) That said, there were a bunch of decisions that NeXT made that were highly questionable. (Stross's book is well-researched, and goes into many of these.) But I think it's also clear that the NeXT experience informed Jobs at Apple, where those mistakes (especially with respect to the market) were not repeated.
- andrekandre 5y ago
  same as you, i came away from reading that book much more interested in NeXT (and steve jobs as well) its a great business case study (especially if you read it knowing what comes later) imo
- twoodfin 5y ago
  On a related note, I was shocked to read in Steven Sinofsky’s (excellent) Substack[1] that Gates in the early ‘90s saw NeXT as the primary rival for Windows in attracting developers. Enough so to have stood up multiple teams “chartered to compete with NeXT”. [1] https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-password-is-nextstep https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/009-passwo...
- spitfire 5y ago
  The way I view Nextstep is some pragmatic programmers were in awe of Smalltalk. Which isn't surprising everyone was in awe of smalltalk (SJ copied it to make the Mac after all). Disappointed they couldn't have it, they went out, got a bottle of tequila and got drunk. Half way through the bottle one of them said "You know what? We could build Smalltalk on top of UNIX!". and thus was born obj-c and Nextstep. There are still things that nextstep is more than ahead of the bleeding edge with. Time tends to erase perspective. Here's an example: // get a connection to some server id server = [NXConnection connectToName: "exampleserver"]; // Then use objects on that server. List *aList; Widget *aWidget; aList = [server widgetList]; aWidget = [aList objectAt: 0]; NB: This example is fantastic for building distributed apps. BUT accessing objects made a local proxy copy of the object. So you wouldn't want to run your world weather model through it - it would copy gigabytes of data over the network. Also, as you can probably imagine it was horribly insecure, with no encryption. It was the late 80's, early 90's.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Except that Objective-C originally did not have anything to do with NeXT, it was latter when NeXT a acquired a license to use it for NeXTSTEP. "The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386332

GeekyBear 5y ago

Another interesting resource is Jobs speaking at the MIT Sloan School of Management while NeXT was in the process of pivoting to enterprise rapid application development. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI