9 ms·
Nostalgia reminds me of this: https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-return-of-steve-jobs/ https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the
by stahi 2y ago
Nostalgia reminds me of this:
https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-return-of-steve-jobs/ https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-...
Amelio and the rest of his senior staff began searching for a way out. They needed a new operating system to buoy their attempts to compete with the Wintel juggernaut. The same search had taken place several times before, but now the company was desperate.
Limited Options
Ultimately the list of possible targets was narrowed down to five options:
License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it.
License Solaris from Sun and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it.
Narrow the focus of the flagging Copland project and release it in a year and a half.
Acquire Be and use BeOS.
Acquire NeXT and use OpenStep.
- mepian 2y agoThey did end up releasing salvageable bits and pieces of Copland as Mac OS 8.
- nullindividual 2y agoSimilar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0]. Both visionary, both only partial successes. WinFS :-( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoI think of it as a time when people became so entranced with the idea of the emerging object-oriented zeitgeist that they imagined that making things OO and component driven would just hand-wave towards success. People rushed to make infrastructure to support this model, and, well, it was no magic bullet. Complexity, fragility, and a lot of hard work remained.
- exe34 2y agothe thing I'd like to see is for software to expose functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites and the content/user data. if you look at what accessibility software achieves by simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS, now imagine any and all software could be connected like that. some of this functionality is now provided in individual silos, e.g. an email with an appointment in gmail can go into your Google calendar. a ticket from your train company can be added to Google wallet. but if you look at a flight booking system and want to compare the total price of a given set of dates for travel, including hotel and other things at different times - you're back to doing it on paper (or use somebody's website where 20% of the flights or hotels you want aren't included).
- nullindividual 2y ago> the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites and the content/user data. You mean, COM?
- Dwedit 2y agoActiveX is raising its arm through the soil
- nullindividual 2y agoOffice is probably the largest consumer-facing application to use COM today. It's honestly a great technology -- which came from the Cairo project.
- postmodest 2y agoIsn't that the SmallTalk model, but everyone decided to use C++ instead?
- pjmlp 2y agoNot everyone, IBM OS/2 SOM had support for Smalltalk, C and C++. Smalltalk was OS/2's .NET, so to speak. Unfortunately it all died alongside OS/2, followed by IBM's pivot to Java.
- temac 2y agoIt's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.
- nemomarx 2y agoThere's a concept in political theory about why people become nostalgic for lost causes, failed movements, etc - kind of a backwards looking utopianism? If only we had done X, if only this group had succeeded instead of failed in the past... I do agree that it's a way to avoid looking at the actual implementations and details of a real thing, and just go to what might have been directly.
- aleph_minus_one 2y agoI rather see a reason that many such cancelled projects had very elegant architectures/structures, which is something that hackers love. If you want to ship a product so that it becomes commercially successful, you often have to "deeply taint" this clear vision to make the product compatible with the multitude of very inelegant (industry) standards that customers expect/require. Thus the nostalgia is not about shipping vs not shipping, but about keeping an elegant vision or be willing to taint it to be compatible with a "depraved" world.
- qingcharles 2y agoRight. Most cancelled projects are beautifully architected and discount tons of installed products with all their decades of cruft. Then you start trying to bring the New Thing(r) into the Real World(tm) and there are 5000 edge cases the original project dealt with in a 42-page if/else block for 270 different OEM patches that were sold by some JV team in another building who have never written a line of code in their lives.
- fasa99 2y ago"Brother, it's edge cases all the way down" - Alan Tuna Turing
- alsetmusic 2y agoI saw Copland at MacWorld Expo Boston at Apple’s booth. It kernel panicked. We didn’t get to use it. But wow do I remember how exciting it was the first time I read about it in MacUser magazine. Basically some GUI mockups and promises of cool under-the-hood improvements, possibly the first time I was excited about future computing. Thank goodness they bought NeXT instead. They had no ability to manage projects at scale at the time. Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other than chase growth; we need another product person at the helm. Oh well.
- karlgkk 2y agoI'm tired of hearing "Tim Apple's Apple Can't Engineer". VisionOS has some of the most incredible, coolest engineering I've seen in a long time, from top to bottom. Even if you're not interested in AR/VR, the writeups and sessions about the dual processor OS layout they've used, the scene and room graphing technology they've built, and the challenges of building ultra low latency pass through scene reconstruction and mapping are incredible. Vision Pro might honestly be one of the technically coolest things built in the last 10 years, and I really hope they get the price down and fix some of the UX (weight, battery, etc), because it is something I use every day (and in fact, am writing this post on right now). It's for sure a Beta/DevKit/etc, and I wouldn't recommend the casual person to buy one, but again, on engineering chops alone, it is a masterpiece.
- jmb99 2y ago> and I really hope they get the price down Very much agreed. I get why it’s expensive and I’m no stranger to the apple tax (and usually don’t mind it all that much), but I got the email today that it’s now available in Canada and $5k for a headset is… steep.
- karlgkk 2y agoFor what it's worth, the entry level PowerBook 100 in 1991, when adjusted for inflation, cost about $5500 USD. An entry level iBook in 2003 would cost about $2700 USD. Yeah, it's expensive, but it's also astonishing how much prices have come down.
- faefox 2y agoWhat I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.
- scelerat 2y agoI can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs
- actionfromafar 2y agoYou mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal. A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.
- alwillis 2y agoApple looked at it as an acquisition, while NeXT looked at it as a merger. NeXT didn’t buy Apple obviously, but Steve Jobs and his lieutenants took over the most important positions within Apple. Which made sense given the situation Apple found itself in.
- faefox 2y agoFor sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.
- tiledjinn 2y agoNo need for hindsight. BeOS is still alive. A Haiku for you.
- nine_k 2y agoSome other company would release the iPhone then!
- Damogran6 2y agoWhile I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.
- GeekyBear 2y agoNext's APIs were also ported to run on top of Windows NT and Sun's Solaris. In addition, the entire NextStep OS ran bare metal on several CPU architectures. > originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k-based workstations and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86-based "IBM-compatible" personal computers, PA-RISC-based workstations from Hewlett-Packard, and SPARC-based workstations from Sun Microsystems. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
- SoftTalker 2y agoYep, I used to run Apple's (maybe it was still NeXT at the time?) Mail app on Windows NT, I can't recall where I got it, maybe it was part of some goodies included with WebObjects?
- dkadams 2y agoYes. WebObjects development was possible on NT due to “YellowBox”. It shipped with ProjectBuilder, EOModler, Mail, and other NeXT apps. You could even do Objective-C monkeypatching shennigans on YellowBox, which I remember being needed at the time to get the scroll wheels on certain mice to work on YellowBox apps. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F75-455A-9681-F186A4365805.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...
- evereverever 2y agoThe YellowBox would have been such a great target. They kept it around for iTunes on Windows and I suspect they still use some version of it.
- pjmlp 2y agoIt were those ports to Sun's Solaris, that influenced Java's design and later on Java EE as well.
- smm11 2y agoI still think Solaris/Mac stood a chance; the hardware would have been miles better than anything else.
- vt240 2y agoThe best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards compatibility.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoWhy was A/UX not in the running, it was already written? Just add some polish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
- rjsw 2y agoA/UX runs on 68k NuBus machines, not PowerPC PCI ones.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoUnix itself does—seems like a short porting effort compared to the other choices. They had emulation available as well.
- lukeh 2y agoA/UX 4.0 I believe was going to be based on OSF/1. The MkLinux port was also useful in the Mach 3.0 migration (as were the open source BSDs which refreshed the 4.4BSD code Rhapsody was based on, from NEXTSTEP 4.0 which only ever shipped as an alpha).
- lizknope 2y agoA/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat. https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was_apples_aux_operating_system_all_about/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was... I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did. In the 1980's Microsoft had their own port of Unix named Xenix. Why didn't they push this instead of the very limited MS-DOS? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix > In March of 1982, Western Electric reduced the royalty fees that it charged for UNIX with the introduction of UNIX System III (a combination of UNIX V7 and PWD). This was done by raising the source license cost, but lowering the royalty per user license to $100 (about $318 in 2023) from $250. This meant that Microsoft’s prepayment of $200000 in 1980 (around $700k in 2023) for a discount in volume was voided if they wished to use the newer system. That same month, on the 10th, Paul Allen held a seminar in NYC where he outlined plans for MS-DOS 2.0.
- anyfoo 2y ago> License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it. Gosh, am I glad that that didn't happen. I wonder how serious of an option that really was, it seems wildly out of place compared to the other propositions, which are all reasonable.
- andrewf 2y agoApple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for-windows-nt/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for...), so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be unreasonable.
- cnasc 2y agoIIRC from reading Showstopper, NT was intended to afford that sort of different frontend swapping. It just happened that Windows became the primary focus in the end.
- stg24 2y agoIt might have been necessary to stick with the NT 3.51 codebase. I think they broke the clean separation of the GUI from the rest of the OS in 4.0, which was launched that year, for performance reasons.
- lemoncucumber 2y agoGoogle for Mac OS X Server 1.0 screenshots... the UI was a bizarre mashup of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, you can see they were part way through bolting a Mac-like interface on. When Mac OS X was eventually released it looked utterly different.
- tarsinge 2y agoI have read these kind of stories many times but I'm starting to realize how much the relative engineering success of MacOS 8 and 9 is overlooked with the now "classic" storytelling centered around Jobs and his comeback. Mac OS 10 was not really usable until 10.1 in 2001, yet the iMac, iBook and PowerBook G3 were successes, so the OS obviously played a role, but reading these stories it's kind of absent. My memories are surely tainted by nostalgia because 1997-2001 I was a teen and avid Mac user but from what I remember between the mid-90s Performa on 7.5 and late 90s iMac on 9 it felt like a lot happened. While not the future, as an end user 8.6/9 felt relatively modern, especially compared to Windows 95/98. And even in the mid-90s even if from a business POV the future was bleak for Apple from an end user one 7.5 was not really worst than 95.
- aryonoco 2y agoI'd argue that OS X (to use the nomenclature of the time) 10.0 was alpha quality software, and even 10.1 was at best what we now would consider beta software. OS X was not usable until 10.2 (and that's when many major software such as Photoshop and even Apple's own Final Cut Pro received their first native OS X port), but even 10.2 didn't reach feature partiy with classic MacOS. It wasn't until 10.3 Tiger that you could safely recommend to friends and family to upgrade to OS X.
- TazeTSchnitzel 2y agoTiger was 10.4