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It surprised me that Steve Jobs would be so open to unix. I thought with his not invented here syndrome and desire to control everything and attraction to simp

It surprised me that Steve Jobs would be so open to unix. I thought with his not invented here syndrome and desire to control everything and attraction to simplicity and graphical UI he would have hated unix. How did he come to love unix enough to build NextStep on it?

mpweiher 2y ago
Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption. Lisa and Mac were products of his seeing the Smalltalk GUI at his visit to PARC. There was nothing off-the-shelf, so they had to be built from scratch. Of NeXT he said that he had been so bamboozled by the GUI at his PARC visit that he missed the other two, arguable more important concepts: OO and networking. NeXT used as much off-the-shelf components as possible: Ethernet + TCP/IP for the network, Unix for the OS, Adobe's Display Postscript for graphics, Stepstone's Objective-C for the OO parts (which in turn mashed together C and Smalltalk). It bundled TeX, Sybase SQL Server, a bunch of scripting languages, Webster's dictionary, etc. They only built themselves what they absolutely had to to get the machine and user experience they wanted.
- sho_hn 2y ago
  > Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption. See also, forking KHTML into WebKit to build Safari when MS cancelled Internet Explorer for macOS and the platform was left without a robust browser choice. For two reasons: That they were somewhat comfortable letting MSIE reign for so long rather than making an inhouse option, and for not starting over when they did.
  - mepian 2y ago
    It’s funny that Apple originally wanted Mozilla (proto-Firefox) but couldn’t figure out how to build it on Mac OS X in a reasonable amount of time.
    - GeekyBear 2y ago
      > couldn’t figure out how to build it Well, no. They evaluated the existing choices and decided that KDE's code was a better fit. > Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
      - mepian 2y ago
        According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. The "evaluation" was literally him and another guy trying to build Mozilla for weeks and failing, and then someone else joining the team and quickly building Konqueror instead.
        GeekyBear 2y ago
        If the people evaluating your code can't get it to build, I'd say that's a good sign that your code isn't ready to be taken up by others.
        cxr 2y ago
        > According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. Kocienda's book doesn't say that Melton's email is a post-hoc rationalization. It doesn't say anything about that email on a meta level. It merely gives a straightforward account of the project's history from Kocienda's perspective. There is zero contradiction between this, the message from Melton on the KDE mailing list, or the other historical accounts (e.g. on Wikipedia) that cite Melton. The official story from Melton has always been that they originally tried to start with Mozilla, found it too difficult to work with, so they abandoned it and adopted KDE folks' work as the basis for their Mac-native browser. The most relevant passage from that email: > When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. (GeekyBear's "Well, no" here is definitely wrong if the particulars from Kocienda's account are in fact accurate, but that's simply poor synthesis on some HNer's part and doesn't make Melton's version a retcon. The accounts we have from those involved are consistent.)
  - delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
    And WebKit eventually birthed Chromium. Truly the circle of life.
  - jen20 2y ago
    I’m pretty sure your history is off here. There was a 5 year agreement around 1998 to keep Office available for the Mac, and to make IE the default (but not only bundled) browser available. Safari was shipped almost exactly at the end of that agreement, and the announcement as to IE for Mac being discontinued was 6 months later.
    - Klonoar 2y ago
      A fun bit of trivia: that IE was a different rendering engine (Tasman, not Trident which was used on Windows).
      - jen20 2y ago
        Indeed - it was also a lot more standards-compliant than Trident, though not without it's own share of fuckery as befitted the age.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Keyframe 2y ago
Maybe he got influenced by Pixar guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE Even though IRIX had its quirks.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  I'm not sure the timeline adds up for that - maybe Next cam before he bought Pixar?
  - throw0101b 2y ago
    > I'm not sure the timeline adds up for that - maybe Next cam before he bought Pixar? Jobs became majority stakeholder of Pixar in 1986. NeXT was incorporated in 1988. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Independent_company_(1986–1999) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Independent_company_(198... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer But Unix workstations were a thing even before then: 68k-based systems were already around in the 1980s, with Sun (taking just one example) releasing their first product in 1982: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 IRIX-based systems on MIPS were big in the 1990s (post-Jurassic Park), but SGI also started with 68k-based systems.
    - Keyframe 2y ago
      They launched NeXTcube in 1988, but they incorporated in sep 1985.
  - Keyframe 2y ago
    it's a far-fetched idea anyways. It's a five months difference; NeXT in sep '85, and pixar in feb '86. More likely scenario is they wanted to come to market as fast as possible with limited resources, so porting Mach kernel and BSD (both proven/robust things) to their platform was probably the fastest route; It'd also have an existing base of developers to attract and carried some weight if they targeted workstation market. edit: this is what made me think why maybe he was influenced, since Steve Jobs did actually launch another "cube" two years before NeXTcube, which was developed in the time before him buying pixar. This thing required an SGI/Sun to be attached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer
pram 2y ago
I mean, Mach 2 was cutting-edge and freely available from CMU. Probably less a love of UNIX and more the necessity of having a practical base for a new workstation OS.
pjmlp 2y ago
He wasn't, his position regarding UNIX beards was well known. Supporting UNIX was a business opportunity to go against Sun and other graphical workstations. There are recordings of NeXT meetings, and his famous appearance at USENIX, regarding this. Note that everything that matters on NeXTSTEP is based on Objective-C and Framework Kits, zero POSIX, beyond what was need for those government and graphics workstation contracts.
- samatman 2y ago
  Those who might care to watch one of those videos themselves, might draw a different conclusion from what you've expressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0 His interview with Unix Today is arguably a better point of reference[0], here's a pull quote: > we believe very strongly that these Unix battles are foolish, that they're not serving our needs as the Unix community and, more importantly, the problems with the Unix marketplace are not that there are three versions of Unix, all 5 percent apart, that need to battle it to the death for one version. The problem is that Unix is only part of what is considered a modern operating system He didn't start a company to sell Unix machines out of some malice toward the bearded. He started it as the Next Step after Unix as it was at the time. Rather successfully in the long term. [0]: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1991/11.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1991/11.html
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Maybe you should dive into additional references then, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449912 And in that meeting he expresses the point UNIX being relevant due to the workstation market, not because he is such a big UNIX fan.

mpweiher 2y ago

Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption. Lisa and Mac were products of his seeing the Smalltalk GUI at his visit to PARC. There was nothing off-the-shelf, so they had to be built from scratch. Of NeXT he said that he had been so bamboozled by the GUI at his PARC visit that he missed the other two, arguable more important concepts: OO and networking. NeXT used as much off-the-shelf components as possible: Ethernet + TCP/IP for the network, Unix for the OS, Adobe's Display Postscript for graphics, Stepstone's Objective-C for the OO parts (which in turn mashed together C and Smalltalk). It bundled TeX, Sybase SQL Server, a bunch of scripting languages, Webster's dictionary, etc. They only built themselves what they absolutely had to to get the machine and user experience they wanted.

sho_hn 2y ago
> Steve Jobs was very open about taking things from elsewhere and refining them for consumption. See also, forking KHTML into WebKit to build Safari when MS cancelled Internet Explorer for macOS and the platform was left without a robust browser choice. For two reasons: That they were somewhat comfortable letting MSIE reign for so long rather than making an inhouse option, and for not starting over when they did.
- mepian 2y ago
  It’s funny that Apple originally wanted Mozilla (proto-Firefox) but couldn’t figure out how to build it on Mac OS X in a reasonable amount of time.
  - GeekyBear 2y ago
    > couldn’t figure out how to build it Well, no. They evaluated the existing choices and decided that KDE's code was a better fit. > Melton explained in an e-mail to KDE developers that KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
    - mepian 2y ago
      According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. The "evaluation" was literally him and another guy trying to build Mozilla for weeks and failing, and then someone else joining the team and quickly building Konqueror instead.
      - GeekyBear 2y ago
        If the people evaluating your code can't get it to build, I'd say that's a good sign that your code isn't ready to be taken up by others.
      - cxr 2y ago
        > According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. Kocienda's book doesn't say that Melton's email is a post-hoc rationalization. It doesn't say anything about that email on a meta level. It merely gives a straightforward account of the project's history from Kocienda's perspective. There is zero contradiction between this, the message from Melton on the KDE mailing list, or the other historical accounts (e.g. on Wikipedia) that cite Melton. The official story from Melton has always been that they originally tried to start with Mozilla, found it too difficult to work with, so they abandoned it and adopted KDE folks' work as the basis for their Mac-native browser. The most relevant passage from that email: > When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. (GeekyBear's "Well, no" here is definitely wrong if the particulars from Kocienda's account are in fact accurate, but that's simply poor synthesis on some HNer's part and doesn't make Melton's version a retcon. The accounts we have from those involved are consistent.)
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
  And WebKit eventually birthed Chromium. Truly the circle of life.
- jen20 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure your history is off here. There was a 5 year agreement around 1998 to keep Office available for the Mac, and to make IE the default (but not only bundled) browser available. Safari was shipped almost exactly at the end of that agreement, and the announcement as to IE for Mac being discontinued was 6 months later.
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    A fun bit of trivia: that IE was a different rendering engine (Tasman, not Trident which was used on Windows).
    - jen20 2y ago
      Indeed - it was also a lot more standards-compliant than Trident, though not without it's own share of fuckery as befitted the age.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Keyframe 2y ago

Maybe he got influenced by Pixar guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQKm7ifJpVE Even though IRIX had its quirks.

andrewstuart 2y ago
I'm not sure the timeline adds up for that - maybe Next cam before he bought Pixar?
- throw0101b 2y ago
  > I'm not sure the timeline adds up for that - maybe Next cam before he bought Pixar? Jobs became majority stakeholder of Pixar in 1986. NeXT was incorporated in 1988. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Independent_company_(1986–1999) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Independent_company_(198... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT_Computer But Unix workstations were a thing even before then: 68k-based systems were already around in the 1980s, with Sun (taking just one example) releasing their first product in 1982: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-1 IRIX-based systems on MIPS were big in the 1990s (post-Jurassic Park), but SGI also started with 68k-based systems.
  - Keyframe 2y ago
    They launched NeXTcube in 1988, but they incorporated in sep 1985.
- Keyframe 2y ago
  it's a far-fetched idea anyways. It's a five months difference; NeXT in sep '85, and pixar in feb '86. More likely scenario is they wanted to come to market as fast as possible with limited resources, so porting Mach kernel and BSD (both proven/robust things) to their platform was probably the fastest route; It'd also have an existing base of developers to attract and carried some weight if they targeted workstation market. edit: this is what made me think why maybe he was influenced, since Steve Jobs did actually launch another "cube" two years before NeXTcube, which was developed in the time before him buying pixar. This thing required an SGI/Sun to be attached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_Image_Computer

pram 2y ago

I mean, Mach 2 was cutting-edge and freely available from CMU. Probably less a love of UNIX and more the necessity of having a practical base for a new workstation OS.

pjmlp 2y ago

He wasn't, his position regarding UNIX beards was well known. Supporting UNIX was a business opportunity to go against Sun and other graphical workstations. There are recordings of NeXT meetings, and his famous appearance at USENIX, regarding this. Note that everything that matters on NeXTSTEP is based on Objective-C and Framework Kits, zero POSIX, beyond what was need for those government and graphics workstation contracts.

samatman 2y ago
Those who might care to watch one of those videos themselves, might draw a different conclusion from what you've expressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtnX1EJHbC0 His interview with Unix Today is arguably a better point of reference[0], here's a pull quote: > we believe very strongly that these Unix battles are foolish, that they're not serving our needs as the Unix community and, more importantly, the problems with the Unix marketplace are not that there are three versions of Unix, all 5 percent apart, that need to battle it to the death for one version. The problem is that Unix is only part of what is considered a modern operating system He didn't start a company to sell Unix machines out of some malice toward the bearded. He started it as the Next Step after Unix as it was at the time. Rather successfully in the long term. [0]: https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1991/11.html https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1991/11.html
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Maybe you should dive into additional references then, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449912 And in that meeting he expresses the point UNIX being relevant due to the workstation market, not because he is such a big UNIX fan.